Actually, just went through the home page...... the first article mentionned that the Federal Court of Appeals ruled against levies on media regardless of actual application since it indirectly means consumers have to pay twice when they purchase digital contents for download.
Glad to see common sense is not yet deprecated in canadian courts:)
Just did a quick search just for the heck and see what was on the table and found this http://www.ccfda.ca/Downloads_resources/cashforbri tney.pdf (Oct. 2002) - Seems like the CPCC wanted a $21/GB levy on mobile storage devices, $100 storage tax on a 5GB iPod? Ouch. No thanks.
I wonder what their plans are for the near future, the document above is two years old, I wonder if there was any progress on the HDD levy - I was considering getting a 200GB drive next, better get it before the $4200 levy is applied!
The funny/sad thing about the levies is that we never hear anything about them other than the occasional petition to against increases and outrageous new levy applications. Like so many other things in politics and capitalism, the policy makers and the lobbyists that guide them do their best to keep a low profile and do their thing behind everyone else's back.
I wonder how far from the truth "The Distinguished Gentleman" might be. (I borrowed the DVD from my mom, another 'lost sale' for the studios, I'm sure they'd love to criminalize borrowing since it too cheats them from rental royaltees and sales.)
> all of his world's problems disappear for about 2^1 nanoseconds
That's extreme optimism... "Windows Update is scanning for updates" usually takes something like a dekasecond, add user interaction and other page-load/download delays and you get closer to an hectosecond.
What's the point of levying money "to help artists" when the group collecting the levies is actually not giving any money away because it has no idea of how to redistribute the cash fairly?
Last time I heard about digital player/media levy money in Canada, they were saying none of it will be redistributed until they come up with such a 'fair' policy with no mention of how soon/late this might happen - AFAIK, this is why nearly all levy hikes have been denied over the last few years.
At some point, they wanted levies on all digital storage including HDDs.
I think this cash pile will mysteriously disappear at some point in the future. I'm pretty sure some of the people managing this would be embarassed if they got audited... I smell something like a "Sponsorship Scandal: Take II" - nothing good usually happens when people managing too much money get little to no public attention.
There is a way to slow it down, it is known as DRM. One problem with DRM is that it is highly unpopular since it breaks backward-compatibility, imposes further barriers to entry for new player device designers and can be extremely restrictive/annoying.
If the MPAA/RIAA could lock down a DVD/CD to one specific set of eyes/ears, they probably would try their best (worst) to do exactly that.
Me, I use downloads to sample stuff I never had any intention to buy in the first place. Often, this results in "accidental" sales when my friends see something they would have never seen or even heard about otherwise.
As far as I am concerned, it seems the "free publicity" argument makes more sense than the studios' hypothetically lost sales panic. After all, underexposure leads to missed sales as well.
The PS2's HDD does not care about what people put on it any more than "regular" HDDs do... Sony is only not providing (obvious) ways for users to do this out-of-the-box. One needs third-party tools to do this on the X-box as well, the main difference being that the PS2 does not ship standard with HDD.
Maybe with commodity clients... but remember that there are plenty of open-source BT clients out there that could be readily be modified for stealth-mode (not sending 'have' messages and initial bitfield) leech-only.
Once a full file has been downloaded and verified, flag all peers that contrinuted as 'pirates' and do the same with all others after downloading some data and matching it.
I wrote my own BT client about a year ago, chances are the MPAA/RIAA/etc. have more than enough budget to whip up their own.
> For less than 5% gain in performance they put a major "complication" into the core.
5%?
This depends on instruction mix and data set sizes/locality. In cases where the instruction mix has generally poor instruction parallelism, SMT can do wonders well beyond 5%... but on highly tuned non-threaded code, it can come with a slight penalty due to shared resources.
The big point hehind SMT is that whenever one thread stalls by waiting for RAM/IO, the CPU can continue working on the other threads instead of waiting.
SMT does not produce the same typical gains as SMP. It does cause most single tasks to be slightly slower but overall system throughput while running multiple apps usually increases by far more than 5% - from what I remember, Intel's projections were in the 30-50% range typical and from my personal experience and limited benchmarking, this feels just about right.
Pipelining may be generally good but adding shifting stages but do note that out of the seven added stages in Prescott, two are dedicated to buffering signals, presumably because they are too slow to reliably get cleanly across the chip between two ticks.
One would have thought that process shrink and these extra stages would have given Prescott significantly more headroom than what Northwood already can achieve but such is not the case in reality, a first in Intel's history AFAIK.
But if everything's electronic from the gear box to brakes and everything else, ABS might be messed up as well, making the brake pedal much less effective - particularly if it is stuck in relaxed mode.
Car manufacturers are putting more and more safeguards for common handling mistakes since they cost them... and what initially appeared to be trivial fixes turned out to have significant unexpected consequences in the form of killing a number of emergency measures.
Along the lines of cutting ignition, this is problematic for cases where the transmission needs to be in 'Park' before the key can be moved off the 'On/Running' position and the transmission is locked in position until the speed drops below about 15km/h.
Other suggestion (also drastic): pull fuses. One of them should kill the ignition - assuming the current surges from breaking high-current inductive circuits does not kill the fuse-puller first. (direct or (most likely) spark-surprise-ouch-screeching_tires-bang indirect)
Next, someone will start applying for stuff like 'a method of losing hair', 'a method for losing hair in a particular pattern (see receding hair line and male-pattern baldness)', etc.
It really is deplorable how the USA's legal and pattent system is accepting abuse to such seemingly unbounded extent. Soon, even the most trivial tasks will require an unmanageable number of pattent licenses.
All this pattent madness is effectively transforming the innovation market into a monopoly where only those with enough pattents worth cross-licensing to resolve pattent disputes can afford to keep going on.
First we had the chipped inkjet cratridges (Lexmark and Epson lawsuits against 3rd-party refills) and now, people unlucky enough to live in places that have DMCA-ish laws will make hobbyists and DIYers federal criminals.
There appears to be no end to the industry self-service... new opportunities to extort people come up all the time.
Hack the firmware to change a burnt-out head-lamp will now own you a nice place in a federal jail along with a criminal file and all the advantages this brings - if you happen to be unlucky enough to be a USA citizen.
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Actually, just went through the home page... ... the first article mentionned that the Federal Court of Appeals ruled against levies on media regardless of actual application since it indirectly means consumers have to pay twice when they purchase digital contents for download.
:)
Glad to see common sense is not yet deprecated in canadian courts
I wonder what this must have looked like.
i tney.pdf (Oct. 2002) - Seems like the CPCC wanted a $21/GB levy on mobile storage devices, $100 storage tax on a 5GB iPod? Ouch. No thanks.
Just did a quick search just for the heck and see what was on the table and found this http://www.ccfda.ca/Downloads_resources/cashforbr
I wonder what their plans are for the near future, the document above is two years old, I wonder if there was any progress on the HDD levy - I was considering getting a 200GB drive next, better get it before the $4200 levy is applied!
The funny/sad thing about the levies is that we never hear anything about them other than the occasional petition to against increases and outrageous new levy applications. Like so many other things in politics and capitalism, the policy makers and the lobbyists that guide them do their best to keep a low profile and do their thing behind everyone else's back.
I wonder how far from the truth "The Distinguished Gentleman" might be. (I borrowed the DVD from my mom, another 'lost sale' for the studios, I'm sure they'd love to criminalize borrowing since it too cheats them from rental royaltees and sales.)
> all of his world's problems disappear for about 2^1 nanoseconds
That's extreme optimism... "Windows Update is scanning for updates" usually takes something like a dekasecond, add user interaction and other page-load/download delays and you get closer to an hectosecond.
What's the point of levying money "to help artists" when the group collecting the levies is actually not giving any money away because it has no idea of how to redistribute the cash fairly?
Last time I heard about digital player/media levy money in Canada, they were saying none of it will be redistributed until they come up with such a 'fair' policy with no mention of how soon/late this might happen - AFAIK, this is why nearly all levy hikes have been denied over the last few years.
At some point, they wanted levies on all digital storage including HDDs.
I think this cash pile will mysteriously disappear at some point in the future. I'm pretty sure some of the people managing this would be embarassed if they got audited... I smell something like a "Sponsorship Scandal: Take II" - nothing good usually happens when people managing too much money get little to no public attention.
There is a way to slow it down, it is known as DRM. One problem with DRM is that it is highly unpopular since it breaks backward-compatibility, imposes further barriers to entry for new player device designers and can be extremely restrictive/annoying.
If the MPAA/RIAA could lock down a DVD/CD to one specific set of eyes/ears, they probably would try their best (worst) to do exactly that.
Me, I use downloads to sample stuff I never had any intention to buy in the first place. Often, this results in "accidental" sales when my friends see something they would have never seen or even heard about otherwise.
As far as I am concerned, it seems the "free publicity" argument makes more sense than the studios' hypothetically lost sales panic. After all, underexposure leads to missed sales as well.
The PS2's HDD does not care about what people put on it any more than "regular" HDDs do... Sony is only not providing (obvious) ways for users to do this out-of-the-box. One needs third-party tools to do this on the X-box as well, the main difference being that the PS2 does not ship standard with HDD.
Maybe with commodity clients... but remember that there are plenty of open-source BT clients out there that could be readily be modified for stealth-mode (not sending 'have' messages and initial bitfield) leech-only.
Once a full file has been downloaded and verified, flag all peers that contrinuted as 'pirates' and do the same with all others after downloading some data and matching it.
I wrote my own BT client about a year ago, chances are the MPAA/RIAA/etc. have more than enough budget to whip up their own.
> For less than 5% gain in performance they put a major "complication" into the core.
5%?
This depends on instruction mix and data set sizes/locality. In cases where the instruction mix has generally poor instruction parallelism, SMT can do wonders well beyond 5%... but on highly tuned non-threaded code, it can come with a slight penalty due to shared resources.
The big point hehind SMT is that whenever one thread stalls by waiting for RAM/IO, the CPU can continue working on the other threads instead of waiting.
SMT does not produce the same typical gains as SMP. It does cause most single tasks to be slightly slower but overall system throughput while running multiple apps usually increases by far more than 5% - from what I remember, Intel's projections were in the 30-50% range typical and from my personal experience and limited benchmarking, this feels just about right.
Pipelining may be generally good but adding shifting stages but do note that out of the seven added stages in Prescott, two are dedicated to buffering signals, presumably because they are too slow to reliably get cleanly across the chip between two ticks.
One would have thought that process shrink and these extra stages would have given Prescott significantly more headroom than what Northwood already can achieve but such is not the case in reality, a first in Intel's history AFAIK.
But if everything's electronic from the gear box to brakes and everything else, ABS might be messed up as well, making the brake pedal much less effective - particularly if it is stuck in relaxed mode. Car manufacturers are putting more and more safeguards for common handling mistakes since they cost them... and what initially appeared to be trivial fixes turned out to have significant unexpected consequences in the form of killing a number of emergency measures. Along the lines of cutting ignition, this is problematic for cases where the transmission needs to be in 'Park' before the key can be moved off the 'On/Running' position and the transmission is locked in position until the speed drops below about 15km/h. Other suggestion (also drastic): pull fuses. One of them should kill the ignition - assuming the current surges from breaking high-current inductive circuits does not kill the fuse-puller first. (direct or (most likely) spark-surprise-ouch-screeching_tires-bang indirect)
Next, someone will start applying for stuff like 'a method of losing hair', 'a method for losing hair in a particular pattern (see receding hair line and male-pattern baldness)', etc.
It really is deplorable how the USA's legal and pattent system is accepting abuse to such seemingly unbounded extent. Soon, even the most trivial tasks will require an unmanageable number of pattent licenses.
All this pattent madness is effectively transforming the innovation market into a monopoly where only those with enough pattents worth cross-licensing to resolve pattent disputes can afford to keep going on.
First we had the chipped inkjet cratridges (Lexmark and Epson lawsuits against 3rd-party refills) and now, people unlucky enough to live in places that have DMCA-ish laws will make hobbyists and DIYers federal criminals. There appears to be no end to the industry self-service... new opportunities to extort people come up all the time.
Hack the firmware to change a burnt-out head-lamp will now own you a nice place in a federal jail along with a criminal file and all the advantages this brings - if you happen to be unlucky enough to be a USA citizen.