Lets be real here, all a ratio better than 1/10 Linux to Windows says is the devices are attractive to geeks.
Sounds like you're the one not being real here...
The EEE PC is a very popular mass-market product. Either you're using a loose definition of "geeks," in which case "geeks" have clearly become a very large market that manufacturers would benefit greatly by catering to... Or else it isn't just "geeks" that are happy with Linux.
That's cute and all - give Asus a cookie, but it doesn't speak for consumer acceptance of Linux.
No, but in the latter case, it might say that consumers don't care about the operating system, and Linux has been shown to be adequate, even despite the lack of Windows interoperability and long-standing Microsoft monopoly.
For some reason, European countries didn't like the ATSC standard and decided to develop their own incompatible standard from scratch. Much the same as happened with 110V@60Hz electricity, radio frequencies, the NTSC-M TV standard, and many other technologies. The only example I can think of going the other way would be DAB, which the US opted not to adopt, but isn't exactly ideal, nor terribly popular in Europe.
Hard drives are designed for air cooling, not conduction.
I wouldn't say that at all. HDDs aren't designed to be completely conduction cooled, but the conduction part of it is, actually, quite important. My HDD certainly saw a serious temperature increase when I suspension mounted it, even though airflow wasn't affected.
That was fairly easy to resolve by aiming the nearest fan more directly at it, rather than only slight incidental/perpendicular airflow.
Suspension mounting, in combination with setting acoustic management (see hdparm) made the hard drive damn near completely silent, and it isn't going to die in less than a year due to the lack of airflow.
That's why those little circuit boards are exposed on the outside of the drive.
The vast majority of the heat generated by a HDD, however, is from the motor, and that most certainly is bound directly to the drive body, where the heat can be conducted away quite easily by contact with the steel case. That can make the difference between overheating, or not.
But, of course, the patch containing the new key would have to -- you guessed it -- contain the new key! So then you just compromise the new key (ad infinitum) by intercepting the patch.
Once SOny notices that happening, they'll make sure to give every PS3 (or small groups of PS3s) it's own key. Then, when one is compromised, they know more or less who did it, and don't provide an update for those PS3s when they revoke the key.
So you use the PS3's player key. Sony aren't going to disable that in a hurry
There are enough keys that every individual PS3 could have it's own key... Not to say that is actually done, but it could happen with a simple firmware update. With so many PS3's internet connected, it shouldn't be difficult.
And I wouldn't be surprised to find that Sony has a mechanism in place to upgrade the firmware from commercially purchased discs... Throw that payload in a few popular movies, and everybody is updated in a matter of months. Then you can disable the old key.
Of course, the real issue is that it's simply far easier to rip the key out of PowerDVD, or some other PC program that you can transparently debug on your computer.
HD broadcasts are just as open as analog; they're just an MPEG-2 transport stream with AC3 audio (usually).
Why do you say "usually"? To the best of my knowledge, AC3 is the only supported audio codec in the ATSC standard* (defined in A/52). MPEG-2 is similarly the only supported video codec.**
*To be pedantic: 2-channel AC3 is actually called AC2, but nobody cares, and even Dolby screws up the notation on a regular basis. **Also being pedantic: MPEG-2 decoders are all backwards compatible, so a broadcaster could conceivably choose to use MPEG-1 video.
It would have to be the same key for all players too. That would mean that one only had to find the key once to be able to play all discs.
Completely wrong.
There are innumerable different player keys, which can be individually disabled on all future discs. Every different brand of player uses a different key, and presumably, different models from the same brand likely use separate keys as well.
It's a fairly simple trick to do. The disc is encrypted with a "disc key". That disc key is stored on the disc, but AES encrypted, using millions of "player keys"... Your player uses its player key to decode the disc key, then uses the disc key to decrypt and play the disc.
When Sony notices that your player key is being publicly distributed, they stop using your player key to encrypt the disc key... Your player (or ripping software as it were) then can't play any future discs, until you upgrade it to a new key.
Absolutely not! There is a limited supply of radioactive material on Earth, and even though the partially depleted variety isn't particularly desirable right now, it's highly likely it will become extremely valuable in a few short years, as demand for non-fossil fuels expands, and reprocessing technologies are developed.
H.264 isn't too much more CPU intensive than MPEG-4, but it's far more memory intensive. That's what makes it tough for phones.
I don't know where you got that information from, but it's utterly untrue. On a very fundamental level, H.264/AVC is vastly more computationally intensive than MPEG-4 ASP/Divx.
See half-pel, in-loop deblocking, CABAC, arithmetic coding, 16 B-frames, multiple reference frames, etc. Numerous iterative processes that are highly computationally intensive, none of which are used with MPEG-4 ASP/Divx.
Software should be written properly. If you write a bad algorithm then you should correct it rather than wait for CPU power / Memory / whatever to become cheap enough. Anything else is lazyness.
We're talking about video here... One of a handful of normal user applications that is still completely CPU (and bus-speed) bound. H.264 decoders are already almost as optimized as they can get, and no skilled programmer is going to step in and make any significant headway there.
I generally agree with you... software development should focus a lot more on optimization. The payback is in lower-end hardware, less user time wasted, slightly higher prices, and/or larger product sales, will likely more than make up for the effort. The industry has simply become short-sighted, and squeezing a piece of crap out the door quickly takes priority over quality.
h.264 is handled quite nicely by nearly every Apple product, many new cell phones, modern flavors of Windows and Linux, modern PC's without any additional hardware offloading.
Most hardware devices (iPod/iPhone included) impose numerous serious restrictions on which H.264 features can be used.
It's common that you have to disable B-frames, disable CABAC, set a low IDC, etc., for compatibility with the above devices.
At that point, you've eliminated practically ALL the benefits of H.264 over older video codecs like MPEG-4 ASP (aka. Divx/Xvid) or even H.263p.
I think you forgot to consider NVIS (near-vertical-incidence skywave) propagation.
No, I didn't. I'm simply not pedantic enough to mention every single irrelevant detail about a topic.
"Skip" of any kind is not relevant to the topic, nor practical in such scenario. You might also note I did say "directly," whereas a satellite, skywave skip, RF signal reflector, repeater, or many other devices would also work, but none of which would answer the question.
Doesn't exactly answer my question on hills, although you did say it was constrained by line of sight, so back to my original comment and the answer appears to be "it won't work if a hill is in the way". Correct?
No, not correct at all.
Whether it will work or not depends on how many degrees of curvature the signal has to disperse across to go "around" the hill in question.
The higher the frequency, the less the signal will "curve" around such obstacles. With UHF being less than half the frequency of WiFi, you can expect it will do a much better job of going around hills, and any other conceivable obstacle. That should allow you to get connectivity in more spots than you otherwise would, but it's never going to work in all situations.
If you have two transceivers at opposite sides of the base of a mountain, no radio frequency is ever going to allow them to communicate directly (well, VLF will, but that's impractically slow, so let's ignore it for simplicity sake). If they have line of sight, just about any frequency will work. As the obstacle between them, blocking line-of-sight communication gets larger, lower frequencies are required to circumvent it.
barcodes reduce the need for manual entry and are less prone to error.
Just barely... on both counts. And I've already listed the cons of barcodes which those benefits must balance against.
FYI, most barcode readers for PCs are just keyboard wedges. No special software or drivers needed.
I'm well aware. But you need some sort of software if you want it to automatically launch a web browser and visit a prescribed URL automatically when a barcode is scanned, as opposed to just dumping a number, or string of HEX in the window with focus.
The probability of finding more accurate info on NANOG than here seems to be higher.
Unfortunately, that "probability" hasn't panned out...
Allow me to summarize the relevant threads on NANOG:
-Verizon de-peered Cogent --Yup, sure did --Same in Europe --Pings fail --Why? ---Because Cogent is inexpensive ---They're a feuding. --They shouldn't do that
will this work over long distances with hills and trees, or will it be line of sight and not much better than current wifi?
Running at less than half the frequency of WiFi, it will do considerably better at going through obstacles, but it's not LF, it's not going to travel hundreds of miles and skip of the ionosphere... You're ALWAYS going to be constrained by line of sight and the curvature of the earth.
Without the strong investment from those with deep pockets, can Open Source software progress at the rate needed to remain viable in the enterprise? What happens when the product lines funding those projects start losing money?
There was a Linux bubble during the dot.com bubble. Every startup thought they could give away a slightly different Linux distro, and make money... It didn't happen, and the VC money for companies without a business plan dried up. Many distros have disappeared. But Linux didn't die, or even stop developing.
If a company needs software, and an open source project ALMOST fits the bill, they will either add the features they need, or throw some funding at the project to get it... Either way, new features get added, and the project continues to develop. This is the way it has always been, and the way it will always be. If there's less money, it might progress slightly less rapidly, or more likely there will just be less idiot-friendly [support] options, but that's about it.
For every big-budget open source project you can name, I can name two competitors that are running on a shoestring budget, and yet manage to maintain parity with their big-money counterpart.
The hype and the money helped to accelerate adoption of open source options, but lack of money likely won't slow it down any... It might just not continue to accelerate so fast.
how much easier would it be just to use the CueCat on a barcode printed in the catalog?
Much more difficult actually...
Opening the company website and typing in a short product code is pretty damn easy. And as an added bonus, it works on every computer out there... You don't need to carry around a big, bulky, barcode scanner, attach it to the computer you're using, install the software from CD, just to scan a bar code, and then remove it later.
Even if you're only ever using it on a single computer, having a big bulky barcode scanner setting on your desk that you barely ever use isn't my idea of good product. Not to mention the added space taken up by a barcode on the page would probably be prohibitive, not to mention ugly, all to support very few die-hard regular shoppers.
If you vastly oversimplify, and/or only cover topics in which they generally agree, you can always find "similarities".
Note that no viable political party anywhere in the world wants to legalize murder, either... Clearly, there is only one party... The one party of rational human beings.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like you're the one not being real here...
The EEE PC is a very popular mass-market product. Either you're using a loose definition of "geeks," in which case "geeks" have clearly become a very large market that manufacturers would benefit greatly by catering to... Or else it isn't just "geeks" that are happy with Linux.
No, but in the latter case, it might say that consumers don't care about the operating system, and Linux has been shown to be adequate, even despite the lack of Windows interoperability and long-standing Microsoft monopoly.
I think it was meant as a poor attempt at a joke... based on my nick.
DVB (T/S/C/H/M) isn't related to ATSC at all.
For some reason, European countries didn't like the ATSC standard and decided to develop their own incompatible standard from scratch. Much the same as happened with 110V@60Hz electricity, radio frequencies, the NTSC-M TV standard, and many other technologies. The only example I can think of going the other way would be DAB, which the US opted not to adopt, but isn't exactly ideal, nor terribly popular in Europe.
I can assure you, tjstork (137384) is a year-round, ultra-right wing, shill. Ditto for pudge (3605).
I wouldn't say that at all. HDDs aren't designed to be completely conduction cooled, but the conduction part of it is, actually, quite important. My HDD certainly saw a serious temperature increase when I suspension mounted it, even though airflow wasn't affected.
That was fairly easy to resolve by aiming the nearest fan more directly at it, rather than only slight incidental/perpendicular airflow.
Suspension mounting, in combination with setting acoustic management (see hdparm) made the hard drive damn near completely silent, and it isn't going to die in less than a year due to the lack of airflow.
The vast majority of the heat generated by a HDD, however, is from the motor, and that most certainly is bound directly to the drive body, where the heat can be conducted away quite easily by contact with the steel case. That can make the difference between overheating, or not.
Once SOny notices that happening, they'll make sure to give every PS3 (or small groups of PS3s) it's own key. Then, when one is compromised, they know more or less who did it, and don't provide an update for those PS3s when they revoke the key.
How many PS3's are you willing to buy?
There are enough keys that every individual PS3 could have it's own key... Not to say that is actually done, but it could happen with a simple firmware update. With so many PS3's internet connected, it shouldn't be difficult.
And I wouldn't be surprised to find that Sony has a mechanism in place to upgrade the firmware from commercially purchased discs... Throw that payload in a few popular movies, and everybody is updated in a matter of months. Then you can disable the old key.
Of course, the real issue is that it's simply far easier to rip the key out of PowerDVD, or some other PC program that you can transparently debug on your computer.
Why do you say "usually"? To the best of my knowledge, AC3 is the only supported audio codec in the ATSC standard* (defined in A/52). MPEG-2 is similarly the only supported video codec.**
*To be pedantic: 2-channel AC3 is actually called AC2, but nobody cares, and even Dolby screws up the notation on a regular basis.
**Also being pedantic: MPEG-2 decoders are all backwards compatible, so a broadcaster could conceivably choose to use MPEG-1 video.
Completely wrong.
There are innumerable different player keys, which can be individually disabled on all future discs. Every different brand of player uses a different key, and presumably, different models from the same brand likely use separate keys as well.
It's a fairly simple trick to do. The disc is encrypted with a "disc key". That disc key is stored on the disc, but AES encrypted, using millions of "player keys"... Your player uses its player key to decode the disc key, then uses the disc key to decrypt and play the disc.
When Sony notices that your player key is being publicly distributed, they stop using your player key to encrypt the disc key... Your player (or ripping software as it were) then can't play any future discs, until you upgrade it to a new key.
What? Cracking DRM has NOTHING to do with the 'analog hole'.
Many people said exactly the same thing when DeCSS and css-auth came out.
Absolutely not! There is a limited supply of radioactive material on Earth, and even though the partially depleted variety isn't particularly desirable right now, it's highly likely it will become extremely valuable in a few short years, as demand for non-fossil fuels expands, and reprocessing technologies are developed.
Just use http://www.clusty.com/ . The search results are just as good as google, and it generates a list of categories that you can select from.
Admittedly, "mechanical" isn't in there... The categories are quite a bit more specific, such as "baby", "shark" "wisdom", "cleaner", etc.
I don't know where you got that information from, but it's utterly untrue. On a very fundamental level, H.264/AVC is vastly more computationally intensive than MPEG-4 ASP/Divx.
See half-pel, in-loop deblocking, CABAC, arithmetic coding, 16 B-frames, multiple reference frames, etc. Numerous iterative processes that are highly computationally intensive, none of which are used with MPEG-4 ASP/Divx.
We're talking about video here... One of a handful of normal user applications that is still completely CPU (and bus-speed) bound. H.264 decoders are already almost as optimized as they can get, and no skilled programmer is going to step in and make any significant headway there.
I generally agree with you... software development should focus a lot more on optimization. The payback is in lower-end hardware, less user time wasted, slightly higher prices, and/or larger product sales, will likely more than make up for the effort. The industry has simply become short-sighted, and squeezing a piece of crap out the door quickly takes priority over quality.
Most hardware devices (iPod/iPhone included) impose numerous serious restrictions on which H.264 features can be used.
It's common that you have to disable B-frames, disable CABAC, set a low IDC, etc., for compatibility with the above devices.
At that point, you've eliminated practically ALL the benefits of H.264 over older video codecs like MPEG-4 ASP (aka. Divx/Xvid) or even H.263p.
No, I didn't. I'm simply not pedantic enough to mention every single irrelevant detail about a topic.
"Skip" of any kind is not relevant to the topic, nor practical in such scenario. You might also note I did say "directly," whereas a satellite, skywave skip, RF signal reflector, repeater, or many other devices would also work, but none of which would answer the question.
No, not correct at all.
Whether it will work or not depends on how many degrees of curvature the signal has to disperse across to go "around" the hill in question.
The higher the frequency, the less the signal will "curve" around such obstacles. With UHF being less than half the frequency of WiFi, you can expect it will do a much better job of going around hills, and any other conceivable obstacle. That should allow you to get connectivity in more spots than you otherwise would, but it's never going to work in all situations.
If you have two transceivers at opposite sides of the base of a mountain, no radio frequency is ever going to allow them to communicate directly (well, VLF will, but that's impractically slow, so let's ignore it for simplicity sake). If they have line of sight, just about any frequency will work. As the obstacle between them, blocking line-of-sight communication gets larger, lower frequencies are required to circumvent it.
Just barely... on both counts. And I've already listed the cons of barcodes which those benefits must balance against.
I'm well aware. But you need some sort of software if you want it to automatically launch a web browser and visit a prescribed URL automatically when a barcode is scanned, as opposed to just dumping a number, or string of HEX in the window with focus.
Unfortunately, that "probability" hasn't panned out...
Allow me to summarize the relevant threads on NANOG:
-Verizon de-peered Cogent
--Yup, sure did
--Same in Europe
--Pings fail
--Why?
---Because Cogent is inexpensive
---They're a feuding.
--They shouldn't do that
THE END
Running at less than half the frequency of WiFi, it will do considerably better at going through obstacles, but it's not LF, it's not going to travel hundreds of miles and skip of the ionosphere... You're ALWAYS going to be constrained by line of sight and the curvature of the earth.
There was a Linux bubble during the dot.com bubble. Every startup thought they could give away a slightly different Linux distro, and make money... It didn't happen, and the VC money for companies without a business plan dried up. Many distros have disappeared. But Linux didn't die, or even stop developing.
If a company needs software, and an open source project ALMOST fits the bill, they will either add the features they need, or throw some funding at the project to get it... Either way, new features get added, and the project continues to develop. This is the way it has always been, and the way it will always be. If there's less money, it might progress slightly less rapidly, or more likely there will just be less idiot-friendly [support] options, but that's about it.
For every big-budget open source project you can name, I can name two competitors that are running on a shoestring budget, and yet manage to maintain parity with their big-money counterpart.
The hype and the money helped to accelerate adoption of open source options, but lack of money likely won't slow it down any... It might just not continue to accelerate so fast.
Much more difficult actually...
Opening the company website and typing in a short product code is pretty damn easy. And as an added bonus, it works on every computer out there... You don't need to carry around a big, bulky, barcode scanner, attach it to the computer you're using, install the software from CD, just to scan a bar code, and then remove it later.
Even if you're only ever using it on a single computer, having a big bulky barcode scanner setting on your desk that you barely ever use isn't my idea of good product. Not to mention the added space taken up by a barcode on the page would probably be prohibitive, not to mention ugly, all to support very few die-hard regular shoppers.
If you vastly oversimplify, and/or only cover topics in which they generally agree, you can always find "similarities".
Note that no viable political party anywhere in the world wants to legalize murder, either... Clearly, there is only one party... The one party of rational human beings.
It's very, VERY hard to PROVE that something (complex) is "wrong".
Creating something better, however, always works.