>> >>..Everybody knows that good code is self documenting...
This is a really bad myth that only stays alive as an attempt to justify either a sloppy development approach, or a purposeful attempt at job security through obscurity.
There are several things that you need to know: What the code does, what it is supposed to do, and how it is supposed to be used.
Good code is not self-documenting. However, when code is well-written (and doesn't do things that are too complicated), I can read it and I will know what it does, and I will be quite confident that it does what it is supposed to do. So well written code will indeed achieve some of the things that comments are there for.
>> Then they need somewhere to put a tuner for analog signals, and hardware video compression circuitry. They need a digital audio out, plus composite, s-video, and hopefully component video outputs...
Fortunately I live in Britain, where all you need is a demultiplexer to grab the digital signal and record it completely unchanged on the harddisk. Since a settop box with receiver, demultiplexer and decoder costs less than £30, all the functionality should be quite cheap.
If you then consider that I don't need a DVD player anymore, and no games console, a Mac Mini PVR looks quite good. Just make it a bit higher to fit a 3.5" harddisk with 250 Gig, a fast processor so that everything can be recompressed to H.264 to save three quarters of the space, and it will sell.
>> I fail to see why this would be considered 'misuse' of the Xbox. It really ought to be able to live anywhere your stereo does. Especially with an external power brick that is dealing with much of the heat.
As an average customer, you might assume that an XBox is supposed to be sitting on a table, and the power brick just goes anywhere out of the way or out of view. It might occur to the average customer that an XBox is a sophisticated electronic device that might have problems if it gets too hot, but anyone who isn't an electrical engineer wouldn't give that power brick any thought. It has to work when I place it on a fake sheep skin carpet with two inch long hair, in a slightly overheated room, close to the heating.
An XBox isn't used only by slightly technically challenged adults, it is also used by completely clueless kids, so it has to be designed to be kidsafe.
>> There is no need to create a rule if those who purchase products for their organisation already share the same beliefs. Obviously, the intent of the rule is substitute the rule makers judgement for the judgement of those who actually use the tools. > We can argue about the merits of the rule, but it is absurd to argue that it was created to meet the specific needs of all those who who use software within the government of Massachusetts.
It was created to allow those who use the software to do their work in a way it should be done, by not creating documents in unstable, proprietary formats that may not be readable in the future without the permission of a convicted illegal monopolist.
>> How can iTunes be so high in one chart, yet only account for less than 5% of EMI's total sales in the same period.
According to the article, Apple is number seven in sales. It is quite possible to be number seven with only 5 percent of sales. Someone might have more accurate numbers, but I think in computer sales Apple is number 5 with about 5%, and Dell is number one with 18%, so Apple could easily be number seven in record sales with only five percent. Depends on how big the six bigger ones are (they could have 15% each), or how big the smaller ones are (there could be 15 more over selling just over four percent each).
>> Sure my old library was there but it was drmed and grayed out. I tried to remerge and set myself as teh new owner of the ipod since I tried all options. Itunes deleted about $400 worth of music and wiped my whole collection clean.:-(
Oh well, you should have asked someone who knows how to use a computer first.
Here is how it works: Step 1: Make copies of your songs on data CDs or data DVDs. Doesn't matter that they are DRM'd, you can copy the files without any problems, you just can't _play_ them on a different computer. Step 2: Unregister your computer with iTMS (not fatal if you forget this step). Step 3: Reformat your system (since that is what you were doing anyway). Step 4: Copy all the DRM'd files back to your computer. Step 5: Register that computer again with iTMS if needed. Step 6: Should you run out of registrations (you can register five computers), tell Apple to unregister _all_ your computers, then go back to Step 4.
>> How would you protect the company's IP but allow an independent and honest study of the code to take place?
That should be easy. If any other company making voting machines copies it, it will turn up when they show _their_ code, and then you can sue their ass off.
>> The Massachusetts case has nothing to do with the quality of software, its about policy makers making broad rules based on ideology without regard to the specific needs of individuals and organizations.
No, it is about policy makers making rules based on the very specific needs of their organisation and the needs of their stake holders, instead of the needs for profit-making of companies by using closed, proprietary formats.
>> In Switzerland, all men have guns, and it is also has one of the lowest crime rates in the world.
This is very misleading. In Switzerland, everyone who has served in the army (and that is basically every healthy adult male) has to keep a rifle in his home with some ammunition in case the country has to be defended in a war.
Occasionally, the presence of the rifle will be checked, and the ammunition will be counted, and if any of the ammunition is missing, or if the rifle is in a place where it could be accessed easily by someone else, you are in deep deep shit. People in Switzerland _don't_ carry guns. They have them somewhere hidden away in their home, very carefully locked.
>> That actually blot off the license plates to cameras watching them. Or how about repaint the plate so it says another number. How about steal another set of plates. Remove the licencse plates??? Place them in the windsheild of their car so the cameras don't see them. Any other ideas??
In Britain, the DVLA has a list of all license plates of cars that are supposed to pay road tax. If your license plate is not in that list, then you are driving a car without paying road tax, so they should be able to stop you immediately.
Stealing another set of license plate is a very interesting idea. There are actually people doing this, and they will make copies of license plates of an identical car. I suppose if a license plate is spotted at different places, and a speed of more than 100 mph would have been required to have the same license plate in both places at these times, then each car with that license plate should be stopped (very carefully, as most likely one car is driven by a completely innocent person).
The final point is an unreadable license plate. License plates are supposed to be readable; so that I can write down your license number if you hit my car and drive away. Having an unreadable license plate is an offense in the first place.
On a side note: License plates in Germany use an especially ugly font that has been specifically designed to make it hard to change the number with small changes. No letter or number can be changed into another letter or number in that font by adding black colour.
>> I have a code in Fortran 77, with a first comment:
this code has no comments. It was hard to write, it must be hard to understand
followed by ten thousands lines of a single, not indented main, full of goto's and undecryptable variable names.
thanks god I never had to put my hands on it.
What's the problem? Just use f2c which will turn it within seconds into ten thousands of lines of C code, full of goto's and undecryptable variable names...
The way I understand this (from the one line in the CNet report), if you install malicious.exe on Windows or malicious.app on MacOS X, and then you go and rename malicious.exe to iTunes.exe or malicious.app to iTunes.app and then set up things in a certain way, it is possible that some code trying to launch iTunes would launch the malicious app, now called iTunes.
Be afraid. Be very afraid. The world is coming to an end.
>> It is not illegal to remote the DRM. It is illegal to bypass it and still play the restricted content. Just remove it an don't use the CD in that computer anymore.
That seems quite reasonable and correct.
Scenario 1: I buy the DRM'd CD and let it anywhere near my PC. Legal. Scenario 2: I buy the DRM'd CD, play it once on my PC, remove the DRM from the PC, remove whatever copies of the music are on my PC, and never let the CD near my PC again. End result is exactly the same as Scenario 1 and should be legal. Scenario 3: I buy the DRM'd CD, install it on the PC, remove the DRM from the PC, make copies of the music. That seems to be illegal.
>> As far as RISC-on-CISC: harder. You need to build up more complicated instructions from a stream of primitive ones and depend on lots of redundant, cache-able sets of contiguous instructions, that will vary at run time.
Has nothing to do with RISC vs. CISC. The most critical factor is the number of registers. You can emulate an x86 on a PPC and keep the integer registers, the segment registers and the floating point registers in PPC registers and have plenty spare for the emulator. If you emulate PPC on x86, most of the integer registers must be kept somewhere in memory.
Compiling RISC to CISC, there is nothing that forces you to create complex instructions. Just don't use them.
And the slow speed of PearPC is mostly due to the fact that this is software created by amateurs, who have nowhere near the resources needed to create a fast emulator. Add a million dollars and ten man years of development effort, and it would be a lot faster.
>> You have two basic types of CPU's in the world. RISC and CISC. "R" in RISC means reduced instruction set.
Incorrect. First, the "R" in RISC stands for "Regular". Count the instructions in the G5 instruction set. There are about 160 Altivec instructions alone!
But second, the two basic types of CPUs are: Pentium 4 and everything else. Then Pentium 4 is a marketing-designed monstrosity that tried to achieve high clockrate over everything else (including performance), and that is completely unbalanced (an add instruction takes half a cycle, a multiply takes 15). Everything else behaves quite similar, whether it is PowerPC G5, Athlon, or Pentium M. Fortunately Intel remembered that years ago, they had built a decent chip (the Pentium III) and started again from there.
>> Saying that many apps are _capable_ of running without Altivec when they're designed to use it is like saying Windows XP is _capable_ of running on a Pentium 2 with 64mb of RAM. Sure its possible, but I don't want to be the one who has to use it.
Many people _do_ use applications capable of using Altivec on G3s. Quicktime, lots of Quartz and Aqua, iTunes, iMovie, they all work on G3s and people use them. And that is G3s that have about 1/3rd of the processing power of a Yonah chip, maybe 40% when you take Rosetta into account.
The idea is probably that a new Intel iBook is much faster than a G4 PowerBook, so you buy an iBook to replace your PowerBook. And three months later, there is the Intel PowerBook which is much faster than the Intel iBook, so your iBook goes on eBay and you buy a PowerBook.
>> I believe Rosetta will only emulate a G3 processor, so apps that require a G4 or G5 won't run.
Can you show us an application that _requires_ a G4 or G5? That would be very rare indeed. Many apps are _capable_ of using Altivec, for example, but these apps will ask the OS whether Altivec is available, the OS will say "no" if it is running on a G3 or an Intel processor, and then the application will happily go on using non-Altivec code.
The only reasonable exception would be an application where the developer decided that it is so processor intensive, and so much in need of Altivec, that running it on a G3 would be pointless. That kind of application is very rare.
It is not the fact that it is beta software. It is just that iTunes is absolutely the worst application that they could have tested.
First, iTunes is the one application in the developer build that comes as a PowerPC application. That means, it hasn't been compiled for a Pentium, but for a PowerPC, and has to be translated to Pentium code by Rosetta. Every other application would have been absolutely on par with its Windows counterpart. I first thought they might have used iTunes deliberately, but it is of course the only one where a Windows version exists, so they had to use this.
Second, iTunes music encoding (which is what was measured) is about the most highly optimised code that you can find. It takes advantage of Altivec on PowerPC, it uses SSE2 and SSE3 on Pentium, and on an elderly G3 it falls back to plain floating-point code, using all the 32 floating-point registers that the G3 has.
Guess what. Rosetta doesn't handle Altivec code. For two reasons: It is an absolute pain to translate to Pentium code, and if an application needs handcoded Altivec optimisations on a PowerPC, then you surely want handcoded optimisation using SSE on the Pentium. Because Altivec is not handled, the G3 version is translated, which is much less optimised. So we are now comparing the translation of plain floating-point code with hand-optimised SSE code. But that floating-point code uses all 32 floating point registers - and Pentium has only eight! So the translated code spends lots of time storing and loading registers, which the Pentium code doesn't. An AAC or MP3 encoder written for Pentium just wouldn't do that; it would try to use fewer variables.
3. iTunes encoding is incredibly processing intensive, while other applications are memory intensive. Memory has the same speed, whether you run original Pentium code or translated PowerPC code. Memory intensive applications tend to use the same time, whether Pentium code or Rosetta-translated code is used. If you copy 100MB of memory, the speed will be exactly the same, whether you use Pentium code or translated PPC code. With compute-intensive code, Rosetta falls behind.
4. iTunes encoding doesn't use any operating system functions. Most apps use the OS a lot, for drawing, user interface, disk access and so on. All OS routines run at full speed, with no translation penalty. Rosetta apps with lots of operating system calls will tend to be quite close to native speed, those without any OS calls will be relatively slower.
So here we have the absolutely worst case for any application: A compute-intensive application, heavily relying on Altivec code, where the much inferior G3 version gets translated to Pentium 4 code. Compared to hand-optimised SSE2 code. Exactly the kind of application where developers would create a native version as quick as possible.
(Note that with a shipping product, iTunes encoding on Windows and on MacOS X 86 will use exactly the same source code and run at exactly the same speed, because Apple will use exactly the same hand-optimised SSE code for both versions.)
What Apple needs right now is a decent chip to put into laptops. The G5 is fine for desktop machines at the moment, and it will probably be competitive for a year or two.
AMD is ahead of Intel in the area where Apple doesn't need a replacement for PowerPC. But in the area where Apple is behind and needs help, it is Intel that is ahead.
But once OS X runs on Intel, there is nothing to stop Apple from using AMD at any time in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
>> >> ..Everybody knows that good code is self documenting...
This is a really bad myth that only stays alive as an attempt to justify either a sloppy development approach, or a purposeful attempt at job security through obscurity.
There are several things that you need to know: What the code does, what it is supposed to do, and how it is supposed to be used.
Good code is not self-documenting. However, when code is well-written (and doesn't do things that are too complicated), I can read it and I will know what it does, and I will be quite confident that it does what it is supposed to do. So well written code will indeed achieve some of the things that comments are there for.
>> Then they need somewhere to put a tuner for analog signals, and hardware video compression circuitry. They need a digital audio out, plus composite, s-video, and hopefully component video outputs...
Fortunately I live in Britain, where all you need is a demultiplexer to grab the digital signal and record it completely unchanged on the harddisk. Since a settop box with receiver, demultiplexer and decoder costs less than £30, all the functionality should be quite cheap.
If you then consider that I don't need a DVD player anymore, and no games console, a Mac Mini PVR looks quite good. Just make it a bit higher to fit a 3.5" harddisk with 250 Gig, a fast processor so that everything can be recompressed to H.264 to save three quarters of the space, and it will sell.
>> I fail to see why this would be considered 'misuse' of the Xbox. It really ought to be able to live anywhere your stereo does. Especially with an external power brick that is dealing with much of the heat.
As an average customer, you might assume that an XBox is supposed to be sitting on a table, and the power brick just goes anywhere out of the way or out of view. It might occur to the average customer that an XBox is a sophisticated electronic device that might have problems if it gets too hot, but anyone who isn't an electrical engineer wouldn't give that power brick any thought. It has to work when I place it on a fake sheep skin carpet with two inch long hair, in a slightly overheated room, close to the heating.
An XBox isn't used only by slightly technically challenged adults, it is also used by completely clueless kids, so it has to be designed to be kidsafe.
>> There is no need to create a rule if those who purchase products for their organisation already share the same beliefs. Obviously, the intent of the rule is substitute the rule makers judgement for the judgement of those who actually use the tools. > We can argue about the merits of the rule, but it is absurd to argue that it was created to meet the specific needs of all those who who use software within the government of Massachusetts.
It was created to allow those who use the software to do their work in a way it should be done, by not creating documents in unstable, proprietary formats that may not be readable in the future without the permission of a convicted illegal monopolist.
>> How can iTunes be so high in one chart, yet only account for less than 5% of EMI's total sales in the same period.
According to the article, Apple is number seven in sales. It is quite possible to be number seven with only 5 percent of sales. Someone might have more accurate numbers, but I think in computer sales Apple is number 5 with about 5%, and Dell is number one with 18%, so Apple could easily be number seven in record sales with only five percent. Depends on how big the six bigger ones are (they could have 15% each), or how big the smaller ones are (there could be 15 more over selling just over four percent each).
>> Sure my old library was there but it was drmed and grayed out. I tried to remerge and set myself as teh new owner of the ipod since I tried all options. Itunes deleted about $400 worth of music and wiped my whole collection clean. :-(
Oh well, you should have asked someone who knows how to use a computer first.
Here is how it works: Step 1: Make copies of your songs on data CDs or data DVDs. Doesn't matter that they are DRM'd, you can copy the files without any problems, you just can't _play_ them on a different computer. Step 2: Unregister your computer with iTMS (not fatal if you forget this step). Step 3: Reformat your system (since that is what you were doing anyway). Step 4: Copy all the DRM'd files back to your computer. Step 5: Register that computer again with iTMS if needed. Step 6: Should you run out of registrations (you can register five computers), tell Apple to unregister _all_ your computers, then go back to Step 4.
>> How would you protect the company's IP but allow an independent and honest study of the code to take place?
That should be easy. If any other company making voting machines copies it, it will turn up when they show _their_ code, and then you can sue their ass off.
>> The Massachusetts case has nothing to do with the quality of software, its about policy makers making broad rules based on ideology without regard to the specific needs of individuals and organizations.
No, it is about policy makers making rules based on the very specific needs of their organisation and the needs of their stake holders, instead of the needs for profit-making of companies by using closed, proprietary formats.
>> In Switzerland, all men have guns, and it is also has one of the lowest crime rates in the world.
This is very misleading. In Switzerland, everyone who has served in the army (and that is basically every healthy adult male) has to keep a rifle in his home with some ammunition in case the country has to be defended in a war.
Occasionally, the presence of the rifle will be checked, and the ammunition will be counted, and if any of the ammunition is missing, or if the rifle is in a place where it could be accessed easily by someone else, you are in deep deep shit. People in Switzerland _don't_ carry guns. They have them somewhere hidden away in their home, very carefully locked.
>> That actually blot off the license plates to cameras watching them. Or how about repaint the plate so it says another number. How about steal another set of plates. Remove the licencse plates??? Place them in the windsheild of their car so the cameras don't see them. Any other ideas??
In Britain, the DVLA has a list of all license plates of cars that are supposed to pay road tax. If your license plate is not in that list, then you are driving a car without paying road tax, so they should be able to stop you immediately.
Stealing another set of license plate is a very interesting idea. There are actually people doing this, and they will make copies of license plates of an identical car. I suppose if a license plate is spotted at different places, and a speed of more than 100 mph would have been required to have the same license plate in both places at these times, then each car with that license plate should be stopped (very carefully, as most likely one car is driven by a completely innocent person).
The final point is an unreadable license plate. License plates are supposed to be readable; so that I can write down your license number if you hit my car and drive away. Having an unreadable license plate is an offense in the first place.
On a side note: License plates in Germany use an especially ugly font that has been specifically designed to make it hard to change the number with small changes. No letter or number can be changed into another letter or number in that font by adding black colour.
>> I have a code in Fortran 77, with a first comment:
this code has no comments. It was hard to write, it must be hard to understand
followed by ten thousands lines of a single, not indented main, full of goto's and undecryptable variable names.
thanks god I never had to put my hands on it.
What's the problem? Just use f2c which will turn it within seconds into ten thousands of lines of C code, full of goto's and undecryptable variable names...
The way I understand this (from the one line in the CNet report), if you install malicious.exe on Windows or malicious.app on MacOS X, and then you go and rename malicious.exe to iTunes.exe or malicious.app to iTunes.app and then set up things in a certain way, it is possible that some code trying to launch iTunes would launch the malicious app, now called iTunes.
Be afraid. Be very afraid. The world is coming to an end.
>> It is not illegal to remote the DRM. It is illegal to bypass it and still play the restricted content. Just remove it an don't use the CD in that computer anymore.
That seems quite reasonable and correct.
Scenario 1: I buy the DRM'd CD and let it anywhere near my PC. Legal.
Scenario 2: I buy the DRM'd CD, play it once on my PC, remove the DRM from the PC, remove whatever copies of the music are on my PC, and never let the CD near my PC again. End result is exactly the same as Scenario 1 and should be legal.
Scenario 3: I buy the DRM'd CD, install it on the PC, remove the DRM from the PC, make copies of the music. That seems to be illegal.
>> As far as RISC-on-CISC: harder. You need to build up more complicated instructions from a stream of primitive ones and depend on lots of redundant, cache-able sets of contiguous instructions, that will vary at run time.
Has nothing to do with RISC vs. CISC. The most critical factor is the number of registers. You can emulate an x86 on a PPC and keep the integer registers, the segment registers and the floating point registers in PPC registers and have plenty spare for the emulator. If you emulate PPC on x86, most of the integer registers must be kept somewhere in memory.
Compiling RISC to CISC, there is nothing that forces you to create complex instructions. Just don't use them.
And the slow speed of PearPC is mostly due to the fact that this is software created by amateurs, who have nowhere near the resources needed to create a fast emulator. Add a million dollars and ten man years of development effort, and it would be a lot faster.
>> Quoting from Answers.com - "RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer)"
Quoting from Wikipedia - "Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC"
Doesn't make it any more correct.
>> You have two basic types of CPU's in the world. RISC and CISC. "R" in RISC means reduced instruction set.
Incorrect. First, the "R" in RISC stands for "Regular". Count the instructions in the G5 instruction set. There are about 160 Altivec instructions alone!
But second, the two basic types of CPUs are: Pentium 4 and everything else. Then Pentium 4 is a marketing-designed monstrosity that tried to achieve high clockrate over everything else (including performance), and that is completely unbalanced (an add instruction takes half a cycle, a multiply takes 15). Everything else behaves quite similar, whether it is PowerPC G5, Athlon, or Pentium M. Fortunately Intel remembered that years ago, they had built a decent chip (the Pentium III) and started again from there.
>> Intentionally crippling their devices to make them sucky-- that doesn't sound so smart.
It isn't. It's something that foolish companies do. We can't make our product X too good because it would kill sales for product Y.
Better companies know that if _you_ don't produce a product that will kill sales for your product Y, _someone_ will.
>> Saying that many apps are _capable_ of running without Altivec when they're designed to use it is like saying Windows XP is _capable_ of running on a Pentium 2 with 64mb of RAM. Sure its possible, but I don't want to be the one who has to use it.
Many people _do_ use applications capable of using Altivec on G3s. Quicktime, lots of Quartz and Aqua, iTunes, iMovie, they all work on G3s and people use them. And that is G3s that have about 1/3rd of the processing power of a Yonah chip, maybe 40% when you take Rosetta into account.
The idea is probably that a new Intel iBook is much faster than a G4 PowerBook, so you buy an iBook to replace your PowerBook. And three months later, there is the Intel PowerBook which is much faster than the Intel iBook, so your iBook goes on eBay and you buy a PowerBook.
>> I believe Rosetta will only emulate a G3 processor, so apps that require a G4 or G5 won't run.
Can you show us an application that _requires_ a G4 or G5? That would be very rare indeed. Many apps are _capable_ of using Altivec, for example, but these apps will ask the OS whether Altivec is available, the OS will say "no" if it is running on a G3 or an Intel processor, and then the application will happily go on using non-Altivec code.
The only reasonable exception would be an application where the developer decided that it is so processor intensive, and so much in need of Altivec, that running it on a G3 would be pointless. That kind of application is very rare.
>> Yeah, but I think deep inside one of the things that motivates Jobs is that he wants to beat Bill Gates.
Wrong. Steve Jobs _has_ beaten Bill Gates. Bill Gates doesn't know it yet, but Steve Jobs and most of the world knows.
And in a smallish engagement on the side, he has beaten Michael Eisner.
It is not the fact that it is beta software. It is just that iTunes is absolutely the worst application that they could have tested.
First, iTunes is the one application in the developer build that comes as a PowerPC application. That means, it hasn't been compiled for a Pentium, but for a PowerPC, and has to be translated to Pentium code by Rosetta. Every other application would have been absolutely on par with its Windows counterpart. I first thought they might have used iTunes deliberately, but it is of course the only one where a Windows version exists, so they had to use this.
Second, iTunes music encoding (which is what was measured) is about the most highly optimised code that you can find. It takes advantage of Altivec on PowerPC, it uses SSE2 and SSE3 on Pentium, and on an elderly G3 it falls back to plain floating-point code, using all the 32 floating-point registers that the G3 has.
Guess what. Rosetta doesn't handle Altivec code. For two reasons: It is an absolute pain to translate to Pentium code, and if an application needs handcoded Altivec optimisations on a PowerPC, then you surely want handcoded optimisation using SSE on the Pentium. Because Altivec is not handled, the G3 version is translated, which is much less optimised. So we are now comparing the translation of plain floating-point code with hand-optimised SSE code. But that floating-point code uses all 32 floating point registers - and Pentium has only eight! So the translated code spends lots of time storing and loading registers, which the Pentium code doesn't. An AAC or MP3 encoder written for Pentium just wouldn't do that; it would try to use fewer variables.
3. iTunes encoding is incredibly processing intensive, while other applications are memory intensive. Memory has the same speed, whether you run original Pentium code or translated PowerPC code. Memory intensive applications tend to use the same time, whether Pentium code or Rosetta-translated code is used. If you copy 100MB of memory, the speed will be exactly the same, whether you use Pentium code or translated PPC code. With compute-intensive code, Rosetta falls behind.
4. iTunes encoding doesn't use any operating system functions. Most apps use the OS a lot, for drawing, user interface, disk access and so on. All OS routines run at full speed, with no translation penalty. Rosetta apps with lots of operating system calls will tend to be quite close to native speed, those without any OS calls will be relatively slower.
So here we have the absolutely worst case for any application: A compute-intensive application, heavily relying on Altivec code, where the much inferior G3 version gets translated to Pentium 4 code. Compared to hand-optimised SSE2 code. Exactly the kind of application where developers would create a native version as quick as possible.
(Note that with a shipping product, iTunes encoding on Windows and on MacOS X 86 will use exactly the same source code and run at exactly the same speed, because Apple will use exactly the same hand-optimised SSE code for both versions.)
>> Why did Apple choose Intel over AMD?
What Apple needs right now is a decent chip to put into laptops. The G5 is fine for desktop machines at the moment, and it will probably be competitive for a year or two.
AMD is ahead of Intel in the area where Apple doesn't need a replacement for PowerPC. But in the area where Apple is behind and needs help, it is Intel that is ahead.
But once OS X runs on Intel, there is nothing to stop Apple from using AMD at any time in the future.
Would be one marketing idea for allofmp3.com to make a list of virulently copy-protected CDs and offer them for sale...
>> Anyway, downloading from them infringes on the exclusive right of the copyright holder to reproduce copies of a copyrighted work. 17 USC 106(1).
I don't think 17 USC 106(1) applies in Russia. Russian courts don't think that 17 USC 106(1) applies in Russia either.