I'm not talking about the one who bought the sword. Anyone who pays real money for an unfair advantage in a multi-player game is not only whacked up in the head, he's also basically a cheater in my book. So that I don't have any sympathy for that one.
However, he wasn't the one stabbed or stabbing.
What's left is two guys fighting over a _shitload_ (for them) of very real money, in the very real world. I'd say the real money's not beside the point at all. I'd say the real money was the _whole_ point there.
"In any case, if someone sold something I lent to them for a large sum of money I think it would be taken to the courts."
Which is what this guy tried first. Except the police basically missed the point in the same way. He got told, basically, ah well, if that money came from virtual property, it's not our business. Again, missing the point that the money wasn't virtual at all.
Also missing the point that a virtual piece of property that's worth real money (even if to a deranged cheater) isn't that irrelevant after all.
We pay and get paid for bits and bytes on a HDD every day. I'm paid to write programs, which in the end also exist only as bits and bytes somewhere. Writers are paid for writing books, you guessed, as bits and bytes on a HDD. (I don't think anyone still uses a typewriter.) Apple expects you to pay for downloading songs: you guessed, just a bunch of bytes. Napster even expects you to pay without ending up owning those tracks: the moment you've cancelled your napster account, you're left with nothing, just like this guy's virtual sword. Lots of people pay for bandwidth or for cable TV, both of which are basically just bits and bytes in transit, or rather different facets thereof. Etc.
Or here's something else to think about: Your bank account also exists really just on the bank's computer, but I bet you'd be pretty pissed off if someone helped himself to it. It's not the bits and bytes that mattered, it's how much money that was worth. Same as this guy's sword.
We're well past the point where "it's virtual" meant "it has no value". Half of the civilized world is by now purely virtual. Web sites, trade secrets, business data, bank accounts, etc, are more and more purely virtual stuff in a computer.
Doesn't make them worthless at all: ask that banks who recently sued IBM whether that data in their database was that worthless. I believe they had losses of millions a day just trying to keep running with a corrupt database.
So if you still think that virtual==worthless stuff only deranged freaks care about, sad to say, you're about half a century too late for that idea.
How about if you get worked up for a helluva lot of money at 41? We're talking _China_, ffs. That's a _lot_ of money for them.
It doesn't even have anything to do with games.
Let's say you wrote a piece of program, or a short novel, or composed some cool piece of music, or painted something funny in Photoshop. (Whatever fits your abilities and hobbies.) It's equally just bits and bytes on a hard drive, right? Nothing to get worked up about, right?
Now let's say you gave it to me, dunno, for review or whatever other reasons.
Now let's say I put my name on it and sold the rights to it for, say, $100,000. (To sorta put into a western perspective the shitload of money that meant in China.) Dunno why someone would want to pay that much for it. It's all just bits and bytes, after all, right? But somehow I found someone willing to give _me_ all that load of real money for _your_ work.
Now tell me that you absolutely positively wouldn't get the idea "hey, wait a minute, that thing wasn't his to sell in the first place, and that money is rightfully mine."
Sure, maybe you'd still be rational enough to not go into a homicidal rage. Other people, however, would be pretty damn angry at that point. Now if the victim also said something stupid like "piss off, I'm not giving you a cent. It was just bits and bytes anyway"... well, I think a _lot_ of people would get very very angry. Maybe even well into homicidal rage territory.
If you'll get your head out of the ass, and pull yourself out of the self-righteous "bah, those delusional nerds" rhetoric, picture the fight as being over those $1000. While the sword may have been virtual, the money was very very real.
Not everyone is a rich western consultant, you know. For some people even in western countries, $1000 is more than they earn in a month. But here we're talking _China. $1000 is a bloody huge fortune.
To put things in a more western perspective: imagine that someone sold something of yours on eBay for, oh, say, $100,000. Would _you_ just shrug it off as "oh well, who cares? It might rightfully be mine, but I'll let him keep the $100,000"? It may have been something virtual, it may have been something you couldn't care less about, but we're still talking a _lot_ of real money. Think hard.
Now maybe _you_ wouldn't kill someone even for that money. But wouldn't you at least get the thought "WTH? It was my item to start with, so the money should be rightfully mine!"
And I'm sure you can see how from there it can degenerate in a fight.
Pray tell, by what warped definition it's not Science Fiction?
Yes, it's a swashbuckler and magic flick. Yes, it's a cute little space opera. No, it wasn't some deep philosophical shit.
It's also probably _the_ SF universe where they went and fleshed out every single bloody detail about how it works. Between the movies, the books and the games, they covered pretty much every single bit of technology, history, and politics in that galaxy.
You could research, or have your favourite SW terminal nerd fill you in on such details as exactly what was the thrust of each engine on a TIE-fighter, or what was its turning radius. Or exactly what went into a lightsaber. Or which animals ate what. Etc.
So it seems to me like it went and explained its science part _far_ beyond the point where any other SF setting ever did. So why and by what definition it's not SF?
Before I get started, this isn't really supposed to be a troll. I'm just trying to give you an insight into _why_ we're wondering about people buying every MacOS point release. And in return maybe you'll help me understand why you do that.
You know, for all the being called "Redmond fanboys" or whatnot, we Windows people don't go buying every single release. Yes, Microsoft fully expects you to pay for XP, but most sane people will not actually upgrade to XP from 2000.
My second computer is still happily running Windows 2000, ever since it was my primary box. The newer A64 machine is on XP only because (A) there was no price discount to buy an older version, and (B) I really wanted the NX bit protection, what with all the buffer-overflow viruses on the Internet. (Not that I ever got virused on 2000 either, but I figured you can't ever have enough layers of defense.)
And even that computer still running Windows 2000 is not that much of an exception. You'd be suprised how many computers still exist out there with Windows '98, or even Windows '95, or in some pathological cases Windows 3.1.
Or here at work until recently NT 4.0 was still the corporate standard.
In fact, I think that in the Windows world, it's safe to say that the OS is the _least_ important part. It's there just so the applications will load. We'd run just as happily (or actually happier) without any OS, if the same apps could be booted directly without an OS. Hence, the lack of Windows people creaming their pants at the thought "woo, we can pay for a new release."
Unless the new version is absolutely needed to run some application, most of us couldn't care less about it.
So in a nutshell that's why we're wondering about it. Because over here on this side of the fence, sticking to an OS for 4-5 years is really the norm. Seeing people getting all excited at the thought of buying yet another yearly remake of the same OS is, well, a bit strange.
So, pray tell, just for my curiosity: _what_ applications didn't work with the old release? Was there some killer-app or killer-game announced that requires Tiger to run? Is there some much needed functionality comes in this release and was sorely missing in Panther? I'm just, you know, curious.
Yes, Microsoft does have a mile long history. One of trying to bully the courts into submission via massive anti-government propaganda.
Remember where the word "astroturfing" comes from? Some of us haven't forgotten yet. In case you don't remember: during the anti-trust trial in the USA, MS paid people to create the impression that everyone is pro-MS, pro-monopoly and anti-DOJ. They pretty much tried to make it look like the government better back down ASAP or face massive population dissent backlash.
That in addition to the direct MS PR about how the government and anti-trust laws "stiffle innovation" and whatnot. Or direct threats that they'll move to another country and stop paying taxes in the US if they're not allowed to break the laws in the US. Etc.
Basically, again: an attempt to bully the US government into submission.
So that's what I see in that "Reduced Edition" bullshit. Yes, something fitting their long history of anti-government propaganda. "Don't buy the version the government made us make" is, in fact, _exactly_ the kind of message that fits MS's history.
And again, IMHO the EU was pretty civilized about it. They just told MS "nope, try another name".
And finally, I don't see MS naming any other product "Reduced Edition". XP Home Edition had features removed too, and it wasn't called "Reduced Networking Edition", no? Or MS Works isn't called "Office Reduced Edition." _No_ marketter will willingly put words like "reduced" or "less" on a box, unless they want to make a point. Those are words that tell the public "don't buy it". "More" is good, "less" is bad. (See euphemisms like "more taste per callory" in sweets ads, instead of saying "less calories.") So I have a hard time believing that "XP Reduced Media Edition" was anything _but_ a heavy handed attempt to mock the court order.
Heh. Didn't think I'd get to say the word "astroturfing" again, what with the relatively pro-MS messages (by/. standards) I'm usually writing lately.
Do you even know what happened there? Nah, it's more fun to jump at a wrong conclusion, eh?
The fact is more simple than that. The EU didn't as much "haggle", it just rejected Microsoft's idea of calling it "Reduced Edition". Th-th-that's all, folks.
So:
1. It didn't even involve much manpower.
2. If MS didn't want to haggle or tie up "government manpower", it could have simply not picked a name that showed outright contempt to the court's decision.
MS wasn't even ordered to change all Windows XP copies it sells, it just was ordered to _also_ sell a version without the media player alongside with the normal version. In a way that doesn't discourage people from buying that version. (E.g., no charging twice for the non-MP version.)
I'd say that MS got off pretty easily there.
It seems to me that slapping a name on it that basically says "don't buy this one" is if anything just a way to show contempt there. So it just got told "nope, that won't do. Pick another one."
Technically, it can be argued that the first to let you put your face on a virtual character's head, and order him/her around, was The Sims. The Deluxe version even shipped standard with a tool allowing you to align and convert one of your photos into a face texture.
And with the right expansion pack, yeah, you could watch your virtual self go on a vacation, like in the summary.
Now ok, it's a far cry from starring in an animated feature, but still, you could build a photo-album or story with it.
Personally I never saw a point in this, though. I'm me, and my sims are my sims. They're _not_ me. (Plus, it would be spooky to do that and then see that sim set the house on fire, or drown in the swimming pool.)
Exactly what "free information" would there be in taking away trademarks? No, really.
I dunno about you, but I quite enjoy the fact that Nescafe is Nestle's trademark. It means that when I go to the supermarket to buy a jar of "Nescafe Classic", chances are it'll actually be just that.
Or when I buy a can of "Pepsi", thanks to that being a trademark, I can have _some_ degree of certainty that there'll actually be Pepsi in the can.
Or when your company buys a "Cisco" router, you can have some degree of certainty that there'll actually be a Cisco router. Or when they buy a "Sun" server, they can have some certainty that it's actually that, and not someone's repackaged old ZX Spectrum.
So taking away those trademarks would make _what_ information free? And how would that benefit society?
Let's picture a word without trademarks. You go to the shop for your favourite brand of coffee. Oops, except everyone would be free to use that brand. If the shop owner wants to grind burnt peanuts and write "Nescafe" on the jar, they're free to. Or you buy a can of "Pepsi" or "Coke", whichever you prefer, and discover that it's some completely unrelated crap that you don't even like the taste of. Etc.
Where's the advantage for the consumer in that? No, seriously.
It seems to me like, if anything, you'd actually have _less_ information in a world without trademarks.
So basically it has nothing to do with "buying into" some concept, it's just a case of thinking for myself. I quite like to know what I buy.
Indeed, calling it anything else wouldn't have been a trademark violation. (Same as building a PC and calling it a Dell PC won't get you in trademark trouble with IBM. Only explicitly calling it an IBM PC would.)
On the other hand, you don't get the same free mindshare and free advertising as when you steal someone's trademark. Advertising that you have a "Scrabble" game on your site gets the attention of everyone who knows what "Scrabble" is. Advertising that you have a "Super-word-puzzle" game on the site, won't get anyone's attention.
It's a valid observation, though, and I suppose it does illustrate a few points. Thanks for bringing it up.
See, what I had in mind by "socially acceptable" was more along the lines of "acceptable for adults". As in, you won't see the CEO of a company (unless maybe if the company is Games Workshop itself) playing Warhammer 40k at the club, but chess might be socially acceptable.
High school is a more interesting case, at least in the wester world, because IMHO it's a massive cultural failure. Doing anything even remotely intellectual-like, or god forbid actually being any good at using your brains, is more likely than not to get you ridiculed, ostracized or downright bullied.
(And in more pathological cases even arrested or questioned. Dangerous people those ostracized nerds, apparently. You never know when they'll shoot up the school;)
It doesn't even matter if it's chess or anything else that requires more than one braincell awake. Being a mindless lemming with a cool t-shirt and the latest Brittney Spears is good, using your brains is bad. It's way uncool to have a brain.
Also, well, chess happens to fall under the heading of "stuff that adults do". You won't catch a cool teenager touching that stuff with a 10 ft pole.
Though that kind of age preconception isn't exclusive to teenagers. It works both ways. A lot of adults won't touch a lot of games with a 10 ft pole (board, table-top and/or video games) if they seem to fall under the heading "stuff for kids."
Thing is, would it have become even socially acceptable, much less common cultural stock, if it was invented in 1948?
Thing is, chess was supposed to be a modern (for that age) wargame. Same as, say, Warhammer 40k or Battletech nowadays.
(Purely for the sake of an unneeded tangent: originally a 4 player game. That's why you have even numbers of every piece, except the king and queen, which originally were two kings. Each of the 4 players started off one edge of the board, with half the pieces. Then eventually they figured out that, in that age before the Internet and online multiplayer, it was a pain to get 4 players together. So each side took two armies, and one king became a "grand vizier". Naming it Queen was a much later medieval invention: back there and then the queen had zero power or rights, but a grand vizier was a very powerful character.)
Look at it this way: if you go out to play Warhammer 40k, you're a "nerd". If you go out to play chess, you're some kind of social or cultural elite.
What's the fundamental difference? That chess wasn't invented in the 20th century, that's all. Chess was already accepted as a socially-acceptable conformist passtime.
So would it really be a problem if chess was invented in 1948 and trademarked? Probably not, because it would fall under the same heading as Warhammer 40k or Battletech: something only nerds do instead of going out and meeting people.
I don't know, I don't really see a possibility of confusion between the names "Coca Cola" and "Pepsi Cola". I mean, really, can you imagine someone ordering a Pepsi by mistake instead of a Coke? (That is, if they really wanted a Coke.)
And it's not that unusual that one word is common between two trademarks. E.g., "International Business Machines" and "Commodore Business Machines". Those have two words out of 3 in common, and AFAIK neither sued the other about it.
And likewise, I'd imagine "Kraft Foods" doesn't have a trademark problem with the hundreds of companies having "foods" in their name.
As for the "but what if someone trademarked 'chess'", then it wouldn't really be common cultural stock. It wouldn't be chess. It would be maybe a game with the same rules, but not _the_ game that had millenia to become common cultural stock in the first place.
We probably wouldn't have international chess tournaments, or wouldn't take them seriously, if it was a game invented in 1948. (You don't see much press about, say, Monopoly championships, do you? Or you don't see IBM making a fuss that their super-computers won a pokemon tournament. In fact, I doubt that they'd even consider entering their computer in one.)
I also see no problem with "workarounds", as you call them, to avoid infringing on someone's property. I'll stick to games for these examples, since we are talking about Scrabble.
I don't see any irreversible damage done, for example, by the fact that the couple hundreds RPG systems aren't called "D&D". Au contraire, if anything, I see that it just proves my point that progress and innovation are in the exact opposite direction than whining about how one should be allowed to steal the others' work. Those people didn't just think of a new name, but actually sat down and made a different RPG system. Some good, some awful, most in between, but on the whole it did help more than if everyone was free to clone D&D and write "D&D" on their box.
Or I see no fundamental damage done by the fact that MTG was trademarked and copyrighted. Again, whoever wanted to cash in on the collectible card game madness, just sat down and designed their own game. And so we got Pokemon, which in turn spawned Digimon and a bunch of other near-clones. Is there any fundamental problem there? Not really. Everyone has no problem understanding that they're (A) collectible stuff games, but (B) different games. And if you're into that kind of games, you have a lot more choice than if everyone just copied the MTG cards.
Even so, "Scrabble" is a trademark of Hasbro. As long as they're willing to defend that trademark, it's theirs. And in fact they _have_ to defend it or lose it. That's in fact the _only_ way for a trademark to be lost: they don't have a time limit.
You know, just like "IBM" is a trademark of International Business Machines, or "Pepsi" is the trademark of Pepsico. You can't just name your new company or your new product "IBM", even though they first used it more than 100 years ago. And you can't just name your own drinks "Pepsi".
So, sorry if I don't feel much sympathy for that site. They just took someone else's property and tried to make a buck out of it. It's no different than trying to make a buck off the Coca-Cola trademark by writing that on your own soft drinks cans.
I see no little guy unfairly oppressed by a big corporation. The little guy is the thief here, and the big corporation is just defending its lawful property.
And how does copying someone else's game help advance the progress of science and useful arts? I've said it before, but advance and progress comes from researching and creating _new_ stuff, not from a million monkeys copying someone else's work.
They have a problem with big bad Hasbro not letting them make a buck off the game Hasbro invented, and the trademark Hasbro owns? How about sitting down and inventing their _own_ game, then? Progress and advance are that-a-way.
Yes, and those AIDS patients were not "invisible" either. They were definitely seen by the doctors, which you previously ranked as getting social attention, no? They were seen by the store clerk too. Etc.
In fact, they were _less_ outcast than some nerds I know, and who don't seem to will themselves to death.
Oh, maybe you mean that they knew they had a death sentence? Well, people can survive up to 3 years with cancer, or in some rare cases get cured. You don't see them willing themselves to death.
Basically that's why I _suspect_ bullshit in mind-over-matter theories: it's invariably an inconsistent mess, where the same thing is true and false at the same time, depending on what it's supposed to explain. I'm supposed to believe that the sky is blue, red and green at the same time, if blue explains this, red explains that, and green happens to be just the right explanation for that other thing.
And, dunno, that's not how science works.
But now seriously, AIDS attacks the immune system. That's what kills you in the end: those other diseases. It might take years, or the first severe flu might fell you. I have no trouble at all believing that some people
A) had a weaker immune system to start with,
B) were diagnosed in much more advanced stages when the epidemic first broke out, because at first noone even knew about AIDS and it took bad cases of those other diseases to even go to a doctor or to not just get a cough syrup and be sent on your way, and
C) by sheer "that's how statistics works" got a more severe disease than others.
It perfectly explains why some people died sooner than others. And does so without needing some made-up psycho-somatic explanation that apparently applied _only_ to them, but never seems to apply to other terminal diseases.
You know, I'm otherwise fairly pro-MS, by Slashdot standards. (In much the same way as being right wing in the EU still counts as left wing in the US, and viceversa.) I do believe that MS has all the right in the world to keep the Windows/Office/IE/whatever sources secret. I don't believe that making money or being a corporation is a capital sin. And worse yet, I do believe that they did make a better product.
(Or more precisely, that everyone else had a crappier product. Who was gonna win the OS wars? OS/2? Heh.)
But no, I don't think that API specs should be an internal secret for a company that produces both the OS and the apps.
Allowing the API conspiracy, for lack of a better word, is what allowed MS to be a monopoly in the first place. You can't expect any sort of even playing field as long as Windows contains parts written just for Word or for IE, and parts which can be deliberately broken when a competing product wants to use them.
E.g., the classic example is Novell. They wanted to make their own Netware servers too able to act as a domain controller, so you can choose whichever fits your general needs best for that role. Basically a fair competition on merits, no?
Microsoft didn't even pretend to play fair. It simply informed Novell that if Novell publishes such a product, MS _will_ break it. And they did. They messed with the APIs and with where does that part go inside Windows, until Novell gave up and cancelled the product.
And that's exactly that kind of anti-competitive behaviour that this ruling is supposed to prevent. Because anything else is just giving MS an official blessing to continue the monopolistic behaviour.
(And in that case they actually analyzed the food, among other things. It's funny the kinds of things you can do when people don't even realize what's being done: e.g., they don't expect the shaman's poison or shards to be detectable, because they haven't even heard of a microscope or about toxicology. And what are they gonna do? Try to give you some of that cursed food too. More stuff to analyze, no?)
So, anyway, basically what you tell me is that it was just a way for someone in power, to order them to commit suicide by starvation. Same as there was nothing psycho-somatic about the Japanese being ordered to commit seppuku. Or like there was nothing psycho-somatic about infantry soldiers obeying the order to do a suicide attack against machinegun nests.
You just need to give someone a worse alternative if they don't obey the order. Preferrably including the prospect of doing really nasty stuff to their family too.
And I don't believe that at least collapsing without food is that miraculous after a few days, if you're a malnourished tribesman to start with. I doubt that those guys had massive fat reserves to burn through. And if it also includes lack of water, even faster.
So I'm somewhat skeptical.
Plus, let's put it this way. If being an outcast could actually cause someone to die, half of us people on/. would have died before reaching puberty.
You can even take your pick. Nerds come in all flavour packs, from would-be-social-but-too-shy-to-speak to real introverts who actually _like_ being left alone with a computer. I don't see many being keel over and die for not being the popular prom queen. Or at least I didn't so far, anyway:p
No, the EU didn't say MS had to GPL any program of their own. The EU just said they had to license their protocols and APIs to everyone, in a non-discriminating way.
Again, this doesn't mean that Windows had to be suddenly GPLed, but that the APIs should be available to _anyone_ who wants to write a program for Windows. Hardly an unreasonable demand, don't you think?
Well, MS basically thought it was smart and slapped a license on those protocols and APIs that basically said you can't share that info with anyone, or show your code to anyone. Basically a legalese way of saying "ok, but you can't use those specs in an OSS program."
Which basically already places a rather unreasonable restriction, when the whole idea in the first place was to make that info available to everyone.
1. To start with the easy part, a lot of the tribal "magic" wasn't really psycho-somatic at all. It involved also poisoning the bugger, just to be on the safe side that the curse works. E.g., some tribes put fine sharp shards or splinters in the food of the "cursed". Which then eventually died. Woohoo, the magic worked.
There were some actual anthropology studies on that topic, after the media had done their sensationalist bullshit number of showing it all as either para-normal or psycho-somatic. Invariably the actual studies never found any evidence of anything being purely psycho-somatic there. Just plain old murder and propaganda.
2. There's a big difference between altering someone's perception of the world (e.g., of pain), and actual healing. Getting someone to subjectively (think they) feel better via social interaction or placebo effects, now that exists, I won't argue with you there. But that usually doesn't mean actual healing: whatever actual damage was there, will still be there.
3. A lot of the psycho-somatic healing, as opposed to just altering someone's perception of pain, is just bullshit and selective confirmation.
Fact is that the human body can recover by itself from the vast majority of illnesses. We are a _very_ robust machine. Things that are (mildly) poisonous to animals, are spices or flavour stuff to us. (E.g., if you were a dog, chocolate would be mildly toxic to you.) Viruses or bacteria that are lethal to animals are a minor annoyance to us. (E.g., mange is lethal for dogs and _the_ biggest mortality factor in wolves, but it's a mild flu to humans.)
Even medicine most often doesn't just outright kill the bacteria in you, and even less so in the case of viruses. Concentrations which would outright solve a disease by themselves, would cause massive damage to your own cells too. Most medicine just gives the virus or bacteria a bit of a hard time while your own immune system does most of the actual work.
This is why faith healing, homeopathy, and all the other bullshit can claim to have results: because those people would have healed anyway. Maybe faster with real medical care, maybe with less complications or lasting damage, but they healed with bullshit instead anyway. And they would have healed without the bullshit too.
It's not really psycho-somatic, it's just that you naturally heal anyway.
4. Social factors do work in another perverse way, though and that is by making people _pretend_ to be healed, if they get the idea that their social recognition and standing depends on that.
If you leave in a very religious community, and you're put in a "Jesus will heal you if you REALLY believe in Him" kind of situation, you have a damn good incentive to at least pretend to be healed. Because otherwise, hey, you're an unbeliever.
5. That goes double when your _own_ self-respect and set of beliefs depends on something working. In that case you won't just pretend as such, you'll start actually convincing yourself that it worked.
E.g., in the same situation as above if that person's own self-respect or view of the world depends on him being a proper faithful follower of Jesus, he'll try hard to convince himself that he's really healed. "No, really, it hurts a lot less when I walk. *ouch*"
But again, just metally blocking a signal doesn't really make its _cause_ go away. Same as wearing sun glasses doesn't make the sun actually become darker.
Now I don't drink at all nowadays, but had my years of working hard at becoming an alcoholic in high school and early university. (Also shows that just working hard at something doesn't mean you'll actually achieve it;)
Ah, those were the times. Waking up with memories of crawling for what seemed like 5 miles towards a bottle of booze, and that somehow it was always to the left. Makes one really think about non-Euclidian space, I'll tell ya.
And I'm not even getting into how much you learn about debugging the next day after you've programmed assembly while dead-drunk. It's quite the education.
Anyway, I can tell you first hand that booze takes a while to affect you. You can already have enough alcohol in you to pass out, and it will take some time for that to happen.
For starters, unless you were giving him a vodka IV (which would have been lethal), there's a helluva lot of difference between having the alcohol in your stomach and having the alcohol in your blood.
So my take is that the guy already had enough vodka in him before you even brought the water. Especially if he couldn't tell the difference between vodka and water. So well, all you describe there is merely that it took a bit of time for it to get into his blood stream.
Actually, the PSU's own dissipation for a start is not constant. If you assume that the PSU had 75% efficiency (and at that kind of low load, like 70-190W out of a 400W PSU, it might have much lower), then you can count on some 25% of that total measured power to be the PSU's dissipation alone.
Which makes it, by the figures in your own message, some 45W for the P4 system, vs some 30W for the A64 system. Hmm... Makes the delta a little bit lower. Again, that's the PSU alone.
And the difference in motherboards isn't as trivial as it sounds, either. E.g., among A64 motherboards alone, I can tell you that there's a _huge_ thermal difference between a VIA K8T800 (the MSI in their test) and, say, an NForce 4. The former runs cool on a passive cooler, the latter, well, there's a reason why Asus puts a 9000 RPM fan on it.
So how does the Intel mobo stack there? Bugger me if I know. But equal to either it likely won't be.
Basically, yes, the Prescott _does_ use more power than an A64, but then they do have a different TDP. Hardly a big surprise.
But it's not as simple as taking a whole system's power use and claiming it's either AMD or Intel marketting factor. And it sure as heck won't say much about what their notebook chips use. That's all I'm saying.
I mean, I know it's/. and reading before writing should not generally be expected, but I'd think that when you provide a link you've at least read what's written there.
The power draw on SPCR was for _whole_ _systems_ built around those CPUs. They even say they include the:
- PSU, which probably accounts for some 30%+ of the total power draw. And here's the fun part: the PSU efficiency is not constant, but depends on the load. So did it contribute more or less to the P4 systems than to the A64 ones?
- IBM 40 GB Desktar 120GXP HDD. From personal experience, I can tell you that it's _not_ a cool'n'quiet HDD. Placing two of those above each others without fans, well, now that cost me two HDDs worth of data. (And it sounds like a chainsaw too, but that's beside the point.)
- Asus GeForce FX 5900 Ultra VGA. Again, not a cool or quiet card by any stretch of imagination. In fact, it's the original NVidia card that was compared to a leafblower, because it needed a centrifugal turbine to stay cool.
- wildly different motherboards
So including the VGA card _and_ PSU _and_ HDD in when you say "the P4 will actually draw 179 watts" is actually just false.
And then using it as "marketting delta" and extrapolating it to mobile CPUs, just shows that you don't even start to have a clue WTF you're talking about. "Marketting delta"? Since when did a _NVidia_ graphics card's power use count as AMD or Intel "marketting delta"? No, really. Does any AMD or Intel CPU come with a NVidia GPU on the die, or what?
I mean, ffs, I'm used to some "creative puffering", conveniently omitting the inconvenient details, and other euphemisms for "lies". But the whole computer industry is already well into outright fraud territory, and some are leading a cavalry charge deep into it.
As just an example of outright fraud: It's gotten to the point where, for example, a dishonest heatsink manufacturer can buy a 28 dBA Panaflo fan and sell it as a 21 dBA fan. And then start selling an even noisier ball-bearing fan instead and _still_ claim 21 dBA.
And I'd love to finger one single fraudster for that. Like, ThermalTake, who did it with their "SilentBoost". But incidentally it shows the other bad effect of allowing lies and fraud:... it's just put a pressure on others to do the same. If you're the honest guy who says "ok, ours are 28 dBA", you lose sales to the cons and frauds claiming "21 dBA" for theirs. So everyone else started doing the same thing: now you have a wide choice of fans with outright fraud specs, including from Sharkoon, ThermalRight, and a bunch of others.
And that's just one example.
And I'd rather see _some_ honesty restored to this industry, rather than shrug it off as "oh, cool, now the CPU manufacturers are cheating too. Well, it's marketting so it's normal."
No, it's not normal. There's a very clear legal term for selling something under deliberately false and mis-leading terms about what it does or how well: it's "fraud". And I think it's damn overdue that something was done about it in this industry.
In no other industry would that be tolerated to this shameless extent. If Joe's Construction Co buys a ton of I-beams from Jack's Steel Mill Inc, and they were supposed to have 1% carbon, Joe actually expects them to match that. You can't deliver pig iron instead and go "oh, well, it was just marketting. Don't tell me you actually expected to get 1% carbon steel for that price. Sucks to be you."
If Jack's Steel Mill delivered pig iron instead of the steel it advertised, it faces some very nasty lawsuits. Much nastier if those beams were used in, say, a bridge, and it collapsed.
And IMHO it's about damn time the same started applying to the computer industry too.
Well, that or there could be a reasonable period of unavailability before it's considered abbandoned and a therefore public domain. For example, if you can't buy something for 1-2 years, I'd say it's safe to consider it ok-to-copy.
Honestly, if your workers were on strike for 1-2 years, I'd think you have bigger problems than people copying your book:P
1. It wouldn't hurt Marvel that much to keep January's Spiderman available for another month, if that's the problem. They can easily either print enough for a year in the first place, or just let someone get those comics scanned over the web for the full fee for a 20 years, or whatever. Again, I've stated no restrictions as to _how_ those works should still be available.
Frankly, neither of the above costs a fortune. If old Dilbert or Calvin and Hobbes comics can still be viewed online for a minor fee, I fail to see why the same couldn't apply to old Marvel comics. No, really, what would be their loss there? If anything, it would be an extra (if small) source of profit.
And if even that's not worth their effort, then what's their loss anyway? That someone might not buy today, on account that in a few decades they'll get them for free? Somehow I doubt that that many people are willing to wait that long.
2. I think it's already possible to cover characters and settings as trademarks, rather than copyright.
E.g., in Marvel's case, witness the recent lawsuit against the makers of City Of Heroes. The issue there was _not_ one of copyright. It was entirely over trademarks.
E.g., even if half of Disney's stuff finally went public domain, you still couldn't make your own Mickey Mouse cartoons. Because Mickey is a trademark. You could, however, copy some old movies that Disney basically wants to bury.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not talking about the one who bought the sword. Anyone who pays real money for an unfair advantage in a multi-player game is not only whacked up in the head, he's also basically a cheater in my book. So that I don't have any sympathy for that one.
However, he wasn't the one stabbed or stabbing.
What's left is two guys fighting over a _shitload_ (for them) of very real money, in the very real world. I'd say the real money's not beside the point at all. I'd say the real money was the _whole_ point there.
"In any case, if someone sold something I lent to them for a large sum of money I think it would be taken to the courts."
Which is what this guy tried first. Except the police basically missed the point in the same way. He got told, basically, ah well, if that money came from virtual property, it's not our business. Again, missing the point that the money wasn't virtual at all.
Also missing the point that a virtual piece of property that's worth real money (even if to a deranged cheater) isn't that irrelevant after all.
We pay and get paid for bits and bytes on a HDD every day. I'm paid to write programs, which in the end also exist only as bits and bytes somewhere. Writers are paid for writing books, you guessed, as bits and bytes on a HDD. (I don't think anyone still uses a typewriter.) Apple expects you to pay for downloading songs: you guessed, just a bunch of bytes. Napster even expects you to pay without ending up owning those tracks: the moment you've cancelled your napster account, you're left with nothing, just like this guy's virtual sword. Lots of people pay for bandwidth or for cable TV, both of which are basically just bits and bytes in transit, or rather different facets thereof. Etc.
Or here's something else to think about: Your bank account also exists really just on the bank's computer, but I bet you'd be pretty pissed off if someone helped himself to it. It's not the bits and bytes that mattered, it's how much money that was worth. Same as this guy's sword.
We're well past the point where "it's virtual" meant "it has no value". Half of the civilized world is by now purely virtual. Web sites, trade secrets, business data, bank accounts, etc, are more and more purely virtual stuff in a computer.
Doesn't make them worthless at all: ask that banks who recently sued IBM whether that data in their database was that worthless. I believe they had losses of millions a day just trying to keep running with a corrupt database.
So if you still think that virtual==worthless stuff only deranged freaks care about, sad to say, you're about half a century too late for that idea.
How about if you get worked up for a helluva lot of money at 41? We're talking _China_, ffs. That's a _lot_ of money for them.
It doesn't even have anything to do with games.
Let's say you wrote a piece of program, or a short novel, or composed some cool piece of music, or painted something funny in Photoshop. (Whatever fits your abilities and hobbies.) It's equally just bits and bytes on a hard drive, right? Nothing to get worked up about, right?
Now let's say you gave it to me, dunno, for review or whatever other reasons.
Now let's say I put my name on it and sold the rights to it for, say, $100,000. (To sorta put into a western perspective the shitload of money that meant in China.) Dunno why someone would want to pay that much for it. It's all just bits and bytes, after all, right? But somehow I found someone willing to give _me_ all that load of real money for _your_ work.
Now tell me that you absolutely positively wouldn't get the idea "hey, wait a minute, that thing wasn't his to sell in the first place, and that money is rightfully mine."
Sure, maybe you'd still be rational enough to not go into a homicidal rage. Other people, however, would be pretty damn angry at that point. Now if the victim also said something stupid like "piss off, I'm not giving you a cent. It was just bits and bytes anyway"... well, I think a _lot_ of people would get very very angry. Maybe even well into homicidal rage territory.
If you'll get your head out of the ass, and pull yourself out of the self-righteous "bah, those delusional nerds" rhetoric, picture the fight as being over those $1000. While the sword may have been virtual, the money was very very real.
Not everyone is a rich western consultant, you know. For some people even in western countries, $1000 is more than they earn in a month. But here we're talking _China. $1000 is a bloody huge fortune.
To put things in a more western perspective: imagine that someone sold something of yours on eBay for, oh, say, $100,000. Would _you_ just shrug it off as "oh well, who cares? It might rightfully be mine, but I'll let him keep the $100,000"? It may have been something virtual, it may have been something you couldn't care less about, but we're still talking a _lot_ of real money. Think hard.
Now maybe _you_ wouldn't kill someone even for that money. But wouldn't you at least get the thought "WTH? It was my item to start with, so the money should be rightfully mine!"
And I'm sure you can see how from there it can degenerate in a fight.
Pray tell, by what warped definition it's not Science Fiction?
Yes, it's a swashbuckler and magic flick. Yes, it's a cute little space opera. No, it wasn't some deep philosophical shit.
It's also probably _the_ SF universe where they went and fleshed out every single bloody detail about how it works. Between the movies, the books and the games, they covered pretty much every single bit of technology, history, and politics in that galaxy.
You could research, or have your favourite SW terminal nerd fill you in on such details as exactly what was the thrust of each engine on a TIE-fighter, or what was its turning radius. Or exactly what went into a lightsaber. Or which animals ate what. Etc.
So it seems to me like it went and explained its science part _far_ beyond the point where any other SF setting ever did. So why and by what definition it's not SF?
And then what would still count as SF?
Before I get started, this isn't really supposed to be a troll. I'm just trying to give you an insight into _why_ we're wondering about people buying every MacOS point release. And in return maybe you'll help me understand why you do that.
You know, for all the being called "Redmond fanboys" or whatnot, we Windows people don't go buying every single release. Yes, Microsoft fully expects you to pay for XP, but most sane people will not actually upgrade to XP from 2000.
My second computer is still happily running Windows 2000, ever since it was my primary box. The newer A64 machine is on XP only because (A) there was no price discount to buy an older version, and (B) I really wanted the NX bit protection, what with all the buffer-overflow viruses on the Internet. (Not that I ever got virused on 2000 either, but I figured you can't ever have enough layers of defense.)
And even that computer still running Windows 2000 is not that much of an exception. You'd be suprised how many computers still exist out there with Windows '98, or even Windows '95, or in some pathological cases Windows 3.1.
Or here at work until recently NT 4.0 was still the corporate standard.
In fact, I think that in the Windows world, it's safe to say that the OS is the _least_ important part. It's there just so the applications will load. We'd run just as happily (or actually happier) without any OS, if the same apps could be booted directly without an OS. Hence, the lack of Windows people creaming their pants at the thought "woo, we can pay for a new release."
Unless the new version is absolutely needed to run some application, most of us couldn't care less about it.
So in a nutshell that's why we're wondering about it. Because over here on this side of the fence, sticking to an OS for 4-5 years is really the norm. Seeing people getting all excited at the thought of buying yet another yearly remake of the same OS is, well, a bit strange.
So, pray tell, just for my curiosity: _what_ applications didn't work with the old release? Was there some killer-app or killer-game announced that requires Tiger to run? Is there some much needed functionality comes in this release and was sorely missing in Panther? I'm just, you know, curious.
Yes, Microsoft does have a mile long history. One of trying to bully the courts into submission via massive anti-government propaganda.
/. standards) I'm usually writing lately.
Remember where the word "astroturfing" comes from? Some of us haven't forgotten yet. In case you don't remember: during the anti-trust trial in the USA, MS paid people to create the impression that everyone is pro-MS, pro-monopoly and anti-DOJ. They pretty much tried to make it look like the government better back down ASAP or face massive population dissent backlash.
That in addition to the direct MS PR about how the government and anti-trust laws "stiffle innovation" and whatnot. Or direct threats that they'll move to another country and stop paying taxes in the US if they're not allowed to break the laws in the US. Etc.
Basically, again: an attempt to bully the US government into submission.
So that's what I see in that "Reduced Edition" bullshit. Yes, something fitting their long history of anti-government propaganda. "Don't buy the version the government made us make" is, in fact, _exactly_ the kind of message that fits MS's history.
And again, IMHO the EU was pretty civilized about it. They just told MS "nope, try another name".
And finally, I don't see MS naming any other product "Reduced Edition". XP Home Edition had features removed too, and it wasn't called "Reduced Networking Edition", no? Or MS Works isn't called "Office Reduced Edition." _No_ marketter will willingly put words like "reduced" or "less" on a box, unless they want to make a point. Those are words that tell the public "don't buy it". "More" is good, "less" is bad. (See euphemisms like "more taste per callory" in sweets ads, instead of saying "less calories.") So I have a hard time believing that "XP Reduced Media Edition" was anything _but_ a heavy handed attempt to mock the court order.
Heh. Didn't think I'd get to say the word "astroturfing" again, what with the relatively pro-MS messages (by
Do you even know what happened there? Nah, it's more fun to jump at a wrong conclusion, eh?
The fact is more simple than that. The EU didn't as much "haggle", it just rejected Microsoft's idea of calling it "Reduced Edition". Th-th-that's all, folks.
So:
1. It didn't even involve much manpower.
2. If MS didn't want to haggle or tie up "government manpower", it could have simply not picked a name that showed outright contempt to the court's decision.
MS wasn't even ordered to change all Windows XP copies it sells, it just was ordered to _also_ sell a version without the media player alongside with the normal version. In a way that doesn't discourage people from buying that version. (E.g., no charging twice for the non-MP version.)
I'd say that MS got off pretty easily there.
It seems to me that slapping a name on it that basically says "don't buy this one" is if anything just a way to show contempt there. So it just got told "nope, that won't do. Pick another one."
That's all the "haggling out."
It's that simple.
Technically, it can be argued that the first to let you put your face on a virtual character's head, and order him/her around, was The Sims. The Deluxe version even shipped standard with a tool allowing you to align and convert one of your photos into a face texture.
And with the right expansion pack, yeah, you could watch your virtual self go on a vacation, like in the summary.
Now ok, it's a far cry from starring in an animated feature, but still, you could build a photo-album or story with it.
Personally I never saw a point in this, though. I'm me, and my sims are my sims. They're _not_ me. (Plus, it would be spooky to do that and then see that sim set the house on fire, or drown in the swimming pool.)
Exactly what "free information" would there be in taking away trademarks? No, really.
I dunno about you, but I quite enjoy the fact that Nescafe is Nestle's trademark. It means that when I go to the supermarket to buy a jar of "Nescafe Classic", chances are it'll actually be just that.
Or when I buy a can of "Pepsi", thanks to that being a trademark, I can have _some_ degree of certainty that there'll actually be Pepsi in the can.
Or when your company buys a "Cisco" router, you can have some degree of certainty that there'll actually be a Cisco router. Or when they buy a "Sun" server, they can have some certainty that it's actually that, and not someone's repackaged old ZX Spectrum.
So taking away those trademarks would make _what_ information free? And how would that benefit society?
Let's picture a word without trademarks. You go to the shop for your favourite brand of coffee. Oops, except everyone would be free to use that brand. If the shop owner wants to grind burnt peanuts and write "Nescafe" on the jar, they're free to. Or you buy a can of "Pepsi" or "Coke", whichever you prefer, and discover that it's some completely unrelated crap that you don't even like the taste of. Etc.
Where's the advantage for the consumer in that? No, seriously.
It seems to me like, if anything, you'd actually have _less_ information in a world without trademarks.
So basically it has nothing to do with "buying into" some concept, it's just a case of thinking for myself. I quite like to know what I buy.
Indeed, calling it anything else wouldn't have been a trademark violation. (Same as building a PC and calling it a Dell PC won't get you in trademark trouble with IBM. Only explicitly calling it an IBM PC would.)
On the other hand, you don't get the same free mindshare and free advertising as when you steal someone's trademark. Advertising that you have a "Scrabble" game on your site gets the attention of everyone who knows what "Scrabble" is. Advertising that you have a "Super-word-puzzle" game on the site, won't get anyone's attention.
It's a valid observation, though, and I suppose it does illustrate a few points. Thanks for bringing it up.
See, what I had in mind by "socially acceptable" was more along the lines of "acceptable for adults". As in, you won't see the CEO of a company (unless maybe if the company is Games Workshop itself) playing Warhammer 40k at the club, but chess might be socially acceptable.
High school is a more interesting case, at least in the wester world, because IMHO it's a massive cultural failure. Doing anything even remotely intellectual-like, or god forbid actually being any good at using your brains, is more likely than not to get you ridiculed, ostracized or downright bullied.
(And in more pathological cases even arrested or questioned. Dangerous people those ostracized nerds, apparently. You never know when they'll shoot up the school;)
It doesn't even matter if it's chess or anything else that requires more than one braincell awake. Being a mindless lemming with a cool t-shirt and the latest Brittney Spears is good, using your brains is bad. It's way uncool to have a brain.
Also, well, chess happens to fall under the heading of "stuff that adults do". You won't catch a cool teenager touching that stuff with a 10 ft pole.
Though that kind of age preconception isn't exclusive to teenagers. It works both ways. A lot of adults won't touch a lot of games with a 10 ft pole (board, table-top and/or video games) if they seem to fall under the heading "stuff for kids."
Thing is, would it have become even socially acceptable, much less common cultural stock, if it was invented in 1948?
Thing is, chess was supposed to be a modern (for that age) wargame. Same as, say, Warhammer 40k or Battletech nowadays.
(Purely for the sake of an unneeded tangent: originally a 4 player game. That's why you have even numbers of every piece, except the king and queen, which originally were two kings. Each of the 4 players started off one edge of the board, with half the pieces. Then eventually they figured out that, in that age before the Internet and online multiplayer, it was a pain to get 4 players together. So each side took two armies, and one king became a "grand vizier". Naming it Queen was a much later medieval invention: back there and then the queen had zero power or rights, but a grand vizier was a very powerful character.)
Look at it this way: if you go out to play Warhammer 40k, you're a "nerd". If you go out to play chess, you're some kind of social or cultural elite.
What's the fundamental difference? That chess wasn't invented in the 20th century, that's all. Chess was already accepted as a socially-acceptable conformist passtime.
So would it really be a problem if chess was invented in 1948 and trademarked? Probably not, because it would fall under the same heading as Warhammer 40k or Battletech: something only nerds do instead of going out and meeting people.
I don't know, I don't really see a possibility of confusion between the names "Coca Cola" and "Pepsi Cola". I mean, really, can you imagine someone ordering a Pepsi by mistake instead of a Coke? (That is, if they really wanted a Coke.)
And it's not that unusual that one word is common between two trademarks. E.g., "International Business Machines" and "Commodore Business Machines". Those have two words out of 3 in common, and AFAIK neither sued the other about it.
And likewise, I'd imagine "Kraft Foods" doesn't have a trademark problem with the hundreds of companies having "foods" in their name.
As for the "but what if someone trademarked 'chess'", then it wouldn't really be common cultural stock. It wouldn't be chess. It would be maybe a game with the same rules, but not _the_ game that had millenia to become common cultural stock in the first place.
We probably wouldn't have international chess tournaments, or wouldn't take them seriously, if it was a game invented in 1948. (You don't see much press about, say, Monopoly championships, do you? Or you don't see IBM making a fuss that their super-computers won a pokemon tournament. In fact, I doubt that they'd even consider entering their computer in one.)
I also see no problem with "workarounds", as you call them, to avoid infringing on someone's property. I'll stick to games for these examples, since we are talking about Scrabble.
I don't see any irreversible damage done, for example, by the fact that the couple hundreds RPG systems aren't called "D&D". Au contraire, if anything, I see that it just proves my point that progress and innovation are in the exact opposite direction than whining about how one should be allowed to steal the others' work. Those people didn't just think of a new name, but actually sat down and made a different RPG system. Some good, some awful, most in between, but on the whole it did help more than if everyone was free to clone D&D and write "D&D" on their box.
Or I see no fundamental damage done by the fact that MTG was trademarked and copyrighted. Again, whoever wanted to cash in on the collectible card game madness, just sat down and designed their own game. And so we got Pokemon, which in turn spawned Digimon and a bunch of other near-clones. Is there any fundamental problem there? Not really. Everyone has no problem understanding that they're (A) collectible stuff games, but (B) different games. And if you're into that kind of games, you have a lot more choice than if everyone just copied the MTG cards.
So the problem is...?
Even so, "Scrabble" is a trademark of Hasbro. As long as they're willing to defend that trademark, it's theirs. And in fact they _have_ to defend it or lose it. That's in fact the _only_ way for a trademark to be lost: they don't have a time limit.
You know, just like "IBM" is a trademark of International Business Machines, or "Pepsi" is the trademark of Pepsico. You can't just name your new company or your new product "IBM", even though they first used it more than 100 years ago. And you can't just name your own drinks "Pepsi".
So, sorry if I don't feel much sympathy for that site. They just took someone else's property and tried to make a buck out of it. It's no different than trying to make a buck off the Coca-Cola trademark by writing that on your own soft drinks cans.
I see no little guy unfairly oppressed by a big corporation. The little guy is the thief here, and the big corporation is just defending its lawful property.
And how does copying someone else's game help advance the progress of science and useful arts? I've said it before, but advance and progress comes from researching and creating _new_ stuff, not from a million monkeys copying someone else's work.
They have a problem with big bad Hasbro not letting them make a buck off the game Hasbro invented, and the trademark Hasbro owns? How about sitting down and inventing their _own_ game, then? Progress and advance are that-a-way.
Yes, and those AIDS patients were not "invisible" either. They were definitely seen by the doctors, which you previously ranked as getting social attention, no? They were seen by the store clerk too. Etc.
In fact, they were _less_ outcast than some nerds I know, and who don't seem to will themselves to death.
Oh, maybe you mean that they knew they had a death sentence? Well, people can survive up to 3 years with cancer, or in some rare cases get cured. You don't see them willing themselves to death.
Basically that's why I _suspect_ bullshit in mind-over-matter theories: it's invariably an inconsistent mess, where the same thing is true and false at the same time, depending on what it's supposed to explain. I'm supposed to believe that the sky is blue, red and green at the same time, if blue explains this, red explains that, and green happens to be just the right explanation for that other thing.
And, dunno, that's not how science works.
But now seriously, AIDS attacks the immune system. That's what kills you in the end: those other diseases. It might take years, or the first severe flu might fell you. I have no trouble at all believing that some people
A) had a weaker immune system to start with,
B) were diagnosed in much more advanced stages when the epidemic first broke out, because at first noone even knew about AIDS and it took bad cases of those other diseases to even go to a doctor or to not just get a cough syrup and be sent on your way, and
C) by sheer "that's how statistics works" got a more severe disease than others.
It perfectly explains why some people died sooner than others. And does so without needing some made-up psycho-somatic explanation that apparently applied _only_ to them, but never seems to apply to other terminal diseases.
You know, I'm otherwise fairly pro-MS, by Slashdot standards. (In much the same way as being right wing in the EU still counts as left wing in the US, and viceversa.) I do believe that MS has all the right in the world to keep the Windows/Office/IE/whatever sources secret. I don't believe that making money or being a corporation is a capital sin. And worse yet, I do believe that they did make a better product.
(Or more precisely, that everyone else had a crappier product. Who was gonna win the OS wars? OS/2? Heh.)
But no, I don't think that API specs should be an internal secret for a company that produces both the OS and the apps.
Allowing the API conspiracy, for lack of a better word, is what allowed MS to be a monopoly in the first place. You can't expect any sort of even playing field as long as Windows contains parts written just for Word or for IE, and parts which can be deliberately broken when a competing product wants to use them.
E.g., the classic example is Novell. They wanted to make their own Netware servers too able to act as a domain controller, so you can choose whichever fits your general needs best for that role. Basically a fair competition on merits, no?
Microsoft didn't even pretend to play fair. It simply informed Novell that if Novell publishes such a product, MS _will_ break it. And they did. They messed with the APIs and with where does that part go inside Windows, until Novell gave up and cancelled the product.
And that's exactly that kind of anti-competitive behaviour that this ruling is supposed to prevent. Because anything else is just giving MS an official blessing to continue the monopolistic behaviour.
We must be talking about different tribes, then.
/. would have died before reaching puberty.
:p
(And in that case they actually analyzed the food, among other things. It's funny the kinds of things you can do when people don't even realize what's being done: e.g., they don't expect the shaman's poison or shards to be detectable, because they haven't even heard of a microscope or about toxicology. And what are they gonna do? Try to give you some of that cursed food too. More stuff to analyze, no?)
So, anyway, basically what you tell me is that it was just a way for someone in power, to order them to commit suicide by starvation. Same as there was nothing psycho-somatic about the Japanese being ordered to commit seppuku. Or like there was nothing psycho-somatic about infantry soldiers obeying the order to do a suicide attack against machinegun nests.
You just need to give someone a worse alternative if they don't obey the order. Preferrably including the prospect of doing really nasty stuff to their family too.
And I don't believe that at least collapsing without food is that miraculous after a few days, if you're a malnourished tribesman to start with. I doubt that those guys had massive fat reserves to burn through. And if it also includes lack of water, even faster.
So I'm somewhat skeptical.
Plus, let's put it this way. If being an outcast could actually cause someone to die, half of us people on
You can even take your pick. Nerds come in all flavour packs, from would-be-social-but-too-shy-to-speak to real introverts who actually _like_ being left alone with a computer. I don't see many being keel over and die for not being the popular prom queen. Or at least I didn't so far, anyway
No, the EU didn't say MS had to GPL any program of their own. The EU just said they had to license their protocols and APIs to everyone, in a non-discriminating way.
Again, this doesn't mean that Windows had to be suddenly GPLed, but that the APIs should be available to _anyone_ who wants to write a program for Windows. Hardly an unreasonable demand, don't you think?
Well, MS basically thought it was smart and slapped a license on those protocols and APIs that basically said you can't share that info with anyone, or show your code to anyone. Basically a legalese way of saying "ok, but you can't use those specs in an OSS program."
Which basically already places a rather unreasonable restriction, when the whole idea in the first place was to make that info available to everyone.
1. To start with the easy part, a lot of the tribal "magic" wasn't really psycho-somatic at all. It involved also poisoning the bugger, just to be on the safe side that the curse works. E.g., some tribes put fine sharp shards or splinters in the food of the "cursed". Which then eventually died. Woohoo, the magic worked.
There were some actual anthropology studies on that topic, after the media had done their sensationalist bullshit number of showing it all as either para-normal or psycho-somatic. Invariably the actual studies never found any evidence of anything being purely psycho-somatic there. Just plain old murder and propaganda.
2. There's a big difference between altering someone's perception of the world (e.g., of pain), and actual healing. Getting someone to subjectively (think they) feel better via social interaction or placebo effects, now that exists, I won't argue with you there. But that usually doesn't mean actual healing: whatever actual damage was there, will still be there.
3. A lot of the psycho-somatic healing, as opposed to just altering someone's perception of pain, is just bullshit and selective confirmation.
Fact is that the human body can recover by itself from the vast majority of illnesses. We are a _very_ robust machine. Things that are (mildly) poisonous to animals, are spices or flavour stuff to us. (E.g., if you were a dog, chocolate would be mildly toxic to you.) Viruses or bacteria that are lethal to animals are a minor annoyance to us. (E.g., mange is lethal for dogs and _the_ biggest mortality factor in wolves, but it's a mild flu to humans.)
Even medicine most often doesn't just outright kill the bacteria in you, and even less so in the case of viruses. Concentrations which would outright solve a disease by themselves, would cause massive damage to your own cells too. Most medicine just gives the virus or bacteria a bit of a hard time while your own immune system does most of the actual work.
This is why faith healing, homeopathy, and all the other bullshit can claim to have results: because those people would have healed anyway. Maybe faster with real medical care, maybe with less complications or lasting damage, but they healed with bullshit instead anyway. And they would have healed without the bullshit too.
It's not really psycho-somatic, it's just that you naturally heal anyway.
4. Social factors do work in another perverse way, though and that is by making people _pretend_ to be healed, if they get the idea that their social recognition and standing depends on that.
If you leave in a very religious community, and you're put in a "Jesus will heal you if you REALLY believe in Him" kind of situation, you have a damn good incentive to at least pretend to be healed. Because otherwise, hey, you're an unbeliever.
5. That goes double when your _own_ self-respect and set of beliefs depends on something working. In that case you won't just pretend as such, you'll start actually convincing yourself that it worked.
E.g., in the same situation as above if that person's own self-respect or view of the world depends on him being a proper faithful follower of Jesus, he'll try hard to convince himself that he's really healed. "No, really, it hurts a lot less when I walk. *ouch*"
But again, just metally blocking a signal doesn't really make its _cause_ go away. Same as wearing sun glasses doesn't make the sun actually become darker.
Now I don't drink at all nowadays, but had my years of working hard at becoming an alcoholic in high school and early university. (Also shows that just working hard at something doesn't mean you'll actually achieve it;)
Ah, those were the times. Waking up with memories of crawling for what seemed like 5 miles towards a bottle of booze, and that somehow it was always to the left. Makes one really think about non-Euclidian space, I'll tell ya.
And I'm not even getting into how much you learn about debugging the next day after you've programmed assembly while dead-drunk. It's quite the education.
Anyway, I can tell you first hand that booze takes a while to affect you. You can already have enough alcohol in you to pass out, and it will take some time for that to happen.
For starters, unless you were giving him a vodka IV (which would have been lethal), there's a helluva lot of difference between having the alcohol in your stomach and having the alcohol in your blood.
So my take is that the guy already had enough vodka in him before you even brought the water. Especially if he couldn't tell the difference between vodka and water. So well, all you describe there is merely that it took a bit of time for it to get into his blood stream.
Actually, the PSU's own dissipation for a start is not constant. If you assume that the PSU had 75% efficiency (and at that kind of low load, like 70-190W out of a 400W PSU, it might have much lower), then you can count on some 25% of that total measured power to be the PSU's dissipation alone.
Which makes it, by the figures in your own message, some 45W for the P4 system, vs some 30W for the A64 system. Hmm... Makes the delta a little bit lower. Again, that's the PSU alone.
And the difference in motherboards isn't as trivial as it sounds, either. E.g., among A64 motherboards alone, I can tell you that there's a _huge_ thermal difference between a VIA K8T800 (the MSI in their test) and, say, an NForce 4. The former runs cool on a passive cooler, the latter, well, there's a reason why Asus puts a 9000 RPM fan on it.
So how does the Intel mobo stack there? Bugger me if I know. But equal to either it likely won't be.
Basically, yes, the Prescott _does_ use more power than an A64, but then they do have a different TDP. Hardly a big surprise.
But it's not as simple as taking a whole system's power use and claiming it's either AMD or Intel marketting factor. And it sure as heck won't say much about what their notebook chips use. That's all I'm saying.
I mean, I know it's /. and reading before writing should not generally be expected, but I'd think that when you provide a link you've at least read what's written there.
The power draw on SPCR was for _whole_ _systems_ built around those CPUs. They even say they include the:
- PSU, which probably accounts for some 30%+ of the total power draw. And here's the fun part: the PSU efficiency is not constant, but depends on the load. So did it contribute more or less to the P4 systems than to the A64 ones?
- IBM 40 GB Desktar 120GXP HDD. From personal experience, I can tell you that it's _not_ a cool'n'quiet HDD. Placing two of those above each others without fans, well, now that cost me two HDDs worth of data. (And it sounds like a chainsaw too, but that's beside the point.)
- Asus GeForce FX 5900 Ultra VGA. Again, not a cool or quiet card by any stretch of imagination. In fact, it's the original NVidia card that was compared to a leafblower, because it needed a centrifugal turbine to stay cool.
- wildly different motherboards
So including the VGA card _and_ PSU _and_ HDD in when you say "the P4 will actually draw 179 watts" is actually just false.
And then using it as "marketting delta" and extrapolating it to mobile CPUs, just shows that you don't even start to have a clue WTF you're talking about. "Marketting delta"? Since when did a _NVidia_ graphics card's power use count as AMD or Intel "marketting delta"? No, really. Does any AMD or Intel CPU come with a NVidia GPU on the die, or what?
I mean, ffs, I'm used to some "creative puffering", conveniently omitting the inconvenient details, and other euphemisms for "lies". But the whole computer industry is already well into outright fraud territory, and some are leading a cavalry charge deep into it.
... it's just put a pressure on others to do the same. If you're the honest guy who says "ok, ours are 28 dBA", you lose sales to the cons and frauds claiming "21 dBA" for theirs. So everyone else started doing the same thing: now you have a wide choice of fans with outright fraud specs, including from Sharkoon, ThermalRight, and a bunch of others.
As just an example of outright fraud: It's gotten to the point where, for example, a dishonest heatsink manufacturer can buy a 28 dBA Panaflo fan and sell it as a 21 dBA fan. And then start selling an even noisier ball-bearing fan instead and _still_ claim 21 dBA.
And I'd love to finger one single fraudster for that. Like, ThermalTake, who did it with their "SilentBoost". But incidentally it shows the other bad effect of allowing lies and fraud:
And that's just one example.
And I'd rather see _some_ honesty restored to this industry, rather than shrug it off as "oh, cool, now the CPU manufacturers are cheating too. Well, it's marketting so it's normal."
No, it's not normal. There's a very clear legal term for selling something under deliberately false and mis-leading terms about what it does or how well: it's "fraud". And I think it's damn overdue that something was done about it in this industry.
In no other industry would that be tolerated to this shameless extent. If Joe's Construction Co buys a ton of I-beams from Jack's Steel Mill Inc, and they were supposed to have 1% carbon, Joe actually expects them to match that. You can't deliver pig iron instead and go "oh, well, it was just marketting. Don't tell me you actually expected to get 1% carbon steel for that price. Sucks to be you."
If Jack's Steel Mill delivered pig iron instead of the steel it advertised, it faces some very nasty lawsuits. Much nastier if those beams were used in, say, a bridge, and it collapsed.
And IMHO it's about damn time the same started applying to the computer industry too.
Well, that or there could be a reasonable period of unavailability before it's considered abbandoned and a therefore public domain. For example, if you can't buy something for 1-2 years, I'd say it's safe to consider it ok-to-copy.
:P
Honestly, if your workers were on strike for 1-2 years, I'd think you have bigger problems than people copying your book
1. It wouldn't hurt Marvel that much to keep January's Spiderman available for another month, if that's the problem. They can easily either print enough for a year in the first place, or just let someone get those comics scanned over the web for the full fee for a 20 years, or whatever. Again, I've stated no restrictions as to _how_ those works should still be available.
Frankly, neither of the above costs a fortune. If old Dilbert or Calvin and Hobbes comics can still be viewed online for a minor fee, I fail to see why the same couldn't apply to old Marvel comics. No, really, what would be their loss there? If anything, it would be an extra (if small) source of profit.
And if even that's not worth their effort, then what's their loss anyway? That someone might not buy today, on account that in a few decades they'll get them for free? Somehow I doubt that that many people are willing to wait that long.
2. I think it's already possible to cover characters and settings as trademarks, rather than copyright.
E.g., in Marvel's case, witness the recent lawsuit against the makers of City Of Heroes. The issue there was _not_ one of copyright. It was entirely over trademarks.
E.g., even if half of Disney's stuff finally went public domain, you still couldn't make your own Mickey Mouse cartoons. Because Mickey is a trademark. You could, however, copy some old movies that Disney basically wants to bury.