The only company other than Intel that could support the fabrication needs of AMD is IBM--no other company has the wherewithal or money to get the job done. AMD's Dresden fabs (and the one in New York that is under development) are very good. But they're not high enough capacity to keep AMD afloat at 25-30% market share, and they can't afford the downtime at any one of their fabs while retooling for a smaller process. So they have to milk as much as they can from each process generation, and this leaves them behind on the transition. Intel, on the other hand, has a lot of fabs and can transition them one by one to a smaller process. Last I checked, so does IBM.
This being said, I think this whole thing is based purely on a bunch of analysts making comments, rather than any true considerations by AMD. Of course their main focus is on development of microchips and not fabrication. Their money comes from sales of microchips, not fabrication. I seriously doubt they would outsource fabrication of anything other than GPUs and low-end CPUs.
If it renders properly in Firefox or Opera, 99.99% of the time it'll render properly in Safari. It's IE that causes problems, because it fails to follow proper standards. I've had to spend a silly amount of time trying to work around IE bugs, when my sites have been 100% correct in Firefox and Opera (and, now that I'm able to check, Safari).
If a web developer doesn't care when their site does break or look odd in Safari, maybe they don't really care that much about the enduser experience. Personally, I think if the browser has more than 1% of the market, it needs to work with my sites. 1% is still a couple million people. I'm not going to abandon that many potential visitors/customers by being an arrogant snob like you seem to suggest.
The driver who has the phone to their head for more than a minute or two is likely to be a terrible driver no matter what the situation, simply because they don't care enough about what they are doing. That said, I have ridden with drivers who are very alert and aware of what they are doing even while talking on a phone (no headset/handsfree).
This device is a waste of money for whoever developed it, because there are many people who depend on their phones for business and must be reachable even while driving. There is also no clear way to determine if the person on the phone is a passenger. If you are pulled over expressly for using a cell phone, and it is proven that it was a passenger on the phone, not the driver, that opens up a lot of liability on the police department. So until that issue is addressed, I don't think anybody is going to be putting this device to use, other concerns notwithstanding.
Copper is a dying connection. If not for DSL, I'd bet that the copper network would be in far worse shape than it is now. More and more people are abandoning landlines for VOIP or cell phones. Many people only have a landline because of DSL. Verizon knows that DSL isn't going to be able to beat cable without massive investment in the copper networks, and for the same price (probably), they can be first to market with a fiber optic network which has huge potential bandwidth. Everyone seems to want something better and faster than POTS, but some folks seem to get pretty upset when the network starts to show signs of age. The phone lines in whatever building you're in are very likely older than you. Do you want Verizon to spend the money on upgrading and replacing those runs of copper with new runs of copper? Or would you prefer they run fiber optic cables instead? Realistically, I don't think it's economical to do both when revenues from POTS have got to be decreasing.
As for the government having screwed up by allowing monopolies, it's just symptomatic of the problems we're currently facing: a whole lot of the laws on the books aren't being enforced, yet Congress and the White House are very eager to enact new laws that do the same thing as existing ones.
If I am understanding this correctly (and IANAL, so maybe I'm completely wrong), does this mean GPLv3 circumvents the DMCA? If that's true, and TiVo continues to use GPLv3 software, would the content producers actually risk taking anyone to court who modified (or provided instructions to do so) a TiVo in order to circumvent DRM? Afterall, if such a case went to court, the end result would be either the GPL is invalidated (rather unlikely) or the DMCA is struck down.
Again, I'm not a lawyer, so please correct me if I have this all wrong.
I'd get a new attorney then. If they have been asked to stop calling and continue to do so, it most certainly is harassment. It is wasting your time and resources, and the company is losing money because of this. These calls, once requested that they stop, are most certainly not 'perfectly legal' anymore.
You know, all throughout my elementary school years, I was told that cursive was necessary to learn because by sixth grade it was mandatory for all homework to be in cursive. Upon arriving in sixth grade, I was informed that it didn't matter if you used cursive or not, and that most things should be typed where possible. I firmly believe that the insistence upon learning cursive in elementary school set back any improvements to my handwriting by several years.
If I had mod points, I'd definitely be using them on your post. But since I don't, I will add my own thoughts.
All this nonsense about spying on your kids suggests poor parenting to me. When your kids first become old enough that they can operate a computer on their own, you need to take the time to teach them about privacy and about the dangers of online predators. I'm pretty sure parents always tell their kids not to talk to strangers. Do parents tell their kids the same thing about strangers online? More often than not, I'm betting they don't. I don't recall my parents ever giving me that advice before I first got online (although in 1994 this kind of thing wasn't the issue it is today), but I had been raised not to blindly trust someone I didn't already know, so I did a pretty good job of keeping my personal information private. My parents trusted me with a computer and internet access in my own room, and once I got my own car, was free to go where I wanted as long as I kept them informed about where I was and when I'd be home. I never had a reason to hide things from my parents, because they trusted me. If you can't trust your kids to be responsible with internet access, then you haven't done your job well. If you have to spy on your kids, they probably won't feel comfortable talking to you about things that are actually quite important. What happens when your 16 year old daughter starts getting pressured into having sex? If you only find this out by way of spying, then you lose any ability to influence her decisions about it.
Every baby starts life with a blank slate - the behaviors, beliefs, and personality they develop are a result of how they are brought up, not of how much government regulation there is to 'protect' them. I know that some people will make the argument that better parenting won't help all kids, since some have parents who either don't care or don't understand. In that regard, I do not believe government regulation is appropriate. I am completely willing to support government legislation that will enact programs and tools that can assist parents in learning how to properly raise their kids to be responsible and to protect their privacy. I am completely willing to support government legislation that will enact programs to teach kids about the importance of online safety and privacy. This is something that should be taught in school to reinforce what the parents should already be doing. I definitely remember hearing teachers talk about the importance of not talking to strangers, and this is the same fundamental idea.
I seem to recall comments from Tim Sweeney and John Carmack that parallelism needed to start from the beginning of the code - IE, if you weren't thinking about it and implementing it when you started the engine, it was too late. You can't just tack it on as a feature. Unreal Engine 3 is a prime example of an engine that is properly parallelized. It was designed from the ground up to take full advantage of multiple processing cores.
If your programmers are telling you they need more time to turn a single-threaded game into a multi-threaded one, then the correct solution IS to push the game out the door, because it won't benefit performance to try to do it at the end of a project. It's a fundamental design choice that has to be made early on.
(Yeah, there's some fanboy will argue that it is internally consistent, from a certain point of view, but that's crap. It requires you to reject everything the community believed for over 20 years, for that to be true.) You're going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.
I think more than voiding a bunch of patents, we will see the end of software patents. IBM, even without the OIN, holds enough patents to destroy a great many software companies. The argument against anyone suing for patent infringement in software has long been that these things are equivalent to nukes - if everybody starts looking closely, we'll find that everyone violates everyone else's patents, and nobody wins.
Why on Earth Microsoft would decide to launch an attack like this is beyond me.
This has more to do with restricting access to imagery which might compromise potential or ongoing military action, I believe. To me, that makes complete sense - why allow your enemy to get a nice overhead view of your troop buildup if you don't have to?
Then again, I did not RTFA, so maybe I missed something.
Depends on the business. Most independent record stores are being pushed out of business thanks to the big box retailers. Boutique stores must have a niche available (in this case, used sales) to stay afloat. The money made by the retailer from the sale of new CDs (or DVDs or software, for that matter) is very slim, and isn't enough to keep the retailer profitable by itself.
Most things like this are pro-business, but you have to consider which business is really benefiting.
You know, a lot of people seem to be confusing the overbearing DMCA and copyright extensions with regular old copyright, as outlined by the Copyright Law of 1790 (http://www.copyright.gov/history/1790act.pdf).
The US Constitution itself allows Congress to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
The reason copyright law has become such a joke is that "limited Times" has been extended to nearly a century, and fails to serve the public, or even the actual author of that work.
Abolishing copyright law entirely will not serve the public interest, as there will suddenly be (relatively) very little original work being produced.
Some folks get overzealous and become enthralled with "get out the vote" campaigns. If people do not wish to vote, they have that right. If they choose not to vote, and then complain that their elected officials are horrible, they have that right too, although they look like fools as a result.
Suggesting that viewing these debates should be mandatory is silly, especially when virtually no answers are non-rehearsed. It's also not debate when you have a bunch of people simply being asked questions. A real debate would be the candidates having to discuss and debate the issues among themselves, for public viewing and consumption. I'd love to see (although not with a dozen candidates, as this might just become unruly) topics nominated and selected by the viewership given to the candidates for a 10- or 15-minute round of debate. I suspect the results would tell us more about the character and reasoning of these candidates than the current format.
It's simply a case of Microsoft squeezing their manufacturing partners too hard. Some of these factories still turn out quality systems that don't fail. But some end up dying pretty quickly. This is probably also a result of using Chinese manufacturing firms, who have not historically cared about quality in the first place. I have a launch 360 and haven't had any problems aside from one or two freezes while running emulation for classic XBOX games (which is as likely to be a glitch in the software as anything).
All this being said, Microsoft needs to push the warranty/replacement costs back onto the manufacturers that are consistently producing the defective systems, or start canceling contracts--otherwise these companies are never going to change their ways.
Civil disobedience is a term I here used so rarely anymore. Posting the key is not a violent act, it does not harm anyone. Yet it is considered "illegal". So I say to you, 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0.
The corporations of this country who believe they should have the power to make and enforce law, be on notice: the people are starting to notice what you've done.
And the 99% of owners who are not tech-savvy enough to handle flashing the firmware of their players will call up the manufacturer, outraged that their rather expensive piece of equipment doesn't work. Only a limited number of people owning these players are actually going to be willing/able to do those sort of updates. Continue fighting against the AACS, as their stated plan of retaliation will destroy their own business model.
You mean Porsche and BMW, right? Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen vehicles have been scoring very poorly on the JD Power and Consumer Reports quality tests lately. Meanwhile, Cadillac, Buick, and GMC have all outscored Toyota on the JD Power benchmarks.
If you say American cars suck, I must ask what the last one you drove was, and when. If you didn't stay up to date on new computer technology, you'd be clueless about the current state of computers after a year. The same goes for cars, though with a slightly longer timeline. Quality improvements at GM have been substantial in the last five years, while VW and MB have slipped.
If China can build a rip-off of a GM car that equals it in every way, and manages to last as long or longer while being half the price, let me know. By the time Chinese auto manufacturing is on par with the quality of Japanese and American factories, the wages will not make China as attractive as it is now (though probably still cheaper).
I find it ironic that copyright law was getting so much attention recently because of the AACS key being posted everywhere, and now we see this. While I am against the current length of copyright, this sort of blatant infringement (especially of newer characters such as Shrek) is outrageous. It has been known and understood for years that China doesn't care about IP laws, whether it is patents or copyrights. Many cars and trucks sold in China (by Chinese companies) are copies of Hyundai, Toyota, or GM designs. When I say copies, I don't just mean visually; many times the parts for the Chinese model of a vehicle can be interchanged with those for the original design. It's disgusting how much the WTO has allowed China to get away with. If this story ever makes it to the mainstream press in the United States, I suspect it might actually cause a significant outcry by the public.
At some point, the people of this country will begin to recognize the true costs of doing business with China.
Shopping and dealing with retail employees never made me lose faith in humanity. Working in retail and dealing with so many horrible excuses for human beings has made me question whether we as a race really deserve to exist. But I have faith that Darwin will take care of things.
Given that more than 100 million were sold worldwide, and how many are sitting around collecting dust since the PS2 and PS3 play PS1 games, I disagree with your "harder to find/more expensive to buy" statement. Sure, a lot of them are wearing out and failing now. But there are plenty that still work, and really, I'm not convinced there's going to be much in the way of "collector" status attached to the PS1 consoles.
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The only company other than Intel that could support the fabrication needs of AMD is IBM--no other company has the wherewithal or money to get the job done. AMD's Dresden fabs (and the one in New York that is under development) are very good. But they're not high enough capacity to keep AMD afloat at 25-30% market share, and they can't afford the downtime at any one of their fabs while retooling for a smaller process. So they have to milk as much as they can from each process generation, and this leaves them behind on the transition. Intel, on the other hand, has a lot of fabs and can transition them one by one to a smaller process. Last I checked, so does IBM.
This being said, I think this whole thing is based purely on a bunch of analysts making comments, rather than any true considerations by AMD. Of course their main focus is on development of microchips and not fabrication. Their money comes from sales of microchips, not fabrication. I seriously doubt they would outsource fabrication of anything other than GPUs and low-end CPUs.
If it renders properly in Firefox or Opera, 99.99% of the time it'll render properly in Safari. It's IE that causes problems, because it fails to follow proper standards. I've had to spend a silly amount of time trying to work around IE bugs, when my sites have been 100% correct in Firefox and Opera (and, now that I'm able to check, Safari).
If a web developer doesn't care when their site does break or look odd in Safari, maybe they don't really care that much about the enduser experience. Personally, I think if the browser has more than 1% of the market, it needs to work with my sites. 1% is still a couple million people. I'm not going to abandon that many potential visitors/customers by being an arrogant snob like you seem to suggest.
The driver who has the phone to their head for more than a minute or two is likely to be a terrible driver no matter what the situation, simply because they don't care enough about what they are doing. That said, I have ridden with drivers who are very alert and aware of what they are doing even while talking on a phone (no headset/handsfree).
This device is a waste of money for whoever developed it, because there are many people who depend on their phones for business and must be reachable even while driving. There is also no clear way to determine if the person on the phone is a passenger. If you are pulled over expressly for using a cell phone, and it is proven that it was a passenger on the phone, not the driver, that opens up a lot of liability on the police department. So until that issue is addressed, I don't think anybody is going to be putting this device to use, other concerns notwithstanding.
Copper is a dying connection. If not for DSL, I'd bet that the copper network would be in far worse shape than it is now. More and more people are abandoning landlines for VOIP or cell phones. Many people only have a landline because of DSL. Verizon knows that DSL isn't going to be able to beat cable without massive investment in the copper networks, and for the same price (probably), they can be first to market with a fiber optic network which has huge potential bandwidth. Everyone seems to want something better and faster than POTS, but some folks seem to get pretty upset when the network starts to show signs of age. The phone lines in whatever building you're in are very likely older than you. Do you want Verizon to spend the money on upgrading and replacing those runs of copper with new runs of copper? Or would you prefer they run fiber optic cables instead? Realistically, I don't think it's economical to do both when revenues from POTS have got to be decreasing.
As for the government having screwed up by allowing monopolies, it's just symptomatic of the problems we're currently facing: a whole lot of the laws on the books aren't being enforced, yet Congress and the White House are very eager to enact new laws that do the same thing as existing ones.
Well, the DMCA states that you can't remove/disable DRM. The GPLv3 "allows" users to remove DRM.
If I am understanding this correctly (and IANAL, so maybe I'm completely wrong), does this mean GPLv3 circumvents the DMCA? If that's true, and TiVo continues to use GPLv3 software, would the content producers actually risk taking anyone to court who modified (or provided instructions to do so) a TiVo in order to circumvent DRM? Afterall, if such a case went to court, the end result would be either the GPL is invalidated (rather unlikely) or the DMCA is struck down.
Again, I'm not a lawyer, so please correct me if I have this all wrong.
I'd get a new attorney then. If they have been asked to stop calling and continue to do so, it most certainly is harassment. It is wasting your time and resources, and the company is losing money because of this. These calls, once requested that they stop, are most certainly not 'perfectly legal' anymore.
You know, all throughout my elementary school years, I was told that cursive was necessary to learn because by sixth grade it was mandatory for all homework to be in cursive. Upon arriving in sixth grade, I was informed that it didn't matter if you used cursive or not, and that most things should be typed where possible. I firmly believe that the insistence upon learning cursive in elementary school set back any improvements to my handwriting by several years.
If I had mod points, I'd definitely be using them on your post. But since I don't, I will add my own thoughts.
All this nonsense about spying on your kids suggests poor parenting to me. When your kids first become old enough that they can operate a computer on their own, you need to take the time to teach them about privacy and about the dangers of online predators. I'm pretty sure parents always tell their kids not to talk to strangers. Do parents tell their kids the same thing about strangers online? More often than not, I'm betting they don't. I don't recall my parents ever giving me that advice before I first got online (although in 1994 this kind of thing wasn't the issue it is today), but I had been raised not to blindly trust someone I didn't already know, so I did a pretty good job of keeping my personal information private. My parents trusted me with a computer and internet access in my own room, and once I got my own car, was free to go where I wanted as long as I kept them informed about where I was and when I'd be home. I never had a reason to hide things from my parents, because they trusted me. If you can't trust your kids to be responsible with internet access, then you haven't done your job well. If you have to spy on your kids, they probably won't feel comfortable talking to you about things that are actually quite important. What happens when your 16 year old daughter starts getting pressured into having sex? If you only find this out by way of spying, then you lose any ability to influence her decisions about it.
Every baby starts life with a blank slate - the behaviors, beliefs, and personality they develop are a result of how they are brought up, not of how much government regulation there is to 'protect' them. I know that some people will make the argument that better parenting won't help all kids, since some have parents who either don't care or don't understand. In that regard, I do not believe government regulation is appropriate. I am completely willing to support government legislation that will enact programs and tools that can assist parents in learning how to properly raise their kids to be responsible and to protect their privacy. I am completely willing to support government legislation that will enact programs to teach kids about the importance of online safety and privacy. This is something that should be taught in school to reinforce what the parents should already be doing. I definitely remember hearing teachers talk about the importance of not talking to strangers, and this is the same fundamental idea.
I seem to recall comments from Tim Sweeney and John Carmack that parallelism needed to start from the beginning of the code - IE, if you weren't thinking about it and implementing it when you started the engine, it was too late. You can't just tack it on as a feature. Unreal Engine 3 is a prime example of an engine that is properly parallelized. It was designed from the ground up to take full advantage of multiple processing cores.
If your programmers are telling you they need more time to turn a single-threaded game into a multi-threaded one, then the correct solution IS to push the game out the door, because it won't benefit performance to try to do it at the end of a project. It's a fundamental design choice that has to be made early on.
I see it as more likely that software patents will simply be invalidated entirely.
I think more than voiding a bunch of patents, we will see the end of software patents. IBM, even without the OIN, holds enough patents to destroy a great many software companies. The argument against anyone suing for patent infringement in software has long been that these things are equivalent to nukes - if everybody starts looking closely, we'll find that everyone violates everyone else's patents, and nobody wins.
Why on Earth Microsoft would decide to launch an attack like this is beyond me.
CD Game X Change and Game Stations are not part of GameStop, btw.
This has more to do with restricting access to imagery which might compromise potential or ongoing military action, I believe. To me, that makes complete sense - why allow your enemy to get a nice overhead view of your troop buildup if you don't have to?
Then again, I did not RTFA, so maybe I missed something.
Depends on the business. Most independent record stores are being pushed out of business thanks to the big box retailers. Boutique stores must have a niche available (in this case, used sales) to stay afloat. The money made by the retailer from the sale of new CDs (or DVDs or software, for that matter) is very slim, and isn't enough to keep the retailer profitable by itself.
Most things like this are pro-business, but you have to consider which business is really benefiting.
You know, a lot of people seem to be confusing the overbearing DMCA and copyright extensions with regular old copyright, as outlined by the Copyright Law of 1790 (http://www.copyright.gov/history/1790act.pdf).
The US Constitution itself allows Congress to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
The reason copyright law has become such a joke is that "limited Times" has been extended to nearly a century, and fails to serve the public, or even the actual author of that work.
Abolishing copyright law entirely will not serve the public interest, as there will suddenly be (relatively) very little original work being produced.
Some folks get overzealous and become enthralled with "get out the vote" campaigns. If people do not wish to vote, they have that right. If they choose not to vote, and then complain that their elected officials are horrible, they have that right too, although they look like fools as a result.
Suggesting that viewing these debates should be mandatory is silly, especially when virtually no answers are non-rehearsed. It's also not debate when you have a bunch of people simply being asked questions. A real debate would be the candidates having to discuss and debate the issues among themselves, for public viewing and consumption. I'd love to see (although not with a dozen candidates, as this might just become unruly) topics nominated and selected by the viewership given to the candidates for a 10- or 15-minute round of debate. I suspect the results would tell us more about the character and reasoning of these candidates than the current format.
It's simply a case of Microsoft squeezing their manufacturing partners too hard. Some of these factories still turn out quality systems that don't fail. But some end up dying pretty quickly. This is probably also a result of using Chinese manufacturing firms, who have not historically cared about quality in the first place. I have a launch 360 and haven't had any problems aside from one or two freezes while running emulation for classic XBOX games (which is as likely to be a glitch in the software as anything).
All this being said, Microsoft needs to push the warranty/replacement costs back onto the manufacturers that are consistently producing the defective systems, or start canceling contracts--otherwise these companies are never going to change their ways.
Civil disobedience is a term I here used so rarely anymore. Posting the key is not a violent act, it does not harm anyone. Yet it is considered "illegal". So I say to you, 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0.
The corporations of this country who believe they should have the power to make and enforce law, be on notice: the people are starting to notice what you've done.
And the 99% of owners who are not tech-savvy enough to handle flashing the firmware of their players will call up the manufacturer, outraged that their rather expensive piece of equipment doesn't work. Only a limited number of people owning these players are actually going to be willing/able to do those sort of updates. Continue fighting against the AACS, as their stated plan of retaliation will destroy their own business model.
You mean Porsche and BMW, right? Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen vehicles have been scoring very poorly on the JD Power and Consumer Reports quality tests lately. Meanwhile, Cadillac, Buick, and GMC have all outscored Toyota on the JD Power benchmarks.
If you say American cars suck, I must ask what the last one you drove was, and when. If you didn't stay up to date on new computer technology, you'd be clueless about the current state of computers after a year. The same goes for cars, though with a slightly longer timeline. Quality improvements at GM have been substantial in the last five years, while VW and MB have slipped.
If China can build a rip-off of a GM car that equals it in every way, and manages to last as long or longer while being half the price, let me know. By the time Chinese auto manufacturing is on par with the quality of Japanese and American factories, the wages will not make China as attractive as it is now (though probably still cheaper).
I find it ironic that copyright law was getting so much attention recently because of the AACS key being posted everywhere, and now we see this. While I am against the current length of copyright, this sort of blatant infringement (especially of newer characters such as Shrek) is outrageous. It has been known and understood for years that China doesn't care about IP laws, whether it is patents or copyrights. Many cars and trucks sold in China (by Chinese companies) are copies of Hyundai, Toyota, or GM designs. When I say copies, I don't just mean visually; many times the parts for the Chinese model of a vehicle can be interchanged with those for the original design. It's disgusting how much the WTO has allowed China to get away with. If this story ever makes it to the mainstream press in the United States, I suspect it might actually cause a significant outcry by the public.
At some point, the people of this country will begin to recognize the true costs of doing business with China.
Shopping and dealing with retail employees never made me lose faith in humanity. Working in retail and dealing with so many horrible excuses for human beings has made me question whether we as a race really deserve to exist. But I have faith that Darwin will take care of things.
Given that more than 100 million were sold worldwide, and how many are sitting around collecting dust since the PS2 and PS3 play PS1 games, I disagree with your "harder to find/more expensive to buy" statement. Sure, a lot of them are wearing out and failing now. But there are plenty that still work, and really, I'm not convinced there's going to be much in the way of "collector" status attached to the PS1 consoles.