Sure. Corporations are as capable -- on a theoretical standpoint -- of murder and enslavement as governments. In actuality, in the past century corporations have waged war (through proxy) and circumvented the constitutional amendments prohibiting slavery (the "company town").
In the US, corporations were one of the main catalysts behind the abolition of slavery. When the industrial revolution was spawned, the new industries in the north realized that they did not have enough free market labor to support their business. Slaves were not considered potential workers because they were in agriculture, had no experience in industry, and no potential for mobility to learn new skills. By freeing slaves, the industrialists in the north knew that they could increase their work pool with ex-slaves who wanted to advance.
What makes corporations more scary than governments (to liberals) is the idea that a democracy or republic gives you or I at least some input.
The fact that you wrote this proves that you are a moron. In the US, nothing drives business EXCEPT customer input. In literally EVERY purchasing decision you have a choice. Don't like McDonalds? Go to Burger King. Don't like the prices of oil? Don't drive. Don't like Windows? Use Linux. Don't like the RIAA? Don't buy recorded music. Etc. Etc. Etc. In fact the very definition of business is that it has no physical power. The government has a monopoly on that. Just to begin with, if corporations don't rely on public input, then why do they spend so much money on advertising in order to attempt to sway customer input? When you answer this satisfactorily, we'll continue from there.
No corporation need answer to anyone but those who can buy stock, and few are constituted to guarantee any kinds of liberties to their employees or clients.
Oh, man. You really clinched it here. WHY should a corporation be required to guarantee liberties to its customers? That is THE stupidest thing I have ever heard in my entire life.
I'm not sure I prefer a big mac to a few well baked escargots or some well made sushi.
The problem is, it's much easier to find a McD's joint than to find a good french or jap resturant.
It's may be harder to locate the best music (i.e. to actually find a place to buy the CD's), but it is not difficult out to FIND OUT about the best music; simply read reviews for the best genres. The majors only put out 20,000-30,000 titles per year, and the current system of review makes it easy to find the best music. Most genres in the indie scenes have fewer than that per year, again making it manageable.
McD's will never make fine food, because they don't care about it. There not in it to make good food. There in it to make a buck out of consistant american man-feed.
I bet that the average escargot joint who charges a $100 a plate is a lot more profitable than most any McDonalds location.
Have you ever though that nsync sounds just like the bs boys and just like bspears and ca? Well, those stuff are written and produced by the same small group of people. DUH!
So?
The reason people listen to fucking nsync is not because their music is good.
On an absolute objective scale, N'Sync et al's songs are not as good (as complex, as beautiful, and as emotionally reaching) as Beethoven's late string quartets, Schoenberg's 12 tone work, or Coltrane's late period work, BUT for what they are trying to do, which is make catchy, radio friendly, well produced, slick sounding music, they do it INCREDIBLY well. All of those songs are perfect little jewels of pop.
People like it because its marketed only in the sense that that's how they found out about it. Big deal. Any act of promoting yourself (including recording music, or publishing music) is promotion. I wouldn't know about Beethoven if he hadn't promoted himself. You wouldn't know about ANY artist, besides your next door neighbor who plays really loud, if the artist hadn't promoted himself.
If you think people actually don't like the music, you are SADLY mistaken. Personally, I think anbybody who does not think the music is catchy and fun to listen to is lying and is insecure about their musical tastes. Catchy and fun does not constitute "good", but it IS what most people are interested it. Have you ever seen those teenage girls get in N'Sync vs. Backstreet Boys fights? They're more passionate than any Slashdotters are on any issue. What would be their motivation if not the music?
Man do you think those nsync vs bs boys shit on MTV is for real? They are fucking paid for by some "independant" promotion company.
Right. N'Sync and the Bastreet Boys did not even consider music as a career but were formed by responding to a newspaper ad. It's manufactured. So? It's what 99.44% of the population wants, and for us remaining 0.56%, there are hundreds of thousands of indie selections per year waiting for our perusal. What's the problem?
Britney Spears may be synthetic, corporate music, but it is slick, well-produced music. The aural equivalent of a Big Mac.
Correct. But here's the rub: 99.44% of the population _prefers_ slick music, and doesn't want to go out and look for other music. There _has_ to be slick commercial music because that's what almost everybody prefers. Even when recorded music ceases to be a market, this kind of fluff will still be played on the radio,
You don't know what bad music is until you have gone through and listened to a pile of promotional records at a radio station. There is an unbelievable amount of really bad music that never gets played on the air.
And even these are the cream of the crop! For every artist who was actually talented enough to get a recording contract, there are 1,000 others trying to make it, who are even less talented.
In the post-RIAA "utopia" which everyone talks about, where ALL music gets EQUAL distribution, we not only have to wade through all the top 40 music, and we not only have to wade through all of the no-talents you describe above (which outnumber the stars by a factor of 10), and not only do we have to wade through all of the unsigned bands (which outnumber signed artists by a factor of 1,000), but on top of THAT, we will need to wade through amateurs: old women crooning in the shower, people singing campfire songs at the family reunion, and junior high school marching bands (all of which probably outnumber unsigned artists by another factor of 1,000).
Right now, when I buy a CD from the best independent labels (such as Rounder, Hightone, or Sugarhill), my "hit rate" (the chance of getting a great CD) is about 95% - the best labels do not release fluff, and have their reputation on the line whenever they release a new CD. According to my calculations above, when a get a random MP3 in the post-record company world, my chance of getting a good song is about 1 in 10,000,000. This is supposed to be better than buying a pre-selected CD, by an artist who has already proven to be talented enough to warrant a sizeable recording budget?
Now, what you are forgetting, is that the same companies sell the unsecure music are the ones who would sell the secure music. So they could simply stop producing the unsecure music, and "force" consumers to buy the secure music.
Many of the major music companies also have a stake in playback equipment (e.g. Sony and Polygram, which owns Philips/Maganvox) so they may have an interest in selling the playback unit very cheap in order to promote the new standard. Again, they could manage this very well. They would not be able to stop production of CD players however, since they do not control that market.
The fact that there is a huge library of unencrypted music out there makes a secure music format almost irrelevant. It would take years to introduce a new medium - CD's have been out for over 15 years, but cassettes still have market. They may be able to reduce that somewhat, perhaps to under 5 years, if they were extremely aggressive. It would probably help in the long run, but there would be a few flat years.
Re:The American Heritage Dictionary...
on
1.21 Quickiewatts
·
· Score: 1
1. j- is the preferred pronounciation 2. They only added g- because a bunch of morons kept saying it that way, so it became a word. It doesn't meant it's correct.
You are, of course, correct. Gigabyte and Gigahertz are pronounced with a soft "g". Anybody who pronounces them with a hard "g" is a bumbling moron, and needs to be sent back to kindergarten and needs to learn how to talk. It's really sickening to see people who are supposedly educated about computers, or about things in general, who pronounce these words incorrectly in public.
Of course, 99.44% of the population does not know how to pronounce "gigabyte/gigaherz", making them the most misprounced words in the industry (edging out "silicon", which about 95% of people do not know how to pronounce properly).
AMD has taken a huge chunk of Intel's market, but who knows, maybe they might be able to make a comeback?
Incorrect. Intel's marketshare 18 months ago was 81%, 6 months ago it was 18%, 12 months ago it was 81%, and today it is 81%. Two things to keep in mind:
AMD has grown its marketshare at the expense of Cyrix and IDT but not at the expensive of Intel.
The PC market has grown _tremendously_ recently, so despite keeping a steady marketshare, Intel is growing at a huge pace.
It smacks of unnecessary alarmism designed to generate message traffic... Trolling, almost.
Correct. What you need to understand is that the Slashdot editors make millions of dollars from stories like this. They do not understand the issues they are discussing, but they know when they put up articles about hot topics, that it will line their pockets even further from all of the click throughs.
Lastly, the deployment of these boxxen on networks could be challenged under the First Amendment by a particularly talented ACLU/EFF type law team.
Incorrect. The internet data lines are owned by private corporations who can do whatever they want and put whatever restrictions they want on them. There is no free speech guaranteed on the internet, since the internet media is not publically owned (like the airwaves, or street corners are).
First the government tells us what software companies can and cannot integrate together, and now they have the right to tell us what a company can and cannot charge for? WTF? What's next, are they going dictate when we can go to the bathroom? This bigger and bigger government thing is really getting out of hand.
The government's fundamental function, according to libertarian dogma, is to protect property rights. Patents are property, and anybody smarter than the communist junior high school students who make up the majority of Slashdot understand this. Therefore, the protection of intellectual property (patents and copyright) is part of the fundamental function of a libertarian government. It goes alongside protection of your physical property from looting, which most would agree is not excessive government intervention.
Someone want to tell me why a consortium like OPEC is illegal in the US and the EU, yet we allow the patent holding cartels do exactly the same thing and call it "Intellectual Property Rights".
Because the Constitution says so? "The Congress shall have Power... To Promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries", US Consistitution, Artile 1, Section 8, Clause 8.
The right to charge whatever the hell you want to for a limited time for thing you invented is a _constitutionally_ granted right. Only the most ultra-liberal, anti-American, and government-loving people would argue against this.
Time for another gov't probe/crackdown.
Ah yes, the tired old Slashdot line: "The government will come and and fixe\ everything! We love the government! Let's make the government really, really, really big and really, really, really powerful and have total control over all of the Big Evil Corporations. The government does nothing but good for us! We're Slashdot so we're really liberal and we love the government to take care of us! We like to spit on the constitution on burn it because we hate individuals rights so much!" Morons.
Intel _is_ the dominant chip supplier. They supply microprocessors to 81% of PC's sold, and chipsets to a significant number. They got out of the DRAM business about 15 years ago. Intel's business is directly proportional to the number of PC's sold. The more PC's sold, the more money Intel makes. So why would it want to stifle production of memory, which would stifle production of PC's?
If you refuse to use non open source OS'es, what did you use before about 10 years ago (when there were NO open source OS'es)? Or did you just recently jump on the bandwagon so you can be trendy and fashionable?
For starters, Intel's StrongArm chip uses less than 1/4 of the power of the environmentally hostile Crusoe chip, and has ALREADY been shipping in desktop systems for YEARS.
Second, there is nothing stopping using something like a mobile Pentium III -- which is approximately as power conservative as the Crusoe, but also much faster -- in a desktop system. There just is no demand to do so.
It's an important thing for geeks - how much fanage your system has. You know - it's like "normal" guys make huge garages and are measured by their piston count. Computer geeks, OTOH, are measured by how many fans and computers you have. If the lights don't dim when you power your baby up, you ain't worthy!
I'd actually be surprised if many/.er's had computers which dim the lights. My biggest VAX, which has a 3.5 kWatt power supply, definitely dims the lights, and is _very_ loud. It has about ten gazillion fans - the disk rack alone has 9 six-inchers. The loudest part is its console which is a DECwriter III (a printer terminal), and every few minutes it prints status messages, and puts out an obnoxious squeal, very loudly. I only turn it on for special occasions.
Most of my other computers have smallish power supplies - 600 watts for a few, and on lower. Some are LOUD (my DNS server, a quad 486, is extremely loud), but they don't dim the lights.
That said, I definitely do like the noise of a general hum of 7 or 8 computers (which is what I keep running full time). It's white noise, and does a good job drowning kids playing, domestic violence at the neighbor's, street noise, and so forth. Sometimes it drowns out the quieter sections of music, and sometimes its hard to hear the phone, which both suck.
I really do wonder about people who cannot handle the noise of a regular ATX machine. I really can't stand perfectly quiet environments; it really does make me nervous.
One of the benefits of RISC has traditionally been a simpler implementation, which means less heat, and as such theoretically higher clock speeds. This is obvious with the clock speed vs. performance of the 21164, which I'm certain someone of your great intellect should be well aware of.
But RISC is neither more cool, nor higher clock speed than IA-32 (whether you call that RISC or CISC). There are mobile IA-32 implementations (Pentium III, but also of course Transmeta), where there hasn't been a mobile Alpha implementation since the early, early days (ditto for Sparc). The fastest Alpha's and Sparc's run at something like 50-60 watts, but the typical Pentium III runs at half that. There are _two_ 1 GHz IA-32 implementations, but nothing close on the RISC front. You can talk "theoretically", but none of the theories are close to what has happened.
Firstly, IA32 doesn't have the fastest processor on 50% of the days.
On integer it does. On FP it doesn't, yet.
Secondly, the IA32 at this point is a pseudo-architecture, and not an underlying processor architecture. The processor architecture of the modern x86 is a simple RISC-like design, with a CISC decoding mechanism.
I think you will find that all microarchitectures differ greatly from the architures. The 21064 was a scalar, in-order processor (and this is what the ISA designed for), but the 21264 has is OOO, superscalar, and has register renaming. And the 21364 is MT. All of these were add-on's which are not specified in the architecture.
If CISC (if you can call a P3 CISC with a straight face) is so superior, why does it ever get beaten by a RISC processor, very much a RISC processor 333MHz slower?
I didn't say it was superior, I said it was extremely competitive. For about 50% of the time in the last 18 months, the fastest microprocessor in the world has been a Pentium II or Pentium III, and the other half, it was been a PA-RISC or Alpha. Clock speed has nothing to do with performance. I see you are really clueless and new to this. PA-RISC is about a third the clock speed of the 21264 but is about as fast.
Sounds like a personal problem to me.
Right. Please offer me the memory ordering rules for the 21264, and your asembly language implementation of Dekker's algorithm. You don't the first clue about cache consistency.
What part of you're wrong don't you understand? Simplicity offers consistancy in performance, complexity requires effort to maintain performance.
If simplicity means higher performance, then why does IA-32 have the fastest microprocessor in the world on 50% of the days in the last 18 months, and simpler architectures such as Sparc and PowerPC aren't even competitive at all, ever?
Wow, that's a real load of nonsense. The highest performing machine on CPU2000 is the AlphaServer DS20E Model 6/667. A machine that's running several hundred MHz less than the P3, I might add. It beats it hands down in integer performance, and totally destroys it floating point operations. Yes, slower indeed!
Well LAST week the Pentium III was the fastest. The DS20 beats by a whopping 4%. I'm sure next week the new Pentium III will get the crown again.
In practice, programming for the Alpha isn't very hard. It's all a matter of mindset.
Obviously you have never done MP assembly language program on Alpha. MP programs in C, or UP assembly language programs are easy as cake on Alpha, but it breaks down for the more complex stuff. Or do you really like to memorize fifty different cache consistency states?
The instruction density of IA32 is one of the things keeping it back on its RISC core. The old memory vs. speed tradeoff at it again.;-)
It's not memory vs. speed when less memory IS greater speed. What part of i-cache, and a ten stage decoding pipeline do you not understand?
The __only__ serious limitation in the IA-32 architecture is the fact that there are only 8 general purposes registers, and the fact that they aren't that general purpose (e.g. the MUL instruction always works with the same registers, the stack pointer must be in ESP, etc.)
Aside from this, the IA-32 architecture is actually considerably more simple than most other architectures to program on.
A few...
IA-32 does all alignment checking for you. There is no problem doing a store split across a line or even a page, and the microarchitecture takes care of this. On something like Alpha, this is illegal, and will generate an exception and the OS must do two stores to perform the operation.
Cache coherency. IA-32 has very well defined cache coherency protocols, and again works in all cases such as split words. Many architectures, including Alpha, leave coherency to the programmer, and you have to do locks yourself. This is extremely complicated, especially for false sharing when it is not clear what is on the same line.
Memory ordering. Ditto as the above. Many of the RISC architectures have very chaotic memory ordering rules, especially the Alpha, which does all sorts of weird out of order and speculative loads so you have to insert fences everywhere. A real mess.
Despite this, IA-32 is still the fastest architecture around. The fastes CPU currently shipping on SPECint2000 is the 1 GHz Pentium III. The RISC architectures are more difficult to program, but are also slower!
One good benefit of the CISC IA-32 architecture is instruction density. You can code in two bytes (a CISC ALU instruction, for example), what it takes 8 btyes to code in RISC (a load/store, then the ALU). When you code denisity is 2x-4x greater, this helps tremendously for i-cache! Also, it really cuts down on the relatively expensive decode process (which is really the only expensive part of the IA-32 architecture)
If you think the P6 line is 32 bit, you are _extremely_ out of touch. The P6 has been doing 36 bit for several years. Perhaps you should check your facts in the future before you claim to know what is going on. Please log on to Intel's developer site (http://developer.intel.com) and get volumes 1-3 of the developer manuals.
Popular music will simply undergo another paradigm shift to accomodate the current vehicle.
You assume that this is good. In the early 1960's when AM radio and the 45 RPM format ruled, Phil Spector was the most reknowned producer because his three minutes symphonic jewels of pop fit the limitations of the media exactly. The more drawn out stuff that was going out at the time -- due to the freer, but less mass popular, format of vinyl -- is much more remembered currently. Spector move music backwards somewhat but it came back around.
The online era will be the same. The limatations are the $400 Compaq and the 56k connection. Music will be altered to best fit in this. But it's a limitation; it is more limiting that before. You don't have the freedom to make a well thought out 75 master work, but are limited to a three minute, low bandwidth (thus low sound quality) jewel of pop.
I think that from now on the artists who, and the record makers who are forcing them to release crap are going to have to start thinking a little more about making each performance special. Just like the 'good old days'.
This is what you don't get. If you are listening to music with filler, you are listening to top 40 pop music. Period. The new Rhonda Vincent album is flawless. So is the new Sleater-Kinney. Something like Chailly's Mahler #5 doesn't have a second which isn't completely enthralling. I can hardly indentify a single CD in my 1000+ collection which isn't compelling thorughout. Of course, I carefully research my purchases and buy only the best; no top 40 music for me.
You admit that music is is going to be shorter when online distribution is the norm. In fact, you relish in it. So what part of the successful recordings are you going to cut? The Ring is something like 20 hours in length; are you going to chop it up into some easily downloadable and unoffensive three minute jewel of pop? People talk about how there is an "artificial scarcity" with the current system of physical records, but there is indeed MORE scarcity with online music: bandwidth.
I would consider most of those _extremely_ mainstream. I have never been to a record store which doesn't have large sections dedicated to Hawkwind, FLA, Front 242, etc. Some of the others I am not familiar with but it doesn't mean they're obscure since I'm not into that type of music. Heck, Dr. Demento is a radio program which puts a lower limit on his popularity.
You misunderstand. I dont give a shit for anything from Madonna to Scraping Foetus Off the Windshield to the Butthole Surfers to whatever. To me, those are all forms of popular music. I dont care what clique your magazines are giving voice to.
Er, I'm talking about serious music, Einstein. Madonna and Scraping Foetus off the Windhsield, Butthol Surfers, and the others are top 40 teeny bop music. Get a copy of Grammaphone or something.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure. Corporations are as capable -- on a theoretical standpoint -- of murder and enslavement as governments. In actuality, in the past century corporations have waged war (through proxy) and circumvented the constitutional amendments prohibiting slavery (the "company town").
In the US, corporations were one of the main catalysts behind the abolition of slavery. When the industrial revolution was spawned, the new industries in the north realized that they did not have enough free market labor to support their business. Slaves were not considered potential workers because they were in agriculture, had no experience in industry, and no potential for mobility to learn new skills. By freeing slaves, the industrialists in the north knew that they could increase their work pool with ex-slaves who wanted to advance.
What makes corporations more scary than governments (to liberals) is the idea that a democracy or republic gives you or I at least some input.
The fact that you wrote this proves that you are a moron. In the US, nothing drives business EXCEPT customer input. In literally EVERY purchasing decision you have a choice. Don't like McDonalds? Go to Burger King. Don't like the prices of oil? Don't drive. Don't like Windows? Use Linux. Don't like the RIAA? Don't buy recorded music. Etc. Etc. Etc. In fact the very definition of business is that it has no physical power. The government has a monopoly on that. Just to begin with, if corporations don't rely on public input, then why do they spend so much money on advertising in order to attempt to sway customer input? When you answer this satisfactorily, we'll continue from there.
No corporation need answer to anyone but those who can buy stock, and few are constituted to guarantee any kinds of liberties to their employees or clients.
Oh, man. You really clinched it here. WHY should a corporation be required to guarantee liberties to its customers? That is THE stupidest thing I have ever heard in my entire life.
I'm not sure I prefer a big mac to a few well baked escargots or some well made sushi.
The problem is, it's much easier to find a McD's joint than to find a good french or jap resturant.
It's may be harder to locate the best music (i.e. to actually find a place to buy the CD's), but it is not difficult out to FIND OUT about the best music; simply read reviews for the best genres. The majors only put out 20,000-30,000 titles per year, and the current system of review makes it easy to find the best music. Most genres in the indie scenes have fewer than that per year, again making it manageable.
McD's will never make fine food, because they don't care about it. There not in it to make good food. There in it to make a buck out of consistant american man-feed.
I bet that the average escargot joint who charges a $100 a plate is a lot more profitable than most any McDonalds location.
Have you ever though that nsync sounds just like the bs boys and just like bspears and ca? Well, those stuff are written and produced by the same small group of people. DUH!
So?
The reason people listen to fucking nsync is not because their music is good.
On an absolute objective scale, N'Sync et al's songs are not as good (as complex, as beautiful, and as emotionally reaching) as Beethoven's late string quartets, Schoenberg's 12 tone work, or Coltrane's late period work, BUT for what they are trying to do, which is make catchy, radio friendly, well produced, slick sounding music, they do it INCREDIBLY well. All of those songs are perfect little jewels of pop.
People like it because its marketed only in the sense that that's how they found out about it. Big deal. Any act of promoting yourself (including recording music, or publishing music) is promotion. I wouldn't know about Beethoven if he hadn't promoted himself. You wouldn't know about ANY artist, besides your next door neighbor who plays really loud, if the artist hadn't promoted himself.
If you think people actually don't like the music, you are SADLY mistaken. Personally, I think anbybody who does not think the music is catchy and fun to listen to is lying and is insecure about their musical tastes. Catchy and fun does not constitute "good", but it IS what most people are interested it. Have you ever seen those teenage girls get in N'Sync vs. Backstreet Boys fights? They're more passionate than any Slashdotters are on any issue. What would be their motivation if not the music?
Man do you think those nsync vs bs boys shit on MTV is for real? They are fucking paid for by some "independant" promotion company.
Right. N'Sync and the Bastreet Boys did not even consider music as a career but were formed by responding to a newspaper ad. It's manufactured. So? It's what 99.44% of the population wants, and for us remaining 0.56%, there are hundreds of thousands of indie selections per year waiting for our perusal. What's the problem?
Britney Spears may be synthetic, corporate music, but it is slick, well-produced music. The aural equivalent of a Big Mac.
Correct. But here's the rub: 99.44% of the population _prefers_ slick music, and doesn't want to go out and look for other music. There _has_ to be slick commercial music because that's what almost everybody prefers. Even when recorded music ceases to be a market, this kind of fluff will still be played on the radio,
You don't know what bad music is until you have gone through and listened to a pile of promotional records at a radio station. There is an unbelievable amount of really bad music that never gets played on the air.
And even these are the cream of the crop! For every artist who was actually talented enough to get a recording contract, there are 1,000 others trying to make it, who are even less talented.
In the post-RIAA "utopia" which everyone talks about, where ALL music gets EQUAL distribution, we not only have to wade through all the top 40 music, and we not only have to wade through all of the no-talents you describe above (which outnumber the stars by a factor of 10), and not only do we have to wade through all of the unsigned bands (which outnumber signed artists by a factor of 1,000), but on top of THAT, we will need to wade through amateurs: old women crooning in the shower, people singing campfire songs at the family reunion, and junior high school marching bands (all of which probably outnumber unsigned artists by another factor of 1,000).
Right now, when I buy a CD from the best independent labels (such as Rounder, Hightone, or Sugarhill), my "hit rate" (the chance of getting a great CD) is about 95% - the best labels do not release fluff, and have their reputation on the line whenever they release a new CD. According to my calculations above, when a get a random MP3 in the post-record company world, my chance of getting a good song is about 1 in 10,000,000. This is supposed to be better than buying a pre-selected CD, by an artist who has already proven to be talented enough to warrant a sizeable recording budget?
Now, what you are forgetting, is that the same companies sell the unsecure music are the ones who would sell the secure music. So they could simply stop producing the unsecure music, and "force" consumers to buy the secure music.
Many of the major music companies also have a stake in playback equipment (e.g. Sony and Polygram, which owns Philips/Maganvox) so they may have an interest in selling the playback unit very cheap in order to promote the new standard. Again, they could manage this very well. They would not be able to stop production of CD players however, since they do not control that market.
The fact that there is a huge library of unencrypted music out there makes a secure music format almost irrelevant. It would take years to introduce a new medium - CD's have been out for over 15 years, but cassettes still have market. They may be able to reduce that somewhat, perhaps to under 5 years, if they were extremely aggressive. It would probably help in the long run, but there would be a few flat years.
1. j- is the preferred pronounciation 2. They only added g- because a bunch of morons kept saying it that way, so it became a word. It doesn't meant it's correct.
You are, of course, correct. Gigabyte and Gigahertz are pronounced with a soft "g". Anybody who pronounces them with a hard "g" is a bumbling moron, and needs to be sent back to kindergarten and needs to learn how to talk. It's really sickening to see people who are supposedly educated about computers, or about things in general, who pronounce these words incorrectly in public.
Of course, 99.44% of the population does not know how to pronounce "gigabyte/gigaherz", making them the most misprounced words in the industry (edging out "silicon", which about 95% of people do not know how to pronounce properly).
AMD has taken a huge chunk of Intel's market, but who knows, maybe they might be able to make a comeback?
Incorrect. Intel's marketshare 18 months ago was 81%, 6 months ago it was 18%, 12 months ago it was 81%, and today it is 81%. Two things to keep in mind:
AMD has grown its marketshare at the expense of Cyrix and IDT but not at the expensive of Intel.
The PC market has grown _tremendously_ recently, so despite keeping a steady marketshare, Intel is growing at a huge pace.
It smacks of unnecessary alarmism designed to generate message traffic... Trolling, almost.
Correct. What you need to understand is that the Slashdot editors make millions of dollars from stories like this. They do not understand the issues they are discussing, but they know when they put up articles about hot topics, that it will line their pockets even further from all of the click throughs.
Lastly, the deployment of these boxxen on networks could be challenged under the First Amendment by a particularly talented ACLU/EFF type law team.
Incorrect. The internet data lines are owned by private corporations who can do whatever they want and put whatever restrictions they want on them. There is no free speech guaranteed on the internet, since the internet media is not publically owned (like the airwaves, or street corners are).
First the government tells us what software companies can and cannot integrate together, and now they have the right to tell us what a company can and cannot charge for? WTF? What's next, are they going dictate when we can go to the bathroom? This bigger and bigger government thing is really getting out of hand.
The government's fundamental function, according to libertarian dogma, is to protect property rights. Patents are property, and anybody smarter than the communist junior high school students who make up the majority of Slashdot understand this. Therefore, the protection of intellectual property (patents and copyright) is part of the fundamental function of a libertarian government. It goes alongside protection of your physical property from looting, which most would agree is not excessive government intervention.
Someone want to tell me why a consortium like OPEC is illegal in the US and the EU, yet we allow the patent holding cartels do exactly the same thing and call it "Intellectual Property Rights".
Because the Constitution says so? "The Congress shall have Power ... To Promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries", US Consistitution, Artile 1, Section 8, Clause 8.
The right to charge whatever the hell you want to for a limited time for thing you invented is a _constitutionally_ granted right. Only the most ultra-liberal, anti-American, and government-loving people would argue against this.
Time for another gov't probe/crackdown.
Ah yes, the tired old Slashdot line: "The government will come and and fixe\ everything! We love the government! Let's make the government really, really, really big and really, really, really powerful and have total control over all of the Big Evil Corporations. The government does nothing but good for us! We're Slashdot so we're really liberal and we love the government to take care of us! We like to spit on the constitution on burn it because we hate individuals rights so much!" Morons.
You're a moron.
Intel _is_ the dominant chip supplier. They supply microprocessors to 81% of PC's sold, and chipsets to a significant number. They got out of the DRAM business about 15 years ago. Intel's business is directly proportional to the number of PC's sold. The more PC's sold, the more money Intel makes. So why would it want to stifle production of memory, which would stifle production of PC's?
If you refuse to use non open source OS'es, what did you use before about 10 years ago (when there were NO open source OS'es)? Or did you just recently jump on the bandwagon so you can be trendy and fashionable?
Um, wouldn't you rather have a biathlon system?
But now I've had this K7 running almost continuously (i.e., 24/7) for two years without a problem, without a fan, and with virtually no sound.
How did you pull that off? The K7 was released in summer 1999.
Nope.
For starters, Intel's StrongArm chip uses less than 1/4 of the power of the environmentally hostile Crusoe chip, and has ALREADY been shipping in desktop systems for YEARS.
Second, there is nothing stopping using something like a mobile Pentium III -- which is approximately as power conservative as the Crusoe, but also much faster -- in a desktop system. There just is no demand to do so.
It's an important thing for geeks - how much fanage your system has. You know - it's like "normal" guys make huge garages and are measured by their piston count. Computer geeks, OTOH, are measured by how many fans and computers you have. If the lights don't dim when you power your baby up, you ain't worthy!
I'd actually be surprised if many /.er's had computers which dim the lights. My biggest VAX, which has a 3.5 kWatt power supply, definitely dims the lights, and is _very_ loud. It has about ten gazillion fans - the disk rack alone has 9 six-inchers. The loudest part is its console which is a DECwriter III (a printer terminal), and every few minutes it prints status messages, and puts out an obnoxious squeal, very loudly. I only turn it on for special occasions.
Most of my other computers have smallish power supplies - 600 watts for a few, and on lower. Some are LOUD (my DNS server, a quad 486, is extremely loud), but they don't dim the lights.
That said, I definitely do like the noise of a general hum of 7 or 8 computers (which is what I keep running full time). It's white noise, and does a good job drowning kids playing, domestic violence at the neighbor's, street noise, and so forth. Sometimes it drowns out the quieter sections of music, and sometimes its hard to hear the phone, which both suck.
I really do wonder about people who cannot handle the noise of a regular ATX machine. I really can't stand perfectly quiet environments; it really does make me nervous.
One of the benefits of RISC has traditionally been a simpler implementation, which means less heat, and as such theoretically higher clock speeds. This is obvious with the clock speed vs. performance of the 21164, which I'm certain someone of your great intellect should be well aware of.
But RISC is neither more cool, nor higher clock speed than IA-32 (whether you call that RISC or CISC). There are mobile IA-32 implementations (Pentium III, but also of course Transmeta), where there hasn't been a mobile Alpha implementation since the early, early days (ditto for Sparc). The fastest Alpha's and Sparc's run at something like 50-60 watts, but the typical Pentium III runs at half that. There are _two_ 1 GHz IA-32 implementations, but nothing close on the RISC front. You can talk "theoretically", but none of the theories are close to what has happened.
Firstly, IA32 doesn't have the fastest processor on 50% of the days.
On integer it does. On FP it doesn't, yet.
Secondly, the IA32 at this point is a pseudo-architecture, and not an underlying processor architecture. The processor architecture of the modern x86 is a simple RISC-like design, with a CISC decoding mechanism.
I think you will find that all microarchitectures differ greatly from the architures. The 21064 was a scalar, in-order processor (and this is what the ISA designed for), but the 21264 has is OOO, superscalar, and has register renaming. And the 21364 is MT. All of these were add-on's which are not specified in the architecture.
If CISC (if you can call a P3 CISC with a straight face) is so superior, why does it ever get beaten by a RISC processor, very much a RISC processor 333MHz slower?
I didn't say it was superior, I said it was extremely competitive. For about 50% of the time in the last 18 months, the fastest microprocessor in the world has been a Pentium II or Pentium III, and the other half, it was been a PA-RISC or Alpha. Clock speed has nothing to do with performance. I see you are really clueless and new to this. PA-RISC is about a third the clock speed of the 21264 but is about as fast.
Sounds like a personal problem to me.
Right. Please offer me the memory ordering rules for the 21264, and your asembly language implementation of Dekker's algorithm. You don't the first clue about cache consistency.
What part of you're wrong don't you understand? Simplicity offers consistancy in performance, complexity requires effort to maintain performance.
If simplicity means higher performance, then why does IA-32 have the fastest microprocessor in the world on 50% of the days in the last 18 months, and simpler architectures such as Sparc and PowerPC aren't even competitive at all, ever?
Wow, that's a real load of nonsense. The highest performing machine on CPU2000 is the AlphaServer DS20E Model 6/667. A machine that's running several hundred MHz less than the P3, I might add. It beats it hands down in integer performance, and totally destroys it floating point operations. Yes, slower indeed!
Well LAST week the Pentium III was the fastest. The DS20 beats by a whopping 4%. I'm sure next week the new Pentium III will get the crown again.
In practice, programming for the Alpha isn't very hard. It's all a matter of mindset.
Obviously you have never done MP assembly language program on Alpha. MP programs in C, or UP assembly language programs are easy as cake on Alpha, but it breaks down for the more complex stuff. Or do you really like to memorize fifty different cache consistency states?
The instruction density of IA32 is one of the things keeping it back on its RISC core. The old memory vs. speed tradeoff at it again. ;-)
It's not memory vs. speed when less memory IS greater speed. What part of i-cache, and a ten stage decoding pipeline do you not understand?
The __only__ serious limitation in the IA-32 architecture is the fact that there are only 8 general purposes registers, and the fact that they aren't that general purpose (e.g. the MUL instruction always works with the same registers, the stack pointer must be in ESP, etc.)
...
Aside from this, the IA-32 architecture is actually considerably more simple than most other architectures to program on.
A few
IA-32 does all alignment checking for you. There is no problem doing a store split across a line or even a page, and the microarchitecture takes care of this. On something like Alpha, this is illegal, and will generate an exception and the OS must do two stores to perform the operation.
Cache coherency. IA-32 has very well defined cache coherency protocols, and again works in all cases such as split words. Many architectures, including Alpha, leave coherency to the programmer, and you have to do locks yourself. This is extremely complicated, especially for false sharing when it is not clear what is on the same line.
Memory ordering. Ditto as the above. Many of the RISC architectures have very chaotic memory ordering rules, especially the Alpha, which does all sorts of weird out of order and speculative loads so you have to insert fences everywhere. A real mess.
Despite this, IA-32 is still the fastest architecture around. The fastes CPU currently shipping on SPECint2000 is the 1 GHz Pentium III. The RISC architectures are more difficult to program, but are also slower!
One good benefit of the CISC IA-32 architecture is instruction density. You can code in two bytes (a CISC ALU instruction, for example), what it takes 8 btyes to code in RISC (a load/store, then the ALU). When you code denisity is 2x-4x greater, this helps tremendously for i-cache! Also, it really cuts down on the relatively expensive decode process (which is really the only expensive part of the IA-32 architecture)
If you think the P6 line is 32 bit, you are _extremely_ out of touch. The P6 has been doing 36 bit for several years. Perhaps you should check your facts in the future before you claim to know what is going on. Please log on to Intel's developer site (http://developer.intel.com) and get volumes 1-3 of the developer manuals.
Popular music will simply undergo another paradigm shift to accomodate the current vehicle.
You assume that this is good. In the early 1960's when AM radio and the 45 RPM format ruled, Phil Spector was the most reknowned producer because his three minutes symphonic jewels of pop fit the limitations of the media exactly. The more drawn out stuff that was going out at the time -- due to the freer, but less mass popular, format of vinyl -- is much more remembered currently. Spector move music backwards somewhat but it came back around.
The online era will be the same. The limatations are the $400 Compaq and the 56k connection. Music will be altered to best fit in this. But it's a limitation; it is more limiting that before. You don't have the freedom to make a well thought out 75 master work, but are limited to a three minute, low bandwidth (thus low sound quality) jewel of pop.
I think that from now on the artists who, and the record makers who are forcing them to release crap are going to have to start thinking a little more about making each performance special. Just like the 'good old days'.
This is what you don't get. If you are listening to music with filler, you are listening to top 40 pop music. Period. The new Rhonda Vincent album is flawless. So is the new Sleater-Kinney. Something like Chailly's Mahler #5 doesn't have a second which isn't completely enthralling. I can hardly indentify a single CD in my 1000+ collection which isn't compelling thorughout. Of course, I carefully research my purchases and buy only the best; no top 40 music for me.
You admit that music is is going to be shorter when online distribution is the norm. In fact, you relish in it. So what part of the successful recordings are you going to cut? The Ring is something like 20 hours in length; are you going to chop it up into some easily downloadable and unoffensive three minute jewel of pop? People talk about how there is an "artificial scarcity" with the current system of physical records, but there is indeed MORE scarcity with online music: bandwidth.
I would consider most of those _extremely_ mainstream. I have never been to a record store which doesn't have large sections dedicated to Hawkwind, FLA, Front 242, etc. Some of the others I am not familiar with but it doesn't mean they're obscure since I'm not into that type of music. Heck, Dr. Demento is a radio program which puts a lower limit on his popularity.
You misunderstand. I dont give a shit for anything from Madonna to Scraping Foetus Off the Windshield to the Butthole Surfers to whatever. To me, those are all forms of popular music. I dont care what clique your magazines are giving voice to.
Er, I'm talking about serious music, Einstein. Madonna and Scraping Foetus off the Windhsield, Butthol Surfers, and the others are top 40 teeny bop music. Get a copy of Grammaphone or something.