Coastalbeat.com

Hey readers, thanks for checking out this week's post. I hope you leave this article feeling like you've been informed, entertained, or maybe some sort of electric fulfillment that you can only get from a few special places.

Anyways, last week we looked at the verdict of what has been the biggest filesharing lawsuit since the days that Napster was brought to American courts way back in the year 2000, and that's The Pirate Bay's guilty verdict after being charged by multiple entertainment production companies and groups. You can read more about the trial from two of my earlier posts, here and here.

This took place in Sweden, where the discussions on intellectual properties and the rights associated with them are considerably different from the conversations here in America, and they are somewhat more popular issues among citizen's. Some of this can be seen in the populace's reactions to the verdict, too. From what I've been reading, it looks like the Stockholm court's decision led to a public demonstration in Stockholm to bolster support for the Pirate Bay Four, which according to various reports had somewhere from 500 to 1,000 participants (a flickr photoset is available for viewing here). Also, the Swedish Pirate Party, an official political party that's mission includes copyright and patent law reformation and online privacy rights, grew by 22,000 members since the day the verdict was announced. This is intriguing, since the Pirate Party in Sweden was already the third-largest party outside of Sweden's Parliament back in 2006, and will have considerable attention now that the Pirate Bay trial is hitting it's second stride. The Swedish Pirate Party now has about 37,000 members in total; it will need 100,000 members in order to elect a party member into the European Parliament.

Will this actually happen, will we see a radical change in intellectual properties, peer-to-peer piracy and laws garnering such an activity? If it ever does, I don't imagine it starting anywhere else right now except for Sweden, so keep your eyes fixed to those Swedes. Kind of like the way it was said in The Matrix: they've just about taken the red pill, they're stumbling down a rabbit hole.

But I've said more than enough, let's look at some tech news for this past week.

I'd like to give a heartfelt farewell to what was a first website host for a ton of tech-oriented people out there, I'm taking about Geocities which has met the chopping block at Yahoo after about 15 years of service. The web utility was a popular place to create your very own website about your family of dogs, your mixed and bootleg tapes collection, or the collective Northeastern Cross-Stitch Knitting Fan Club. I remember using it as, and note that I'm writing this with hesitation, a site to show off my awesome fighting robot, "Road-Killa". Practically “most” of the girls laughed at it (and by “most” I mean “all”), but what can I say? They didn't have a need to live this dream of BattleBots glory and fame.

From what I recall, Geocities had a pretty good WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) page builder and allowed a user to upload up to 15MB of content per account for free, and I'm sure that is what brought a bunch of people to the pursuit of web development and hosting later on in life. I can see how it affected my life, for instance: it preserved my virginity until people forgot about Road-Killa, which met an ironic ending underneath a neighbor's El Dorado.

RIP Geocities, may you sleep well in the legends of early-Web 2.0 Heaven.

AMD has just released their latest flagship for the Phenom line of processors, and after reading and browsing multiple benchmarks from sites like HotHardware.com, AnandTech.com, and a few others, it looks like it's a product for the underdog company to be proud of. This latest release is the Phenom II X4 955, and it's available under the Black Edition package, which gives high-end overclockers an unlocked clock multiplier which makes the hardware's overclocking limit much easier to attain.

Before you read any further, let me say it first that the Intel's Core i7 processors are still outperforming this new Phenom II quad-core on pretty much every application and game, but what AMD is going for with these products are price-to-performance ratios, which they're meeting pretty well. While the cheapest Core i7 is only a few $10's higher than the Phenom II X4 955, the hardware requirements for an i7 computer system are still way above what's necessary for this AMD build. The new Phenom uses AMD's new AM3 socket, but motherboards with AM3 support can be bought for under $100 where Intel's i7 system needs a new motherboard starting at or near $200. That is where AMD should be stealing Intel's thunder, and I've told my readers before in earlier posts: price is important to me. Computers and technology are an investment to me, I'm careful with where and how I spend my dollar, but I understand that this view won't deter the purist, highest-end hardware users and they're probably aware of the cost that their endeavors require. But for me, I'm happy spending and saving wisely and making the best of my buck at the end of the day.