Most people don't do after-market upgrades. For businesses, it's often quicker/cheaper to replace the machines every 3 years, and for home customers, they often use it until it breaks, especially since most of them would have to pay Geek Squad $200 to add the extra RAM or HDD. At that price, the new $600 machine from $OEM looks tempting. I'm not saying upgrading is bad or that no-one does it, I'm saying that the percentage of people who do it is relatively low (less than 1/3 of all PC owners)
Price-wise, there are $500-800 laptops. They fit pretty well into the home-consumer and corporate price brackets. Granted, they suck relative to $800 desktops, but we're reaching the point at which GHz of CPU and GB of HDD don't sell machines as easily. While there are certainly ways to make use of larger HDDs and faster CPUs, most consumers don't make use of them yet. Features like in-home wireless will make laptops more attractive than slightly-faster desktops.
Maybe they couldn't get the smart A+ guys, and hired two A- guys to compensate?
I'm not defending Google here, I'm just pointing out that the two statements are not totally contradictory. Technically, all the google blog said is "There exist candidates that we can't hire (but would like to) because of immigration laws".
Correct, the talk was in Canada, but most software copyright (and most film/music copyright), including the copyrights for most of OS X, Windows, and UNIX, is held in the US by US corporations under US law.
ZIP+4 is one of the best changes in the bill. My ZIP code (20180) "has" cable, but it's only available in the town 3 miles away from me. Geographically, 95% of my ZIP code (and probably 60-70% population-wise) have no broadband, yet we're listed as having access to broadband. This bill is designed to stop the cable/phone Companies from telling the government and media that they've fulfilled their promise to bring "broadband to the masses" by redefining broadband to 2 Mb/s of theoretical speed (not even actual speed) and making them show penetration with better granularity.
I would suggest that 'promoting progress for the benefit of the public' being the only legitimate purpose of copyright requires justification.
In the United States, the Constitution explicitly states this. if you read the relevant Article I section and paragraph, it specifically spells this out ("to promote the useful arts and sciences" or something).
Another possible purpose is to protect the right of the creator to be the sole beneficiary of his labour.
That's an interesting theory, but it's not the theory espoused in the US Constitution. In fact, prior to the 1900s, most copyright didn't cover derivative works (translations, reuse of characters, etc.)
The Wii isn't designed to replace bars, parties, and hot sex. It's designed to replace "400 hundred channels and there's nothing on!!" or "Dude, I'm so bored" or "Let's go to the movie theater". I'd go out on a limb and say that that's the nightlife for most people 4-5 nights a week. The only people I know with a life like you describe every single night are college kids failing their classes.
(Disclaimer: I am not you. You might have a life where-in you do go out or have sex every night of the week. If so, congratulations. But that's not typical).
The goal isn't to hurt Microsoft legally. The goal is to get Microsoft to further weaken any patent cases. Essentially, the patent situation is thus:
Microsoft has 200+ patents they claim Linux infringes on.
In response, Linux has the following counters:
1) Microsoft itself likely infringes on a non-zero number of Open Innovation Network patents 2a) Many Microsoft patents cover obvious things. 2b) Many Microsoft patents are invalid due to prior art. 3) If we knew what the patents were, we could avoid some of them.
Linux supporters can plan to use (2) to try to obviate MS patents, while using (3) to get around a few of the patents, and (1) to have ammo to fight MS back with.
The GPL3 Microsoft-Novell thing gives Linux supporters a 4th weapon:
4) If MS "conveys" or "distributes" GPLv3 software, it waives its right to patent claims against people who use that software.
This defense, (4), works great if MS can somehow be proven to "convey" or "distribute" something like Samba or NTFS-3g or Mono under the GPL3, because it takes a dozen MS patent claims off the market in one fell swoop.
See, but that doesn't break any of the Freedoms that FSF espouses. I can still update, modify, recompile, or remove whichever version of Samba Apple ships. I could even write my own SMB-compatibility app. In the worst case scenario, I can't use that preference pane if I "break" Samba. But that's my problem, not Apple's.
Apple is actually really modular with its code. You can replace a lot of components, and as long as they're compatible, there's no issue. I've upgraded several of the installed OSS programs, and I've even replaced Apple's Finder (I literally do not even have the old one on this computer). I'm perfectly allowed to do that. Occasionally that borks updates when Apple tries to update the Finder or Apache in a 10.4.y patch, but that's my problem (and easily worked around) and not a GPL violation.
It took considerable work for the Allies to even find out how the Enigma machine worked. If you have no clue of the process used at all, cryptoanalysis becomes harder. Here, however, hackers have technical documentation to a limited degree, and we have implementations of it available to test in limited circumstances. When you look at the AACS hackers, they had considerable help from using technical descriptions of AACS.
I'm not saying obscurity is the answer to security, but it can help.
I am not an artist, but I run sound at a lot of shows involving smaller bands in the Charlottesville, Virginia area. I also work with booking bands at a few venues. I'm not in charge by any means, but I have a pretty decent view of bands and venues.
I've found that bands that play several covers draw significantly better crowds. I've found that if I can advertise a band as playing notable cover songs, it increases audience size and audience participation. I've found that if a band plays covers, people will still listen to the originals and will be more likely to buy CDs. A person who walks by a show playing a cover at a free show or coffeehouse situation, they'll come in much more frequently than if it's a band playing a song they don't know.
Admittedly, this isn't scientific, and it's only based on shows I've worked, seen, or heard about from co-workers/associates in a college town.
In fact, when you look at piracy, it's not everyone who has to have a 5 GB VM, it's the one guy "cracking" the DRM. Once said DRM is cracked and the file is up on the Interwebs, it's available to all without the need for a VM.
Instructions per Second = Cycles/Second (the MHz) * Instructions/Cycle (IPC). An IPS increase can come from either MHz or IPC increases. Therefore, if you triple IPC and halve MHz, you have a 1.5 increase in (single-threaded) performance. You misread "instructions per second" as IPC, which it isn't.
Penryn (a die shrink of the Core2 Duo/Quad plus some SSE4) should have 3 GHz+ models. The real performance issue isn't clockspeed, it's instructions per second. When you make 128-bit SSE take fewer cycles, and you add execution units, improve scheduling logic, and reduce access latencies (through pre-fetching or larger caches, or faster buses), you make processors faster. A processor that runs at 2 GHz with 3 Instructions per clock is just as fast as one that runs at 4 GHz with 1.5 IPC. The reason clockspeed hasn't been increasing is because performance gains have been coming from other areas. Intel could probably sell a juiced-up 3.6 GHz Core 2 Extreme, but it'd run at 180 Watts or something, and cost like $1500.
If they block encryption, they'd start losing customers in spades. Although only nerds might notice if SSH/VPNs/VNC failed to work, everyone would notice if they can't access Amazon or their bank online.
That's not the point. The point is that even if I have an account on TorrentSpy or The Pirate Bay or Demonoid or wherever, I'm not automatically a criminal. The point is that because there are legitimate uses for P2P, visiting a P2P site should not be sufficient proof of suspicious activity to warrant logging a user. In much the same manner, cops can't follow or question everyone who comes out of a gun store, because there are dozens of reasons to buy a gun.
Movies and TV Shows have dramatically increased in production time. You might have several months of shooting for big movies now, or at least 40 days+. A TV show is shot over 7-10 days. And those are 12 hour days easily. Then there are script readings, character work, promotional stuff, etc. Being in a movie is a lot of work. There aren't enough hours in a day to be in more than 2-3 big movies a year. Sure, smaller flicks might shoot for only a few weeks, and I guess you could be in 6-10 of those, but movies are increasing in size, not decreasing.
The deal with Halo is that playing Halo with 4 friends is pretty easy (all you need are 4 controllers), and it's a lot easier to have a 16-person Halo party than to have a 16-person LAN party. While $PC_FPS_OF_CHOICE has better graphics and possibly better controls (people can fight K/M vs. controller all day if they want), it's so much more fun to blast the guy sitting next to you than a guy over the network.
The thing that a lot of hardcore gamers don't realize is that casual gamers like "party games". I can play Halo with my friend/apartmentmate/whoever, but I can't play Doom or Counterstrike with them right next to me.
Because developing an AIDs drug costs billions, but making it costs pennies. Merck can already rake in the cash on this stuff from first world countries. This is the "these people would never buy it anyways" subset of piracy, and while it makes sense when we're talking about movies to say "They shouldn't get them at all then", we're talking about lives here.
Correct. Sharing within colleges is difficult to impossible to stop. But colleges could do something about external sharing. When a student at a college can get an uplink of 2-4 Mbps that's relatively untraceable with little effort (like I could do right now if so inclined), that dramatically affects the outside world's download speeds. In theory, said student could easily saturate the top real-world speeds of half a dozen external downloaders. With 4 MB songs, that's 3-7 songs per minute.
Additionally, if students have a hard time downloading, that'll cut down on the number of AxxO or VTV releases making into the above mentioned untraceable campus cloud. You sneaker-net offers limited selection (what the guy down the hall has), whereas places like ThePirateBay or MiniNova or IsoHunt have thousands of CDs to pick from.
It's not about stopping piracy, it's about putting a damper on it, and the **AA think that colleges are a very juicy "low-hanging" fruit. If they can reduce campus piracy by x%, or reduce the efforts it brings the outside world, they're gonna be pretty happy.
Look, I'm all for shortening the copyright terms, but 80% of what students at major universities are pirating is NEW stuff, like 0-5 year old movies and books. It's not Casablanca or anything. I say this as a university student who knows people who pirate, and from the understanding I've been able to gather, that's the majority of it.
This would cost an awful lot of money, simply because of scale, and the diverse needs of the community. There are 15000+ students at my (not on the list) school, with at least 7000 of those on campus residents. About 80% of the off-grounds people have laptops, and maybe 15% bring them to class daily. That means that during the day you have in excess of 2000 laptops connecting throughout the day, in addition to the 6000 computers in people's dorms, and the 1000ish in libraries and computer labs, and you hit 9-10 thousand computers on your network on an average day. You can't monitor or sort that traffic cheaply.
Given that no University (especially not a top-25 one like mine) wants to be seen as anti-digital-freedom to prospective students, no college can really afford to go to a locked-down system of "block everything but ports 80, 8080, and AIM", because, well, they can't afford to politically, and there are dozens of departments that need to use Technology X on Port Y.
Essentially, colleges have to chose between massively inconveniencing legitimate uses and spending truckloads of money badly needed elsewhere at colleges.
I don't get it. That just means that if you want it, you just have to get it from Novell. Or Microsoft. I mean, if Novell has the license to distribute it, and they distribute it, then there should be no real issue. While I don't like Quicksilver (I trust MS less than Adobe, personally), I don't think Linux support will dramatically affect adoption, so this is at best a neutral move (possibly a positive one).
I imagine that they still can resemble a lot of it from other files - they should still have all the layout pieces for one, and all the authors ought to have at least rough drafts of their stories on their personal computers. The deadline's screwed, but they can probably get it out a few weeks late (or in July, depending on how often they normally publish).
My assumption is that, one way or another, this case isn't winnable under the DMCA. I wish it was, but I'm doubtful. More to the point, people like VA Software or Digg.com don't have the hundreds of thousands of dollars needed to fight this sort of a suit.
Slashdot Mirror
Most people don't do after-market upgrades. For businesses, it's often quicker/cheaper to replace the machines every 3 years, and for home customers, they often use it until it breaks, especially since most of them would have to pay Geek Squad $200 to add the extra RAM or HDD. At that price, the new $600 machine from $OEM looks tempting. I'm not saying upgrading is bad or that no-one does it, I'm saying that the percentage of people who do it is relatively low (less than 1/3 of all PC owners)
Price-wise, there are $500-800 laptops. They fit pretty well into the home-consumer and corporate price brackets. Granted, they suck relative to $800 desktops, but we're reaching the point at which GHz of CPU and GB of HDD don't sell machines as easily. While there are certainly ways to make use of larger HDDs and faster CPUs, most consumers don't make use of them yet. Features like in-home wireless will make laptops more attractive than slightly-faster desktops.
Maybe they couldn't get the smart A+ guys, and hired two A- guys to compensate?
I'm not defending Google here, I'm just pointing out that the two statements are not totally contradictory. Technically, all the google blog said is "There exist candidates that we can't hire (but would like to) because of immigration laws".
Correct, the talk was in Canada, but most software copyright (and most film/music copyright), including the copyrights for most of OS X, Windows, and UNIX, is held in the US by US corporations under US law.
ZIP+4 is one of the best changes in the bill. My ZIP code (20180) "has" cable, but it's only available in the town 3 miles away from me. Geographically, 95% of my ZIP code (and probably 60-70% population-wise) have no broadband, yet we're listed as having access to broadband. This bill is designed to stop the cable/phone Companies from telling the government and media that they've fulfilled their promise to bring "broadband to the masses" by redefining broadband to 2 Mb/s of theoretical speed (not even actual speed) and making them show penetration with better granularity.
I would suggest that 'promoting progress for the benefit of the public' being the only legitimate purpose of copyright requires justification.
In the United States, the Constitution explicitly states this. if you read the relevant Article I section and paragraph, it specifically spells this out ("to promote the useful arts and sciences" or something).
Another possible purpose is to protect the right of the creator to be the sole beneficiary of his labour.
That's an interesting theory, but it's not the theory espoused in the US Constitution. In fact, prior to the 1900s, most copyright didn't cover derivative works (translations, reuse of characters, etc.)
The Wii isn't designed to replace bars, parties, and hot sex. It's designed to replace "400 hundred channels and there's nothing on!!" or "Dude, I'm so bored" or "Let's go to the movie theater". I'd go out on a limb and say that that's the nightlife for most people 4-5 nights a week. The only people I know with a life like you describe every single night are college kids failing their classes.
(Disclaimer: I am not you. You might have a life where-in you do go out or have sex every night of the week. If so, congratulations. But that's not typical).
The goal isn't to hurt Microsoft legally. The goal is to get Microsoft to further weaken any patent cases. Essentially, the patent situation is thus:
Microsoft has 200+ patents they claim Linux infringes on.
In response, Linux has the following counters:
1) Microsoft itself likely infringes on a non-zero number of Open Innovation Network patents
2a) Many Microsoft patents cover obvious things.
2b) Many Microsoft patents are invalid due to prior art.
3) If we knew what the patents were, we could avoid some of them.
Linux supporters can plan to use (2) to try to obviate MS patents, while using (3) to get around a few of the patents, and (1) to have ammo to fight MS back with.
The GPL3 Microsoft-Novell thing gives Linux supporters a 4th weapon:
4) If MS "conveys" or "distributes" GPLv3 software, it waives its right to patent claims against people who use that software.
This defense, (4), works great if MS can somehow be proven to "convey" or "distribute" something like Samba or NTFS-3g or Mono under the GPL3, because it takes a dozen MS patent claims off the market in one fell swoop.
See, but that doesn't break any of the Freedoms that FSF espouses. I can still update, modify, recompile, or remove whichever version of Samba Apple ships. I could even write my own SMB-compatibility app. In the worst case scenario, I can't use that preference pane if I "break" Samba. But that's my problem, not Apple's.
Apple is actually really modular with its code. You can replace a lot of components, and as long as they're compatible, there's no issue. I've upgraded several of the installed OSS programs, and I've even replaced Apple's Finder (I literally do not even have the old one on this computer). I'm perfectly allowed to do that. Occasionally that borks updates when Apple tries to update the Finder or Apache in a 10.4.y patch, but that's my problem (and easily worked around) and not a GPL violation.
It took considerable work for the Allies to even find out how the Enigma machine worked. If you have no clue of the process used at all, cryptoanalysis becomes harder. Here, however, hackers have technical documentation to a limited degree, and we have implementations of it available to test in limited circumstances. When you look at the AACS hackers, they had considerable help from using technical descriptions of AACS.
I'm not saying obscurity is the answer to security, but it can help.
I am not an artist, but I run sound at a lot of shows involving smaller bands in the Charlottesville, Virginia area. I also work with booking bands at a few venues. I'm not in charge by any means, but I have a pretty decent view of bands and venues.
I've found that bands that play several covers draw significantly better crowds. I've found that if I can advertise a band as playing notable cover songs, it increases audience size and audience participation. I've found that if a band plays covers, people will still listen to the originals and will be more likely to buy CDs. A person who walks by a show playing a cover at a free show or coffeehouse situation, they'll come in much more frequently than if it's a band playing a song they don't know.
Admittedly, this isn't scientific, and it's only based on shows I've worked, seen, or heard about from co-workers/associates in a college town.
In fact, when you look at piracy, it's not everyone who has to have a 5 GB VM, it's the one guy "cracking" the DRM. Once said DRM is cracked and the file is up on the Interwebs, it's available to all without the need for a VM.
Instructions per Second = Cycles/Second (the MHz) * Instructions/Cycle (IPC). An IPS increase can come from either MHz or IPC increases. Therefore, if you triple IPC and halve MHz, you have a 1.5 increase in (single-threaded) performance. You misread "instructions per second" as IPC, which it isn't.
Penryn (a die shrink of the Core2 Duo/Quad plus some SSE4) should have 3 GHz+ models. The real performance issue isn't clockspeed, it's instructions per second. When you make 128-bit SSE take fewer cycles, and you add execution units, improve scheduling logic, and reduce access latencies (through pre-fetching or larger caches, or faster buses), you make processors faster. A processor that runs at 2 GHz with 3 Instructions per clock is just as fast as one that runs at 4 GHz with 1.5 IPC. The reason clockspeed hasn't been increasing is because performance gains have been coming from other areas. Intel could probably sell a juiced-up 3.6 GHz Core 2 Extreme, but it'd run at 180 Watts or something, and cost like $1500.
If they block encryption, they'd start losing customers in spades. Although only nerds might notice if SSH/VPNs/VNC failed to work, everyone would notice if they can't access Amazon or their bank online.
That's not the point. The point is that even if I have an account on TorrentSpy or The Pirate Bay or Demonoid or wherever, I'm not automatically a criminal. The point is that because there are legitimate uses for P2P, visiting a P2P site should not be sufficient proof of suspicious activity to warrant logging a user. In much the same manner, cops can't follow or question everyone who comes out of a gun store, because there are dozens of reasons to buy a gun.
Movies and TV Shows have dramatically increased in production time. You might have several months of shooting for big movies now, or at least 40 days+. A TV show is shot over 7-10 days. And those are 12 hour days easily. Then there are script readings, character work, promotional stuff, etc. Being in a movie is a lot of work. There aren't enough hours in a day to be in more than 2-3 big movies a year. Sure, smaller flicks might shoot for only a few weeks, and I guess you could be in 6-10 of those, but movies are increasing in size, not decreasing.
The deal with Halo is that playing Halo with 4 friends is pretty easy (all you need are 4 controllers), and it's a lot easier to have a 16-person Halo party than to have a 16-person LAN party. While $PC_FPS_OF_CHOICE has better graphics and possibly better controls (people can fight K/M vs. controller all day if they want), it's so much more fun to blast the guy sitting next to you than a guy over the network.
The thing that a lot of hardcore gamers don't realize is that casual gamers like "party games". I can play Halo with my friend/apartmentmate/whoever, but I can't play Doom or Counterstrike with them right next to me.
Because developing an AIDs drug costs billions, but making it costs pennies. Merck can already rake in the cash on this stuff from first world countries. This is the "these people would never buy it anyways" subset of piracy, and while it makes sense when we're talking about movies to say "They shouldn't get them at all then", we're talking about lives here.
Well, probably. I haven't seen Spider-Man 3 yet, so he could be lying.
Correct. Sharing within colleges is difficult to impossible to stop. But colleges could do something about external sharing. When a student at a college can get an uplink of 2-4 Mbps that's relatively untraceable with little effort (like I could do right now if so inclined), that dramatically affects the outside world's download speeds. In theory, said student could easily saturate the top real-world speeds of half a dozen external downloaders. With 4 MB songs, that's 3-7 songs per minute.
Additionally, if students have a hard time downloading, that'll cut down on the number of AxxO or VTV releases making into the above mentioned untraceable campus cloud. You sneaker-net offers limited selection (what the guy down the hall has), whereas places like ThePirateBay or MiniNova or IsoHunt have thousands of CDs to pick from.
It's not about stopping piracy, it's about putting a damper on it, and the **AA think that colleges are a very juicy "low-hanging" fruit. If they can reduce campus piracy by x%, or reduce the efforts it brings the outside world, they're gonna be pretty happy.
Look, I'm all for shortening the copyright terms, but 80% of what students at major universities are pirating is NEW stuff, like 0-5 year old movies and books. It's not Casablanca or anything. I say this as a university student who knows people who pirate, and from the understanding I've been able to gather, that's the majority of it.
This would cost an awful lot of money, simply because of scale, and the diverse needs of the community. There are 15000+ students at my (not on the list) school, with at least 7000 of those on campus residents. About 80% of the off-grounds people have laptops, and maybe 15% bring them to class daily. That means that during the day you have in excess of 2000 laptops connecting throughout the day, in addition to the 6000 computers in people's dorms, and the 1000ish in libraries and computer labs, and you hit 9-10 thousand computers on your network on an average day. You can't monitor or sort that traffic cheaply.
Given that no University (especially not a top-25 one like mine) wants to be seen as anti-digital-freedom to prospective students, no college can really afford to go to a locked-down system of "block everything but ports 80, 8080, and AIM", because, well, they can't afford to politically, and there are dozens of departments that need to use Technology X on Port Y.
Essentially, colleges have to chose between massively inconveniencing legitimate uses and spending truckloads of money badly needed elsewhere at colleges.
I don't get it. That just means that if you want it, you just have to get it from Novell. Or Microsoft. I mean, if Novell has the license to distribute it, and they distribute it, then there should be no real issue. While I don't like Quicksilver (I trust MS less than Adobe, personally), I don't think Linux support will dramatically affect adoption, so this is at best a neutral move (possibly a positive one).
I imagine that they still can resemble a lot of it from other files - they should still have all the layout pieces for one, and all the authors ought to have at least rough drafts of their stories on their personal computers. The deadline's screwed, but they can probably get it out a few weeks late (or in July, depending on how often they normally publish).
My assumption is that, one way or another, this case isn't winnable under the DMCA. I wish it was, but I'm doubtful. More to the point, people like VA Software or Digg.com don't have the hundreds of thousands of dollars needed to fight this sort of a suit.