Re:GPL does pretty much the same thing ...
on
Who Owns Software?
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· Score: 1
If so, then this sound very much like the GPL. The are both licenses. If you fail to comply with the terms of the GPL you are violating a copyright since the license is the only thing that grants permission to the copyrighted work, and if you fail to comply with the terms of the EULA you are violating a copyright since the license is the only thing that grants permission to the copyrighted work. The difference is in the terms of the GPL vs. the terms of an EULA. The terms of the GPL allow you unlimited use and only put limits on your right to redistribute. The terms of the EULA allow you only limited use. To run afoul of the GPL, you have to be doing something that isn't allowed under copyright (because the GPL is more permissive than copyright), whereas its possible to run afoul of an EULA while doing things that copyright law would allow you to do.
Well, it shipped a week or two late, at prices commiserate to higher quality PCs, and it's loud as hell. I don't see "quick, cheap, or good" in there...
Bingo. Wish I hadn't blown my mod points in a previous thread today. Unfortunately, that doesn't solve their problem. Apple doesn't just need people to upgrade, they need to sell more iPods.
The problem with large businesses is that it's not enough to make a lot of money. You have to make more money than last year. If Apple brings in $1 billion/quarter this year, next year they'll need to bring in $1.1 billion/quarter, or they'll fail to meet expectations and their stock price will drop. This means that their products have to get more expensive on average, or they have to sell a lot more.
The traditional way to have sales growth is to increase market share or increase market size. The problem is that Apple can't really do this. They've saturated the market, because everyone who could want an MP3 player has one, and over 3/4 of the market buy iPods. They really can't grow the market size any more in the Western world, and they'll have a hard time getting that much higher market share.
The revolutions you speak of result in people replacing their products with more Apple products. Rather than "planned/forced obselesence", Apple makes you want their next product. But while that insures that they'll sell a consistent number of iPods year-over-year, it's not growth. They need to get you to increase the speed of your update cycle. Unfortunately, the fastest they can get you purchasing an iPod is once per year, and more realistically once every 2-3 years.
iPods have actually been getting more expensive. Not in the sense that the pricepoints have gone up (they haven't), but in the sense that the iPod distribution is slowly trending more expensive (people are buying an iPod Touch instead of a Nano). That's great, but that's not sustainable, and so they need the other factors too.
People don't care about applications, they care about functionality. For a lot of that (email, web, word processing, etc), Linux does the job, but there's still a set of functionality (like painlessly opening a.doc or importing someone's turbotax info or playing the latest game) that's still a ways out.
The Pareto Principle says that the last 20% of the functionality takes 80% of the work. This means that to get that last mile stuff is going to be hard.
The problem with Slashdot isn't the lack of signal, it's the presence of noise. We have a lot of insightful and intelligent commentators, and those (barring the #10 joke) were the writers whose question he saw. Slashdot still has a higher signal-to-noise ratio than the average blog. We've got no shortage of signal, but at times the moderation system has a hard time picking it out from the noise.
If you browse at +3, as I do, the most common problem seems to be that moderators can't always tell an inaccurate but detailed post from a truly accurate one. Because of the difficulty of moderating a +4 post down, most of the time we have a (4, Informative) being corrected by a (5, Insightful) reply.
Oil demand in the US is pretty inelastic in the short term. This means that people will pay whatever they have to keep the heat running in their homes or to drive to work/school. If oil prices rise 50%, demand might fall 5% or 10% (as people lower the thermostat or skip driving to the gym).
As a result, if oil supply dropped by even 25% (as it did during the Yom Kippur War embargo in 1973), it would take drastic measures to reduce consumption by 25%. Like shutting factories, gas rationing at the pumps, closing schools in the winter, massive inflation (as transportation costs skyrocket), all kinds of bad stuff. In the long term, people buy more efficient cars or heat-proof their houses, but in the short term, only the most painful of measures can reduce consumption.
National Energy Independence means avoiding this. If multinational corporations threatened to reduce US oil output by 25% if their demands weren't met, we'd have troops nationalizing the oil fields within 72 hours.
Energy Independence is completely separate from clean energy. Energy Independence means that the Middle East doesn't have the power to stop our economy instantly.
Clean energy means energy that is less pollutant.
The two are often used together because the adoption of clean energy brings energy independence (since most clean energy solutions can be implemented in the US). Thus clean energy implies energy independence, but not vice-versa.
Or Adobe customers with Intel Macs (and when CS4 comes out, that'll be most of their Mac base) will install and run Windows to do Photoshop stuff.
The Mac advantage is that 64-bit is seamless (same drivers, same OS install), while Windows 64-bit requires buying a different version of Windows with different drivers.
It's a lot of work to port from Carbon to Cocoa. They're moving from C++ -> Objective-C and linking against different libraries. Hopefully the move will result in better software (because Cocoa is a better framework than Carbon), but it's a difficult move.
The problem is that that's an ISP tax, and it's label-by-label. At $5/label, that's $20 on a $50 internet bill, doesn't provide any services (still have to deal with P2P hassles), doesn't compensate artists, and doesn't cover indie labels or unsigned artists.
The best bet would be some sort of fee-collection organization. Because music downloads through some sort of central authority can be monitored and recorded easily, it's possible to have a census-based system which is totally fair to artists (as opposed to a survey-based system like radio).
That's because there's only one iPhone model. In 18 months, when there's 2-3 models spanning mid-range to ultra-high-end phones (plus refurbs and used older models), the iPhone will be scary to a lot of Windows Mobile models. Right now, it only competes for the high-end non-business market (and now maybe some of the business end with the Exchange support).
No, to install MSN Messenger, you'd need Trident and the IE DLLs (the parts which render HTML/CSS/Javascript), not the IE front-end app (the part responsible for the GUI and history and bookmarks, etc.). Similarly, one could remove Konqueror on a KDE system, but leave KHTML/WebKit intact, and have no issues with other dependent applications. Microsoft could either:
1) Only allow linking to the IE DLLs from "signed applications" unless you pay a fee, or 2) Allow applications to link to the DLLs freely, but just not install the IE GUI frontend.
From a marketing perspective, it'd be dumb not to include IE whenever possible (because they need bundling for browser dominance).
Just in case you're serious, he meant crapflooding, which is flooding a forum with dozens or hundreds of meaningless messages to lower the signal-to-noise ratio.
In 2009, even the lowest-end laptops are gonna have 2 GB of RAM. 128 MB for video is small potatoes for a consumer machine. Sure, you could add some extra RAM on the side, but that's $20 on a $800 machine (which sounds small, but is a decent slice of the profits). And adding 32 MB on die for video wouldn't help free up bandwidth or all that much RAM (because it's not large enough to not overflow into main RAM, and it's got to get to the Display Adapter somehow either way).
The reason Intel has so much of the market share is because of price - Intel's IG solutions (and low-end chipsets overall) are the cheapest on the market. The chip-integrated GPU will be popular because it can cut those costs further. For the 95% of the populace who doesn't need more than Vista+Office+web+email, the goal now is to make their computers lighter, cheaper, and more efficient. Most users can't tell the difference between a 3870 and an Intel IG (given 2+ GB of RAM, which is soon to be normal), simply because the most graphically intensive thing they do is Flip 3D.
That description seems pretty vague to me. Can YOU tell me *exactly how the money gets divided* ? Do you know how ASCAP or BMI money gets divided?.
Some of it is actually a full census (like the music played on shows on broadcast TV or music sold on CDs or TV DVDs), but a lot of it (radio, commercials and live covers) is done via "random" surveys. The surveys for radio are weighted based on how much the radio station paid in licensing fees (source). Which means the big giant stations dominate that, which sort of favors Britney Spears at the expense of smaller bands. It would be pretty easy to do all the radio stuff by census (if not trivially automatically than manually emailing playlists in), but they've successfully resisted that for some time. Of course, they do some Internet stuff via census instead of survey, but some of their Internet stuff is survey-based.
A census based system would be "fair", while a survey based system would have the same old problems.
I wasn't being completely serious, but I meant it in the broad case - absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Now, I'm not running around accusing people of things, I'm just saying.
the Wikipedia elite seem to be so inept in keeping secret their devious plots.
How do you know? I mean, for all you know, they're actually really adept at keeping their devious plots secret. I mean, I doubt it, but for all we know, they've covered up hundreds of other scandals, and it's only these few that trickle to our ears.
In this case, I doubt it, due to the openness of the medium and the inherent traceability. I'm just saying that if someone is adept at keeping their plots secret, by definition you wouldn't know they had anything (else) to hide in the first place.
No, I don't know any plots or dirt or anything, I'm just being pedantic.
It's the new hip thing. When you've done something wrong or at least sketchy, and someone's reporting on it, sue them to shut them down. In the old days, it was a lot harder for stuff like this to come out on a national or global scale, but nowadays, with the Internet, anyone with a camera or basic research skills can bust you. It's gotta be driving people white-collar crooks and sleazeballs crazy.
Disclaimer: I don't know the facts of this particular case. I'm just talking about a general trend.
Alternatively, it's because he can speak with some authority. Many of his posts are thoughtful, insightful paragraphs that educate the average/.-er. And even the ones which are just single-word answers benefit from his experience and reputation. This is not uncommon when you have other notable people commenting in articles relevant to their expertise, people like Jimbo Wales or Bruce Perens.
It's not a factor of them being upmodded because of who they are, but rather being upmodded because their expertise and commentary is relevant and benefits the community of readers as a whole. It's perfectly possible to have this phenomenon arise because of a person's situation as opposed to position or reputation, such as if a person was on Slashdot in the middle of a major event like a terrorist attack and offering a crucial and unique perspective.
The obvious answer to this question is that among the million-plus slashdot readers, there probably exist differing opinions about copyright. The same people who push "information just wants to be free" need not be the same people supporting this.
However, it's fully possible to conceive of how one could be anti-RIAA/anti-proprietary and still support this ruling. Common objections to the current state of IP include the fact that copyright lasts 70+ years, denial of fair use rights, draconian legal tactics, and pursuing non-commercial infringement. None of those factors apply here. This is a recent photograph (I'm assuming, since it's on Flickr) and the infringement was commercial, not personal. The results of this legal action don't restrict my freedoms in any way, and the tactics used to obtain victory don't trample all over privacy. Only people absolutely against copyright (or extremely pro-corporation) would hate this ruling.
Most consumer applications don't max out a processor. Having a switchable processor would be worth it only in really specialized situations. As a result, no one would code the software for it.
The software would simply have to be multithreaded the OS would take care of the rest, the software wouldn't need to do anything special.
There's more than that. For the performance gain to be noticeable, I need to need the extra processing power. If OS+RSS+email+browsing+itunes only takes up 50% of a core (as you'd expect with even a low-end current chip), then it doesn't matter if I have 1 core, 2, 3, or a 8 cores. The milliseconds of lower latency aren't noticeable to the end user. Only uses where processor usage hits 80%+ from time to time will see any benefit. Processes which aren't CPU bound or already occur faster than the user really notices won't benefit from multiple cores unless the background processes eat a lot of CPU. If you're not stressing the machine, you won't notice a difference between a dual-core and a tri-core and a quad-core.
It's one thing to hotplug an external hard drive, quite another to swap processors while running.
then ill edit some pictures ( I dont know much about graphics but i think multicores are generally good for this)
then ill play some games ( some games are better at threading than others). It's pretty rare that you're going to be using 100% power in the first case and probably not in the second case. Unless you're doing professional work (like with Photoshop or Aperture) or batch work on a dozen photos, you're not going to max out even a 2.0 GHz dual core. At least, you won't save enough time with the quad set-up to justify altering the settings. And with a decent CPU, either way your CPU won't be the bottleneck (unless you have $2k+ in graphics cards and 8 GB of RAM) gaming. And even threaded games generally thread out to 2 or 3 processors. There's no such thing as n-core scaling. Supposedly some games will see a benefit from 4 cores, but that's few and far between.
Most consumer applications don't max out a processor. Having a switchable processor would be worth it only in really specialized situations. As a result, no one would code the software for it.
Finally, the power draw on the desktop isn't something that's really an issue. The differences would be noticeable as a dollar or two on your electric bill. Batteries in laptops are measured in tens of watt-hours, while home electric prices are in the pennies/kilowatt-hour range. So if you save 50 watts in a desktop low-power mode on a computer you use 8 hours a day (it's sleeping most of the time), that's 50*8*30 = 12,000 watt-hours, or 12 kilowatt hours. At 10 cents per kilowatt-hour (admittedly, that's a year-old US residential average), you save $1.20 a month. One degree on the thermostat or better sealed windows save more. However, in a laptop with 60-90Wh battery, every watt counts.
What you're proposing would be ridiculously complex, and if it's possible, isn't worth it. If it was possible to switch without physical access (changing something on the board), it'd probably require a restart. It'd only be worth it to a tiny group of people. In most cases, people know what workload will max out their computer, and build around that (graphics workstation, server, gaming, whatever). Either the workload will be single-threaded or multi-threaded. In the remaining time when the processor isn't at full utilization, it really doesn't matter if you're using 3 or 4 cores, since you're only using 20%-25% of the processor anyways.
It also wouldn't work under Windows, because you'd have to reauthorize WGA every time you switched.
On voltages - the idea is that the processor passes a stability test with a set voltage and within a set thermal envelope. The highest clock speed at which they pass that test is how they're sold. Over-clockers who are willing to change voltage and deal with increased heat can get a processor to go faster (there are limits on that too, though). Some mobile processors have settings which adjust the clock settings, multiplier, and voltage simultaneously to reach a low power mode. My point is that in most cases, it's all or nothing in that you either are running at full speed on all cores, or at reduced speed everywhere. Some newer processors can do the cores independently, but for the most part, the speed has to be consistent core-to-core. And that down-adjustable clockspeed stuff is limited to mobile chips.
You're right that a lot of people are going to look at the "one processor disabled" and have qualms (which are probably unreasonable). And that might chase away some people. But I don't think it'll come up. Celerons sold well, and they were "disabled" Pentiums. Some Athlons were Opterons with fewer working HyperTransport links in a different package. Every mid-range GPU ever is a "disabled" version of the high-end one. There's even software to "softmod" some upper-mid-range chips to their full glory (apparently, this is now less common). While it's an issue for consumers, historically there's not a lot of evidence that it's a major one, and it's not one that a lot of people know about.
The conversation with the sales person probably won't even touch on the design of the processor. On the consumer side, the consumer and the Best Buy sales guy won't know anything about it, and on the business side, most companies will do enough research to rule it out as a major factor. The real issue is at the intersection where people have enough knowledge to have read the article, but not enough knowledge to recognize that this isn't unusual. This wouldn't stop me from buying a tri-core chip (the fact that Intel is beating the pants off AMD would, though) because I know better, and it wouldn't stop Joe Schmoe, because he'll have no idea about it.
The marketing logic is going to be "Faster than the comparably priced quadcore, more cores than the same price dualcore", and it might make some sales. Personally, I'm not convinced a 2.6 GHz AMD tri-core will beat a Q6600 (2.4 GHz Intel quadcore) in single-threaded benchmarks, so the issue is sort of moot. Pre-Penryn, Intel's chips were competitive with Phenom/Barcelona Opterons, and now Wolfdale/Yorktown/Harpertown are spanking them. In a closer processor preformance race, this would be an interesting idea, but the performance gap makes the tri-core hard to sell, except on the extreme low-end. The cheapest quad-core Yorkfield you can get (when it's out in a few weeks) will be $266 for a 2.5 GHz chip. There will be a 3.16 GHz dual-core at the same price, with a 3.0 GHz dual-core below $200 (source). To come in between them, you'd have to a 2.6-2.8 GHz tri-core between $225 and $250. That just doesn't make AMD money.
Finally, disclaimer: I am a college student in a Computer Architecture class who has read a bit about this sort of stuff. I am not an expert on this at all. I also own a Mac Pro, which is an Intel workstation.
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All of SCO's claims were eliminated pre-trial via findings of fact and stuff. Therefore, all this trial consists of is Novell's counter-claims.
Well, it shipped a week or two late, at prices commiserate to higher quality PCs, and it's loud as hell. I don't see "quick, cheap, or good" in there...
Bingo. Wish I hadn't blown my mod points in a previous thread today. Unfortunately, that doesn't solve their problem. Apple doesn't just need people to upgrade, they need to sell more iPods.
The problem with large businesses is that it's not enough to make a lot of money. You have to make more money than last year. If Apple brings in $1 billion/quarter this year, next year they'll need to bring in $1.1 billion/quarter, or they'll fail to meet expectations and their stock price will drop. This means that their products have to get more expensive on average, or they have to sell a lot more.
The traditional way to have sales growth is to increase market share or increase market size. The problem is that Apple can't really do this. They've saturated the market, because everyone who could want an MP3 player has one, and over 3/4 of the market buy iPods. They really can't grow the market size any more in the Western world, and they'll have a hard time getting that much higher market share.
The revolutions you speak of result in people replacing their products with more Apple products. Rather than "planned/forced obselesence", Apple makes you want their next product. But while that insures that they'll sell a consistent number of iPods year-over-year, it's not growth. They need to get you to increase the speed of your update cycle. Unfortunately, the fastest they can get you purchasing an iPod is once per year, and more realistically once every 2-3 years.
iPods have actually been getting more expensive. Not in the sense that the pricepoints have gone up (they haven't), but in the sense that the iPod distribution is slowly trending more expensive (people are buying an iPod Touch instead of a Nano). That's great, but that's not sustainable, and so they need the other factors too.
People don't care about applications, they care about functionality. For a lot of that (email, web, word processing, etc), Linux does the job, but there's still a set of functionality (like painlessly opening a .doc or importing someone's turbotax info or playing the latest game) that's still a ways out.
The Pareto Principle says that the last 20% of the functionality takes 80% of the work. This means that to get that last mile stuff is going to be hard.
The problem with Slashdot isn't the lack of signal, it's the presence of noise. We have a lot of insightful and intelligent commentators, and those (barring the #10 joke) were the writers whose question he saw. Slashdot still has a higher signal-to-noise ratio than the average blog. We've got no shortage of signal, but at times the moderation system has a hard time picking it out from the noise. If you browse at +3, as I do, the most common problem seems to be that moderators can't always tell an inaccurate but detailed post from a truly accurate one. Because of the difficulty of moderating a +4 post down, most of the time we have a (4, Informative) being corrected by a (5, Insightful) reply.
Oil demand in the US is pretty inelastic in the short term. This means that people will pay whatever they have to keep the heat running in their homes or to drive to work/school. If oil prices rise 50%, demand might fall 5% or 10% (as people lower the thermostat or skip driving to the gym).
As a result, if oil supply dropped by even 25% (as it did during the Yom Kippur War embargo in 1973), it would take drastic measures to reduce consumption by 25%. Like shutting factories, gas rationing at the pumps, closing schools in the winter, massive inflation (as transportation costs skyrocket), all kinds of bad stuff. In the long term, people buy more efficient cars or heat-proof their houses, but in the short term, only the most painful of measures can reduce consumption.
National Energy Independence means avoiding this. If multinational corporations threatened to reduce US oil output by 25% if their demands weren't met, we'd have troops nationalizing the oil fields within 72 hours.
Energy Independence is completely separate from clean energy. Energy Independence means that the Middle East doesn't have the power to stop our economy instantly. Clean energy means energy that is less pollutant. The two are often used together because the adoption of clean energy brings energy independence (since most clean energy solutions can be implemented in the US). Thus clean energy implies energy independence, but not vice-versa.
Or Adobe customers with Intel Macs (and when CS4 comes out, that'll be most of their Mac base) will install and run Windows to do Photoshop stuff. The Mac advantage is that 64-bit is seamless (same drivers, same OS install), while Windows 64-bit requires buying a different version of Windows with different drivers. It's a lot of work to port from Carbon to Cocoa. They're moving from C++ -> Objective-C and linking against different libraries. Hopefully the move will result in better software (because Cocoa is a better framework than Carbon), but it's a difficult move.
The problem is that that's an ISP tax, and it's label-by-label. At $5/label, that's $20 on a $50 internet bill, doesn't provide any services (still have to deal with P2P hassles), doesn't compensate artists, and doesn't cover indie labels or unsigned artists. The best bet would be some sort of fee-collection organization. Because music downloads through some sort of central authority can be monitored and recorded easily, it's possible to have a census-based system which is totally fair to artists (as opposed to a survey-based system like radio).
That's because there's only one iPhone model. In 18 months, when there's 2-3 models spanning mid-range to ultra-high-end phones (plus refurbs and used older models), the iPhone will be scary to a lot of Windows Mobile models. Right now, it only competes for the high-end non-business market (and now maybe some of the business end with the Exchange support).
No, to install MSN Messenger, you'd need Trident and the IE DLLs (the parts which render HTML/CSS/Javascript), not the IE front-end app (the part responsible for the GUI and history and bookmarks, etc.). Similarly, one could remove Konqueror on a KDE system, but leave KHTML/WebKit intact, and have no issues with other dependent applications. Microsoft could either:
1) Only allow linking to the IE DLLs from "signed applications" unless you pay a fee, or
2) Allow applications to link to the DLLs freely, but just not install the IE GUI frontend.
From a marketing perspective, it'd be dumb not to include IE whenever possible (because they need bundling for browser dominance).
Just in case you're serious, he meant crapflooding, which is flooding a forum with dozens or hundreds of meaningless messages to lower the signal-to-noise ratio.
In 2009, even the lowest-end laptops are gonna have 2 GB of RAM. 128 MB for video is small potatoes for a consumer machine. Sure, you could add some extra RAM on the side, but that's $20 on a $800 machine (which sounds small, but is a decent slice of the profits). And adding 32 MB on die for video wouldn't help free up bandwidth or all that much RAM (because it's not large enough to not overflow into main RAM, and it's got to get to the Display Adapter somehow either way).
The reason Intel has so much of the market share is because of price - Intel's IG solutions (and low-end chipsets overall) are the cheapest on the market. The chip-integrated GPU will be popular because it can cut those costs further. For the 95% of the populace who doesn't need more than Vista+Office+web+email, the goal now is to make their computers lighter, cheaper, and more efficient. Most users can't tell the difference between a 3870 and an Intel IG (given 2+ GB of RAM, which is soon to be normal), simply because the most graphically intensive thing they do is Flip 3D.
Some of it is actually a full census (like the music played on shows on broadcast TV or music sold on CDs or TV DVDs), but a lot of it (radio, commercials and live covers) is done via "random" surveys. The surveys for radio are weighted based on how much the radio station paid in licensing fees (source). Which means the big giant stations dominate that, which sort of favors Britney Spears at the expense of smaller bands. It would be pretty easy to do all the radio stuff by census (if not trivially automatically than manually emailing playlists in), but they've successfully resisted that for some time. Of course, they do some Internet stuff via census instead of survey, but some of their Internet stuff is survey-based.
A census based system would be "fair", while a survey based system would have the same old problems.
I wasn't being completely serious, but I meant it in the broad case - absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Now, I'm not running around accusing people of things, I'm just saying.
the Wikipedia elite seem to be so inept in keeping secret their devious plots.
How do you know? I mean, for all you know, they're actually really adept at keeping their devious plots secret. I mean, I doubt it, but for all we know, they've covered up hundreds of other scandals, and it's only these few that trickle to our ears.
In this case, I doubt it, due to the openness of the medium and the inherent traceability. I'm just saying that if someone is adept at keeping their plots secret, by definition you wouldn't know they had anything (else) to hide in the first place.
No, I don't know any plots or dirt or anything, I'm just being pedantic.
It's the new hip thing. When you've done something wrong or at least sketchy, and someone's reporting on it, sue them to shut them down. In the old days, it was a lot harder for stuff like this to come out on a national or global scale, but nowadays, with the Internet, anyone with a camera or basic research skills can bust you. It's gotta be driving people white-collar crooks and sleazeballs crazy.
Disclaimer: I don't know the facts of this particular case. I'm just talking about a general trend.
Alternatively, it's because he can speak with some authority. Many of his posts are thoughtful, insightful paragraphs that educate the average /.-er. And even the ones which are just single-word answers benefit from his experience and reputation. This is not uncommon when you have other notable people commenting in articles relevant to their expertise, people like Jimbo Wales or Bruce Perens.
It's not a factor of them being upmodded because of who they are, but rather being upmodded because their expertise and commentary is relevant and benefits the community of readers as a whole. It's perfectly possible to have this phenomenon arise because of a person's situation as opposed to position or reputation, such as if a person was on Slashdot in the middle of a major event like a terrorist attack and offering a crucial and unique perspective.
The obvious answer to this question is that among the million-plus slashdot readers, there probably exist differing opinions about copyright. The same people who push "information just wants to be free" need not be the same people supporting this.
However, it's fully possible to conceive of how one could be anti-RIAA/anti-proprietary and still support this ruling. Common objections to the current state of IP include the fact that copyright lasts 70+ years, denial of fair use rights, draconian legal tactics, and pursuing non-commercial infringement. None of those factors apply here. This is a recent photograph (I'm assuming, since it's on Flickr) and the infringement was commercial, not personal. The results of this legal action don't restrict my freedoms in any way, and the tactics used to obtain victory don't trample all over privacy. Only people absolutely against copyright (or extremely pro-corporation) would hate this ruling.
The software would simply have to be multithreaded the OS would take care of the rest, the software wouldn't need to do anything special.
There's more than that. For the performance gain to be noticeable, I need to need the extra processing power. If OS+RSS+email+browsing+itunes only takes up 50% of a core (as you'd expect with even a low-end current chip), then it doesn't matter if I have 1 core, 2, 3, or a 8 cores. The milliseconds of lower latency aren't noticeable to the end user. Only uses where processor usage hits 80%+ from time to time will see any benefit. Processes which aren't CPU bound or already occur faster than the user really notices won't benefit from multiple cores unless the background processes eat a lot of CPU. If you're not stressing the machine, you won't notice a difference between a dual-core and a tri-core and a quad-core.
then ill edit some pictures ( I dont know much about graphics but i think multicores are generally good for this)
then ill play some games ( some games are better at threading than others). It's pretty rare that you're going to be using 100% power in the first case and probably not in the second case. Unless you're doing professional work (like with Photoshop or Aperture) or batch work on a dozen photos, you're not going to max out even a 2.0 GHz dual core. At least, you won't save enough time with the quad set-up to justify altering the settings. And with a decent CPU, either way your CPU won't be the bottleneck (unless you have $2k+ in graphics cards and 8 GB of RAM) gaming. And even threaded games generally thread out to 2 or 3 processors. There's no such thing as n-core scaling. Supposedly some games will see a benefit from 4 cores, but that's few and far between.
Most consumer applications don't max out a processor. Having a switchable processor would be worth it only in really specialized situations. As a result, no one would code the software for it.
Finally, the power draw on the desktop isn't something that's really an issue. The differences would be noticeable as a dollar or two on your electric bill. Batteries in laptops are measured in tens of watt-hours, while home electric prices are in the pennies/kilowatt-hour range. So if you save 50 watts in a desktop low-power mode on a computer you use 8 hours a day (it's sleeping most of the time), that's 50*8*30 = 12,000 watt-hours, or 12 kilowatt hours. At 10 cents per kilowatt-hour (admittedly, that's a year-old US residential average), you save $1.20 a month. One degree on the thermostat or better sealed windows save more. However, in a laptop with 60-90Wh battery, every watt counts.
They can't. The analog bands were partially sold in the most recent FCC auction. Someone else owns them as of like 2010 or something.
What you're proposing would be ridiculously complex, and if it's possible, isn't worth it. If it was possible to switch without physical access (changing something on the board), it'd probably require a restart. It'd only be worth it to a tiny group of people. In most cases, people know what workload will max out their computer, and build around that (graphics workstation, server, gaming, whatever). Either the workload will be single-threaded or multi-threaded. In the remaining time when the processor isn't at full utilization, it really doesn't matter if you're using 3 or 4 cores, since you're only using 20%-25% of the processor anyways.
It also wouldn't work under Windows, because you'd have to reauthorize WGA every time you switched.
On voltages - the idea is that the processor passes a stability test with a set voltage and within a set thermal envelope. The highest clock speed at which they pass that test is how they're sold. Over-clockers who are willing to change voltage and deal with increased heat can get a processor to go faster (there are limits on that too, though). Some mobile processors have settings which adjust the clock settings, multiplier, and voltage simultaneously to reach a low power mode. My point is that in most cases, it's all or nothing in that you either are running at full speed on all cores, or at reduced speed everywhere. Some newer processors can do the cores independently, but for the most part, the speed has to be consistent core-to-core. And that down-adjustable clockspeed stuff is limited to mobile chips.
You're right that a lot of people are going to look at the "one processor disabled" and have qualms (which are probably unreasonable). And that might chase away some people. But I don't think it'll come up. Celerons sold well, and they were "disabled" Pentiums. Some Athlons were Opterons with fewer working HyperTransport links in a different package. Every mid-range GPU ever is a "disabled" version of the high-end one. There's even software to "softmod" some upper-mid-range chips to their full glory (apparently, this is now less common). While it's an issue for consumers, historically there's not a lot of evidence that it's a major one, and it's not one that a lot of people know about.
The conversation with the sales person probably won't even touch on the design of the processor. On the consumer side, the consumer and the Best Buy sales guy won't know anything about it, and on the business side, most companies will do enough research to rule it out as a major factor. The real issue is at the intersection where people have enough knowledge to have read the article, but not enough knowledge to recognize that this isn't unusual. This wouldn't stop me from buying a tri-core chip (the fact that Intel is beating the pants off AMD would, though) because I know better, and it wouldn't stop Joe Schmoe, because he'll have no idea about it.
The marketing logic is going to be "Faster than the comparably priced quadcore, more cores than the same price dualcore", and it might make some sales. Personally, I'm not convinced a 2.6 GHz AMD tri-core will beat a Q6600 (2.4 GHz Intel quadcore) in single-threaded benchmarks, so the issue is sort of moot. Pre-Penryn, Intel's chips were competitive with Phenom/Barcelona Opterons, and now Wolfdale/Yorktown/Harpertown are spanking them. In a closer processor preformance race, this would be an interesting idea, but the performance gap makes the tri-core hard to sell, except on the extreme low-end. The cheapest quad-core Yorkfield you can get (when it's out in a few weeks) will be $266 for a 2.5 GHz chip. There will be a 3.16 GHz dual-core at the same price, with a 3.0 GHz dual-core below $200 (source). To come in between them, you'd have to a 2.6-2.8 GHz tri-core between $225 and $250. That just doesn't make AMD money.
Finally, disclaimer: I am a college student in a Computer Architecture class who has read a bit about this sort of stuff. I am not an expert on this at all. I also own a Mac Pro, which is an Intel workstation.