- Will AT&T bill for incoming packets? Even those not solicited?
- If you're charged for all incoming packets how do you STOP somebody's botnet from sending you packets? DDoS attacks could become Distributed Denial of Funds...
- Will they charge for ICMP packets?
- How about the packets they use to communicate with and control their modem (which don't even get to the customer's interface)?
From extensive research on the behavior of modern ISP's, I can answer all of your questions with 100% certainty, including the one you didn't type out:
- Yes, Hell yes.
- You can't.
- They will.
- Of course.
- Lube will cost extra.
At 1Mbyte per sec, its 250000 seconds worth, or about 30 days worth.
Nice try, but you're off by, oh, an order or two of magnitude...
At 1Mbyte/sec, you're looking at less than 3 days until you hit the 250GB cap.
At the same rate, it would be less than 6 hours until the 20GB cap would be hit (although presumably plans with that much bandwidth would have higher caps.)
For someone who claims to pay attention to the "true order" of game releases, you seem to have forgotten one; by your method, San Andreas would be GTA 5, since it was proceeded by GTA, GTA 2, GTA 3, and GTA: Vice City.
Also, in your haste to criticize me for my apparently nonstandard method of "reading the title on the box/disc/game itself" to determine the name of a game, you dodged the more relevant points I was making. Simply put, your comparison is inherently useless for determining the effect of HD installs on game performance - by careful choice of computer components, it is easy to build a computer that will stutter while running GTA:SA.
Further, from a development side, one can make multiple versions of a game that are all sold under one title, but on different platforms, and have arbitrarily poor performance on any of them. Unless you can make a true apples-to-apples comparison between two systems with similar hardware and the same game executable, you have proved nothing. It would be at least as plausible to claim that the differences are due to more available RAM, faster CPUs, higher-end graphics cards, more efficient code, or lack of an emulation layer when running the PC version as to credit it to the hard drive installation.
Does the HDD install on the PC version get credit for higher-resolution textures, larger draw distance, and mouse-look support, too?
Sorry, but those earlier mods were actually pretty justified. Your post was not just incorrect, but contained outright lies.
First, while HDD's are indeed faster than optical media, there are a number of games for the 360 that already cache data onto the drive if it is present. In these cases, installing the game to the disk with NXE will actually result in -slower- performance than before, since the game will be recaching back to the same HDD, and thrashing like mad.
Second, your GTA4 comparison was wrong on basically every level possible. The Windows version of the game has not yet been released, so there's no way in hell you can compare it to the PS3 and 360 versions - you're clearly lying about doing so. Also, the PS3 version of the game has always had a mandatory install to the hard drive - if you're still claiming to see stuttering, it's certainly not due to a lack of an HDD install. Finally, even when the PC version comes out, comparisons between it and the 360 version will tell you nothing about the effects of HDD installation, since it will be a different executable, running with completely different capabilities in terms of CPU, GPU, and RAM. By your logic, I could install it on a computer with far below the minimum requirements, and thereby claim that I had proven HDD installs caused constant performance problems.
And for the record, since I've known the two best physics professors, I've lacked a penis.
FTFY, and I can see where you are^W were coming from. Fortunately for me, the legends in my field have still yet to intimidate me enough to merit cutting off my own in shame, or I'd be in the exact same situation.
Well put. Expanding on that, very few serious gamers are running at 30fps on the PC. At a more-plausible 60-120fps, you're looking at 6-12 frames elapsing in that 100ms period. From my experience practicing on the original UT with Godlike bots at 180% speed or higher (it wasn't designed to handle CPU's that dynamically frequency scale), most kills are scored before you're even fully conscious of the enemy's presence. In fast-paced gameplay situations like that, it takes much less than 100ms to make the difference between winning the match and being practically shut out.
Admittedly, console games are much slower-paced than PC shooters, largely due to the less-precise aiming that a gamepad brings. But even there, as anyone who has been in a shotgun duel in one of the Halo games can attest, an extra 100ms of lag in reflexes or network connection can be a game-breaker.
There's an old legal maxim that say if you can't win under the law, argue the facts. And if you can't win under either, well, there's always lying, cheating, and stealing.
I thought it went:
If the facts are on your side, bang on the facts.
If the law is on your side, bang on the law.
If neither the facts nor the law is on your side, bang on the table
I'm not sure what the RIAA lawyers are doing here, banging their heads against the wall perhaps?
I don't know either, but as long as "get banged in a jail cell" comes next, I'm fine with it.
That's largely true, but the fact is, China -has- kicked out Google in the past. There have been large stretches where Google's domains have been blocked in China, or even more insidiously, redirected to Baidu instead. This (in addition to Google's past problems with Chinese search localization) is a big reason why China is one of the few countries in which Google has a minority marketshare. While Google's decision to censor the Chinese search results was controversial inside the company, and a move I initially disagreed with, it's still the best choice in a bad situation. If Google gains mindshare in China, it can slowly begin to open up its results over time - a hardline stance helps nobody except the Chinese government and Baidu.
I don't know the full details, but I believe Google Apps would fit that need. There's a few levels of service for it, but most established businesses probably go for the Premier version, which offers a SLA, and costs $50/per person/per year, iirc, and I think most corporate ISP's already provide uptime guarantees as well.
Google Calender is used internally at Google (among other places) for exactly what you're describing, right down to the fun of inviting rooms to your meeting (and being notified that they won't attend the meeting if you didn't check the room's availability and tried to double-book). I found it to be an excellent solution, with great usability and GMail integration, and as a web-based app, it runs happily on more or less any modern OS. Once the corporate inertia starts wearing off, I think I know where all the Outlook customers will be heading.
BTW, one weird idea would be to send a bunch of women and have them serve as incubators. In particular, if we send several missions of women AND zygotes, then we can grow a colony there. It may be a lot cheap approach to guarantee bio-diversity. In fact, I would think that once we have several small groups there, that we should send not just human zygotes, but also seeds and a number of animal zygotes. it would be useful for just in case. Not to make any sweeping generalizations here, nor to imply anything about your pornographic preferences, but how many women do you know who'd be willing to give birth to livestock personally?
I'm not even sure where to start with this (very much mistaken) post, but I'd suggest you read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_selection, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_primate_and_hominin_fossils to get a grasp on the concepts being discussed and get back to us. Setting aside the religious zealots who cannot be easily convinced to reason logically, I think the real reason that the Young-Earth Creationist mythos has persisted, particularly in the US, is that far too few people are informed on the issues. The current theory of evolution is the dominant scientific model precisely because it fits so very well with observations in many different areas, including fossil records, experiments with single-celled life in laboratories, and in some cases, in a manner visible in more advanced species within a single human lifetime (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth). While there may still be some undiscovered evidence that will require further adjustment of current evolutionary theory, the survival of monkeys is certainly not it. Do your part in the fight against ignorance and the pseudo-scientific dogma of ID, and educate yourself on the issues.
...There's always the whole part about having to pay ZOMGAZILLION DOLLARS in taxes on the now-astronomical value of the IP. On the whole, it actually sounds like a pretty decent system to me.
I can't think of a way in which that would work very well either. At least from a technical standpoint, the way that bittorrent works makes virtually no distinction between seeders and leechers. As soon as a leecher gets the last piece of data, they become a seeder. So, either your system would have to register leechers as well as seeders, or it would have to automagically prevent the people who have 100% of the file from continuing to torrent without a permit. The first approach fails handily: if the procedure is done only once per user and thus used primarily for prosecuting, rather than preventing, piracy, I don't see how it identifies a user that much more than their IP address does already. A good public-key signature setup could make it difficult to spoof, but once a computer has been compromised by malware, all bets are off. Also, it's unclear how users would be prevented from signing data with made-up keys - for an ISP to check that in any semblance of real time would be computationally prohibitive, and expecting other torrent clients to do any key-checking whatsoever is just silly. I suspect a more proactive, per-torrent system would be similarly unworkable, as it would either require human approval beforehand, which is functionally impossible, or again only be used for after-the-fact evidence of guilt with the similar problems as before.
If you attempt to register seeders exclusively, it is trivial to get around the system: many torrent clients already support so-called "Super Seeding" mode, in which a user with the entire file claims to only have certain pieces of it on a per-user basis in such a way as to spread the entire file in an efficient manner using a smaller amount of upstream bandwidth. Even assuming a clever system that can detect such trickery, all a seeder has to do is set up multiple clients, each of which distributes some portion of data so that together they have all the blocks of data.
Finally, the easiest way to show how no content-based attacks on infringing torrents can work is to consider encrypted files. A restricted-access site that hosts links to torrents with misleading names and datafiles encrypted by passwords found only on the site would be immune to these techniques unless we propose to block all encrypted torrents. Even then, stenography and similar techniques force us right back to the original costly and onerous system of individually whitelisting torrents or approved/rich organizations.
Honestly, I think it is easiest to think of the issue like the many important rights afforded to citizens by civilized governments. While there are many "problems" associated with them (free speech => hate speech+obscenity, safety from unreasonable search+seizure => sometimes letting criminals go unpunished, etc), I think most people realize that the benefits of our freedoms far outweigh the resulting negatives.
The idea of assigning unique signatures to "approved" bittorrent traffic is a fiasco waiting to happen, and counter to the ideals of an egalitarian internet (rather than a one-way tube from large corporations into the minds of consumers - we already have TV for that!) Since a signature would have to depend on the data being torrented (to prevent 'illegitimate' parties from coping it verbatim for their own torrents), a new one would be required for every new or changed file. This would add an anticompetitive barrier to any smaller organizations that want to use it, as well as delaying release of "approved" torrents, since each release would presumably have to be hand-checked, which would almost certainly cost $$$ that few can afford. (If each new release isn't checked for potentially infringing content, it becomes trivial to sneak arbitrary files into signed torrents, defeating the system.) The fact of the matter is, the main appeal of the bittorrent model is the ability to widely distribute files without having to have a high-powered server infrastructure to handle all the downloads. That's why pirates use it, that's why OSS people use it, hell, that's even why Blizzard uses it. The difference is, Blizzard could afford to distribute updates by HTTP if needed - lots of others can't. And, once this is done for bt, piracy will move to other avenues, requiring authorization and official signatures for more and more protocols - maybe even HTTP!
Making it so only multi-billion-dollar entities are allowed to distribute content to users isn't going to kill piracy --- it'll just kill the internet as we know it.
Yup, sorry, we're all still laughing at you. When you go ask the salesman how much it'll cost you to re-enable that 4th core, he'll either stare at you blankly (BestBuy) or tell you "Well, it's an extra $x to buy the 4-core version instead of a 3-core version." And why might customers prefer to buy the 3-core instead of the 4-core model, you ask? Do you have the fastest processor, graphics card, etc. that money can buy? I doubt it! The savvy customer looks at the prices, considers the performance, and settles for the compromise that meets his needs. Seeing that customers still buy dual-core machines, even though quad-core is available, I think it's safe to say that they'll buy 3-core chips, too, assuming the price is right.
Also, the manufacturer is probably not losing profit overall in my example: Suppose AMD markets the 4-core Phenom, and only the 4-core, at $400. Some people may buy that, but many will look at AMD's offering compared to a less-powerful (but still good) Intel chip for $250, and buy Intel instead. But if there was 3-core AMD model at that price point, AMD wouldn't lose as many customers to their competitor. Not everyone is willing to spend top dollar for a CPU, even if it's worth every penny by the benchmarks.
Finally, your statement:
Do you really want a CPU that had a part of it fail testing? Do you think that fact should have to be advertised on the box?
is complete and utter nonsense. Tech companies have been doing exactly this for years without problems, and it's the most logical way to do things. For RAM you can often find PC2-5400, PC2-6400, even PC2-8000 with exactly the same variety of IC inside! Usually when they test any kind of chips, they see if they'll work at the highest standard, and if so, sell them accordingly - if not, they get sold at a lower standard. If you bought the cheaper version, you didn't get sold a defective product, you got *exactly* what you paid for! There are various CPU models already on the market that are exactly the same as more expensive ones but weren't stable at higher clocks or had some L2 cache disabled. For example, the B2 stepping Core 2 Duo e6300 and e6400 procs were exactly the same as the more expensive e6600 and e6700, only with half the cache disabled or defective, and clocked slower. Graphics cards have been doing this as well, and there are even some cases in which users have managed to unlock the extra pipelines and overclock, turning their cut-down card into the more expensive version. The manufacturers don't care a whit, as long as people aren't doing it frequently and reliably enough to render the more expensive model redundant. As long as the 3 cores in use have been tested to work reliably, why should you care whether the remaining core was defective or working before it was disabled? You're not using it, you didn't pay for it, so as far as you're concerned, it's as though it never existed - and those 3 cores that you did buy work as advertised!
In all likelihood, the fourth core didn't pass the QA tests, i.e., doesn't work. The choice is then between selling it as a 3-core chip (and still making good money) or throwing it away. Further, if it turns out that demand is higher for the cheaper 3-core model, AMD may disable the 4th core on some working 4-core Phenoms and sell them for the cheaper rate. This happens all the time in the CPU world, and even more in the GPU world - not everyone is willing to pay $500+ for a top-of-the-line card, so NVidia has a number of cards that are cut-down versions of more expensive cards that either didn't pass QA completely (or had pipelines laser-cut) to be sold where the demand is. Also, your point about manufacturing costs is completely moot. The real cost in a CPU is not per-unit: a single chip is actually quite cheap to produce, once fab lines are up and running - it's the design and testing that cost the real money, and by not designing a separate 3-core model and supporting the separate fab process, they can actually *save money*.
While you're laughing at the salesman, the rest of us are laughing at you.
I think even most slashdotters could get an award for passing the Turing Test!
(In all seriousness, congratulations to the winners - I haven't read the details yet, but it's quite an accomplishment.)
I'm not sure who told you that DDR3 RAM was low latency, but the statement is dead wrong. If you RTFA, you'll see that the new 2+GHz DDR3 has a CAS 10 latency!! While it's true that it's clocked more than double a typical DDR2 module @ 800mhz, these DDR2 modules are typically CAS 4 or 5, and timings can sometimes be tightened even further. The throughput of DDR3 memory is certainly boosted greatly over DDR2, but no matter how you measure it, memory latency has not seen the same improvement.
I'm not talking about manually blocking incoming ports - most decent firewall programs will allow you to control which applications get outbound access. For Steam, I have ZA set to prompt me at boot time whether or not I want to allow it to connect. As far as I can tell, clicking "No" instead of "Yes" in a dialog bubble is about as easy as it gets. Steam does have its downsides, I'll admit, but auto-updating and being able to play any game in their catalog without swapping CD's all the time make up for them in spades.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a difference between not supporting third-party applications and actively working to stop their use.
In this case, Apple's doing the latter, and that's pretty evil.
Amarok 1.4.
FTFY
Naturally. From my experiences prior to upgrading back to 1.4, Amarok 2 has problems with megabyte plus libraries.
Ok this is a total thread-jack, but what is a good responsive player than can handle terabyte plus libraries.
Amarok.
Which brings up other issues:
- Will AT&T bill for incoming packets? Even those not solicited?
- If you're charged for all incoming packets how do you STOP somebody's botnet from sending you packets? DDoS attacks could become Distributed Denial of Funds...
- Will they charge for ICMP packets?
- How about the packets they use to communicate with and control their modem (which don't even get to the customer's interface)?
From extensive research on the behavior of modern ISP's, I can answer all of your questions with 100% certainty, including the one you didn't type out:
- Yes, Hell yes.
- You can't.
- They will.
- Of course.
- Lube will cost extra.
At 1Mbyte per sec, its 250000 seconds worth, or about 30 days worth.
Nice try, but you're off by, oh, an order or two of magnitude...
At 1Mbyte/sec, you're looking at less than 3 days until you hit the 250GB cap.
At the same rate, it would be less than 6 hours until the 20GB cap would be hit (although presumably plans with that much bandwidth would have higher caps.)
For someone who claims to pay attention to the "true order" of game releases, you seem to have forgotten one; by your method, San Andreas would be GTA 5, since it was proceeded by GTA, GTA 2, GTA 3, and GTA: Vice City.
Also, in your haste to criticize me for my apparently nonstandard method of "reading the title on the box/disc/game itself" to determine the name of a game, you dodged the more relevant points I was making. Simply put, your comparison is inherently useless for determining the effect of HD installs on game performance - by careful choice of computer components, it is easy to build a computer that will stutter while running GTA:SA.
Further, from a development side, one can make multiple versions of a game that are all sold under one title, but on different platforms, and have arbitrarily poor performance on any of them. Unless you can make a true apples-to-apples comparison between two systems with similar hardware and the same game executable, you have proved nothing. It would be at least as plausible to claim that the differences are due to more available RAM, faster CPUs, higher-end graphics cards, more efficient code, or lack of an emulation layer when running the PC version as to credit it to the hard drive installation.
Does the HDD install on the PC version get credit for higher-resolution textures, larger draw distance, and mouse-look support, too?
Sorry, but those earlier mods were actually pretty justified. Your post was not just incorrect, but contained outright lies.
First, while HDD's are indeed faster than optical media, there are a number of games for the 360 that already cache data onto the drive if it is present. In these cases, installing the game to the disk with NXE will actually result in -slower- performance than before, since the game will be recaching back to the same HDD, and thrashing like mad.
Second, your GTA4 comparison was wrong on basically every level possible. The Windows version of the game has not yet been released, so there's no way in hell you can compare it to the PS3 and 360 versions - you're clearly lying about doing so. Also, the PS3 version of the game has always had a mandatory install to the hard drive - if you're still claiming to see stuttering, it's certainly not due to a lack of an HDD install. Finally, even when the PC version comes out, comparisons between it and the 360 version will tell you nothing about the effects of HDD installation, since it will be a different executable, running with completely different capabilities in terms of CPU, GPU, and RAM. By your logic, I could install it on a computer with far below the minimum requirements, and thereby claim that I had proven HDD installs caused constant performance problems.
To put it succinctly, you failed. Sorry.
And for the record, since I've known the two best physics professors, I've lacked a penis.
FTFY, and I can see where you are^W were coming from. Fortunately for me, the legends in my field have still yet to intimidate me enough to merit cutting off my own in shame, or I'd be in the exact same situation.
who is modding this crap as interesting?
It's those damn moderator-robots, of course!
(Which I'm told are the robust, self-controlled pinnacles of Slashdot moderating who will never fail us.)
Well put. Expanding on that, very few serious gamers are running at 30fps on the PC. At a more-plausible 60-120fps, you're looking at 6-12 frames elapsing in that 100ms period. From my experience practicing on the original UT with Godlike bots at 180% speed or higher (it wasn't designed to handle CPU's that dynamically frequency scale), most kills are scored before you're even fully conscious of the enemy's presence. In fast-paced gameplay situations like that, it takes much less than 100ms to make the difference between winning the match and being practically shut out.
Admittedly, console games are much slower-paced than PC shooters, largely due to the less-precise aiming that a gamepad brings. But even there, as anyone who has been in a shotgun duel in one of the Halo games can attest, an extra 100ms of lag in reflexes or network connection can be a game-breaker.
I thought it went:
If the facts are on your side, bang on the facts.
I don't know either, but as long as "get banged in a jail cell" comes next, I'm fine with it.If the law is on your side, bang on the law.
If neither the facts nor the law is on your side, bang on the table
I'm not sure what the RIAA lawyers are doing here, banging their heads against the wall perhaps?
That's largely true, but the fact is, China -has- kicked out Google in the past. There have been large stretches where Google's domains have been blocked in China, or even more insidiously, redirected to Baidu instead. This (in addition to Google's past problems with Chinese search localization) is a big reason why China is one of the few countries in which Google has a minority marketshare. While Google's decision to censor the Chinese search results was controversial inside the company, and a move I initially disagreed with, it's still the best choice in a bad situation. If Google gains mindshare in China, it can slowly begin to open up its results over time - a hardline stance helps nobody except the Chinese government and Baidu.
I don't know the full details, but I believe Google Apps would fit that need. There's a few levels of service for it, but most established businesses probably go for the Premier version, which offers a SLA, and costs $50/per person/per year, iirc, and I think most corporate ISP's already provide uptime guarantees as well.
Google Calender is used internally at Google (among other places) for exactly what you're describing, right down to the fun of inviting rooms to your meeting (and being notified that they won't attend the meeting if you didn't check the room's availability and tried to double-book). I found it to be an excellent solution, with great usability and GMail integration, and as a web-based app, it runs happily on more or less any modern OS. Once the corporate inertia starts wearing off, I think I know where all the Outlook customers will be heading.
Sounds like a great idea, but until they come out with 128-gigabyte miniSD cards I'm going to need that goatse guy for a roommate. :(
I'm not even sure where to start with this (very much mistaken) post, but I'd suggest you read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_selection, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_primate_and_hominin_fossils to get a grasp on the concepts being discussed and get back to us. Setting aside the religious zealots who cannot be easily convinced to reason logically, I think the real reason that the Young-Earth Creationist mythos has persisted, particularly in the US, is that far too few people are informed on the issues. The current theory of evolution is the dominant scientific model precisely because it fits so very well with observations in many different areas, including fossil records, experiments with single-celled life in laboratories, and in some cases, in a manner visible in more advanced species within a single human lifetime (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth). While there may still be some undiscovered evidence that will require further adjustment of current evolutionary theory, the survival of monkeys is certainly not it. Do your part in the fight against ignorance and the pseudo-scientific dogma of ID, and educate yourself on the issues.
...There's always the whole part about having to pay ZOMGAZILLION DOLLARS in taxes on the now-astronomical value of the IP. On the whole, it actually sounds like a pretty decent system to me.
I can't think of a way in which that would work very well either. At least from a technical standpoint, the way that bittorrent works makes virtually no distinction between seeders and leechers. As soon as a leecher gets the last piece of data, they become a seeder. So, either your system would have to register leechers as well as seeders, or it would have to automagically prevent the people who have 100% of the file from continuing to torrent without a permit. The first approach fails handily: if the procedure is done only once per user and thus used primarily for prosecuting, rather than preventing, piracy, I don't see how it identifies a user that much more than their IP address does already. A good public-key signature setup could make it difficult to spoof, but once a computer has been compromised by malware, all bets are off. Also, it's unclear how users would be prevented from signing data with made-up keys - for an ISP to check that in any semblance of real time would be computationally prohibitive, and expecting other torrent clients to do any key-checking whatsoever is just silly. I suspect a more proactive, per-torrent system would be similarly unworkable, as it would either require human approval beforehand, which is functionally impossible, or again only be used for after-the-fact evidence of guilt with the similar problems as before.
If you attempt to register seeders exclusively, it is trivial to get around the system: many torrent clients already support so-called "Super Seeding" mode, in which a user with the entire file claims to only have certain pieces of it on a per-user basis in such a way as to spread the entire file in an efficient manner using a smaller amount of upstream bandwidth. Even assuming a clever system that can detect such trickery, all a seeder has to do is set up multiple clients, each of which distributes some portion of data so that together they have all the blocks of data.
Finally, the easiest way to show how no content-based attacks on infringing torrents can work is to consider encrypted files. A restricted-access site that hosts links to torrents with misleading names and datafiles encrypted by passwords found only on the site would be immune to these techniques unless we propose to block all encrypted torrents. Even then, stenography and similar techniques force us right back to the original costly and onerous system of individually whitelisting torrents or approved/rich organizations.
Honestly, I think it is easiest to think of the issue like the many important rights afforded to citizens by civilized governments. While there are many "problems" associated with them (free speech => hate speech+obscenity, safety from unreasonable search+seizure => sometimes letting criminals go unpunished, etc), I think most people realize that the benefits of our freedoms far outweigh the resulting negatives.
The idea of assigning unique signatures to "approved" bittorrent traffic is a fiasco waiting to happen, and counter to the ideals of an egalitarian internet (rather than a one-way tube from large corporations into the minds of consumers - we already have TV for that!) Since a signature would have to depend on the data being torrented (to prevent 'illegitimate' parties from coping it verbatim for their own torrents), a new one would be required for every new or changed file. This would add an anticompetitive barrier to any smaller organizations that want to use it, as well as delaying release of "approved" torrents, since each release would presumably have to be hand-checked, which would almost certainly cost $$$ that few can afford. (If each new release isn't checked for potentially infringing content, it becomes trivial to sneak arbitrary files into signed torrents, defeating the system.) The fact of the matter is, the main appeal of the bittorrent model is the ability to widely distribute files without having to have a high-powered server infrastructure to handle all the downloads. That's why pirates use it, that's why OSS people use it, hell, that's even why Blizzard uses it. The difference is, Blizzard could afford to distribute updates by HTTP if needed - lots of others can't. And, once this is done for bt, piracy will move to other avenues, requiring authorization and official signatures for more and more protocols - maybe even HTTP!
Making it so only multi-billion-dollar entities are allowed to distribute content to users isn't going to kill piracy --- it'll just kill the internet as we know it.
Also, the manufacturer is probably not losing profit overall in my example: Suppose AMD markets the 4-core Phenom, and only the 4-core, at $400. Some people may buy that, but many will look at AMD's offering compared to a less-powerful (but still good) Intel chip for $250, and buy Intel instead. But if there was 3-core AMD model at that price point, AMD wouldn't lose as many customers to their competitor. Not everyone is willing to spend top dollar for a CPU, even if it's worth every penny by the benchmarks.
Finally, your statement: is complete and utter nonsense. Tech companies have been doing exactly this for years without problems, and it's the most logical way to do things. For RAM you can often find PC2-5400, PC2-6400, even PC2-8000 with exactly the same variety of IC inside! Usually when they test any kind of chips, they see if they'll work at the highest standard, and if so, sell them accordingly - if not, they get sold at a lower standard. If you bought the cheaper version, you didn't get sold a defective product, you got *exactly* what you paid for! There are various CPU models already on the market that are exactly the same as more expensive ones but weren't stable at higher clocks or had some L2 cache disabled. For example, the B2 stepping Core 2 Duo e6300 and e6400 procs were exactly the same as the more expensive e6600 and e6700, only with half the cache disabled or defective, and clocked slower. Graphics cards have been doing this as well, and there are even some cases in which users have managed to unlock the extra pipelines and overclock, turning their cut-down card into the more expensive version. The manufacturers don't care a whit, as long as people aren't doing it frequently and reliably enough to render the more expensive model redundant. As long as the 3 cores in use have been tested to work reliably, why should you care whether the remaining core was defective or working before it was disabled? You're not using it, you didn't pay for it, so as far as you're concerned, it's as though it never existed - and those 3 cores that you did buy work as advertised!
In all likelihood, the fourth core didn't pass the QA tests, i.e., doesn't work. The choice is then between selling it as a 3-core chip (and still making good money) or throwing it away. Further, if it turns out that demand is higher for the cheaper 3-core model, AMD may disable the 4th core on some working 4-core Phenoms and sell them for the cheaper rate. This happens all the time in the CPU world, and even more in the GPU world - not everyone is willing to pay $500+ for a top-of-the-line card, so NVidia has a number of cards that are cut-down versions of more expensive cards that either didn't pass QA completely (or had pipelines laser-cut) to be sold where the demand is. Also, your point about manufacturing costs is completely moot. The real cost in a CPU is not per-unit: a single chip is actually quite cheap to produce, once fab lines are up and running - it's the design and testing that cost the real money, and by not designing a separate 3-core model and supporting the separate fab process, they can actually *save money*.
While you're laughing at the salesman, the rest of us are laughing at you.
I think even most slashdotters could get an award for passing the Turing Test! (In all seriousness, congratulations to the winners - I haven't read the details yet, but it's quite an accomplishment.)
I'm not sure who told you that DDR3 RAM was low latency, but the statement is dead wrong. If you RTFA, you'll see that the new 2+GHz DDR3 has a CAS 10 latency!! While it's true that it's clocked more than double a typical DDR2 module @ 800mhz, these DDR2 modules are typically CAS 4 or 5, and timings can sometimes be tightened even further. The throughput of DDR3 memory is certainly boosted greatly over DDR2, but no matter how you measure it, memory latency has not seen the same improvement.
I'm not talking about manually blocking incoming ports - most decent firewall programs will allow you to control which applications get outbound access. For Steam, I have ZA set to prompt me at boot time whether or not I want to allow it to connect. As far as I can tell, clicking "No" instead of "Yes" in a dialog bubble is about as easy as it gets. Steam does have its downsides, I'll admit, but auto-updating and being able to play any game in their catalog without swapping CD's all the time make up for them in spades.