The upper end of what can be construed as "limited term" is ~300 years -- twice the oldest human lifespan, allowing for a unique creation to be preserved for the entire life of the author, plus the entire life of a single heir.
More like 4 generations. I'd guess that the average life expectancy is about 75. Yup, guessed right, 78. Since it's probably a bell curve, I'd expect 95% of the population to live to less than 90 or 95, and 99% to live to less than 100. Practically speaking, 300 years is at least 3 generations for all but a lucky few.
Upon reading the BD+ wikipedia entry, it sounds like BD+ is just executable code that can be used to decrypt the content included on the disc. Since they include both the key to decrypt the content, and a modifiable executable right on the disc, it sounds like it will be about as hard to hack as trial software. Not hard at all. Remove the parts that check the hardware (or make them always say the hardware is fine), then use the key to decrypt. Burn the cracked version. Profit?
While I agree with you that PC laptops are cheaper for better performance, your example is not. GHz for GHz, Core 2 Duos consistently outperform AMD X2s. Check any benchmarks. I prefer Anandtech. Here's one example. Also, both are 64-bit.
If I were building a dedicated HTPC on the Windows side (unlike the general purpose C2D HTPC I own), I might use an AMD EE/SFF CPU, MicroATX motherboard, and I'm partial to Lian Li, so probably this case, although SilverStone also offers some good HTPC cases. I'd also use a faster hard drive than the Mini, possibly a RAID. Dealing with multi-GB files all the time has got to be dog-slow on that thing. It's slow enough on the 2x500 GB RAID-0 I use now.
If I wanted HD (which I probably would), I might go for a Core 2 Duo E6700 instead. My current E6600 (OC @ 3.2 GHz) still almost maxes out on certain HD movies. The Mini wouldn't stand a chance of playing them without dropping frames. Also, I'd choose quiet cooling from SilentPCReview. They're really the pros as far as quiet HTPCs go.
It is actually unreasonable for anyone who just wants a cheap computer to buy a mac, just like it is unreasonable for anyone who just want cheap stuff to shop at, say Target. MS and Walmart are both cheaper options, and those who are buying solely on price tend to visit them. OTOH, both are trying to become more upscale, but the stigma of being the cheap option are hurting the effort. Why would Apple want tarnish it's image by competing at the low end?
It's simpler than that. If you're going to play a niche role of about 2-3% worldwide marketshare, would you rather have that niche be the low end, low margin market or the high end, high margin market? Everything Apple does to keep up that high end image (their ads, celebrity spokespeople, targeting "creative professionals", their style, the "Apple culture"), while using standard Intel hardware and reusing open source OS components, is designed to ensure they stay the leaders of that high margin niche market, rather than any of the lower-margin, huge markets.
Dell and HP battle for first place at around 15% of the market each. But they do so by cost cutting and streamlining the distribution model. Most of their sales are very low margin. If Apple wanted to compete in that market, they'd need to completely redesign their business model. And for what gain? They make more profit having their 2% in the high end.
When the iPod came out there were already a lot of people trying to sell digital players, but none of them were very well designed, none of them did a good job of accommodating the entire workflow, none of them were really easy to learn and use. There were players with better stats and more features, but the adoption was very limited. Most people were sticking with portable CD players as a result. The iPod changed that both by providing the right package and through good marketing.
No there weren't. The competition was basically Rio, with its fairly large flash players, with tiny memory capacity. I had one that was 32 MB. It held about a CD's worth, for $200. There was no other mass-produced hard drive player available in the US.*
Apple initially succeeded in the market because they used a hard drive and had an established brand. The brand from a fairly unrelated market helped the general public realize that mp3 players (as they were called at the time) even existed. The market still would have grown quickly as small size, large capacity hard drives and flash memory were introduced. Apple joined at the right time.
They've continued succeeding because of other factors, such as style and intuitive interface. But that is not the initial reason for their success.
* From what I've read, HP owned a small company in Asia that had released a hard drive player, but it was not available in the US. They didn't capitalize on it like Apple did.
I would like to see a bootable Linux benchmark CD that runs stock GCC compiled code in 32 and 64-bit mode and provides various workload, scalability, and throughput tests. Something that is open and runs precisely the same code on all machines. Something anyone can pop in his own PC or laptop. But then, even if that were to exist, would the sites start to report that benchmark in their reviews?
So you want completely synthetic benchmarks instead of testing the applications that their readers actually use. Somehow I think that's never going to happen.
Incidentally, as this all relates to Tivo--I'd be willing to bet they won't use any new GPL material in their new systems. In fact, they'll probably remove whatever GPL material they already have as they migrate to a closed source system. Once bitten, twice shy. So, the net result is a loss of freedom, I guess you'd say. Way to go, freedom advocates.
Has TiVo contributed any changes back to GNU/Linux? Has the use of GNU/Linux by TiVo benefited the projects used in any way? Has it benefited compatibility and interoperability in any way? If not, fuck 'em, to put it bluntly. TiVo switching to proprietary code will have absolutely zero influence on GNU/Linux, instead only on TiVo's bottom line.
I have the 9700 NT. Like you, I was concerned with the huge size and weight of some of the towers. The Zalmans provide most of the benefit of the towers (performance, "silent"), while weighing in much closer to spec. They also include the fan, rather than some of the towers where you attach a 120 mm. That can be good or bad depending on whether you wanted to install your own quiet fan.
The difference between the 9700 LED that they reviewed and the 9700 NT that I own is primarily that the LED version has a manually-adjustable fan speed, while the NT is adjustable based on temperature through the BIOS if your board supports it. NT is also black instead of copper and nVidia branded. Both actually include the LED, which I didn't know until I bought it.
I use the Zalman to run a 2.4 GHz E6600 at 3.2 GHz with 50C idle/55C load. It would be better with a cooler case than the Lian Li A05 I own. I believe the Intel whitepaper puts the thermal recommendation at 61C max for Core 2 Duos, in case anyone is interested. With the auto fan speed, it only ramps up the fans to 100% when I'm playing games.
If you look at the prices for Core 2 Duos, the difference between something like the E6600 and the X6800 is $750. Slap a $50 cooler on the E6600, clock it up to 3.2 GHz easily (~3.6 GHz max on air) and you have a CPU that performs better than one that would have cost you $700 more. You'd have to be kinda crazy not to overclock the Core 2 Duos.
You're right that most users don't, but they should. It's a worthy investment.
That's how I first misread the headline. The real headline and the guy's story is actually pretty pathetic. He gave up. They won. They'd love it if everyone else did the same.
True. In fact, I've never seen an 11 Mbps DVD. I think I saw one that was almost 8 Mbps. Most are 5 Mbps or less. For example, Star Wars Ep. 2 that I have on my HDD is an avg. bitrate of 5445 Kbps. That's a DVD-9, so it is higher than FS/WS, two-sided DVDs, or old DVD-5s.
Complete double standard. I listen to a talk radio show that plays songs as the intro from the commercial break. Sometimes they play a full song. They also record video once every week or so that includes those songs. This video with copyrighted songs gets uploaded (with explicit permission) to YouTube/Google. It's funny that those videos are legal, yet they include the same songs that the RIAA will get taken down with the DMCA, if it is some random people dancing to it instead of a broadcast from a talk radio show.
So in 5 years, OpenFabriCAD has cost the company ($100,000+($33,000*5)+($8,000*5))=$305,000 for 10 users for 5 years, OR - $6,100 per user. You've also got a product that very few people understand, and your userbase is a handful of people that use it.
Where's the value proposition, again?
From your post, it sounds like you don't understand open source. The scenario you outlined wouldn't be a good value because you're assuming they don't reuse any code or libraries, that there isn't a preexisting project that you can adapt, and that all the work is done for one company, rather than a community.
For that narrow scope of designing a large "open source" (in quotes because you omitted any sharing of source in your scenario--maybe you meant proprietary/custom/from-scratch instead?) program for 10 users at 1 company, it's not a good value. But the way that real open source projects work, where they build on each other's work, it is.
Customizing and maintaining an existing project (developed primarily outside your company by other programmers) is more like ($22,000*5)+($8000*5)=$150,000 for 10 users for 5 years, or $1500 per user. And that's for fairly heavy customization of this OpenFabricCAD app. More common applications like DBMS, web servers, CRM, and CMS cost much closer to just the admin salary using open source.
Voltage is lower. Existing (pre-P35) boards won't support the Penryn.
Do you have a link for that? (Preferably from Intel, or a motherboard vendor, or a review site that talked to Intel) Because I can't find anywhere that old motherboard incompatibility is stated definitively.
But why does a new CPU needs a newer Chipset ?!?!?
I looked for a definitive answer from nVidia or eVGA, but it's not clear whether nForce 680i boards will support Penryn/Wolfdale or not. FWIW, a moderator at the eVGA forums thinks they will, but nobody knows for sure.
So unless Intel says otherwise, chipsets from other vendors may work with Penryn, regardless of Intel's chipset refresh for DDR3. I mean, most enthusiast boards do well over 1333 MHz FSB, and also have fine-grained voltage adjustments. Unless the rumor mentioned in that thread about a new vreg revision is true, it should work. Theoretically.
It would be more convenient if they would just use a barcode on your neck, or an RFID chip in your arm. Who wants to carry around a drivers license? Also, we need to make it impossible to pay with cash or checks.
Plus there are all these benefits: 1) You can identify where people are at all times 2) You can track every purchase everyone ever makes and where they make it 3) You can use the above to profile almost every action and behavior of every individual 4) You can shut off the ability to buy anything for alleged criminals and political dissidents
Sounds like a great idea. I only hope we can continue to move in that direction even faster.
If I had seen it I'd click it. Just for the hell of it. Not because I think Firefox is completely invulnerable, but because it has a low probability of infecting me. Best case I cost some moron some money. Worst case I find a hole in Fx. Why not? That is, if I paid any attention whatsoever to Google Ads.
Outside of, I think, NYC (where IIRC unmetered landline plans were unavailable for a long time), and those that choose metered plans, landline-to-anything is free to the landline and has been so as long as I've been alive (32 yrs and counting). The resistance in the US market was the idea of paying to call someone else locally; callee gets the benefit of being mobile with the phone, so why should caller pay for it?
It may be rare, but most of Vermont is metered. Local calls are 0.5-2.2 cents per minute. They added per-minute charges when they expanded the local calling areas to include several additional towns.
hence the "double-dipping" of US cell phone providers I mentioned. Callers always pay (sometimes in "free" minutes). But with cell phones, so does the receiving end.
More like 4 generations. I'd guess that the average life expectancy is about 75. Yup, guessed right, 78. Since it's probably a bell curve, I'd expect 95% of the population to live to less than 90 or 95, and 99% to live to less than 100. Practically speaking, 300 years is at least 3 generations for all but a lucky few.
Upon reading the BD+ wikipedia entry, it sounds like BD+ is just executable code that can be used to decrypt the content included on the disc. Since they include both the key to decrypt the content, and a modifiable executable right on the disc, it sounds like it will be about as hard to hack as trial software. Not hard at all. Remove the parts that check the hardware (or make them always say the hardware is fine), then use the key to decrypt. Burn the cracked version. Profit?
Yeah, and then we could open source it. Then it would be available to everyone who has a use for it! Wait a minute...
While I agree with you that PC laptops are cheaper for better performance, your example is not. GHz for GHz, Core 2 Duos consistently outperform AMD X2s. Check any benchmarks. I prefer Anandtech. Here's one example. Also, both are 64-bit.
You failed to mention if the processors are even in the same family....
The Dell could be a Celeron for all we know.
If I were building a dedicated HTPC on the Windows side (unlike the general purpose C2D HTPC I own), I might use an AMD EE/SFF CPU, MicroATX motherboard, and I'm partial to Lian Li, so probably this case, although SilverStone also offers some good HTPC cases. I'd also use a faster hard drive than the Mini, possibly a RAID. Dealing with multi-GB files all the time has got to be dog-slow on that thing. It's slow enough on the 2x500 GB RAID-0 I use now.
If I wanted HD (which I probably would), I might go for a Core 2 Duo E6700 instead. My current E6600 (OC @ 3.2 GHz) still almost maxes out on certain HD movies. The Mini wouldn't stand a chance of playing them without dropping frames. Also, I'd choose quiet cooling from SilentPCReview. They're really the pros as far as quiet HTPCs go.
Note that they're still not Core 2 Duos, which it would take to beat the X2 4000+.
It's simpler than that. If you're going to play a niche role of about 2-3% worldwide marketshare, would you rather have that niche be the low end, low margin market or the high end, high margin market? Everything Apple does to keep up that high end image (their ads, celebrity spokespeople, targeting "creative professionals", their style, the "Apple culture"), while using standard Intel hardware and reusing open source OS components, is designed to ensure they stay the leaders of that high margin niche market, rather than any of the lower-margin, huge markets.
Dell and HP battle for first place at around 15% of the market each. But they do so by cost cutting and streamlining the distribution model. Most of their sales are very low margin. If Apple wanted to compete in that market, they'd need to completely redesign their business model. And for what gain? They make more profit having their 2% in the high end.
No there weren't. The competition was basically Rio, with its fairly large flash players, with tiny memory capacity. I had one that was 32 MB. It held about a CD's worth, for $200. There was no other mass-produced hard drive player available in the US.*
Apple initially succeeded in the market because they used a hard drive and had an established brand. The brand from a fairly unrelated market helped the general public realize that mp3 players (as they were called at the time) even existed. The market still would have grown quickly as small size, large capacity hard drives and flash memory were introduced. Apple joined at the right time.
They've continued succeeding because of other factors, such as style and intuitive interface. But that is not the initial reason for their success.
* From what I've read, HP owned a small company in Asia that had released a hard drive player, but it was not available in the US. They didn't capitalize on it like Apple did.
So you want completely synthetic benchmarks instead of testing the applications that their readers actually use. Somehow I think that's never going to happen.
Has TiVo contributed any changes back to GNU/Linux? Has the use of GNU/Linux by TiVo benefited the projects used in any way? Has it benefited compatibility and interoperability in any way? If not, fuck 'em, to put it bluntly. TiVo switching to proprietary code will have absolutely zero influence on GNU/Linux, instead only on TiVo's bottom line.
Link to the 7700-AlCu you mentioned.
I have the 9700 NT. Like you, I was concerned with the huge size and weight of some of the towers. The Zalmans provide most of the benefit of the towers (performance, "silent"), while weighing in much closer to spec. They also include the fan, rather than some of the towers where you attach a 120 mm. That can be good or bad depending on whether you wanted to install your own quiet fan.
The difference between the 9700 LED that they reviewed and the 9700 NT that I own is primarily that the LED version has a manually-adjustable fan speed, while the NT is adjustable based on temperature through the BIOS if your board supports it. NT is also black instead of copper and nVidia branded. Both actually include the LED, which I didn't know until I bought it.
I use the Zalman to run a 2.4 GHz E6600 at 3.2 GHz with 50C idle/55C load. It would be better with a cooler case than the Lian Li A05 I own. I believe the Intel whitepaper puts the thermal recommendation at 61C max for Core 2 Duos, in case anyone is interested. With the auto fan speed, it only ramps up the fans to 100% when I'm playing games.
If you look at the prices for Core 2 Duos, the difference between something like the E6600 and the X6800 is $750. Slap a $50 cooler on the E6600, clock it up to 3.2 GHz easily (~3.6 GHz max on air) and you have a CPU that performs better than one that would have cost you $700 more. You'd have to be kinda crazy not to overclock the Core 2 Duos.
You're right that most users don't, but they should. It's a worthy investment.
Or programmer laziness, in the case where changing something else might supersede the information in the dialog currently displayed.
That's how I first misread the headline. The real headline and the guy's story is actually pretty pathetic. He gave up. They won. They'd love it if everyone else did the same.
True. In fact, I've never seen an 11 Mbps DVD. I think I saw one that was almost 8 Mbps. Most are 5 Mbps or less. For example, Star Wars Ep. 2 that I have on my HDD is an avg. bitrate of 5445 Kbps. That's a DVD-9, so it is higher than FS/WS, two-sided DVDs, or old DVD-5s.
Complete double standard. I listen to a talk radio show that plays songs as the intro from the commercial break. Sometimes they play a full song. They also record video once every week or so that includes those songs. This video with copyrighted songs gets uploaded (with explicit permission) to YouTube/Google. It's funny that those videos are legal, yet they include the same songs that the RIAA will get taken down with the DMCA, if it is some random people dancing to it instead of a broadcast from a talk radio show.
From your post, it sounds like you don't understand open source. The scenario you outlined wouldn't be a good value because you're assuming they don't reuse any code or libraries, that there isn't a preexisting project that you can adapt, and that all the work is done for one company, rather than a community.
For that narrow scope of designing a large "open source" (in quotes because you omitted any sharing of source in your scenario--maybe you meant proprietary/custom/from-scratch instead?) program for 10 users at 1 company, it's not a good value. But the way that real open source projects work, where they build on each other's work, it is.
Customizing and maintaining an existing project (developed primarily outside your company by other programmers) is more like ($22,000*5)+($8000*5)=$150,000 for 10 users for 5 years, or $1500 per user. And that's for fairly heavy customization of this OpenFabricCAD app. More common applications like DBMS, web servers, CRM, and CMS cost much closer to just the admin salary using open source.
Do you have a link for that? (Preferably from Intel, or a motherboard vendor, or a review site that talked to Intel) Because I can't find anywhere that old motherboard incompatibility is stated definitively.
I looked for a definitive answer from nVidia or eVGA, but it's not clear whether nForce 680i boards will support Penryn/Wolfdale or not. FWIW, a moderator at the eVGA forums thinks they will, but nobody knows for sure.
So unless Intel says otherwise, chipsets from other vendors may work with Penryn, regardless of Intel's chipset refresh for DDR3. I mean, most enthusiast boards do well over 1333 MHz FSB, and also have fine-grained voltage adjustments. Unless the rumor mentioned in that thread about a new vreg revision is true, it should work. Theoretically.
It would be more convenient if they would just use a barcode on your neck, or an RFID chip in your arm. Who wants to carry around a drivers license? Also, we need to make it impossible to pay with cash or checks.
Plus there are all these benefits:
1) You can identify where people are at all times
2) You can track every purchase everyone ever makes and where they make it
3) You can use the above to profile almost every action and behavior of every individual
4) You can shut off the ability to buy anything for alleged criminals and political dissidents
Sounds like a great idea. I only hope we can continue to move in that direction even faster.
Multi-channel, 4.7 GB capacity, and most importantly, built-in DRM?
If I had seen it I'd click it. Just for the hell of it. Not because I think Firefox is completely invulnerable, but because it has a low probability of infecting me. Best case I cost some moron some money. Worst case I find a hole in Fx. Why not? That is, if I paid any attention whatsoever to Google Ads.
It may be rare, but most of Vermont is metered. Local calls are 0.5-2.2 cents per minute. They added per-minute charges when they expanded the local calling areas to include several additional towns.
I guess I wasn't clear enough. I'm not sure how uncommon the scenario in the US is. Maybe this will help.
-Landline-to-landline-
Calling end: $$$
Receiving end: 0
-Cell-to-landline-
Calling end: $$$
Receiving end: 0
-Landline-to-cell-
Calling end: $$$
Receiving end: $$$
-Cell-to-cell- (typically)
Calling end: $$$
Receiving end: $$$
hence the "double-dipping" of US cell phone providers I mentioned. Callers always pay (sometimes in "free" minutes). But with cell phones, so does the receiving end.