10.05.2007

RIAA Wins Landmark Case

From Ars Technica:

Side stepping a bit from the usual subject and focusing instead on the landmark case Capitol Records v. Jammie Thomas. I certainly don't want to inflate the implications of this case although it is precedent setting and affects the future behaviour of the RIAA against the 'pirates'. The rest of the world seemed to be polarised on this issue as if it is black and white, Record labels versus music fans, them against us. This isn't always the case.

In fact there is something unique about this legal battle that may not necessarily be applicable to most piracy cases. The evidence against Jammie Thomas is overwhelming. The problem was that she's quite tech savvy enough to work herself around the Internet but at the same time tech stupid to have used the same username wherever she went. Even when using Kazaa! (In fact using Kazaa speaks volume on what kind of Internet user she is). The question of willful file sharing is pretty much evident in this case. The big problem for the RIAA is that everyone is not as blatant as Ms Thomas. Gathering evidence that corroborates wouldn't be as easy.

For the RIAA, its always the case of bad publicity whenever it comes out as sues its customers. In fact I blame the RIAA and the MPAA for making everyone like Jammie Thomas aware of the possibility of getting music or movies online for free. They're the biggest piracy advertising movement on this planet locking in anti-piracy ads on everything they touch showing people that it can be done.

The record labels are corporations made up of people like you and me. The tactics they're employing annoys the hell out of everyone including music fans. We need to send the message to the record labels that we own MP3 players not CD players. We stopped buying CD's 5 years ago and they have yet to wake up and align their business to our needs. I don't care if you get your music illegally or not, but I do believe that blatant actions by the defendant in this particular case is quite over the top. Again, it's not always black and white.

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

boo music comps

Anonymous said...

I think that the consumer is winning this war lately, but the RIAA will continue to win small battles against people who continue to pirate music.

There are lots of services that offer to let you listen to songs, burn CDs, and download music for a lot less than the music industry used to charge. That cat is out of the bag, and the RIAA won't be able to charge me $16 for a CD, I can download the one song I like for 99 cents.

Music pirates need to celebrate what they've won and let the RIAA bleed to death now.

GutterRat said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anonymous said...

Here’s a bit of info that bears a look.

It seems vendors, especially Apple, can’t get enough Penryns. Apparently, from the article, which in this case I don’t doubt, Intel has got the entire high end, high margin stuff they can make, sold. Taken with a grain of salt, however, the article also say’s AMD’s 2.6 part will give the Penny some competition. You know, I am really TIRED of the same old smoke and mirror CRAP on what AMD’s parts are going to do when they are released. Can’t they give it a break? Don’t these guys get the picture yet? They just keep pumping the neighbor’s cat.

Reading between the lines, of course, I don’t see vendors clamoring for AMD’s 2.6, 2.9, 3.0123, whatever, parts! If AMD even had this stuff, do they think there’d be any volume??? If AMD can’t get them running, without the craters, who can, Chartered?

I don’t tink soooo.

AMD supplies the world with one FAB??? WTF is up with that? The bottom line, you ask? I don’t hear, read, blog, whisper, ANYTHING about ANYBODY fighting over ANY of AMD chips in production or on paper!

That IDIOT over at Morgan Stanley, Mike Iipacas, decided to “Jaw Down” both INTC and NVDA, sending the stocks south a few days back. The moron didn’t even mention AMD’s financial position in his conquest to single handedly drive all the leaders in the chip sector down in one day! AMD’s stock was relatively unchanged!?! If you don’t think Wall Street is soft on AMD, think twice. Big money, heavily invested, is hoping for the best. I hope they get CREAMED. Wait! They already have!

http://moneycentral.msn.com/ownership?Symbol=amd


This is extremely contrary to how much vendors want INTC newest and fastest 45nM parts! Further, according to Mike Dips Shits of Morgan Stanley, there will be a chip glut! You can play ping pong with this all day long. But, in the final analysis, vendors still want their machines to be the fastest. They will pay a premium the privilege, too, obviously. So this makes INTC look bad?!?!?

Go figure.

http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer
/news/2007/10/05/intel-extreme-penryn-shortage

SPARKS

Axel said...

sparks

Taken with a grain of salt, however, the article also say’s AMD’s 2.6 part will give the Penny some competition. You know, I am really TIRED of the same old smoke and mirror CRAP on what AMD’s parts are going to do when they are released.

It doesn't matter when the 2.6 parts will be released. As shown in both the Anandtech and Tech Reports reviews, K10 is slower than Kentsfield per clock in general purpose apps and especially SSE-heavy multimedia apps. Penryn will extend the IPC lead over K10 in these apps and provide higher clocks to boot.

Since Phenom and Barcelona are precisely the same core, it's game over for AMD because we already know how Phenom will perform. The Anandtech review compared dual-socket K8 and single-socket K10 platforms, both using registered DDR2 memory. K10 had about a 15% IPC lead over K8, minus some amount due to the fact that dual-socket communication latency is substantially higher than for native four-core. We know that Kentsfield has around a 20-25% average IPC lead in these apps over dual socket K8. Therefore, K10 doesn't even catch up to Kentsfield per clock. Phenom will be another disappointment just like R600. Due to its much larger die size compared to Yorkfield compounded by lower IPC and clock speeds, AMD have absolutely no hope of competing.

Anonymous said...

Secret AMD Taliban Core Logo Exposed!

Anonymous said...

Well, Axel, that’s the rub. YOU, Dr. Yield, The DOC, GURU, In The Know, all of you, know the score with Barcelona. You guys have been consistently correct for 3 consecutive quarters! The numbers don’t lie. Neither do the financials. But, these so called objective mouth pieces are driving down a 30 to 34 dollar a share stock, based on NOTHING more than mere speculation and pump. Intel is currently ramping up 45n en mass. Ah, no big deal. AMD selling broken quad cores as tri core, they call this marketing genius and it will talk the chip world by storm!

They said 40 percent over Clovertown. They bought it.
They said 2 quarter 2007. They bought it.
They said 3 quarter 2007 in volume. They bought it.
3.0 GHz, they bought it.
Tri core F up, they bought it.
Profitability by the end of this year, they’re buying it.
“Intel has something to worry about now!” they keep spewing it.


NONE OF IT HAS PANNED OUT, ZIP, NADA, SQUAT, NOTHING!!


Things look so bad for Intel, according to Morgan Stanley, they down graded the stock.

Target 22!

Never in my life have a seen so much hype and bullshit revolve around two companies. I hope someone rakes Morgan Stanley over the coals for this one. INTC will by shear performance, and I CAN’T WAIT for 3Q financials. Let’s see how they’ll pump these numbers.

Hey, they can always fall back on the market share thing. AMD has increased market share as they sell at a loss. “But they still look good!” They lose hundreds of millions per quarter, “let’s put a buy rating on it.” INTC is ramping to 45nM and will be making too many chips fast chips causing a market glut, “put a sell on it”

What the hell is wrong with this picture?

SPARKS

Anonymous said...

"What the hell is wrong with this picture?"

SPARKS,

Starting with page 14 through page 39 is what's wrong with the picture.

http://google.brand.edgar-online.com/fetchFilingFrameset.aspx?FilingID=5216885&Type=HTML

Anonymous said...

AMD Triple Core - Marketing Hype or Mainstream Killer?

http://legitreviews.com/article/240/1/

Verdict: Marketing Hype.

Someone post this on Sharidouche's blog please

Axel said...

Copied from Scientia's blog for posterity:

Proof that the reason for AMD's silence on K10 all year is that the new product is too little too late for anything but high bandwidth server apps, as has been evident since the first benchmarks started leaking months ago. Not sure what AMD have been smoking for the last couple years in the R&D department, but in single threaded apps K10 only improves over K8 by:

8% IPC in base int
13% IPC in peak int
10% IPC in fp (base & peak)

Per clock, Clovertown at 2.0 GHz is faster than K10 in all those measures:

+35% IPC in base int
+31% IPC in peak int
+29% IPC in base fp
+43% IPC in peak fp

Penryn is only a month away and will only widen this lead, at lower power usage and smaller die size, plus with SSE4. Barcelona and Phenom are exactly the same processor, so we already know how Phenom will perform. Penryn's higher IPC and clocks than K10 makes it obvious to anyone but the wantonly oblivious that Penryn will simply crush K10 in the workstation & desktop spaces, at substantially lower production cost.

Intel will thus control pricing in those markets and will easily force Phenom X4/X2 to be priced lower than Yorkfield/Wolfdale at the same clock, as I predicted in the comments for Scientia's blog entry "AMD: Limited Options". To which Scientia replied with his own prediction: "No. A 2.5Ghz Kuma is likely to be priced the same as a 2.66Ghz Wolfdale." Wrong (again).

Since AMD's revenue base is mostly dependent on desktop & mobile, they will continue to sustain great losses through 2008 unless they drastically reduce costs.

Unknown said...

Backup post, Scientia loves his delete button!



Indeed axel. The only thing AMD has any lead left on is scaling. But this is only temporary. Penryn with more cache and 1600 FSB improves Intel's scaling and Nehalem will massively increase this and remove AMD's last advantage.

It's clear that once this is done Intel's MASSIVE per core IPC advantage will be fully shown. This isn't even counting the enhancements in Penryn and Nehalem to the core!

AMD is finsihed.

Anonymous said...

The triple core link above is a waste of time... it brings up points already made by many on the internet and the guy lacks a decent understanding of Silicon....

While sure, there can be a frequency mismatch for one of the cores and frequency does vary across a wafer - it is not as dramatic as his hypothetical "3 cores at 2.6GHz, one core @ 2.0GHz" example suggests.

Keep in mind these die are all spatially close together and the die, while big, is only 283mm2. Does he really think they'll be a 600MHz variation in frequency between cores that are no more than 10-15mm apart on the wafer (linearly)?

You may get some nastiness (significant fluctuations) on the edge of the wafer but for the bulk of the wafer you will not see such dramatic swings in such small distances. While admittedly I have no data, AMD is doing triple core this more for yield than for frequency issues (or perhaps for some crazy marketing reasons?).

Also keep in mind EVEN IF HIS HYPOTHETICAL IS TRUE - is a tri-core @2.6GHz going to sell for much more a quad core at 2.0GHz.....now what happens if that frequency gap is even smaller?

Anonymous said...

“Also keep in mind EVEN IF HIS HYPOTHETICAL IS TRUE - is a tri-core @2.6GHz going to sell for much more a quad core at 2.0GHz.....now what happens if that frequency gap is even smaller?”


Ok, I’ll go with that. Even so, as most programs today, and a number of games, are compiled with treads for two cores. Wouldn’t that dictate that a three core at 2.6 would outperform a quad core at lower clocks? An E6850 bests Q6600 in these specific (games) applications by higher clocks. Perhaps AMD is going down the same path/price point.

I believe, despite all the press hoopla, AMD has resigned itself internally that there is no way they can out perform INTC, presently. Perhaps, they’re just trying to stay alive by simply offering higher performance parts within their own lineup. It’s not a bad way to go since they have no other alternative.

Sell the bum quads, or 3 cores that will clock to 2.6.

Generate revenue from product that would otherwise be trashed.

Partially satisfy there die hard customer base by giving them a faster upgrade option.

Buy more time to revise Barcy enough to finally get the thing to perform as advertised, at perhaps 3 gig, maybe?

Clearly, it’s not enough to get them in the black, but it might be enough to make some badly needed cash. It’s got to come from somewhere. After all, they have expended all other options.


It seems these guys perform best when their backs are against the wall. Not so when they are sitting on 4 Billion in cash on easy street.

SPARKS