...is that there really is no way to test the hypothesis that others praying for the patient (without the patient's knowledge) really helps. So you assign some people to pray for some patients but not others. Big deal. There are too many uncontrolled factors at play here:
1) How do you know those "assigned" are heartfelt in their prayers?
2) How do you know those assigned aren't praying for others too?
3) How do you deal with the fact that the patient's friends and family are probably praying for them, yet (perhaps atheist) relatives of other patients may or may not be?
With these and similar complications, it's rather difficult to isolate the effects of prayer (if any) on the patient since we don't know who may be praying for them.
Maybe prayers do help. Maybe they don't. I just don't see us being able to determine this based on studies such as the one you cite, especially since there's really no way to measure prayer.
Antitrust laws were passed to protect small businesses, as well as the consumer. Microsoft is directly responsible for the creation and growth of literally thousands of small ISVs and consulting firms
It's also been directly responsible for the death of thousands of small ISVs, usually through illegal business tactics.
The ONLY firm that is portrayed as a "victim" in the Findings is Netscape
Untrue. While only a few companies were mentioned by name in the finding ( the big ones - Netscape, Sun, Apple, IBM, Intel), there are hordes of smaller companies who were just too numerous, or too small in size, to get mentioned specifically. This doesn't mean they weren't the victim of illegal practices.
The "remedies" that people are talking about won't actually help any consumer. There is some fanciful notion that some consumer somewhere is harmed by the pricing of Windows
I don't think the notion is "fanciful" at all. The fact that MS can charge roughly twice what the market would naturally support without the monopoly is real harm to all MS customers, ie almost all Intel-compatible PC buyers. That's a lot of money taken from a lot of people. The fact that consumers don't have a choice is not fancy either, but fact. The fact that MS killed off technologies that would be valuable to the consumer, in order to protect its OS monopoly, is not fanciful but fact (for example, Native Signal Processing).
but breaking up Microsoft will cause immediate, permanent damage to lots of small businesses across America
And the argument could be made that breaking up MS will provide immediate opportunity for lots of small businesses across America (and overseas) who were previously unable to compete because of MS. The fact that some people have made themselves reliant on MS does not mean that we should allow MS to continue illegal behavior that harms the consumer and competition. Certainly, any remedy should consider the entirety of who will be harmed and who helped. But if you don't do something, you continue to victimize the public and many software companies. Some remedies might hurt MS-reliant companies, or they might not. But any remedy is bound to cause some short-term pain to *somebody*. So it's a tough decision that Judge Jackson has to make. I personally am going to wait until he makes it to pass my own judgment, because it is an extremely tough issue, and I'd like to see the Judge's reasoning.
I can see where you're coming from, but I think you're looking at too narrow a view of "remedies". With respect to structural remedies (i.e. breaking up the company in some fashion), the plans most people are talking about are NOT creating a thousand Baby Bills, each owning a single piece of MS software (ie VB, SQL Server, etc). The options being discussed generally fall into two categories:
1) Split MS into an OS group, an applications group, and a hardware group, etc.
2) Make several "copies" of MS, all of which have rights to MS's entire IP portfolio. So all of the Baby Bills all have Windows, VB, SQL, DCOM, etc)
If choice 1 were to be enacted (I doubt it will, as it doesn't solve the fundamental problem of the illegal monopoly), then what you're worried about won't come to pass. The Applications company will still make all those applications you use (VB, SQL server,etc), and they'll all still work together and will be able to provide support for integrated solutions. And since their products run on NT, you're naturally going to be getting support for them on NT. Further, the OS group isn't going to change the OS on a whim, so DCOM et al will still be there. No problem.
If choice 2 is enacted, then you still don't have to worry much (this scenario I see as more likely than choice 1). You still have the ability to buy all your components from one company (ie some Baby Bill), with all the benefits and problems associated with that choice. But now, you benefit from the fact that there are several competing Baby Bills trying to provide you the best product and service. In order to get the level of integration you had before, you don't have to buy from just one company. Bill#1 may have improved SQL so it runs better. This new product though is compatible with the Windows, VB, etc from all Bills- nobody would buy the new version if it weren't. Similarly with all the MS products. If you would rather not use the better SQL from Bill#1, because you want one location for all your support needs, just buy everything from one vendor. Business as usual. Except you benefit from the new situation in that prices will be lower, and product quality will improve, no matter which Bill you're buying from. 'Cause all those Bills want to be able to provide the best value. MS has little incentive to do that now, it only need provide enough that you're afraid to leave. With many Baby Bills, they have to innovate much more to survive...and you the customer will benefit.
From what I've seen, you are correct in that MS does provide a much more comprehensive developer support program, largely because they have their hands in everything. Where I think you are going wrong is in the assumption that a breakup of MS would end this. On the contrary, if MS were to be dealt with as in option (2) above, you'd have multiple companies (I've heard speculation of between 3 and 5 such Baby Bills) who could provide that very same support. And because they are more cost-sensitive than large companies, those thousands of small firms will benefit the most.
There's nothing stopping a DJ from taking the sound output from the sound card and sending that into a mixer. Chances are the DJ isn't going to be relying solely/at all on the computer for mixing (it's just much simpler to use a hardware mixer than try to do all that with a mouse). But using MP3 can make the DJ's job a bit easier so that rather than shuffle through hordes of CDs, it's a quick couple of clicks.
It's possible that the only software he's using is for the player (ie WinAmp or equivalent), and is just sending the sound card output into a mixer. In which case it's essentially the same situation as with a CD as source; this way you just don't have to bring all sorts of CDs.
I dont make a habbit of buying CDs for 1 song. Not for 20 bucks... and I KNOW that it doesnt cost the RIAA even close to that to print and market the CDs (per disc)
I believe the number is something around $0.80 per CD (according to a Wired article - dead tree version- I saw a while back).
Re:This is absolutely ludicrous..
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Usenet Gag Order
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The First Amendment is not absolute, in that you are correct. However, the judge banned a guy from talking about *skiing* in a Usenet group. There's quite a difference between issuing an order instructing the guy to not post threats, and issuing an order that prevents legitimate speech. It certainly seems to be a violation of his First Amendment rights.
There seem to be two related but independent issues in this.
The first issue is, who owns the legal rights to the work that a professor does while employed by a university? Is it the professor, or the university? If it's the university, then the situation is pretty much the same (from the prof's standpoint) as that of the "poor engineer"; ie that his employer has the rights to his works/publications.
The second issue is, are student's lecture notes the creative work of a student (ie their interpretation/analysis of the lecture), or are they to be considered as part of the lecture itself? If the former, then the notes are the property of the student, who may do with them whatever he/she wishes. If the latter, then they belong to the university/professor (depending on the results of the first question).
As I see it, notes that a student takes during class are their own creative work, consisting of a summary/analysis of material presented in lecture. If the notes are indeed that (and not verbatim copies of the lecture) then the notes belong to the student. Thus they may do as they wish with them, including selling them.
Now, if the university comes along and requires, as a condition of enrollment, that all students must sign a contract that says they will not distribute their notes, then the students are stuck.
This is somewhat analogous to the engineer who works for some company and has to sign NDAs, etc. But it's not exactly the same. The NDAs and things that the engineer has to sign apply to company secrets. But at a university, the vast majority, if not all, of what you're learning is public knowledge, not trade secrets. Thus the university doesn't have any rights to the knowledge that you possess. If you feel like sharing your knowledge, in the form of notes or anything else, that is your right.
I can see how, in the case of advanced courses, there may be situations where the professor may wish to discuss a theory of theirs which has not yet been published. I expect that this situation is not all *that* common, but I could be wrong:). A reasonable solution, IMHO, to this dilemma is to have the students in the class sign an NDA of some sort that applies to that specific research item. Thus the students can publish their notes on the public knowledge portion of the class, while protecting any unpublished research items. This avoids professors having to "dumb down" the lectures, and protects the rights of the students and professors.
How can you rant and rage about the evil's of non-disclosure agreements/non-compete, yet proclaim that professors have no rights to their own work
It seems that the implicit assumption in your statement is that the student's notes are somehow the work of the lecturer (if this was not your intent, please correct me). I believe the the student's notes are the student's interpretation of the lecture, and as such are the student's property, not that of the lecturer. If the student had made a verbatim copy of the lecturer, or tape recorded him/her and published said copy, in that case I can see an excellent argument for those being the property of the lecturer. But to claim student-created notes as the IP of the professor seems a bit much.
The objection, I am sure, lies primarily in the fact that the individual is not allowed to profit from his own ideas
But the professor is profiting from his ideas, as is his right. It's called his employment as a professor. In addition, at UCLA they sell professor-approved lecture notes. I would argue that the students also have the right to profit from *their* work, the notes they took.
And what about publications such as Cliff's Notes? They summarize literary works in pretty good detail, probably as well as (or better than) many students notes:-) But AFAIK the authors of the original work have no legal rights to the Cliff's Notes.
The reason why is that they need to grow somehow. The rule is in business, that you grow or you die. And besides, growth makes the shareholders happy:-)
It's often easier for said big companies to grow by invading new markets than by somehow trying to stimulate extra demand in the markets you already are in. Though of course, they often try both, as that would maximize profits even more.
One thing that can cause problems is excessive accumulation of dirt and grime. Besides having the potential to cause malfunctions, excessive dust and grime makes the system look unappealing to potential users. I would recommend the use of a thin covering material to shield it from unwanted substances, especially during use.
Are you overclocking? While overclocking can lead to more fun in your games, if you overclock too much you can wear the part down causing boot failures. You can only compute so much in a given time, trying to do more is just asking for trouble.
And I don't even want to know where the Matrox Dual-Head comes into this...
8^p
PS No, my choice of verb for what the Matrox is doing was not intended as a pun. Though it should've been;-)
Intent to restrict access is a vital point in any 'password-protected' defense against CMU's actions. By using a password of 'mp3' (which most people recognize as the password to use when attempting to access MP3 resources) or by placing the password in a README file, you are making it clear that you have no intention to restrict access to your MP3 files. For that reason, the data can be legally classified as 'public'.
Suppose for the sake of argument that we accept this 'implicit' classification as public, if the password is something like mp3, or certainly if the password is in a readme file. But where do you draw the line as to what passwords consitute intent to make it public vs. private?
If I use my name as a password, or some personal detail that some random person might not think of, but Computing Services could (since they know who I am and lots of other details), is that considered opening for public access?
I personally see a good argument for considering shares "public" if the password is in a readme file. Then it's clear you intend it for public consumption. But I think it's less clear if the password is merely something that is common, such as mp3. People have tons of passwords these days, and often use simple to guess, and thus easy to remember, passwords (how many ppl use 'password' as their ISP password? Does that mean if I guess their ISP password that should be considered the same as them posting it on their Web site?)
I don't think that the situation here is all that clear. And since the CMU Computing Code of Ethics states that those shares not marked *explicitly* as public should be considered private, CMU should not have attempted to guess passwords. At least not with making an announcement prior to that stating the change in their policy so that students would be aware of it, and could change their passwords accordingly.
If you had a folder shared and they couldn't guess the password, if you said anywhere that you would give out the password upon request they killed your connectivity. Even if there was no copyright-infringing material there, but merely if it *seemed* that way! They simply assumed that there was if you said you would give out passwords like that. Of course no one would give passwords to Computing Services, so they couldn't check. For all the details check the Computing Services email message linked in my above post.
What the Chronicle article fails to mention, or made factual mistakes with:
1) These files were NOT on student websites. They were on students' own machines shared via Microsoft Networking.
2) Many of the computers found "in violation" had their shares passworded. However, CMU tried to guess passwords when it ran into them. So if they could guess it, they considered it public access.
3) The uproar is not so much about the school trying to reduce mp3 sharing over their network, but the manner in which they did it. The CMU Computing Code of Ethics clearly states, "Every member of Carnegie Mellon has two basic rights: privacy and a fair share of resources. It is unethical for any other person to violate these rights...On shared computing systems, all user files and directories are considered to be private and confidential. Only files which a user has explicitly made public (e.g., by placing in a "public" directory) should be considered open for general access. Accessing and using files in another person's directory when not expressly permitted to do so by the owner is a violation of that person's privacy" The Code further states "Loopholes in computer systems or knowledge of a special password should not be used to alter computer systems, obtain extra resources or take resources from another person". Clearly what CMU has done, by going into folders not marked as public and guessing passwords has violated their own Code of Ethics. That has gotten a lot of people pretty upset. They followed the rules but lost access anyway.
4. The students affected could reduce the time they lost network access by a few weeks by going to a stupid "education" seminar to hear why copyright infringement is bad, and then write some paper along those lines. I think those that did that get their access back on Nov 14, or something like that.
5. Computing Services sent out an email to the student body giving their side of the event. You can find the text here.
Sharky Extreme seems to have been fairly impartial in the past, and having read this latest review I don't see that as having changed at all.
First off, the Sharky benchmarks show the ATI card being *faster* than the GeForce in most of the benchmarks. Thus, the product they're examining *does* beat the competition.
Secondly, Sharky used the latest NON-BETA drivers for the GeForce card. The new Nvidia drivers you are speaking of are beta right now. Sharky has said they will re-run the tests with the new drivers once they are no longer beta, and will update their results. Generally, Sharky tends to use the stable drivers to more accurately reflect a product (so bugs in new drivers won't skew results). They would've used non-beta drivers for the ATI card too, but since the ATI card hasn't been released, the only drivers available are the beta-quality ones that came with their engineering sample. Pointing the beta-ness of the ATI drivers out when some benchmark scores seem a little anomalous is, IMHO, a good practice, not a lack of objectivity.
Sharky's did a Hardware Preview, not a review. Yes there's a reason they call it preview, not review. The ATI card they're previewing is not a released product, but rather an engineering sample with beta drivers. Sharky was upfront about this fact, as they always are, and therefore mentioned that the ATI drivers are beta, and the board they are benchmarking may not be at the same clock speeds as released version (which is coming in December). Thus the numbers are not the end-all, but rather a suggestion of what may be coming along in the next month or two. This is what Sharky Extreme said at the beginning, so I wouldn't get too bent out of shape over it. Nobody claimed that the final ATI board will or will not beat the GeForce solutions, merely that it has the *potential* to.
Some things to consider about the ATI Rage Fury MAXX versus GeForce256 solutions:
1. The ATI card being previewed in the Sharky article had 64MB of video RAM, and the GeForce board in question on 32MB. This naturally gives a certain advantage to the ATI card.
2. The ATI drivers in the test were very rough, beta-quality drivers. This means the performance will likely increase by its release date in December. The GeForce drivers may very well be more optimized by then as well.
3. By December, there will likely be GeForce boards using Double Data Rate SDRAM, as opposed to the standard SDRAM used on the GeForce and ATI boards right now. This should help out the GeForce. The GeForce also supports up to 128MB of video RAM, so there might be 64MB versions out in December also to match the ATI card's 64, especially since that would help the marketing. These should help out GeForce performance a good bit.
4. We don't know that the clock rates of the ATI board being tested will match those of the eventual production run. If ATI gets good yields, the released boards may be at higher clock speeds. If not, then they may be lower (this has happened with other companies' previewed boards, such as, IIRC, Sharky's preview of the Savage2000).
My main point here is that this isn't a full-fledged review, but rather a look ahead at the potential out there. Once the ATI card is released, I'm sure they'll have a review comparing the released boards from the various companies. Let's not get too upset about comparisons between a beta board and a released product:-) They're showing the potential out there. If I were cynical, I would say that this is so you'll visit their website to check for updates when new drivers come out, and when the board is finally released:-)
However, has anyone tried that internet phone stuff?
Well, I tried Netscape's Conference software (voice as well as a shared whiteboard) back about 2 years ago. It worked pretty well, but keep in mind that both I and the friend I tried it out with were on school LANs, so I don't know how it'd work on a modem connection.
The lawsuit is NOT about the AOL website, it is regarding the AOL *online service*. Basically the blind group is arguing that AOL is a "public accomodation" (despite not being a physical place), and as such should be covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act. Their main complaint is that because AOL uses graphics for just about *everything*, with no corresponding text that can be easily read by a screen-reading OCR program, and no keyboard shortcuts for many common actions, that it makes it unduly difficult for the blind to use. Thus they are suing AOL to make them create more blind-friendly software/service.
Though, as far as I can tell by the article, the group didn't first petition AOL for changes, but rather just decided to sue instead. Grr...this country is too damn litigous. It seems rather ass-backward for someone to sue first. Why not just ask for changes first, and see if AOL will agree to them? It would make business sense for AOL, especially from a PR perspective, to make the requested changes (provided they're not ridiculous...but adding some text shouldn't be a big deal). Then if they don't, go about seeing if they're covered by the ADA (whether they are or not isn't exactly clear).
AOL has also said that some of the changes they were planning already. So they may very well become accessible regardless of the lawsuit.
The truth of the matter is that the only way to prevent nuclear war is to stop nuclear proliferation and limit the number of nuclear weapons in existence. Too bad the US Senate took a big step in the wrong direction last week.
The thing is, the threat of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) works great when you've got a small number of nations with nuclear weapons. The USA and USSR weren't about to nuke each other, because they knew damn well it was suicide. And they each had stringent controls in place to ensure no accidental launches. And they also had reasonably stable political systems, so none of the countries were about to fall into anarchy. So our treaty with the Soviet Union made a lot of sense back when they still existed.
The problem now is that rather than having a small number of powerful nations with nukes, the world now has dozens of countries with nukes, some in very unstable regions. This poses a huge problem: what if some piss-ant dictator, who's not necessarily very sane, manages to gain control of one of these countries (even if for only a short time)? They may decide that their neighboring country, or the US (the favorite demon of various dictators of the world) needs to feel some pain. So they launch some nukes, and don't care if we retaliate. Or maybe they think we won't retaliate with nukes, for political reasons. Are we supposed to leave ourselves open to this?
Yeah, it would've been great if we could've prevented everyone from getting nukes, but the genie's out of the bottle. I don't think we're going to be able to get it back in just yet. An undefended US is just too tempting of a target. However, if we have a defense system, it gives us much more leverage when trying to prevent nuclear proliferation. If then we say, OK, let's all get rid of the nukes; then the afore-mentioned nations have no good reason not to go along. Having the nukes is no longer much use, and why risk the anger of the world community if there's no gain?
The only way we're going to eliminate the chance of nuclear war is through diplomacy, since as you said any defense system can be overwhelmed. However, the chances of a nuclear attack coming from a stable nation is very low, due to the MAD factor and diplomatic efforts. Having the defense system provides protection against those that diplomacy will never reach.
And so, a defense system is the only way for us to truly take a step forward in nuclear disarmament.
...or at least fairly well-known in the high-end-consumer graphics card area. Their TNT2 Ultra product was the fastest TNT2 Ultra board out there, until they went out of business this past summer. They didn't ship nearly as many parts as, say, Creative, but what they shipped was the best.
Unfortunately, have the best product technologically doesn't mean you'll stay in business. Turns out quantity won out over quality (not that the competition was shoddy, far from it).
I'm glad though that somebody bought the rights to their tech at least, so hopefully the purchaser (Guillemot, IIRC) will be even more able to make some really awesome graphics boards.
See, the K6 design just wasn't very superscalar. For those who don't know what that particular buzzword means, it refers to how many stages the pipeline is divided into. More stages means the processor does less things in each clock cycle, which means you can fit more cycles in a second
Actually, the word you're looking for is pipelined. Pipelining is the technique of dividing the processing work into several stages, so that you can decrease the size of a clock cycle (increase the MHz). The term superscalar refers to how wide the processor is, as to opposed how deep (pipelined = depth, superscalar = width). As in, if I can fetch and execute 4 instructions per cycle, then it's order-4 superscalar. If an instruction takes 10 cycles to execute, then the pipeline is 10 stages deep (actually, this is a simplification since superscalar CPUs typically have multiple, diversified execution units, and different execution units have different number of pipe stages) The width is pretty much independent of the pipeline depth.
So, say we have an order-two superscalar CPU (as a plain Pentium MMX is). Then you might have something like this (note this is not the actual Pentium, but a generalization):
In the example integer operations take one less cycle than floating point. The above processor is two wide (ie Stages 1 thru 3 deal with two instructions at a time), so is order-2 superscalar. The pipeline depth would probably be considered to be 7 (3 fetch/decode + 3 FP execute + 1 writeback)
You may be right about the K-6 pipe depth, I don't know offhand how many pipe stages it has. The P6 family (Pentium Pro, PII, PIII) is pipelined to the hilt, so you are correct in that Intel's chips are heavily pipelined. I just looked it up (I have a draft chapter about the P6 of my prof's book, the chapter was written by the P6 architects), and the diagram they give has 8 stages in the front-end (instruction fetch/decode), 3 on the back-end (instn retirement), and varying amounts in the middle (3 for basic ops, 6+ for multi-cycle ops, 5 or 9+ for various memory ops). So 14 is probably around a minimum as far as pipeline depth goes. I've heard Willamette is far deeper.
As far as how superscalar-ness effects the manufacturing, becoming more superscalar is unlikely to be helpful. It actually increases the compexity of the CPU by a large amount, and thus will require more silicon area. More area generally leads to lower yields -> more manufacturing difficulty.
It's more likely that AMD simply was inexperienced with manufacturing in the past, and had some bumps to get over. Their new fab, and the move to.18 micron should help out their manufacturing prowess (smaller processes mean that you can fit more chips on a wafer. This means your yield of chips is better, since if the area is smaller it's less likely the part will contain a defect caused by material impurities.) This also means your cost of production goes down, so AMD's profits should be improved.
One other quick note: On the one hand, it happens to be true that the recent trend toward graphics cards with GPUs takes a good deal of the advantage off of the Athlon's superior floating point performance
True to an extent, but there are still a lot of FP calculations involved in games and other apps, that aren't handled by the transformation engine of the GPU. So floating-point performance is still very important.
Exactly. The word-of-mouth factor here is especially useful because a lot of people who aren't knowledgable about computers have a friend or relative who is, and will ask their advice about a computer purchasing decision. They'll ask who makes the best stuff, and if the advisor is indeed knowledgable they'll tell them the AMD not only offers the fastest products, but offers the best bang-for-your-buck on the high end (and maybe low-end, but they've got competition with the Celeron). So word of mouth can work wonders even if the average consumer doesn't initially know the Athlon is better.
The situation is a little different with corporations, though. But I think that companies have seen that AMD's chips are reliable and less expensive than Intel's. And now, the chips are more powerful than the PIII family, and are being produced in quantity. The only problem I see, which is not a small one, is the fact that many major OEMs aren't building Athlon systems (for example Dell). This might hurt Athlon sales in the corporate market.
Slashdot Mirror
because, as we all know, Meept! had such high quality posts
I will admit though they were occasionally entertaining
...is that there really is no way to test the hypothesis that others praying for the patient (without the patient's knowledge) really helps. So you assign some people to pray for some patients but not others. Big deal. There are too many uncontrolled factors at play here:
1) How do you know those "assigned" are heartfelt in their prayers?
2) How do you know those assigned aren't praying for others too?
3) How do you deal with the fact that the patient's friends and family are probably praying for them, yet (perhaps atheist) relatives of other patients may or may not be?
With these and similar complications, it's rather difficult to isolate the effects of prayer (if any) on the patient since we don't know who may be praying for them.
Maybe prayers do help. Maybe they don't. I just don't see us being able to determine this based on studies such as the one you cite, especially since there's really no way to measure prayer.
Antitrust laws were passed to protect small businesses, as well as the consumer. Microsoft is directly responsible for the creation and growth of literally thousands of small ISVs and consulting firms
It's also been directly responsible for the death of thousands of small ISVs, usually through illegal business tactics.
The ONLY firm that is portrayed as a "victim" in the Findings is Netscape
Untrue. While only a few companies were mentioned by name in the finding ( the big ones - Netscape, Sun, Apple, IBM, Intel), there are hordes of smaller companies who were just too numerous, or too small in size, to get mentioned specifically. This doesn't mean they weren't the victim of illegal practices.
The "remedies" that people are talking about won't actually help any consumer. There is some fanciful notion that some consumer somewhere is harmed by the pricing of Windows
I don't think the notion is "fanciful" at all. The fact that MS can charge roughly twice what the market would naturally support without the monopoly is real harm to all MS customers, ie almost all Intel-compatible PC buyers. That's a lot of money taken from a lot of people. The fact that consumers don't have a choice is not fancy either, but fact. The fact that MS killed off technologies that would be valuable to the consumer, in order to protect its OS monopoly, is not fanciful but fact (for example, Native Signal Processing).
but breaking up Microsoft will cause immediate, permanent damage to lots of small businesses across America
And the argument could be made that breaking up MS will provide immediate opportunity for lots of small businesses across America (and overseas) who were previously unable to compete because of MS. The fact that some people have made themselves reliant on MS does not mean that we should allow MS to continue illegal behavior that harms the consumer and competition. Certainly, any remedy should consider the entirety of who will be harmed and who helped. But if you don't do something, you continue to victimize the public and many software companies. Some remedies might hurt MS-reliant companies, or they might not. But any remedy is bound to cause some short-term pain to *somebody*. So it's a tough decision that Judge Jackson has to make. I personally am going to wait until he makes it to pass my own judgment, because it is an extremely tough issue, and I'd like to see the Judge's reasoning.
I can see where you're coming from, but I think you're looking at too narrow a view of "remedies". With respect to structural remedies (i.e. breaking up the company in some fashion), the plans most people are talking about are NOT creating a thousand Baby Bills, each owning a single piece of MS software (ie VB, SQL Server, etc). The options being discussed generally fall into two categories:
1) Split MS into an OS group, an applications group, and a hardware group, etc.
2) Make several "copies" of MS, all of which have rights to MS's entire IP portfolio. So all of the Baby Bills all have Windows, VB, SQL, DCOM, etc)
If choice 1 were to be enacted (I doubt it will, as it doesn't solve the fundamental problem of the illegal monopoly), then what you're worried about won't come to pass. The Applications company will still make all those applications you use (VB, SQL server,etc), and they'll all still work together and will be able to provide support for integrated solutions. And since their products run on NT, you're naturally going to be getting support for them on NT. Further, the OS group isn't going to change the OS on a whim, so DCOM et al will still be there. No problem.
If choice 2 is enacted, then you still don't have to worry much (this scenario I see as more likely than choice 1). You still have the ability to buy all your components from one company (ie some Baby Bill), with all the benefits and problems associated with that choice. But now, you benefit from the fact that there are several competing Baby Bills trying to provide you the best product and service. In order to get the level of integration you had before, you don't have to buy from just one company. Bill#1 may have improved SQL so it runs better. This new product though is compatible with the Windows, VB, etc from all Bills- nobody would buy the new version if it weren't. Similarly with all the MS products. If you would rather not use the better SQL from Bill#1, because you want one location for all your support needs, just buy everything from one vendor. Business as usual. Except you benefit from the new situation in that prices will be lower, and product quality will improve, no matter which Bill you're buying from. 'Cause all those Bills want to be able to provide the best value. MS has little incentive to do that now, it only need provide enough that you're afraid to leave. With many Baby Bills, they have to innovate much more to survive...and you the customer will benefit.
From what I've seen, you are correct in that MS does provide a much more comprehensive developer support program, largely because they have their hands in everything. Where I think you are going wrong is in the assumption that a breakup of MS would end this. On the contrary, if MS were to be dealt with as in option (2) above, you'd have multiple companies (I've heard speculation of between 3 and 5 such Baby Bills) who could provide that very same support. And because they are more cost-sensitive than large companies, those thousands of small firms will benefit the most.
There's nothing stopping a DJ from taking the sound output from the sound card and sending that into a mixer. Chances are the DJ isn't going to be relying solely/at all on the computer for mixing (it's just much simpler to use a hardware mixer than try to do all that with a mouse). But using MP3 can make the DJ's job a bit easier so that rather than shuffle through hordes of CDs, it's a quick couple of clicks.
It's possible that the only software he's using is for the player (ie WinAmp or equivalent), and is just sending the sound card output into a mixer. In which case it's essentially the same situation as with a CD as source; this way you just don't have to bring all sorts of CDs.
I dont make a habbit of buying CDs for 1 song. Not for 20 bucks... and I KNOW that it doesnt cost the RIAA even close to that to print and market the CDs (per disc)
I believe the number is something around $0.80 per CD (according to a Wired article - dead tree version- I saw a while back).
The First Amendment is not absolute, in that you are correct. However, the judge banned a guy from talking about *skiing* in a Usenet group. There's quite a difference between issuing an order instructing the guy to not post threats, and issuing an order that prevents legitimate speech. It certainly seems to be a violation of his First Amendment rights.
There seem to be two related but independent issues in this.
:). A reasonable solution, IMHO, to this dilemma is to have the students in the class sign an NDA of some sort that applies to that specific research item. Thus the students can publish their notes on the public knowledge portion of the class, while protecting any unpublished research items. This avoids professors having to "dumb down" the lectures, and protects the rights of the students and professors.
The first issue is, who owns the legal rights to the work that a professor does while employed by a university? Is it the professor, or the university? If it's the university, then the situation is pretty much the same (from the prof's standpoint) as that of the "poor engineer"; ie that his employer has the rights to his works/publications.
The second issue is, are student's lecture notes the creative work of a student (ie their interpretation/analysis of the lecture), or are they to be considered as part of the lecture itself? If the former, then the notes are the property of the student, who may do with them whatever he/she wishes. If the latter, then they belong to the university/professor (depending on the results of the first question).
As I see it, notes that a student takes during class are their own creative work, consisting of a summary/analysis of material presented in lecture. If the notes are indeed that (and not verbatim copies of the lecture) then the notes belong to the student. Thus they may do as they wish with them, including selling them.
Now, if the university comes along and requires, as a condition of enrollment, that all students must sign a contract that says they will not distribute their notes, then the students are stuck.
This is somewhat analogous to the engineer who works for some company and has to sign NDAs, etc. But it's not exactly the same. The NDAs and things that the engineer has to sign apply to company secrets. But at a university, the vast majority, if not all, of what you're learning is public knowledge, not trade secrets. Thus the university doesn't have any rights to the knowledge that you possess. If you feel like sharing your knowledge, in the form of notes or anything else, that is your right.
I can see how, in the case of advanced courses, there may be situations where the professor may wish to discuss a theory of theirs which has not yet been published. I expect that this situation is not all *that* common, but I could be wrong
How can you rant and rage about the evil's of non-disclosure agreements/non-compete, yet proclaim that professors have no rights to their own work
:-) But AFAIK the authors of the original work have no legal rights to the Cliff's Notes.
It seems that the implicit assumption in your statement is that the student's notes are somehow the work of the lecturer (if this was not your intent, please correct me). I believe the the student's notes are the student's interpretation of the lecture, and as such are the student's property, not that of the lecturer. If the student had made a verbatim copy of the lecturer, or tape recorded him/her and published said copy, in that case I can see an excellent argument for those being the property of the lecturer. But to claim student-created notes as the IP of the professor seems a bit much.
The objection, I am sure, lies primarily in the fact that the individual is not allowed to profit from his own ideas
But the professor is profiting from his ideas, as is his right. It's called his employment as a professor. In addition, at UCLA they sell professor-approved lecture notes. I would argue that the students also have the right to profit from *their* work, the notes they took.
And what about publications such as Cliff's Notes? They summarize literary works in pretty good detail, probably as well as (or better than) many students notes
The reason why is that they need to grow somehow. The rule is in business, that you grow or you die. And besides, growth makes the shareholders happy :-)
It's often easier for said big companies to grow by invading new markets than by somehow trying to stimulate extra demand in the markets you already are in. Though of course, they often try both, as that would maximize profits even more.
A couple other thoughts on his trouble booting:
;-)
One thing that can cause problems is excessive accumulation of dirt and grime. Besides having the potential to cause malfunctions, excessive dust and grime makes the system look unappealing to potential users. I would recommend the use of a thin covering material to shield it from unwanted substances, especially during use.
Are you overclocking? While overclocking can lead to more fun in your games, if you overclock too much you can wear the part down causing boot failures. You can only compute so much in a given time, trying to do more is just asking for trouble.
And I don't even want to know where the Matrox Dual-Head comes into this...
8^p
PS No, my choice of verb for what the Matrox is doing was not intended as a pun. Though it should've been
Intent to restrict access is a vital point in any 'password-protected' defense against CMU's actions. By using a password of 'mp3' (which most people recognize as the password to use when attempting to access MP3 resources) or by placing the password in a README file, you are making it clear that you have no intention to restrict access to your MP3 files. For that reason, the data can be legally classified as 'public'.
Suppose for the sake of argument that we accept this 'implicit' classification as public, if the password is something like mp3, or certainly if the password is in a readme file. But where do you draw the line as to what passwords consitute intent to make it public vs. private?
If I use my name as a password, or some personal detail that some random person might not think of, but Computing Services could (since they know who I am and lots of other details), is that considered opening for public access?
I personally see a good argument for considering shares "public" if the password is in a readme file. Then it's clear you intend it for public consumption. But I think it's less clear if the password is merely something that is common, such as mp3. People have tons of passwords these days, and often use simple to guess, and thus easy to remember, passwords (how many ppl use 'password' as their ISP password? Does that mean if I guess their ISP password that should be considered the same as them posting it on their Web site?)
I don't think that the situation here is all that clear. And since the CMU Computing Code of Ethics states that those shares not marked *explicitly* as public should be considered private, CMU should not have attempted to guess passwords. At least not with making an announcement prior to that stating the change in their policy so that students would be aware of it, and could change their passwords accordingly.
I forgot to mention:
If you had a folder shared and they couldn't guess the password, if you said anywhere that you would give out the password upon request they killed your connectivity. Even if there was no copyright-infringing material there, but merely if it *seemed* that way! They simply assumed that there was if you said you would give out passwords like that. Of course no one would give passwords to Computing Services, so they couldn't check. For all the details check the Computing Services email message linked in my above post.
What the Chronicle article fails to mention, or made factual mistakes with:
1) These files were NOT on student websites. They were on students' own machines shared via Microsoft Networking.
2) Many of the computers found "in violation" had their shares passworded. However, CMU tried to guess passwords when it ran into them. So if they could guess it, they considered it public access.
3) The uproar is not so much about the school trying to reduce mp3 sharing over their network, but the manner in which they did it. The CMU Computing Code of Ethics clearly states, "Every member of Carnegie Mellon has two basic rights: privacy and a fair share of resources. It is unethical for any other person to violate these rights...On shared computing systems, all user files and directories are considered to be private and confidential. Only files which a user has explicitly made public (e.g., by placing in a "public" directory) should be considered open for general access. Accessing and using files in another person's directory when not expressly permitted to do so by the owner is a violation of that person's privacy" The Code further states "Loopholes in computer systems or knowledge of a special password should not be used to alter computer systems, obtain extra resources or take resources from another person". Clearly what CMU has done, by going into folders not marked as public and guessing passwords has violated their own Code of Ethics. That has gotten a lot of people pretty upset. They followed the rules but lost access anyway.
4. The students affected could reduce the time they lost network access by a few weeks by going to a stupid "education" seminar to hear why copyright infringement is bad, and then write some paper along those lines. I think those that did that get their access back on Nov 14, or something like that.
5. Computing Services sent out an email to the student body giving their side of the event. You can find the text here.
Sharky Extreme seems to have been fairly impartial in the past, and having read this latest review I don't see that as having changed at all.
:-) They're showing the potential out there. If I were cynical, I would say that this is so you'll visit their website to check for updates when new drivers come out, and when the board is finally released :-)
First off, the Sharky benchmarks show the ATI card being *faster* than the GeForce in most of the benchmarks. Thus, the product they're examining *does* beat the competition.
Secondly, Sharky used the latest NON-BETA drivers for the GeForce card. The new Nvidia drivers you are speaking of are beta right now. Sharky has said they will re-run the tests with the new drivers once they are no longer beta, and will update their results. Generally, Sharky tends to use the stable drivers to more accurately reflect a product (so bugs in new drivers won't skew results). They would've used non-beta drivers for the ATI card too, but since the ATI card hasn't been released, the only drivers available are the beta-quality ones that came with their engineering sample. Pointing the beta-ness of the ATI drivers out when some benchmark scores seem a little anomalous is, IMHO, a good practice, not a lack of objectivity.
Sharky's did a Hardware Preview, not a review. Yes there's a reason they call it preview, not review. The ATI card they're previewing is not a released product, but rather an engineering sample with beta drivers. Sharky was upfront about this fact, as they always are, and therefore mentioned that the ATI drivers are beta, and the board they are benchmarking may not be at the same clock speeds as released version (which is coming in December). Thus the numbers are not the end-all, but rather a suggestion of what may be coming along in the next month or two. This is what Sharky Extreme said at the beginning, so I wouldn't get too bent out of shape over it. Nobody claimed that the final ATI board will or will not beat the GeForce solutions, merely that it has the *potential* to.
Some things to consider about the ATI Rage Fury MAXX versus GeForce256 solutions:
1. The ATI card being previewed in the Sharky article had 64MB of video RAM, and the GeForce board in question on 32MB. This naturally gives a certain advantage to the ATI card.
2. The ATI drivers in the test were very rough, beta-quality drivers. This means the performance will likely increase by its release date in December. The GeForce drivers may very well be more optimized by then as well.
3. By December, there will likely be GeForce boards using Double Data Rate SDRAM, as opposed to the standard SDRAM used on the GeForce and ATI boards right now. This should help out the GeForce. The GeForce also supports up to 128MB of video RAM, so there might be 64MB versions out in December also to match the ATI card's 64, especially since that would help the marketing. These should help out GeForce performance a good bit.
4. We don't know that the clock rates of the ATI board being tested will match those of the eventual production run. If ATI gets good yields, the released boards may be at higher clock speeds. If not, then they may be lower (this has happened with other companies' previewed boards, such as, IIRC, Sharky's preview of the Savage2000).
My main point here is that this isn't a full-fledged review, but rather a look ahead at the potential out there. Once the ATI card is released, I'm sure they'll have a review comparing the released boards from the various companies. Let's not get too upset about comparisons between a beta board and a released product
However, has anyone tried that internet phone stuff?
Well, I tried Netscape's Conference software (voice as well as a shared whiteboard) back about 2 years ago. It worked pretty well, but keep in mind that both I and the friend I tried it out with were on school LANs, so I don't know how it'd work on a modem connection.
Hope this is a little help.
So they did have at least some communication with AOL before suing
You're right. My bad.
The lawsuit is NOT about the AOL website, it is regarding the AOL *online service*. Basically the blind group is arguing that AOL is a "public accomodation" (despite not being a physical place), and as such should be covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act. Their main complaint is that because AOL uses graphics for just about *everything*, with no corresponding text that can be easily read by a screen-reading OCR program, and no keyboard shortcuts for many common actions, that it makes it unduly difficult for the blind to use. Thus they are suing AOL to make them create more blind-friendly software/service.
Though, as far as I can tell by the article, the group didn't first petition AOL for changes, but rather just decided to sue instead. Grr...this country is too damn litigous. It seems rather ass-backward for someone to sue first. Why not just ask for changes first, and see if AOL will agree to them? It would make business sense for AOL, especially from a PR perspective, to make the requested changes (provided they're not ridiculous...but adding some text shouldn't be a big deal). Then if they don't, go about seeing if they're covered by the ADA (whether they are or not isn't exactly clear).
AOL has also said that some of the changes they were planning already. So they may very well become accessible regardless of the lawsuit.
Anyway, later all...
-Stradivarius
The truth of the matter is that the only way to prevent nuclear war is to stop nuclear proliferation and limit the number of nuclear weapons in existence. Too bad the US Senate took a big step in the wrong direction last week.
The thing is, the threat of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) works great when you've got a small number of nations with nuclear weapons. The USA and USSR weren't about to nuke each other, because they knew damn well it was suicide. And they each had stringent controls in place to ensure no accidental launches. And they also had reasonably stable political systems, so none of the countries were about to fall into anarchy. So our treaty with the Soviet Union made a lot of sense back when they still existed.
The problem now is that rather than having a small number of powerful nations with nukes, the world now has dozens of countries with nukes, some in very unstable regions. This poses a huge problem: what if some piss-ant dictator, who's not necessarily very sane, manages to gain control of one of these countries (even if for only a short time)? They may decide that their neighboring country, or the US (the favorite demon of various dictators of the world) needs to feel some pain. So they launch some nukes, and don't care if we retaliate. Or maybe they think we won't retaliate with nukes, for political reasons. Are we supposed to leave ourselves open to this?
Yeah, it would've been great if we could've prevented everyone from getting nukes, but the genie's out of the bottle. I don't think we're going to be able to get it back in just yet. An undefended US is just too tempting of a target. However, if we have a defense system, it gives us much more leverage when trying to prevent nuclear proliferation. If then we say, OK, let's all get rid of the nukes; then the afore-mentioned nations have no good reason not to go along. Having the nukes is no longer much use, and why risk the anger of the world community if there's no gain?
The only way we're going to eliminate the chance of nuclear war is through diplomacy, since as you said any defense system can be overwhelmed. However, the chances of a nuclear attack coming from a stable nation is very low, due to the MAD factor and diplomatic efforts. Having the defense system provides protection against those that diplomacy will never reach.
And so, a defense system is the only way for us to truly take a step forward in nuclear disarmament.
I said there was no text here :)
...or at least fairly well-known in the high-end-consumer graphics card area. Their TNT2 Ultra product was the fastest TNT2 Ultra board out there, until they went out of business this past summer. They didn't ship nearly as many parts as, say, Creative, but what they shipped was the best.
Unfortunately, have the best product technologically doesn't mean you'll stay in business. Turns out quantity won out over quality (not that the competition was shoddy, far from it).
I'm glad though that somebody bought the rights to their tech at least, so hopefully the purchaser (Guillemot, IIRC) will be even more able to make some really awesome graphics boards.
but I was right that having a deeper pipeline means it's easier to fab high clock speed parts
:)
Very true. After the first swapping of terms I should've realize you meant pipelined rather than superscalar with regards to the fabbing
See, the K6 design just wasn't very superscalar. For those who don't know what that particular buzzword means, it refers to how many stages the pipeline is divided into. More stages means the processor does less things in each clock cycle, which means you can fit more cycles in a second
.18 micron should help out their manufacturing prowess (smaller processes mean that you can fit more chips on a wafer. This means your yield of chips is better, since if the area is smaller it's less likely the part will contain a defect caused by material impurities.) This also means your cost of production goes down, so AMD's profits should be improved.
Actually, the word you're looking for is pipelined. Pipelining is the technique of dividing the processing work into several stages, so that you can decrease the size of a clock cycle (increase the MHz). The term superscalar refers to how wide the processor is, as to opposed how deep (pipelined = depth, superscalar = width). As in, if I can fetch and execute 4 instructions per cycle, then it's order-4 superscalar. If an instruction takes 10 cycles to execute, then the pipeline is 10 stages deep (actually, this is a simplification since superscalar CPUs typically have multiple, diversified execution units, and different execution units have different number of pipe stages) The width is pretty much independent of the pipeline depth.
So, say we have an order-two superscalar CPU (as a plain Pentium MMX is). Then you might have something like this (note this is not the actual Pentium, but a generalization):
Stage 1 - Instruction Fetch
Stage 2 - Instruction Decode 1
Stage 3 - Instruction Decode 2
--
Integer 1 | Floating Point 1
Integer 2 | Floating Point 2
---------- | Floating Point 3
--
Stage 4 - Writeback Results
In the example integer operations take one less cycle than floating point. The above processor is two wide (ie Stages 1 thru 3 deal with two instructions at a time), so is order-2 superscalar. The pipeline depth would probably be considered to be 7 (3 fetch/decode + 3 FP execute + 1 writeback)
You may be right about the K-6 pipe depth, I don't know offhand how many pipe stages it has. The P6 family (Pentium Pro, PII, PIII) is pipelined to the hilt, so you are correct in that Intel's chips are heavily pipelined. I just looked it up (I have a draft chapter about the P6 of my prof's book, the chapter was written by the P6 architects), and the diagram they give has 8 stages in the front-end (instruction fetch/decode), 3 on the back-end (instn retirement), and varying amounts in the middle (3 for basic ops, 6+ for multi-cycle ops, 5 or 9+ for various memory ops). So 14 is probably around a minimum as far as pipeline depth goes. I've heard Willamette is far deeper.
As far as how superscalar-ness effects the manufacturing, becoming more superscalar is unlikely to be helpful. It actually increases the compexity of the CPU by a large amount, and thus will require more silicon area. More area generally leads to lower yields -> more manufacturing difficulty.
It's more likely that AMD simply was inexperienced with manufacturing in the past, and had some bumps to get over. Their new fab, and the move to
One other quick note:
On the one hand, it happens to be true that the recent trend toward graphics cards with GPUs takes a good deal of the advantage off of the Athlon's superior floating point performance
True to an extent, but there are still a lot of FP calculations involved in games and other apps, that aren't handled by the transformation engine of the GPU. So floating-point performance is still very important.
Exactly. The word-of-mouth factor here is especially useful because a lot of people who aren't knowledgable about computers have a friend or relative who is, and will ask their advice about a computer purchasing decision. They'll ask who makes the best stuff, and if the advisor is indeed knowledgable they'll tell them the AMD not only offers the fastest products, but offers the best bang-for-your-buck on the high end (and maybe low-end, but they've got competition with the Celeron). So word of mouth can work wonders even if the average consumer doesn't initially know the Athlon is better.
The situation is a little different with corporations, though. But I think that companies have seen that AMD's chips are reliable and less expensive than Intel's. And now, the chips are more powerful than the PIII family, and are being produced in quantity. The only problem I see, which is not a small one, is the fact that many major OEMs aren't building Athlon systems (for example Dell). This might hurt Athlon sales in the corporate market.