EcoblogIT

Thanks, goober

For the fix to a Blogger glitch.

The end of file sharing?

Both Economist.com and NYTimes.com are running stories today about the US Supreme Court decision to allow a copyright infringement lawsuit against Grokster and Streamcast Networks.


The decision overturns a ruling by federal courts that the two companies were not responsible for the ways in which their customers used the file swapping networks.


It appears to be a win for the music and film industries over the tech industry and concerns have been raised over the effect this will have on technical innovation. To be honest though, the cries over all the good work that will be stifled by this heavy handed lawsuit remind me of my own defensive posturing in grade school when questioned about missing homework.


Roughly 90% of file sharing traffic is copyrighted music and movies. The 10% of legitimate files being transferred could probably be handled by a dressed up FTP service. These companies must be aware that without the free music and movies their user base, and thus advertising revenue, would be significantly lower.


But I could be wrong. Do any of you use Grokster, Morpheus, ShareBear, LimeWire, eDonkey, eMule or some other file sharing service to swap files legally?

Spell with flickr

This is really neat.

Excel does everything

I'm so glad that I'm not the only person that wonders why some people try to use Excel for, well, everything.

Lots more of interesting stuff about software linked from Brevity.org

Google or a dog?

sectretGeek's Award for the Silliest User Interface: Windows Search. Nuff said.

THE Return of the PVR


SO I got my PVR working although in a truly pants geek way.

I had to buy a new motherboard to get it working properly, which completely destroys the whole aspect of having a PVR for £50. But hey ho, I now have a pc hidden behind the tv and you can't see e.t.c which was a key thing for the lady of the house who already thinks a 32" tv is too big.

I tread carefully when putting big shiny white boxes with untidy cables hanging anywhere.

My only problem now is that I don't have enough scart slots on the tv to have all the things put in. I may need to get a cable switcheroo thingamijig. Are they any good? I want one with a remote, if they are not automatic, which will probably push me over the edge of my enforced acceptable levels of plastic in living room quota.

I love timeshifting and have decided that I'm going to use it for live sports and wait a suitable amount of time so I don't have to listen to half time babble about tunnel bust ups. The only problem here is if I here my neighbours cheering I'll know a goal is coming, this is slightly less horrific than the whole of Saturday night telling people not to tell me football results only to over hear how well "Terry Henry" did at the bar.

The horror of a ruined Match of the Day. Hopefully I have PVR va va voom.

Sometimes bad design stinks

The site Snopes.com has not verified if this complaint (may need to right click and save as to view, else view from the site itself) is for real, but it just goes to show that whilst we work on various high tech. problems, seemingly simple ones go unsolved.

Apples for apples?

Or what's the difference between a VAX and an Alpha?

It went largely un-noticed when Apple announced recently that it would be switching to Intel chips that this could be one more nail in the coffin for RISC chips. The concept of a reduced intruction set computer was first put forward by John Cocke of IBM in the 1970s (Cray built systems that weren't known as RISC at the time but certainly had reduced instruction sets - the term RISC was later coined by David Patterson at the University of California in Berkeley). Cocke argued that computers only used 20% of the instructions built into the processor and that one with fewer instructions built in would be cheaper to manufacture and that it would get more done in a shorter time as each instruction would take the same amount of time to execute. Why was this the case? Bceause the processing of each instruction would be "pipelined" so that as soon as one had been executed execution of the next could start. This was not the case with a RISC processor where some instructions take longer to process than others. It was also apparant that the people that designed the processors hadn't optimised all the instructions and it was possible to perform some tasks quicker by breaking them down into their individual components.

The RISC concept was deployed in the first IBM PC/XTs and went on to be used in SUN Sparc chips and DEC Alphas as well as the Motorola 68000 and the PowerPC. The less frequently used 80% of instructions on a CISC chip (coined after the term RISC to highlight the difference) undertake complex tasks that match high level programming constructs such as "increment register by one and branch if zero". Having such instructions built into the processor meant that the code was smaller, took up less memory and ran faster. As memory became less expensive, this became less important and so a RISC chip could do the smae thing with the programmer writing multiple lines of code to perform what might take one line on a CISC chip. And so in the 1990s DEC regularly set the benchmark for clock speed (cycles and therefore analagous to intructions per second) with it's Alpha. I recall the veritable excitement at taking delivery of one of the first 333MHz machines in the UK at a time when the Pentium was clocking 100Mhz! The Alpha was a 64 bit processor too.

At the time RISC was seen as the future of computing, but the increasing dominance of the "Wintel" (Windows on Intel) platform at both eworkstation and server level has since nipped that vision in the bud. The Alpha architecture remains in Intel's Itanium, but it's future doesn't look that rosy with Intel compromising to ensure backward compatability with 32 bit apps.

The original Pentium chip was Intel's first stab at packaging a CISC processor in a RISC wrapper. What this means is that although the Pentium is a CISC processor at it's heart, it actually executes some complex instructions by using multiple simple instructions and performance is increased by the use of more than one instruction pipeline.

So is this the end for RISC? Not quite. Mobile 'phones, PDAs and game consoles (such as the new PSP) use RISC processors, so who knows?

Humans beat machines!

Michael Jackson Acquittal Makes Yahoo! News Before Google - Search Engine Journal

Sugar not so suite for Salesforce.com?

SugarCRM offers Open Source CRM software (on demand too).

Skypoo!



The excellent PaidContent.org has picked up on a rumour that Yahoo! might partner with Skype.

Sun has too much cash

"We have the cash, we have a strong financial position. We have committed to turning the huge cash position at Sun into profitable growth," said Sun's CEO Scott McNealy on the $4.1bn cash purchase of StorageTek. Reuters has more.

Chris Martin a geek?

Marcus du Sautoy explains Coldplay's new album cover in The Guardian.

Deep Throat outs himself

W Mark Felt who was second-in-command at the FBI at the time of the Watergate scandal has told Vanity Fair that he was Deep Throat. The Guardian reports on the article here (registration required). I wonder whether traditional journalists would be used by someone in a similar position now or whether a blogger would get the story. Recently, Apple won the first round of their case against Nick Ciarelli of ThinkSecret.com who broke the news of the impending release of the iPod in 2001 and the Mac mini this year before official announcements. This is being billed by some as a test case as to whether bloggers are journalists and therefore have the same rights to confidentaility of sources as Woodward and Bernstein perhaps did. The Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge James Kleinberg ruled in Apple's favour, saying that reporters who published "stolen property" weren't entitled to protections. No mention of any distinction between bloggers and reporters was made and so my take is that this isn't a blogger/journalist issue at all.