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Basically it makes placing a projector and screen in the solarium a viable option.

Brillian's LCOS engine looked nice at the show, but this screen got me more excited.

Reference Links:

http://www.insightmedia.info/emailblasts/InsightMe diaAnnouncesBestBuzzAwards.htm

http://www.extremetech.com/slideshow_viewer/0,2393 ,l=&s=1005&a=128243&po=10,00.asp

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/0,,SB108742977 261939595-IRjg4Nllal3nZyva3qHbqyCm4,00.html

on Extremetech

There was a good article about dual-monitor setups on Extremetech recently.

Here are some info links
extremetech
The register

Since this is not the first machine of theses types of machines, nor has it been modded to run Linux how does this rate as News for Nerds?

According to this ExtremeTech article, which seems to be a bit better than the ZDnet story. It's based on interviews with Glenn Henry, the founder of Via's Centaur division.

Few consumers accept(s/ed) this and buys a modkit to solve the problem. Same way it will be for the IBM hardware.

There's just one little problem. Modding depends on the safety system in question being on a separate chip on the motherboard. For now this is the case, but according to Ross Anderson's TCPA FAQ this will be changed. Intel's answer is LaGrande. AMD hasn't gone public with theirs yet, but they've announced they'll be providing a similar solution. It's a lot harder to mod a microprocessor.

AMD did a dual core demo the week before. They opened the boxes, passed around sample chips, showed enlargements of the cores, etc.

Intel did their demo with a closed box, presumably in response to AMD. Only when asked if it was really dual core did they say it contained "real silicon".

Intel showed enlargements of their dual core Itanium chip along with their demo.

Or at least that's the company's general counsel says in this ExtremeTech story. It also looks like Infineon feels that this is going to be but the first of many such admissions by other DRAM makers...

Anyone else have this problem?

The Pentium 4 (and other Intel processors) breaks down the larger x86 instructions into small RISC like components known as micro-ops which are then processed by the cpu.
There is some information here:
PC Processor Microarchitecture

Instead why don't we write some information to the Boot sector of the hard drive that will cause data loss on Linux distributions. We could install it on our annual Tax Software an tell the people to try to return it to the retail store where they bought it if they don't like it. We will let people uninstall our software, but not the spyware that comes with it.

Sound Familiar? Thanks Intuit - NOT!

Whaaaaat?

A3D was two things: an API and an algorithm for positioning a sound in 3D space. The API was essentially the same as Microsoft's DirectSound 3D, which is still used today. The difference, at the time, was the addition of a handful of functions to deal with the fact that Aureal's acceleration was in hardware, which was unsupported by DirectX at the time. These were particularly required due to the fact that the early 3D audio hardware supported an extremely limited number of 3D channels.

Fast forward to the modern era, and you will find some things have changed. Microsoft's software 3D audio rendering takes a much, much smaller slice of the CPU due to faster processors. Microsoft (since DX5) has allowed hardware acceleration to DS3D, utterly obsoleting A3D as an API. Sensaura (recently purchased by Creative) has licensed their 3D positional audio algorithms to a large number of sound card and motherboard companies. Guillemot, Creative, I/O Magic, NVidia, Terratec, Philips, and other companies have continued to make sound cards (and chipsets) with various levels of hardware and software 3D positional audio.

These days it's more difficult to tell where the hardware ends and the software begins due to motherboard design issues.

But if you've been listening to stereo since Aureal went out of business, it's not your soundcard's fault.

Chris Owens
San Carlos, CA

GPU were NEVER a threat to cpus.

Note that I didn't say Graphics Processors [I use that term since I was corrected by the second reply to my first post] were a threat to CPUs. I said they were a threat to Intel's business. I fully agree that a Graphics Processor isn't designed for a single pipeline execution model using double precision or integer arithmetic - so replacing a CPU with a Graphics Processor is foolhardy. However, if you take the CPU and make it a commodity rather than the key hardware feature, the margin goes away - and so does Intel's profit.

ExtremeTech has some history where they specifically mention (near the bottom of that page) that 'there was also some concern by Intel and Microsoft that the graphics chips were becoming the central feature of the PC architecture, shifting the focus from the CPU and the operating system.' I apologize that I can't get a more specific reference for you - the development of AGP is ancient history on the Internet; there aren't any juicy blogs to point to, and my hard copy items from that time have long since been recycled.

This is a CLASSIC example of politics alive and well in technology. Sony bought Columbia records to make the CD successful after losing out on Betamax. For a more recent example directly in the comptuer industry, look at the give and take between Intel and Rambus on DRDRAM. The best technology does NOT necessarily win, and the companies involved are NOT always doing things for consumer benefit or technology reasons.

WMA plain sucks

-snip-

160kbps WMA are better than 128kbps WMA, but it's no way better than what you can found on concurrent services at 128kbps.

Err... You're talking about pre-WMA9, right?

It's a very good format by now.

Check out some blind test that explicitly is about WMA9:
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1560783 ,00.asp

Commence critiquing the benchmark, but at least try to find an equally or more credible benchmark that has different findings. From everything I've seen the believe that WMA just must suck is wishful thinking.

As for the MHz "myth," MHz is perfectly fine for comparing within a single architecture (or codec), and about as fair as any other benchmark for comparing between architectures if you knock down the P4 by about 25%. The Pentium-M, AMD 64, and PowerPC are all fairly close in IPC. Most of the bencharks that sharply contradict MHz are on some narrow benchmark, carefully chosen to "prove" a point.

Hopefully this more directly addresses the issue.

The 3.6 gig prescott puts out 115 watts

This article puts the 3.2 and 3.4's at about 103 watts.

This article pegs the Athlon 64 at 116 watts.

Yeah, you are engaged in CPU tribalism/fanboyism, whether you realize it or not. Both chips are pretty much equally "hot". One should use a different yardstick to compare the two.

BTW, this article has the Itanium sucking 130 watts, which is probably where the misinformation came from.

You want hamsters? You've got it

I'm pretty down on the PMC. I put my reasons together here on ExtremeTech. It's not a review, but I've had hands-on time with all of them (real reviewers are forbidden to post a review until the Non-Disclosure expires sometime in the near future).

Then, after being raked over the coals by Microsoft apologists, I revised my opinions. The PMC is actually a brilliant trojan horse that'll let Microsoft take over the porn industry!

jim

I'm pretty down on the PMC. I put my reasons together here on ExtremeTech. It's not a review, but I've had hands-on time with all of them (real reviewers are forbidden to post a review until the Non-Disclosure expires sometime in the near future).

Then, after being raked over the coals by Microsoft apologists, I revised my opinions. The PMC is actually a brilliant trojan horse that'll let Microsoft take over the porn industry!

jim

Extremetech ran this 2 days ago. My story submission was denied yesterday. Heres the link:

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1639250 ,00.asp

Here's a video (9.7MB) from SIGGRAPH (Note: slow to load; wait for it). It was linked to from this page: Not terribly imressive, I'm afraid. It's hard to imagine how this might scale up to anything useful. The omni-directional treadmill referred to elsewhere seems much more promising.

Here's a video (9.7MB) from SIGGRAPH (Note: slow to load; wait for it). It was linked to from this page: Not terribly imressive, I'm afraid. It's hard to imagine how this might scale up to anything useful. The omni-directional treadmill referred to elsewhere seems much more promising.

1. Cedega Fastest: 33 fps
2. 
   Linux Fastest: 37 fps
   Cedega High: 31 fps
   Linux high: 35 fps

15% desktop, 8.4% laptop, 4.8% server

Maybe because Intel still holds about 95% of the x86 server market, people don't need to switch back if they never left.

iPod minis only have 4gig hard drives, you don't think those will show up in cell phones soon?

A 2-gig drive already costs less than $50, so see what happens in a year or two... I guess it all depends on what your definition of soon is...

AMD hit 50% for one week. The Q1'04 market share numbers are 15% desktop, 8% mobile, 5% x86 server Just because we think AMD should be kicking ass doesn't mean it is so. There is alot more that factors into the equation than performace numbers or design.
I doubt AMD could even reach 50% in the near future, since they would need to add large amounts of manufacturing capacity.

"Weren't we seeing the ATi cards outperforming nVidia by disgusting margins on HL2 benchmarks?"

Were you referring to these?
Those benches are quite old (Sept 2003!!!) and you'll note that different generations of cards were used here. Also, the HL2 benches were run under DX9 and DX8, AFAIK the Doom3 benches were run under openGL.

So no... there is no direct comparison. Different card gens and different rendering tech was used in the benches. Though it does look like nVidia is back on the ball after getting their asses handed to them by the ATI 9800's.

And as far as your speculation that there may be some pro-nVidia fudging ... from the article: "Both ATI and NVIDIA were present for the testing and brought their latest driver sets." So no, I don't think there was anything underhanded here.

Have a look here

This should give you a fair idea about CMOS, Image sensors, how colour is created etc... that should be a good starting point

Intel currently holds 80%+ marketshare for desktops, 90%+ for laptops and x86 servers.

Not just Intel, AMD did the same thing back when the first athlons came out.
They aren't ripping the customer off. The customer decides they will pay X amount of $ for Y performance. The chip dealer agrees to sell you a chip guaranteed for that performance. You got exactly what you paid for, if you happen to get something that is potentially better, consider yourself lucky.
There are a number of reasons companies do this.
- If their yields skew a little towards the high end, they may run out of mid-level chips to meet demands, so they sacrifice some of the high-end ones to meet the difference.
- Quality. Remember those old 5 1/4" floppys, some were double sided, some were single sided. You just put a notch in the single sided floppy and you had instant double sided. 99% of the time it was fine, but the other 1% you could have data errors or bad sectors on that other side.
- Mass Production. Its cheaper to have one design and disable the unneeded/untested parts. 64-bit is on existing prescott chips just disabled. Does it work 100%? maybe, maybe not. Intel may not have been comfortable with it, so its disabled until they do more testing. The only reason its there is because its potentially cheaper to just flip a switch and turn it on if the design is good.

On many sites including that one, it helps a great deal if you click 'Print this page' or something to that effect and read that instead. In this case: http://www.extremetech.com/print_article/0,1583,a= 130946,00.asp.

Not sure if this is what your looking for but, Nvidia's card offers that: "The products will include a TV tuner card with hardware MPEG-2 encoding"

It might be propoganda, but it was and is still true. Compare CineBench benchmarks of an array of top of the line PC chips and a G5 2.5MP, each with the Nvidia GeForce 6800 Ultra

PC's: http://www.extremetech.com/image_popup/0,1554,s=10 05&iid=82125,00.asp G5: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?s=&thre adid=78063

Even with their extra 1GHz, the G5 still beats them by more then 200 points, and CineBench 2003 1.0 isn't even optimized for the G5! Especially now, when comparing 32-bit chips to 64/32-bit chips, you cannot compare machines simply on their clockspeed. Even intel has come to this fact, giving their chips numbers based on their power instead of their clockspeed.

Here are the patents in question (from an ExtremeTech article -- December 16, 2002 -- Porn Kings Aflame Over Multimedia Patents)

Acacia's licensing efforts are based on five patents, all of which cover basically the same thing: patents #5,253,275, #5,550,863 and #6,002,720 are "open continuations" of patent #5,132,992, an "Audio and Video Receiving and Transmission System," which was issued in July 1992. The fifth patent, #6,144, 702, is described as a "division" of the '992 patent and was approved in November of 2000.

The '992 patent abstract reads as follows: "A system of distributing video and/or audio information employs digital signal processing to achieve high rates of data compression. The compressed and encoded audio and/or video information is sent over standard telephone, cable or satellite broadcast channels to a receiver specified by a subscriber of the service, preferably in less than real time, for later playback and optional recording on standard audio and/or video tape."

Yes AMD stole .1% market share last quarter.

FWIW...

Extreme Tech HDTV review (7 out of 10)

*shrug*

e.

I found this series to be a pretty big let down. I guess I was expecting too much, but I was hoping the author would go down the list of where digital doesn't live up to film as a call to action for camera makers and consumers. But no, the series for the most part just talks about existing digital camera features like autofocus and zoom lenses. Oh well.

I want to see some serious discussion about things like color gamut. The gamut of film (especially slide film) is much better than that of digital cameras. Is anyone working to improve the situation for digicams? There's a interesting looking article at extreme tech that talks about gamuts here.

Basically current sRGB devices don't cover the full range of colors which the human visual system can percieve (nor does film, but film comes closer than digital). Think of deep violet for instance. You simply can't get those hues on a monitor, and so today's digital cameras just don't record those colors. However, it is likely that some day we will have monitors and hardcopy ouptut devices that perform as well as the human visual system. So ideally the pictures I take today would have the full range of color information, even if they're forced to display only a subset of those colors on current display devices. That way, in the future when "uberdisplays" are available, my pictures from 2000 will still look nice, and not washed out and cheesy like color photographs from the 60's do today.

If you widen the gamut of CCDs, you'll probably want to add a few bits to each color channel as well -- use 12 bit color instead of 8 bit for instance.

And as long as you're adding bits, the other thing it seems like digital cameras could possibly offer some day is point-and-click high dynamic range (HDR) images, say in EXR format. Couldn't one build CDD sensors with automatic gain control (ISO) on a per-pixel basis, and then assemble the results into a HDR image? Currently the way to make HDR images is by taking several photos of the same scene and carefully merging them together, but that's pretty cumbersome.

With HDR images, you have much more flexibility to adjust the exposure and reveal detail in the shadows after taking the image.

What other cool things could digital cameras offer that would take us beyond simply replacing film cameras?

The current story should read:
Repran writes "Extremetech reports that the DVD Forum this week approved HD-DVD 1.0, [...] In related news, an arstechnica story reports that Microsoft's VC-9 codec has been included in the official HD-DVD specs."

I think it's important to keep story sources in the headline. It's a matter of politeness, and gives the reader a immediate idea on who is saying what. For stories with a zillion links, I think it's generally OK to leave the names of the sources out if it would lead to excessive clutter.

Even more annoying is this story:

An anchor tag on "The University of Tokyo" should go to the University of Tokyo's website. The link should be anchored to "illusion of invisibility" or perhaps "Optical Camouflage."

I never liked the tendency to anchor irrelevant things to stories, but it's done often enough that it's confusing when it gets mixed up. Also, the submitter's diatribe should be left out, but that's another matter.

Or maybe I'm just getting old and crusty.

some "hdtv" resolutions..

(should have previewed.)

In theory if you have a PS3, when you added a Sony TV to the mix, the TV could process some extra data from your Playstation. Maybe when the Playstation is idle it could help the TV with its video editing tasks. Get more Sony products any they could help speed up your whole network of cell based devices. It sounds pretty cool to me to have a cluster of consumer products working for you. About the Sony API, I haven't written any code for Playstation, but from reading the article about the IBM/Sony workstation OS it seems like it would be easier able to put games together.

However, there is a limit to the number of different/reconfigured PC's you can install to using the provided key, and yes tracking that can be a pain in the ass. I've worked on projects where we needed to test on lots of PC's over a multiple month period, and we ended up having to basically make a pool of keys from multiple subscriptions so that people with more extreme requirements (like the device driver guys) wouldn't run out of activations.

Yes, we could have constantly reinstalled without activating or kept calling MS tech support, but both of those also qualify as a pain in the ass in my book.

Suck your own smoke.

Yes if you consider less than 1% gain in overall PCs to 14.9%, loss of 3.2% in laptops to 8.4%, and gain of 1.7% to 4.8% of servers huge gains

Hitachi, however, just announced a 7200rpm 400GB SATA drive. It will take a little while to become available, but then you will only need 3 drives to get 1.2TB. Mmmm.

linkage

stolen from Anandtech

HardOCP
Ascully
DriverHeaven
TrustedReviews
K-Hardware
Hardware Analysis
Hexus
The Tech Report
Beyond3D
Neoseeker
ExtremeTech
Gamers Depot
Lost Circuits
Firing Squad
Tom's Hardware
Bjorn3D
Hot Hardware

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He already commented on where he thinks game graphics are going at this year's GDC -- in short, I believe he's saying that 10 years more improvement should get us technologically there, but that there are severe problems with how we create the more detailed and larger quantity of content necessary cheaply enough.

Excellent question. Reverse engineering in a clean room is perfectly legal. In fact you probably would not be here looking at slashdot but for reverse engineering by Compaq of the old IBM computers to make the first IBM clones. Here is an interesting article and quote from Analyst: Intel Reverse-Engineered AMD64:

While exactly copying a processor's microarchitecture would be illegal, creating a compatible product through the use of an original clean room design is legally protected.

From Wikipedia, an interesting article (Clean room design) about how the old IBM computers were reverse engineered and cloned:

Clean room design is an attempt to reverse-engineer a design and then recreate it without infringing any of the copyrights and trade secrets associated with the original design, since independent invention is a defense against infringement. Because independent invention is not a defense against patents, clean room designs typically cannot be used to circumvent patent restrictions.

The term implies that the design team works in an environment that is 'clean', or demonstrably uncontaminated by any knowledge of the proprietary techniques used by the competitor.

Typically, a clean room design is done by having someone look at the system to be reimplemented and having this person write a specification. This specification is then reviewed by a lawyer to ensure that no copyrighted material is included. The specification is then implemented by a team with no connection to the original examiners.

A famous example is from Compaq who built the first clone of an IBM computer through a clean room implementation of the BIOS.

The term clean room used on its own has a different meaning in the field of integrated circuit manufacture.

Combining the safety and productivity of ML and Caml with the libraries, tools and cross-language working of .NET