It increases the cost of ownership - people with older HDTVs which do not support HDCP cannot play their PS3 in any of the digital HD modes, so it necessitates the purchase of more expensive hardware. What's the actual benefit for Sony?....it's a completely uninformed decision caused by simply not considering the negative effects. What makes you think this is a downside for sony?
What is going to happen when someone discovers they can't digitally connect thier PS3 to thier old HDTV*? Either they are going to get a new HDTV, they are going to buy a component cable or they are going to live with composite.
If they buy a new TV or a component cable (you can use a standard HDMI cable with a PS3 but you need a special cable for component) then there is a reasonable chance that sony just made another sale.
*how many HDTVs are there that support DVI/HDMI but not HDCP anyway?
There is always some risk of infringing code getting into your products through the actions of either your employers or third parties who provide the code to you (and there are very few companies who don't use code licensed from third parties). OSS has the downsides though that it may be harder to find who to pin the blame on and that by making your code public you increase the risk of someone finding the infringement and suing you over it.
Still I think the post you linked is overblowing the risk. As you say a number of companies with pretty deep pockets ship OSS and even MS was (and maybe still is) shipping some BSD code in the TCP/IP stuff.
P.S. The post you linked doesn't seem to be actual comment from MS just comment from someone who claims he wrote the post after speaking to "someone who is in a position to really understand both Microsoft and open source" whatever that is supposed to mean.
I don't know about where you live, but here in the UK schools, colleges and universities are measured on results. At school and collage (uk defintion of collage here for the americans reading this) where standardised tests are used I would agree with you.
Once you get to university level though it becomes much harder to compare because every university has thier own sylabus and thier own tests. So you don't know if students are getting good grades because of good teaching or because the test is too easy.
At least with mysql the normal way to communicate with it is to link with the client libraries they supply.
I guess someone could write alternative client libraries and/or a bridge process to some other protocol so the app didn't have to link against any mysql code but i'm not aware of any such projects.
Er, why? And from what I understand, the code is GPL'd, right? Right!
So they own it kinda in the same way RedHat owns RedHat Linux? Wrong!
Redhat probably have complete ownership of some apps (not sure what their contributor rules are like for say rpm) but most of them they either don't own any of the code in an app at all or they only own some of the code (which doesn't really get you much except the ability to reuse the code they own in other projects). So afaict other than the brand and it's associate reputation they own little of significance.
Mysql (the division of sun and before that the company) takes pains to make sure that all the code in mysql (the database) is either owned by them or by third parties they have propriety licensing agreements with. This means that they are the only company who can sell (or in some cases give, see php for example) you a license to link the mysql libraries with non-gpl software*. Afaict selling such licenses is mysql's main revenue source. So a fork would struggle to make any income and could not be used for propietry apps.
*This is based on the FSFs interpretation of the GPL but unless we see court cases in a number of countries showing otherwise the safe thing for a buisness to do is to follow said interpretation.
Lets look at what it stands for: Digital Rights Management. It it is attempt to digitaly enforce the rights you buy when you enter into a contract. When I go into a shop and buy a book or a CD* the only contract I enter into is the implied contract of a purchase. There are restrictions set by the governement (which will vary from country to country) on copying and public performance but those restrictions do not come from a contract. You can still generally lend it out, resell it second hand, donate it to a library if it becomes rare.
OTOH with DRM bookd and music "sold" for download you are indeed just buying a fairly draconian license. You can't put it on devices the vendor doesn't approve of, you can't put it on any device bought/activated after the vendors activation servers dissapear and so on. Combine this with the unreliability of consumer electronics and such a "purchase" becomes effectively a rental of indeterminate length.
That alone would be bad enough but worse is that DRM works by allowing the users devices to have decryption keys that the user isn't allowed to have. This means working DRM and FOSS are pretty much diametrically opposed.
*DVDs and software are a different case because of DMCA (or your countries equivilent) issues in the former case and the legal theory (accepted by some courts but not others afaict) that you need a license to copy software to your computer and use it and EULA issues respectively
One of them was a microwave beam misdirect. Note that while you could only manually trigger that disaster with the help of the cheat it could also happen randomly (assuming you have "no disasters" turned off).
what you are describing is known as pumped storage and it has been around for a long time but it isn't cheap and suffers from the same issue as regular dam based hydro (indeed it's usually done in combination with it) which is that there are relatively few sites that are both techincally good and politically acceptable.
I got one wrong, a patent related question (and this may well have been something that changed between V2 and V3 iirc the patent related stuff got a major overhaul between V2 and V3)
Of course that was with knowlage of not just the GPL but the FSFs interpretation of the GPL.
Don't even get me started on the dual-version ANSI and Unicode functions, Transitioning from a system where strings were assumed to be in the local legacy encoding to a unicode based system (a transition all operating systems relavent today have had to go through) is a difficult problem with essentially no good soloution.
The way unix-like systems went for is to use UTF-8 and treat it as if it was just another legacy encoding. The problem with this approach is that it means that systems configured for unicode and systems configured for legacy use different encodings which tends to break stuff.
The way windows went for is to introduce duplicate APIs for unicode, this has the advantage that nothing that worked before breaks but requires all apps that want unicode support to be updated.
Apparently ut2K4 is playable on the x3100 and apparently the x4500 is faster. If i'm not mistaken that would make it comparable to a geforce fx5200. Whether that counts as mediocre depends on your standards I guess.
Unfortunately all the reviews i've seen of the x4500 seem to focus on games/settings that it can't handle rather than finding out what it can handle.
It is certainly good news that AMD is opening up the specs for ATI graphics but ultimately i'm going to base my buying descisions on what works best now not what may work best in a few years time.
The following subsystems have not been implemented yet or show some limitations:
* 3D acceleration is active by default only on R5xx and RS6xx right now. Experimental support for R6xx and R7xx is available, but not for the faint of heart. Also, there is an experimental 3D bringup tool for testing on 6xx/7xx.
* 2D acceleration is active by default now, except on RV740.
* No TV and Component connector support so far.
* Suspend & Resume isn't completely tested, but works on a variety of hardware. Your mileage may vary. Note that typically you need some BIOS workarounds on the kernel command line, ask your distribution for that.
* Powermanagement has to be enabled explicitely. Depending on your hardware, the fan might run at full speed. This turned out to be really tricky.
See also RadeonFeature and RadeonProgram for a features and supported 3D program lists.
The following known bugs have not been resolved yet (ordered by severity):
* Digital output on PCIEPHY (RS780) doesn't light up unless connected at boot time. Affects mostly displays connected to laptops thru DVI/HDMI. It is a problem with the AtomBIOS byte code parser which is used at the moment. The only work around is to boot with this output connected at boot time.
* Bug 14500: External monitor does not display native resolution
* Some cards seem to provide broken connector tables. We're constantly fixing those. Please report if you have one.
It really depends how you define the market. Yes intel makes a lot of motherboard chipsets and most of those come with integrated graphics with 3D capability that ranges from appalling to mediocre.
If you define the market as all GPUs sold even those that are used in machines that never need 3D acceleration or those that are there because they are part of the chipset but are disabled by a better card (which is what I suspect your stats do) then it doesn't at all surprise me that intel comes out on top.
OTOH if you define the market as GPUs sold for use on seperate cards (that is GPUs that customers buy willingly because they want more than their onboard graphics offers) then afaict ATI and nVidia are the only real players left.
P.S. this post does not take any position postive or negative on whether nVidia is an evil monopolist, just that I don't think it's reasonable to count crappy integrated graphics and chips for gaming cards as the same market.
Which means the real question is will the living standards in the poor world rise to levels that halt thier population growth before a resource crisis and/or runaway climate change drags the whole world down.
It appears MS eased up on the HDD restriction at some point, some netbooks are now shipping with 160GB hdds (and at least on the HP mini I got it came as a single partion)
Windows 7 starter allows up to 2GB but being a proper edition of windows I expect the limits to actually be enforced this time.
ALL SSL attacks are MitM attacks. An eaves drop attack is a lazy MitM that could become an active MitM if he cared. Somewhat true.
One big downside of being an active MITM is it makes it much easier to get caught. If some peice of software doesn't behave in the way you expect or maybe someone manually verifies a certificate then the tampering may be reveled. Depending on how much influence they have they may then start looking for you.
The impression I get of canonical is they are desperate to portray ubuntu as a distro suitable for enterprise andOEM customers because they know that is where the money is but they just don't have the resources to do so. Consider for example when they shipped a beta of firefox in a LTS release because they didn't want and/or couldn't afford to have to backport fixes to the then current version of firefox for the life of the LTS release. Not to mention that thier defintion of long term support only looks long term when you compare it with thier 6-monthy "ricer" releases.
do you have a source for that claim? it was probablly true when the athlon64/opteron showed up while intel was still on P4 (and the P4 based xeons) but more recently all the reports i've seen say that intel is ahead in top end performance and performance per watt and doing pretty well in the performance per dollar as well.
That "current UK tech" *is* from 50 years ago - that's how our plugs have been for a very long time - since 1946 in fact. So 63 years. Note that while BS1363 is indeed that old the early versions didn't have pin insulation and I don't think shutters were mandatory when it was first introduced either (not sure on that though).
And i'm betting people often use adaptors and/or forcing methods that connect the live and neutral but fail to connect the earth. Hell I see foreigners in the UK doing this all too often.
how about the folks who walk over hot coals IIRC the mythbusters looked into this one and it was mostly about not panicing. The coals while hot don't conduct heat very well so as long as you don't dig in (which will happen if you try to run) or stay in contact too long your feet will be ok.
The big problems are power and to a lesser extent size (which relates to power because you have to store the power somewhere). Even simple radio tracking collars aren't exactly small, something with GPS and GSM is likely to get much bigger.
The reason we can get away with "microchiping" dogs and cats is a combination of loose skin and the fact that the chips are bloody small. The reason they can be so small is that they are powered by the reader and since the reading is nearly contact the power levels for the ID signal sent back to the reader can be very low.
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It increases the cost of ownership - people with older HDTVs which do not support HDCP cannot play their PS3 in any of the digital HD modes, so it necessitates the purchase of more expensive hardware. What's the actual benefit for Sony? ....it's a completely uninformed decision caused by simply not considering the negative effects.
What makes you think this is a downside for sony?
What is going to happen when someone discovers they can't digitally connect thier PS3 to thier old HDTV*? Either they are going to get a new HDTV, they are going to buy a component cable or they are going to live with composite.
If they buy a new TV or a component cable (you can use a standard HDMI cable with a PS3 but you need a special cable for component) then there is a reasonable chance that sony just made another sale.
*how many HDTVs are there that support DVI/HDMI but not HDCP anyway?
There is always some risk of infringing code getting into your products through the actions of either your employers or third parties who provide the code to you (and there are very few companies who don't use code licensed from third parties). OSS has the downsides though that it may be harder to find who to pin the blame on and that by making your code public you increase the risk of someone finding the infringement and suing you over it.
Still I think the post you linked is overblowing the risk. As you say a number of companies with pretty deep pockets ship OSS and even MS was (and maybe still is) shipping some BSD code in the TCP/IP stuff.
P.S. The post you linked doesn't seem to be actual comment from MS just comment from someone who claims he wrote the post after speaking to "someone who is in a position to really understand both Microsoft and open source" whatever that is supposed to mean.
I don't know about where you live, but here in the UK schools, colleges and universities are measured on results.
At school and collage (uk defintion of collage here for the americans reading this) where standardised tests are used I would agree with you.
Once you get to university level though it becomes much harder to compare because every university has thier own sylabus and thier own tests. So you don't know if students are getting good grades because of good teaching or because the test is too easy.
At least with mysql the normal way to communicate with it is to link with the client libraries they supply.
I guess someone could write alternative client libraries and/or a bridge process to some other protocol so the app didn't have to link against any mysql code but i'm not aware of any such projects.
Er, why? And from what I understand, the code is GPL'd, right?
Right!
So they own it kinda in the same way RedHat owns RedHat Linux?
Wrong!
Redhat probably have complete ownership of some apps (not sure what their contributor rules are like for say rpm) but most of them they either don't own any of the code in an app at all or they only own some of the code (which doesn't really get you much except the ability to reuse the code they own in other projects). So afaict other than the brand and it's associate reputation they own little of significance.
Mysql (the division of sun and before that the company) takes pains to make sure that all the code in mysql (the database) is either owned by them or by third parties they have propriety licensing agreements with. This means that they are the only company who can sell (or in some cases give, see php for example) you a license to link the mysql libraries with non-gpl software*. Afaict selling such licenses is mysql's main revenue source. So a fork would struggle to make any income and could not be used for propietry apps.
*This is based on the FSFs interpretation of the GPL but unless we see court cases in a number of countries showing otherwise the safe thing for a buisness to do is to follow said interpretation.
Lets look at what it stands for: Digital Rights Management. It it is attempt to digitaly enforce the rights you buy when you enter into a contract.
When I go into a shop and buy a book or a CD* the only contract I enter into is the implied contract of a purchase. There are restrictions set by the governement (which will vary from country to country) on copying and public performance but those restrictions do not come from a contract. You can still generally lend it out, resell it second hand, donate it to a library if it becomes rare.
OTOH with DRM bookd and music "sold" for download you are indeed just buying a fairly draconian license. You can't put it on devices the vendor doesn't approve of, you can't put it on any device bought/activated after the vendors activation servers dissapear and so on. Combine this with the unreliability of consumer electronics and such a "purchase" becomes effectively a rental of indeterminate length.
That alone would be bad enough but worse is that DRM works by allowing the users devices to have decryption keys that the user isn't allowed to have. This means working DRM and FOSS are pretty much diametrically opposed.
*DVDs and software are a different case because of DMCA (or your countries equivilent) issues in the former case and the legal theory (accepted by some courts but not others afaict) that you need a license to copy software to your computer and use it and EULA issues respectively
One of them was a microwave beam misdirect.
Note that while you could only manually trigger that disaster with the help of the cheat it could also happen randomly (assuming you have "no disasters" turned off).
what you are describing is known as pumped storage and it has been around for a long time but it isn't cheap and suffers from the same issue as regular dam based hydro (indeed it's usually done in combination with it) which is that there are relatively few sites that are both techincally good and politically acceptable.
I got one wrong, a patent related question (and this may well have been something that changed between V2 and V3 iirc the patent related stuff got a major overhaul between V2 and V3)
Of course that was with knowlage of not just the GPL but the FSFs interpretation of the GPL.
Don't even get me started on the dual-version ANSI and Unicode functions,
Transitioning from a system where strings were assumed to be in the local legacy encoding to a unicode based system (a transition all operating systems relavent today have had to go through) is a difficult problem with essentially no good soloution.
The way unix-like systems went for is to use UTF-8 and treat it as if it was just another legacy encoding. The problem with this approach is that it means that systems configured for unicode and systems configured for legacy use different encodings which tends to break stuff.
The way windows went for is to introduce duplicate APIs for unicode, this has the advantage that nothing that worked before breaks but requires all apps that want unicode support to be updated.
Can you think of any better soloutions?
And by the way, once this story hit the news, the casino settled out of court.
Did they say how much they settled for or was that kept a secret?
Apparently ut2K4 is playable on the x3100 and apparently the x4500 is faster. If i'm not mistaken that would make it comparable to a geforce fx5200. Whether that counts as mediocre depends on your standards I guess.
Unfortunately all the reviews i've seen of the x4500 seem to focus on games/settings that it can't handle rather than finding out what it can handle.
It is certainly good news that AMD is opening up the specs for ATI graphics but ultimately i'm going to base my buying descisions on what works best now not what may work best in a few years time.
http://wiki.x.org/wiki/radeonhd has the following claims
The following subsystems have not been implemented yet or show some limitations:
* 3D acceleration is active by default only on R5xx and RS6xx right now. Experimental support for R6xx and R7xx is available, but not for the faint of heart. Also, there is an experimental 3D bringup tool for testing on 6xx/7xx.
* 2D acceleration is active by default now, except on RV740.
* No TV and Component connector support so far.
* Suspend & Resume isn't completely tested, but works on a variety of hardware. Your mileage may vary. Note that typically you need some BIOS workarounds on the kernel command line, ask your distribution for that.
* Powermanagement has to be enabled explicitely. Depending on your hardware, the fan might run at full speed. This turned out to be really tricky.
See also RadeonFeature and RadeonProgram for a features and supported 3D program lists.
The following known bugs have not been resolved yet (ordered by severity):
* Digital output on PCIEPHY (RS780) doesn't light up unless connected at boot time. Affects mostly displays connected to laptops thru DVI/HDMI. It is a problem with the AtomBIOS byte code parser which is used at the moment. The only work around is to boot with this output connected at boot time.
* Bug 14500: External monitor does not display native resolution
* Some cards seem to provide broken connector tables. We're constantly fixing those. Please report if you have one.
Seems like it's still a work in progress to me.
It really depends how you define the market. Yes intel makes a lot of motherboard chipsets and most of those come with integrated graphics with 3D capability that ranges from appalling to mediocre.
If you define the market as all GPUs sold even those that are used in machines that never need 3D acceleration or those that are there because they are part of the chipset but are disabled by a better card (which is what I suspect your stats do) then it doesn't at all surprise me that intel comes out on top.
OTOH if you define the market as GPUs sold for use on seperate cards (that is GPUs that customers buy willingly because they want more than their onboard graphics offers) then afaict ATI and nVidia are the only real players left.
P.S. this post does not take any position postive or negative on whether nVidia is an evil monopolist, just that I don't think it's reasonable to count crappy integrated graphics and chips for gaming cards as the same market.
Which means the real question is will the living standards in the poor world rise to levels that halt thier population growth before a resource crisis and/or runaway climate change drags the whole world down.
Why do you consider the bottom edition of windows (given away practically free afaict) supporting "only" 2GB of ram to be madness?
Personally I think the other restrictions in 7 starter are far more onerous, I guess MS is hoping to sell a lot of "anytime upgrades" to home premium.
It appears MS eased up on the HDD restriction at some point, some netbooks are now shipping with 160GB hdds (and at least on the HP mini I got it came as a single partion)
Windows 7 starter allows up to 2GB but being a proper edition of windows I expect the limits to actually be enforced this time.
ALL SSL attacks are MitM attacks. An eaves drop attack is a lazy MitM that could become an active MitM if he cared.
Somewhat true.
One big downside of being an active MITM is it makes it much easier to get caught. If some peice of software doesn't behave in the way you expect or maybe someone manually verifies a certificate then the tampering may be reveled. Depending on how much influence they have they may then start looking for you.
The impression I get of canonical is they are desperate to portray ubuntu as a distro suitable for enterprise andOEM customers because they know that is where the money is but they just don't have the resources to do so. Consider for example when they shipped a beta of firefox in a LTS release because they didn't want and/or couldn't afford to have to backport fixes to the then current version of firefox for the life of the LTS release. Not to mention that thier defintion of long term support only looks long term when you compare it with thier 6-monthy "ricer" releases.
do you have a source for that claim? it was probablly true when the athlon64/opteron showed up while intel was still on P4 (and the P4 based xeons) but more recently all the reports i've seen say that intel is ahead in top end performance and performance per watt and doing pretty well in the performance per dollar as well.
IEC connectors are rated for 15A
I'm pretty sure the standard only allows for 10A though I have seen some manufacturers claim 15A.
The same goes for the larger variant, 16A standard but i've seen some manufacturers claim 20A.
That "current UK tech" *is* from 50 years ago - that's how our plugs have been for a very long time - since 1946 in fact. So 63 years.
Note that while BS1363 is indeed that old the early versions didn't have pin insulation and I don't think shutters were mandatory when it was first introduced either (not sure on that though).
And i'm betting people often use adaptors and/or forcing methods that connect the live and neutral but fail to connect the earth. Hell I see foreigners in the UK doing this all too often.
how about the folks who walk over hot coals
IIRC the mythbusters looked into this one and it was mostly about not panicing. The coals while hot don't conduct heat very well so as long as you don't dig in (which will happen if you try to run) or stay in contact too long your feet will be ok.
The big problems are power and to a lesser extent size (which relates to power because you have to store the power somewhere). Even simple radio tracking collars aren't exactly small, something with GPS and GSM is likely to get much bigger.
The reason we can get away with "microchiping" dogs and cats is a combination of loose skin and the fact that the chips are bloody small. The reason they can be so small is that they are powered by the reader and since the reading is nearly contact the power levels for the ID signal sent back to the reader can be very low.