1) Measure the bandwidth usage of encrypted data per month. 2) If it is over some limit, throttle the speed.
That way torrents will work for a while and then slow down. Even a throttled connection should be able to handle online banking. This is only on the cheap service.
I'd also sell a more expensive service with higher limits, static IP addresses and less contention. In fact I'd have a load of options, at the top of which you'd basically be able to max out the connection 24x7. Cheaper connections would have published limits and would throttle speed once people went over them. Actually, who cares what the data is, just count the bits.
I'd be very surprised if the NSA/MI5 etc didn't have some way to get access to data from Google, Yahoo and so on.
In Madrid the terrorists apparently knew that if they all shared on webmail address and saved the emails in draft then the intelligence services would not be able to read them
Now, I don't remember the program, but I'm sure the London bombers who were caught tried this and it didn't work. That implies to me that the NSA at least has a way to read webmail. MI5 could ask them, or it could force webmail providers to allow the webmail equivalent of wiretaps and keyword searches if they want to operate in the UK. Given that Google and Yahoo collaborate with the Chinese government it's reasonable to assume they would collaborate with Western ones too.
So is North Korea really a bogeyman? I think they give themselves a lot more headache than anyone else tries to pin on them. Why not just set up a "cute dictatorship" by declaring Kim Jong Il "familial monarch" (britain I am looking at you) or "prime minister"
I think you totally misunderstand how these governments really work. The slightest hint that they are unwilling to use force against people, the whole thing disappears - everyone goes from loving the leader to hating his guts overnight. And then the people that run it get killed like Ceausescu and his secret police goons did unless they can leave the country really fast.
It's funny when people who think that the US government is nefarious are also absolutely sure that the North Korea government, that killed millions of its citizens from famine in the 1990s must be acting rationally and in its people's best interests.
I'm pretty much sure that when the regime goes, we'll find it did much nastier things to its citizens the famine too.
Plus Saddam sent troops into Saudi Arabia. The Saudis had no army capable of standing up to Iraq , and if Iraq had controlled it plus Kuwait it would have control of a huge chunk of the world's oil supply plus the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina.
Hey I downloaded that and it was a load of nonsense about tapping zero point energy using only two nails and one glass of warm salt water. I talked to my buddy and we tried it one night whilst drunk and it blew up my kitchen.
There are several different ways to measure computer performance. One way is to measure how fast the computer completes a single task; this is a speed measure. Another way is to measure how many tasks a computer can accomplish in a certain amount of time; this is called a throughput, capacity or rate measure. The SPEC speed metrics (e.g., SPECint2006) are used for comparing the ability of a computer to complete single tasks. The SPEC rate metrics (e.g., SPECint_rate2006) measure the throughput or rate of a machine carrying out a number of tasks.
For the rate metrics, multiple copies of the benchmarks are run simultaneously. Typically, the number of copies is the same as the number of CPUs on the machine, but this is not a requirement. For example, it would be perfectly acceptable to run 63 copies of the benchmarks on a 64-CPU machine (thereby leaving one CPU free to handle system overhead).
SpecInt2006 and SpecFP2006 are both single core benchmarks, it is only SpecRate which is multicore. In which case this shows a 3Ghz Nehalem has more performance per core than a 5Ghz PPC. That's not too unexpected actually, Nehalem is out of order and POWER6 isn't.
Looking at int rate for 4 cores, which really is a multicore benchmark,
Power6 does indeed come out ahead. And for the rate scores with more than 16 cores, pretty much all the scores are for Risc because no one bothers to make x86 machines with that many cores. Mind you Larrabee might change that. Larrabee is in order too, has loads of cores and a wide vector FP unit. If all the rhetoric about being vector complete is true, it seems like it would score very well on Spec FP rate for lots of cores, something x86 is still weak at.
Here are the results you linked to for a 5Ghz PPC were
SPECfp2006 = 24.9 SPECfp_base2006 = 20.1
So even at SpecFP where Risc has traditionally been quite a bit ahead, x86 is now on top. On SpecInt it's been like that for ages, at least since Athlon64.
I think the point is that in the long run you will have one Larrabee like chip in a desktop that does both the CPU and GPU functions. And in a server that same chip could manage a huge thread pool, which is the best way to do server applications IMO.
Actually the key patents on x86 probably run out soon. x64 has always been licensable from AMD. And an AMD or Intel x86/x64 chip has been at the top of the SpecInt benchmark for most of the last few years. Plus Itanium killed of most of the Risc architectures and x64 looks likely to kill off or nicheify Itanium.
Meanwhile NVidia are rumoured to be working on a Larrabee like chip of their own. Via have a ten year patent license, by which point the architecture is rather open. And Larrabee shows a chip with a lot of simple x86 cores is good enough at graphics for most people to not need a powerful GPU. I bet a Larrabee like CPU would be great in a server too, and it's trivially highly scalable by changing the number of cores.
Media Player Classic is primarily based on the DirectShow architecture, and therefore automatically uses installed DirectShow decoding filters. For instance, after the open source DirectShow decoding filter ffdshow has been installed, fast and high quality decoding and postprocessing of the DivX, Xvid, H.264 and Flash Video formats is available in MPC.
MPC provides DXVA beta support, for newer nVidia and ATI video cards when using an H.264 or VC-1. This provides hardware-acceleration for playback.
In addition to DirectShow, MPC can also use the QuickTime and the RealPlayer architectures (if installed on the computer) to play their native files.
Most video and audio formats are supported natively through the libavcodec library of the FFmpeg project. For those formats where no open source decoder has been made yet MPlayer relies on binary codecs. It can use Windows DLLs directly with the help of a DLL loader forked from avifile (which itself forked its loader from the Wine project).
The combination of CSS decryption software and use of formats covered by software patents places a fully-functional MPlayer in the legal bind shared by most open source multimedia players. In the past MPlayer used to include OpenDivX, a GPL-incompatible decoder library. This has since been removed, making MPlayer itself completely free software. Usage of patented codecs in free software however is a still pending potential problem affecting FFmpeg, MPlayer and similar software when used in countries where software patents apply.
The difference being that you can pretty much always find two or three DirectShow codecs for any particularly any audio or video format, and usually one of them is really good. With something like mplayer either a file works or it doesn't. If I want to watch a movie, I don't want to have to write a codec and give it away for free as part of something like mplayer. Also MPC has a nice clean user interface and you can just install filters to do advanced stuff. Last but not least DirectShow has GPU acceleration
And they aren't "idiots" - as somebody has tagged the story - they are just normal people. There's a staggering lack of respect for other people's wishes being shown in the comments here.
It would be an interesting experiment to repost the same story but mention government owned CCTV cameras instead of Google owned street view ones.
I'm sure all of us (if we're honest) can think of pet peeves with some of the open-source developers' more capriciously craniorectal idiocies in just about any non-trivial project. This has nothing to do with Linux, and is a failing equally shared with closed-source software.
The difference is that with commercial software there is a selective pressure to limit this. Loads of commercial stuff sinks into a mire of out of touch developers, meddling managers and poor QA. Those companies go bust because people stop buying their stuff. Surviving companies need to limit this trend. Funnily enough having share holders, managers and CEOs who can sack you tends to make you produce things people want to buy. Closed source software allows this model because you sell licenses.
Actually you could model software development as evolution - the changes the developers make are analogous to mutations and the customers are selecting the the good products.
With open source software you can try this model, but since other people are (by definition) able to grab the source and compile it themselves, you're forced to sell services and give away the software. If developers do something which alienates customers, those customers just leave and the developers are unaffected.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually AVI can do that too
http://www.videohelp.com/forum/archive/avi-with-two-audio-channels-how-do-i-remove-one-of-them-t355471.html
Back when I did this I used DVDDecrypter to strip out protection that DVDShrink couldn't handle.
That's just criminals being eliminated from the system.
I thought we could model the climate for hundreds of years into the future?
How do you know it's a "pound-you-in-your-ass" prison? In the US do you have different types of prisons, some with ass poundage and some without?
Actually it should work like this
1) Measure the bandwidth usage of encrypted data per month.
2) If it is over some limit, throttle the speed.
That way torrents will work for a while and then slow down. Even a throttled connection should be able to handle online banking. This is only on the cheap service.
I'd also sell a more expensive service with higher limits, static IP addresses and less contention. In fact I'd have a load of options, at the top of which you'd basically be able to max out the connection 24x7. Cheaper connections would have published limits and would throttle speed once people went over them. Actually, who cares what the data is, just count the bits.
Tell them that they are welcome to pay more for an "enterprise class" connection, at which point I disable the check.
Sigh.
I'd be very surprised if the NSA/MI5 etc didn't have some way to get access to data from Google, Yahoo and so on.
In Madrid the terrorists apparently knew that if they all shared on webmail address and saved the emails in draft then the intelligence services would not be able to read them
http://m.digg.com/tech_news/Madrid_Train_Bombers_Used_E-mail_Trick_to_Avoid_Gov_t_Detection?offset=60
Now, I don't remember the program, but I'm sure the London bombers who were caught tried this and it didn't work. That implies to me that the NSA at least has a way to read webmail. MI5 could ask them, or it could force webmail providers to allow the webmail equivalent of wiretaps and keyword searches if they want to operate in the UK. Given that Google and Yahoo collaborate with the Chinese government it's reasonable to assume they would collaborate with Western ones too.
So is North Korea really a bogeyman? I think they give themselves a lot more headache than anyone else tries to pin on them. Why not just set up a "cute dictatorship" by declaring Kim Jong Il "familial monarch" (britain I am looking at you) or "prime minister"
I think you totally misunderstand how these governments really work. The slightest hint that they are unwilling to use force against people, the whole thing disappears - everyone goes from loving the leader to hating his guts overnight. And then the people that run it get killed like Ceausescu and his secret police goons did unless they can leave the country really fast.
I think someone who's effectively a God emperor can afford better cognac than the American stuff.
It's funny when people who think that the US government is nefarious are also absolutely sure that the North Korea government, that killed millions of its citizens from famine in the 1990s must be acting rationally and in its people's best interests.
I'm pretty much sure that when the regime goes, we'll find it did much nastier things to its citizens the famine too.
Plus Saddam sent troops into Saudi Arabia. The Saudis had no army capable of standing up to Iraq , and if Iraq had controlled it plus Kuwait it would have control of a huge chunk of the world's oil supply plus the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina.
What do you think of the geopolitical analysis here by J Doll, P Pepper et al
http://www.authentichistory.com/1950s/atomicmusic/1950_When_They_Drop_The_Atomic_Bomb-Jackie_Doll.html
Look at this PDF, page 8, top left picture
It's actually from here
http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/hoaxes/computer.asp
That said, I suspect whoever wrote it was aware of the Snopes article.
Hey I downloaded that and it was a load of nonsense about tapping zero point energy using only two nails and one glass of warm salt water. I talked to my buddy and we tried it one night whilst drunk and it blew up my kitchen.
http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/Docs/readme1st.html#Q15
There are several different ways to measure computer performance. One way is to measure how fast the computer completes a single task; this is a speed measure. Another way is to measure how many tasks a computer can accomplish in a certain amount of time; this is called a throughput, capacity or rate measure.
The SPEC speed metrics (e.g., SPECint2006) are used for comparing the ability of a computer to complete single tasks.
The SPEC rate metrics (e.g., SPECint_rate2006) measure the throughput or rate of a machine carrying out a number of tasks.
For the rate metrics, multiple copies of the benchmarks are run simultaneously. Typically, the number of copies is the same as the number of CPUs on the machine, but this is not a requirement. For example, it would be perfectly acceptable to run 63 copies of the benchmarks on a 64-CPU machine (thereby leaving one CPU free to handle system overhead).
SpecInt2006 and SpecFP2006 are both single core benchmarks, it is only SpecRate which is multicore. In which case this shows a 3Ghz Nehalem has more performance per core than a 5Ghz PPC. That's not too unexpected actually, Nehalem is out of order and POWER6 isn't.
Looking at int rate for 4 cores, which really is a multicore benchmark,
http://www.onscale.de/specbrowser/2006-ir-004.html
it seems like Nehalem is still ahead, but not by as much. Same with int rate for 8 CPUs
http://www.onscale.de/specbrowser/2006-ir-008.html
Now for FP rate the picture is different
http://www.onscale.de/specbrowser/2006-fr-004.html
Power6 does indeed come out ahead. And for the rate scores with more than 16 cores, pretty much all the scores are for Risc because no one bothers to make x86 machines with that many cores. Mind you Larrabee might change that. Larrabee is in order too, has loads of cores and a wide vector FP unit. If all the rhetoric about being vector complete is true, it seems like it would score very well on Spec FP rate for lots of cores, something x86 is still weak at.
Here are the SpecInt scores
http://www.onscale.de/specbrowser/2006-i.html
The top score is an Intel Xeon X5570 at 2933Mhz
SPECint2006 = 36.3
SPECint_base2006 = 32.2
Look at SpecFP
http://www.onscale.de/specbrowser/2006-f.html
The same chip is on top there too
SPECfp2006 = 42.0
SPECfp_base2006 = 39.3
Here are the results you linked to for a 5Ghz PPC were
SPECfp2006 = 24.9
SPECfp_base2006 = 20.1
So even at SpecFP where Risc has traditionally been quite a bit ahead, x86 is now on top. On SpecInt it's been like that for ages, at least since Athlon64.
I think the point is that in the long run you will have one Larrabee like chip in a desktop that does both the CPU and GPU functions. And in a server that same chip could manage a huge thread pool, which is the best way to do server applications IMO.
Actually the key patents on x86 probably run out soon. x64 has always been licensable from AMD. And an AMD or Intel x86/x64 chip has been at the top of the SpecInt benchmark for most of the last few years. Plus Itanium killed of most of the Risc architectures and x64 looks likely to kill off or nicheify Itanium.
Meanwhile NVidia are rumoured to be working on a Larrabee like chip of their own. Via have a ten year patent license, by which point the architecture is rather open. And Larrabee shows a chip with a lot of simple x86 cores is good enough at graphics for most people to not need a powerful GPU. I bet a Larrabee like CPU would be great in a server too, and it's trivially highly scalable by changing the number of cores.
I'd say x86/x64 will be around for a long time.
That's not true. Media Player Classic is a Windows only application based on Microsoft's DirectShow.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Player_Classic#DirectShow.2C_QuickTime_and_RealPlayer_architectures
Media Player Classic is primarily based on the DirectShow architecture, and therefore automatically uses installed DirectShow decoding filters. For instance, after the open source DirectShow decoding filter ffdshow has been installed, fast and high quality decoding and postprocessing of the DivX, Xvid, H.264 and Flash Video formats is available in MPC.
MPC provides DXVA beta support, for newer nVidia and ATI video cards when using an H.264 or VC-1. This provides hardware-acceleration for playback.
In addition to DirectShow, MPC can also use the QuickTime and the RealPlayer architectures (if installed on the computer) to play their native files.
MPlayer is based on libavcodec
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPlayer#Legal_issues
Most video and audio formats are supported natively through the libavcodec library of the FFmpeg project. For those formats where no open source decoder has been made yet MPlayer relies on binary codecs. It can use Windows DLLs directly with the help of a DLL loader forked from avifile (which itself forked its loader from the Wine project).
The combination of CSS decryption software and use of formats covered by software patents places a fully-functional MPlayer in the legal bind shared by most open source multimedia players. In the past MPlayer used to include OpenDivX, a GPL-incompatible decoder library. This has since been removed, making MPlayer itself completely free software. Usage of patented codecs in free software however is a still pending potential problem affecting FFmpeg, MPlayer and similar software when used in countries where software patents apply.
The difference being that you can pretty much always find two or three DirectShow codecs for any particularly any audio or video format, and usually one of them is really good. With something like mplayer either a file works or it doesn't. If I want to watch a movie, I don't want to have to write a codec and give it away for free as part of something like mplayer. Also MPC has a nice clean user interface and you can just install filters to do advanced stuff. Last but not least DirectShow has GPU acceleration
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectX_Video_Acceleration
And My Good Sir vs I demand satisfaction.
I was going for the stereotype of somewhat effete but vicious and nationalistic upper class English types, like in a Mel Gibson film.
And they aren't "idiots" - as somebody has tagged the story - they are just normal people. There's a staggering lack of respect for other people's wishes being shown in the comments here.
It would be an interesting experiment to repost the same story but mention government owned CCTV cameras instead of Google owned street view ones.
[Draws sword and swishes the air menacingly]
My Good Sir! I demand satisfaction!
I'm sure all of us (if we're honest) can think of pet peeves with some of the open-source developers' more capriciously craniorectal idiocies in just about any non-trivial project. This has nothing to do with Linux, and is a failing equally shared with closed-source software.
The difference is that with commercial software there is a selective pressure to limit this. Loads of commercial stuff sinks into a mire of out of touch developers, meddling managers and poor QA. Those companies go bust because people stop buying their stuff. Surviving companies need to limit this trend. Funnily enough having share holders, managers and CEOs who can sack you tends to make you produce things people want to buy. Closed source software allows this model because you sell licenses.
Actually you could model software development as evolution - the changes the developers make are analogous to mutations and the customers are selecting the the good products.
With open source software you can try this model, but since other people are (by definition) able to grab the source and compile it themselves, you're forced to sell services and give away the software. If developers do something which alienates customers, those customers just leave and the developers are unaffected.