Basically, I pose that file sharing is taking the place of radio to promote artists. One problem here. To hear an artist on P2P, you need to search for them,... Radio, OTOH, will play stuff you never knew existed until you heard it there. You'll note that I delved into MySpace as an example of that functionality further down precisely to address that issue. That's the final piece of the puzzle to complete the removal of the RIAA cartel from factory production and promotion of "music" that they've (d)evolved to.
Yeah, that's right, the research concluded that "file sharing probably increases aggregate welfare." I'll bet if we all got drills & augers, we could get that into the brains of the people running the RIAA & MPAA. That's been one of the main facets of those opposed to the xxAA camps. However, this study mentions some symptoms without delving into them.
File sharing enables more acts to be exposed to a larger audience. File sharing is probably hurting radio more than it is artists, as it becomes increasingly difficult to cater to the growing diverse tastes of what used to be their audience. Basically, I pose that file sharing is taking the place of radio to promote artists. Why do I say promote? If you've ever heard an MP3 or other compressed format played at a reasonable or louder volume on quality equipment, you wouldn't be asking.
Control of musical output is being taken away from large conglomerates, and is actually being put back into the hands of the people. Over the course of the last 20 or so years, the FCC has allowed the independent radio station to become extinct as they were gobbled up mainly by one of 2 corporations: Infinity and ClearChannel. These corporations, namely ClearChannel as I have personally seen them destroy the selection of radio stations in my city, have attempted to create a one size fits all set of stations to pump music and [lack of] talent through to the chumps, um, audience. Via this control, and payola, for which I have no direct proof other than the absolute crap on the radio that has driven away large portions of their audience, they thought they were setup to just print money by promoting talentless acts with crappy contracts that would "sell" just because they promoted them.
What happened instead is this internet thing and P2P, wherein people started sharing music, music that wasn't promoted, wasn't on the local airwaves, and thus not in the RIAA members's maximized profit model. It got even worse when sites like MySpace (yes, I have to give it some props) started serving as an alternative promotion source for bands.
So there's much more to P2P and music sales than what these or any statistics show. Falling sales are not related to increased P2P. I'd argue that sales haven't fallen any more than they have explicitly because of P2P. Why? Take a look at the last 6 months of album releases. Can you name more than 2 albums of note? I can't. I haven't seen a single Rock/Alternative/Pop album I wanted in the past 6 months. Is it because there aren't any musicians out there? Naah, it's because tripe has been promoted and is all that's for sale.
I'd love an open supported format set as much as the next guy, but Notes was next to unusable in Rev3/4. (It's been years, I know, but something that bad doesn't get revisited often)
You'd honestly expect MSN to run on anything but x86 since their OS doesn't run on anything else? Unless things have changed recently, don't they have lots of complaints about response speed and general performance and uptime? After all, hotmail used to run on something other than MS and used to work.
Google runs linux, and essentially is relatively trivial individual operations.
MySpace, from my couple of page views, seems largely a train-wreck of static content with some basic forum/blogging additions - just need big pipes.
Amazon and Ebay are the two out of your set that are non-trivial. Since Ebay has the "Powered by Sun" and Java logos on it, I'm assuming that it runs Sun hardware. As Sun does sell x86 hardware, I can make no statements about what Ebay is running, other than related to the sites I've worked on that Sun assisted with hardware for - they were all E10K on up machines. With the hardware virtualization etc, those machines just cannot be beat for power in rack space and HA configurations. I'd be surprised if Sun changed their party line for EBay.
Amazon promotes Perl in their pages. I couldn't find anything stating what they run on or what they actually use internally, and don't have time to dig deeper.
Blizzard? The system that keeps going down, if you can believe all the reports? Apparently they're set up the same way as every other MMO since the beginning of text-based MMOs, and suffer the same issues (lag, disconnects, poor server performance, etc). I wouldn't call that "successful", no matter what their profit is.
As for corporate websites, let's just say that a several of those mentioned are above 35,000 concurrent users and transact billions per year. No consultants, or only as staff augmentation, not as decision makers in most cases. The high dollar hardware was chosen because at the end of the day, server downtime is far more expensive than the more expensive hardware.
On the x86 front: the core of AMD's x86 is looking less and less like an x86. Intel is moving the same way, albeit a little more slowly, from what I've been reading so far. At least as far as what gets out to the market. UltraSparc IV's, T1s, Power'x's etc still have their niches that they fill much better than their x86 counterparts.
Fujitsu is definitely making the new high-end ultra Sparc IVs these days, or whatever the latest version is. Once you get outside reasonably trivial and/or small and medium sized websites, you'll find that people generally don't run x86 to serve their pages. I happen to know one large site that does use x86 and microsoft products at the moment (They're converting to Java). They're running a server farm of over 1600 machines (and those aren't single proc machines and are near capacity!). I know another large company that does approximately 35% of their traffic on 8 sun boxes and a handful of as400s, and still have plenty of headroom to grow. The latter also used to provide real-time data, while the former used caches up to 2 hours old (ie, the "smaller" site provided much more processing intensive features).
Now, those numbers may say more about MS software than x86, but it's certainly clear to me at least which solution is "better" performing. I should also note that while every project I've worked on since 99 has been developed on software running on MS OSes and x86, not a single solution in production ran on that hardware or software. They all ran on IBM, Sun, and/or HP hardware and OSes, with one exception that ran on Dell boxes with Linux.
It's funny and weird, but I believe there's more Gulf stations still, in some states. The bulk were bought up in one of the mergers a while back. All the ones in my state disappeared.
The util.concurrent package is mostly a JCP rewrite of Doug Lea's original oswego utility package, as far as users are concerned. The real bits are deeper down in the memory model and VM changes that went to support a more integrated approach for supporting threads and synchronization.
Therein lies the humurous part. Intel's "real lineup" is nothing more than a few minor tweaks and the application of modern processes to 10 year old tech. You might be able to whip the buggy harder, add a second horse, but eventually the locomotive just wears you out as it passes you. (Even if it's quarter-scale)
As for delivering a knockout blow with the P4, I wouldn't count my chickens just yet. AMDs offerings still smoke Intel's in the server market, esp anything over 2 CPUs.
It's not any specific feature. Java comes with a slew of libraries, some of which are very well designed. Ebay's problems, as I understood them, dealt with the response time of the backend communications. JMS happens to work very well in that environment. A lot of that would be conjecture.
So, back to inherent scalability. Java will run on your PII all the way up to big iron. Take your pick of hardware for your specific needs. High website serving (integer only)? Use Sun's T1 processor systems. Need high floating point performance? Use Ultra-Sparc IVs or Opterons.
Yes, but as Apple starts moving into MS's market, I think you'll start seeing nervousness @ MS about it. Pulling office could kill Apple's move into the business sector, and I doubt the DOJ would look kindly on any such move, given MS's history.
This is way more than a mere quad core design. I was hoping to impart that. It is actually dropping some of the legacy x86 architecture internally, and adding big-iron features - the nested paging per core will be a huge plus for businesses that run multiple CPU machines with lots of virtualization for instance.
The separated schedulers for floating and integer math allows for more parallelism, another speed up.
The shared L3 and reduced latency L2 caches should put Barcelona ahead of Cloverton's split caches: only 2 cores share a cache, one of the features that made Core 2 Duo's faster was that the cache was shared among all existing processors.
I think the real heart of the matter is going to be that these CPUs will far outshine Intel's best in multi CPU rigs, especially business type rigs. They should be on par for single CPU gaming machines, although I'm going to hedge and say AMD might be a little faster on games that can use more than 1 core. (Almost none at the moment, I know, but they'll start coming out soon)
I was pricing the macbook pro Core 2 Duo 2.33 GHz, 2GB RAM, 15.4 inch wide screen 1440X900, a 256MB graphics card, 120GB 5400 rpm HD, Bluetooth, wireless G, weighing under 6 lb.
Dell's came out at around $3300. Apple's was a mere $2500. I didn't even account for the additional software that comes witht he Mac.
Oh, and I'd love a comparison with the mini. Heck, to be honest, I'd love a comparison with the Mac Pro. Or the iMac. No one can touch them for what they are. That's why Apple's star is rising, and Dell, Gateway, and HP are trying to differentiate their bottom trawling products.
I was under the impression that Esso (mostly northern from what I recall) was part of the Gulf/Esso/etc pieces that merged/were acquired and became Exxon.
Standard Oil for sure. But they've been replaced by Exxon-Mobil.
AT&T has been replaced by... AT&T...
IBM still exists, and they're working hard to replace themselves by offering the black-box approach with a couple of consultants to make it work for your business.
Apple? They have a monopoly? On what? They're merely an online distributor for content "owned" and controlled by RIAA entities (I'm not a paying customer, although some of their free content is ok). iPods (I own 2)? Not a chance, any MP3 player will do. I just happen to like the iPod better for the way I use mine, but there's no anti-competitive reason to buy one. Their Macs? They're great, and a decent deal for the money, if they happen to meet your requirements (for those that continue along the fallacy of them being more expensive, I priced out identical systems from HP, Dell, and Apple by feature. Apple was cheaper, not even accounting for the better software)
On the one hand I wish Apple would sell OSX for general purpose PCs. Even for only a small subset of supported peripheral hardware. They could charge for the help calls, with 1 or 2 included in the original OS price. It would shock MS to the core, as they cannot pull the only product that matters due to anti-monopoly agreements already (Office).
Then we might see new competition in the OS/Software space, and maybe get rid of this boat-anchor Vista is trying to bring to the party.
I personally think the really telling thing is that many major web sites are java. Take a look at Ebay. Remember their "conversion" to.NET? It didn't last, doesn't scale. I'm also aware of several other large scale websites that I've personally been involved with that are either converted to java, or in the process of conversion, because their original codebase and architecture no longer scale. (Those were in Perl, C, and C++ btw).
Java's strength is on the server side. Why? Because I can take code and migrate it from machine to machine, OS to OS, with little care for specifics of such moves. Hardware comes and goes, but business code lives forever (and if you doubt this, go look at the financial software run by any older large corporation, or the government for that matter). With Java, obtaining new hardware usually involves merely installing the JVM/application server and software, and you're up and running.
The music "sharing" issue is irrelevant to EMI's selling no DRM music. I guarantee you that you can go out and find any EMI artist on some P2P network. However, if I now can download a guaranteed lossless quality music stream at a reasonable price without DRM, there'd be no qualms here about buying it online.
Note that MP3 != lossless, thus MP3s online are of little value to me. They're merely teasers for getting a CD, or not.
I was under the impression that MS dropped OpenGL entirely, which is fine. According to their diagrams on driver models, the only way full hardware acceleration occurs for audio is via vendor provided OpenAL support. Since vendors are providing OpenGL support for some time now, I'd strongly suspect this same approach is mirrored on the graphics side, meaning that OpenGL support will be provided solely by the vendors.
The upshot of this is that vendor provided APIs (OpenAL/GL) will side-step all the Vista cruft and can provide direct access to hardware that Vista's APIs forbid.
Now if a Vendor screws up support, that's another thing entirely.
I just finished reading the wunderbar description about Vista's new User land driver models and what it means to Creative. I say rock on, everyone migrate to Vista and clamor for OpenAL and OpenGL games. Vista, apparently is going to be the best thing for OpenAL/GL gaming ever.
I'm pretty certain from their approach with audio, that the video path couldn't be much better, for the same reason. So vendor provided OpenAL/GL access to their hardware is probably going to be the best path for game makers to take. That could have wonderful implications for freeing games from MS entirely, as then it becomes relatively trivial to port to multiple systems.
First, I agree with Alsee. TPM is inherently evil, because it was designed for an evil purpose. (How anyone can argue that locking out the owner of a computer is anything but evil is beyond me)
As for tamper-proof computers as you describe, exactly how would I install a new OS on it, perhaps something I wrote myself? Or a special purpose system I built out of an OSS source? Or really do any of a number of things millions around the globe do?
Besides, if I really wanted a "secure" system, I would only boot off of a known static source, like, say, a CD or DVD. That gives me a clean boot everytime. I want my BIOS to be too stupid to do anything but boot, as then there's very little that can be done to subvert such a system. There's no need for my BIOS to do anything more.
Your case of using TPM to "guarantee" the general boot case could be accomplished by a simple pluggable ROM type "drive" that could be replaced at the owner's will. As Alsee also stated, the master key(s) also belong to the owner should encryption or anything of the sort be desired.
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One problem here. To hear an artist on P2P, you need to search for them,
Radio, OTOH, will play stuff you never knew existed until you heard it there. You'll note that I delved into MySpace as an example of that functionality further down precisely to address that issue. That's the final piece of the puzzle to complete the removal of the RIAA cartel from factory production and promotion of "music" that they've (d)evolved to.
File sharing enables more acts to be exposed to a larger audience. File sharing is probably hurting radio more than it is artists, as it becomes increasingly difficult to cater to the growing diverse tastes of what used to be their audience. Basically, I pose that file sharing is taking the place of radio to promote artists. Why do I say promote? If you've ever heard an MP3 or other compressed format played at a reasonable or louder volume on quality equipment, you wouldn't be asking.
Control of musical output is being taken away from large conglomerates, and is actually being put back into the hands of the people. Over the course of the last 20 or so years, the FCC has allowed the independent radio station to become extinct as they were gobbled up mainly by one of 2 corporations: Infinity and ClearChannel. These corporations, namely ClearChannel as I have personally seen them destroy the selection of radio stations in my city, have attempted to create a one size fits all set of stations to pump music and [lack of] talent through to the chumps, um, audience. Via this control, and payola, for which I have no direct proof other than the absolute crap on the radio that has driven away large portions of their audience, they thought they were setup to just print money by promoting talentless acts with crappy contracts that would "sell" just because they promoted them.
What happened instead is this internet thing and P2P, wherein people started sharing music, music that wasn't promoted, wasn't on the local airwaves, and thus not in the RIAA members's maximized profit model. It got even worse when sites like MySpace (yes, I have to give it some props) started serving as an alternative promotion source for bands.
So there's much more to P2P and music sales than what these or any statistics show. Falling sales are not related to increased P2P. I'd argue that sales haven't fallen any more than they have explicitly because of P2P. Why? Take a look at the last 6 months of album releases. Can you name more than 2 albums of note? I can't. I haven't seen a single Rock/Alternative/Pop album I wanted in the past 6 months. Is it because there aren't any musicians out there? Naah, it's because tripe has been promoted and is all that's for sale.
I'd love an open supported format set as much as the next guy, but Notes was next to unusable in Rev3/4. (It's been years, I know, but something that bad doesn't get revisited often)
You'd honestly expect MSN to run on anything but x86 since their OS doesn't run on anything else? Unless things have changed recently, don't they have lots of complaints about response speed and general performance and uptime? After all, hotmail used to run on something other than MS and used to work.
Google runs linux, and essentially is relatively trivial individual operations.
MySpace, from my couple of page views, seems largely a train-wreck of static content with some basic forum/blogging additions - just need big pipes.
Amazon and Ebay are the two out of your set that are non-trivial. Since Ebay has the "Powered by Sun" and Java logos on it, I'm assuming that it runs Sun hardware. As Sun does sell x86 hardware, I can make no statements about what Ebay is running, other than related to the sites I've worked on that Sun assisted with hardware for - they were all E10K on up machines. With the hardware virtualization etc, those machines just cannot be beat for power in rack space and HA configurations. I'd be surprised if Sun changed their party line for EBay.
Amazon promotes Perl in their pages. I couldn't find anything stating what they run on or what they actually use internally, and don't have time to dig deeper.
Blizzard? The system that keeps going down, if you can believe all the reports? Apparently they're set up the same way as every other MMO since the beginning of text-based MMOs, and suffer the same issues (lag, disconnects, poor server performance, etc). I wouldn't call that "successful", no matter what their profit is.
As for corporate websites, let's just say that a several of those mentioned are above 35,000 concurrent users and transact billions per year. No consultants, or only as staff augmentation, not as decision makers in most cases. The high dollar hardware was chosen because at the end of the day, server downtime is far more expensive than the more expensive hardware.
On the x86 front: the core of AMD's x86 is looking less and less like an x86. Intel is moving the same way, albeit a little more slowly, from what I've been reading so far. At least as far as what gets out to the market. UltraSparc IV's, T1s, Power'x's etc still have their niches that they fill much better than their x86 counterparts.
Fujitsu is definitely making the new high-end ultra Sparc IVs these days, or whatever the latest version is. Once you get outside reasonably trivial and/or small and medium sized websites, you'll find that people generally don't run x86 to serve their pages. I happen to know one large site that does use x86 and microsoft products at the moment (They're converting to Java). They're running a server farm of over 1600 machines (and those aren't single proc machines and are near capacity!). I know another large company that does approximately 35% of their traffic on 8 sun boxes and a handful of as400s, and still have plenty of headroom to grow. The latter also used to provide real-time data, while the former used caches up to 2 hours old (ie, the "smaller" site provided much more processing intensive features).
Now, those numbers may say more about MS software than x86, but it's certainly clear to me at least which solution is "better" performing. I should also note that while every project I've worked on since 99 has been developed on software running on MS OSes and x86, not a single solution in production ran on that hardware or software. They all ran on IBM, Sun, and/or HP hardware and OSes, with one exception that ran on Dell boxes with Linux.
It's funny and weird, but I believe there's more Gulf stations still, in some states. The bulk were bought up in one of the mergers a while back. All the ones in my state disappeared.
The util.concurrent package is mostly a JCP rewrite of Doug Lea's original oswego utility package, as far as users are concerned. The real bits are deeper down in the memory model and VM changes that went to support a more integrated approach for supporting threads and synchronization.
Therein lies the humurous part. Intel's "real lineup" is nothing more than a few minor tweaks and the application of modern processes to 10 year old tech. You might be able to whip the buggy harder, add a second horse, but eventually the locomotive just wears you out as it passes you. (Even if it's quarter-scale)
As for delivering a knockout blow with the P4, I wouldn't count my chickens just yet. AMDs offerings still smoke Intel's in the server market, esp anything over 2 CPUs.
Until they hit that wonderful FSB wall....
I know they're working on a solution to that.
My point was that without even factoring that in, the Apple product was already significantly cheaper. I didn't feel the need to flog the dead horse.
It's not any specific feature. Java comes with a slew of libraries, some of which are very well designed. Ebay's problems, as I understood them, dealt with the response time of the backend communications. JMS happens to work very well in that environment. A lot of that would be conjecture.
So, back to inherent scalability. Java will run on your PII all the way up to big iron. Take your pick of hardware for your specific needs. High website serving (integer only)? Use Sun's T1 processor systems. Need high floating point performance? Use Ultra-Sparc IVs or Opterons.
With MS, you get a choice of.... x86. Period.
Yes, but as Apple starts moving into MS's market, I think you'll start seeing nervousness @ MS about it. Pulling office could kill Apple's move into the business sector, and I doubt the DOJ would look kindly on any such move, given MS's history.
This is way more than a mere quad core design. I was hoping to impart that. It is actually dropping some of the legacy x86 architecture internally, and adding big-iron features - the nested paging per core will be a huge plus for businesses that run multiple CPU machines with lots of virtualization for instance.
The separated schedulers for floating and integer math allows for more parallelism, another speed up.
The shared L3 and reduced latency L2 caches should put Barcelona ahead of Cloverton's split caches: only 2 cores share a cache, one of the features that made Core 2 Duo's faster was that the cache was shared among all existing processors.
I think the real heart of the matter is going to be that these CPUs will far outshine Intel's best in multi CPU rigs, especially business type rigs. They should be on par for single CPU gaming machines, although I'm going to hedge and say AMD might be a little faster on games that can use more than 1 core. (Almost none at the moment, I know, but they'll start coming out soon)
I guess you're still running that 4GHz P4 then?
I was pricing the macbook pro Core 2 Duo 2.33 GHz, 2GB RAM, 15.4 inch wide screen 1440X900, a 256MB graphics card, 120GB 5400 rpm HD, Bluetooth, wireless G, weighing under 6 lb.
Dell's came out at around $3300. Apple's was a mere $2500. I didn't even account for the additional software that comes witht he Mac.
Oh, and I'd love a comparison with the mini. Heck, to be honest, I'd love a comparison with the Mac Pro. Or the iMac. No one can touch them for what they are. That's why Apple's star is rising, and Dell, Gateway, and HP are trying to differentiate their bottom trawling products.
They're Standard Oil reformed. There's only a few more pieces out there that are left.
Kinda reminds you of the telecom industry, doesn't it?
I was under the impression that Esso (mostly northern from what I recall) was part of the Gulf/Esso/etc pieces that merged/were acquired and became Exxon.
Standard Oil for sure. But they've been replaced by Exxon-Mobil.
AT&T has been replaced by... AT&T...
IBM still exists, and they're working hard to replace themselves by offering the black-box approach with a couple of consultants to make it work for your business.
MS... well, if Vista doesn't dethrone them, nothing will.
Apple? They have a monopoly? On what? They're merely an online distributor for content "owned" and controlled by RIAA entities (I'm not a paying customer, although some of their free content is ok). iPods (I own 2)? Not a chance, any MP3 player will do. I just happen to like the iPod better for the way I use mine, but there's no anti-competitive reason to buy one. Their Macs? They're great, and a decent deal for the money, if they happen to meet your requirements (for those that continue along the fallacy of them being more expensive, I priced out identical systems from HP, Dell, and Apple by feature. Apple was cheaper, not even accounting for the better software)
On the one hand I wish Apple would sell OSX for general purpose PCs. Even for only a small subset of supported peripheral hardware. They could charge for the help calls, with 1 or 2 included in the original OS price. It would shock MS to the core, as they cannot pull the only product that matters due to anti-monopoly agreements already (Office).
Then we might see new competition in the OS/Software space, and maybe get rid of this boat-anchor Vista is trying to bring to the party.
I personally think the really telling thing is that many major web sites are java. Take a look at Ebay. Remember their "conversion" to .NET? It didn't last, doesn't scale. I'm also aware of several other large scale websites that I've personally been involved with that are either converted to java, or in the process of conversion, because their original codebase and architecture no longer scale. (Those were in Perl, C, and C++ btw).
Java's strength is on the server side. Why? Because I can take code and migrate it from machine to machine, OS to OS, with little care for specifics of such moves. Hardware comes and goes, but business code lives forever (and if you doubt this, go look at the financial software run by any older large corporation, or the government for that matter). With Java, obtaining new hardware usually involves merely installing the JVM/application server and software, and you're up and running.
The music "sharing" issue is irrelevant to EMI's selling no DRM music. I guarantee you that you can go out and find any EMI artist on some P2P network. However, if I now can download a guaranteed lossless quality music stream at a reasonable price without DRM, there'd be no qualms here about buying it online.
Note that MP3 != lossless, thus MP3s online are of little value to me. They're merely teasers for getting a CD, or not.
You're missing the point: with the information stored in a DB, there's no telling what they can do with that data at a later time.
I was under the impression that MS dropped OpenGL entirely, which is fine. According to their diagrams on driver models, the only way full hardware acceleration occurs for audio is via vendor provided OpenAL support. Since vendors are providing OpenGL support for some time now, I'd strongly suspect this same approach is mirrored on the graphics side, meaning that OpenGL support will be provided solely by the vendors.
The upshot of this is that vendor provided APIs (OpenAL/GL) will side-step all the Vista cruft and can provide direct access to hardware that Vista's APIs forbid.
Now if a Vendor screws up support, that's another thing entirely.
If you mean float like rocks....
I just finished reading the wunderbar description about Vista's new User land driver models and what it means to Creative. I say rock on, everyone migrate to Vista and clamor for OpenAL and OpenGL games. Vista, apparently is going to be the best thing for OpenAL/GL gaming ever.
I'm pretty certain from their approach with audio, that the video path couldn't be much better, for the same reason. So vendor provided OpenAL/GL access to their hardware is probably going to be the best path for game makers to take. That could have wonderful implications for freeing games from MS entirely, as then it becomes relatively trivial to port to multiple systems.
XP has a protection scheme?
First, I agree with Alsee. TPM is inherently evil, because it was designed for an evil purpose. (How anyone can argue that locking out the owner of a computer is anything but evil is beyond me)
As for tamper-proof computers as you describe, exactly how would I install a new OS on it, perhaps something I wrote myself? Or a special purpose system I built out of an OSS source? Or really do any of a number of things millions around the globe do?
Besides, if I really wanted a "secure" system, I would only boot off of a known static source, like, say, a CD or DVD. That gives me a clean boot everytime. I want my BIOS to be too stupid to do anything but boot, as then there's very little that can be done to subvert such a system. There's no need for my BIOS to do anything more.
Your case of using TPM to "guarantee" the general boot case could be accomplished by a simple pluggable ROM type "drive" that could be replaced at the owner's will. As Alsee also stated, the master key(s) also belong to the owner should encryption or anything of the sort be desired.