There's nothing stopping you from buying a low-end PC and installing a real GPU. AFAIK, most systems with integrated graphics still have a PCI Express slot so you can upgrade.
I also don't see any gouging going in in gaming PCs. I recently built a $1000 gaming PC and prebuilt models with similar specs were selling for $1100-1200, which is not much of a markup.
The difference is economics. There are so many Wii users that it's worth doing an actual port. Mac gamers get Cider when the developer can't afford to do the job right.
To me, the interesting thing was embedding the OS in the BIOS.
That's not what they did. AFAIK there's one flash chip that holds a conventional BIOS and a separate flash chip that holds the Splashtop Linux installation. Instead of giving you the choice to boot from disk, CD, or USB, the BIOS gives you a choice to boot from flash, disk, CD, or USB. Technically, there's nothing to see here.
I was assuming one would buy a Motorola cable box/DVR.
Maybe you could, but the whole point of Tru2Way seems to be that you can buy a better box than the cable company offers. Right now the only better box on the market is Tivo, although Moxi is coming.
If you don't use Tivo's schedules, can you waive the subscription fee, or is it still mandatory?
AFAIK Tivo is selling the boxes below cost and making it up on the subscription.
It wasn't a typo. Tivo charges $13/month for their box in addition to all the fees you pay the cable company. (I exaggerated slightly when I said $20/month; sorry.)
will our devices report what we're watching to our cable companies now, making us all unwitting Nielsen Raters?
Yes, because switched digital video (SDV) technology requires it.
Will this just serve to lock consumers into a model like cell phones in the future?
No, we are in the cell phone model today, and Tru2way gets us out of it. Today you pay $50/month for cable and $10/month for the box, while Tru2way allows you to pay $50/month for cable, $5/month for the card, and $500 upfront plus $20/month for the box.
That Supermicro board has only six slots; how do you get 32GB? The Tyan board only has eight slots, which would require quite expensive 4GB DIMMs to get 32GB.
I think a motherboard with 16 slots would be a better choice.
It does when you are doing FCoE in software, which is what this thread is about. Sure, the vendors would like to sell you specialized FCoE cards which will end up costing the same as an Ethernet NIC and an FC HBA put together, but you don't have to buy them.
Not really. There was already an unofficial AMF spec, so having an official spec that says the same thing makes no difference. The problem with Gnash is that they just don't have enough coders to keep up with changes in Flash Player, so they will fall farther and farther behind.
Realistically, Mozilla can afford to pay the license fees. H.264 is only $5M per year. It would be expensive (total Firefox development costs $12M/year IIRC) and it wouldn't help the IceWeasel people, but it could work.
I think you're missing the point. Nokia and many other companies have already paid the MPEG-4 license fees, because if they shipped a device that only supports Vorbis+Theora then customers would complain that "this thing can't play any videos that I have". In the real world, MPEG-4/H.264 is it. That's why there are a ton of HOWTOs about installing "free" MPEG-4 codecs under Linux. There are virtually no tools to encode in Theora and thus virtually no content. I doubt that will change if W3C makes Theora mandatory to implement in Web browsers. What would actually happen is that browsers would implement both "mandatory" Theora and "optional" MPEG-4 and people would go on using MPEG-4 like they do today. Thus Nokia would not save any money on patent licenses, and they'd have to spend more money on supporting a codec that no one uses.
You know, as network speeds and storage capacities have been improving so dramatically, the importance of compression has decreased in a similar fashion. MPEG-4 became pervasive because it allowed people to share movies illegally. Nowadays, you can download an ISO of a DVD and it's no big deal.
DVDs are still significantly compressed. And speak for yourself; if I downloaded DVD ISOs on a regular basis I'd fear that my ISP would come after me.
The technical inferiorities of Theora just mean your perfectly good looking video streams are a little bigger than MP4 streams. With bandwidth and storage as cheap as it is, that's cheaper to deal with than licensing for distribution.
So instead of an HD movie being 50GB, it'll be 100GB? I think broadband has a long way to go before people will stop caring about compression efficiency.
Theora video is somewhat based on H.261 and is obsolete in regards with recent developments such as H.264 and VP8 from On2. Can someone knowledgable about Theora make any comment on this assertion?
"Unlike Vorbis and Speex, legitimate best-in-class codecs, Theora's coding quality is obviously poor relative to contemporary competition. This poor performance stems both from implementation and design deficiencies."
At first glance it appears to be a set of extensions to robots.txt that allow newspapers to specify things like: This article will disappear from our site in N days, so it better disappear from search engines at the same time Don't frame this article Don't extract images or thumbnails from this article If you show a cached copy of this article, it better include the original ads etc.
FiOS is based on PON, which is also a bus topology. But in this case it's 622 Mbps shared by 32 homes, which still gives at least 20 Mbps per customer.
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People are adopting IPv6 from the outside in, but they're using 6to4 and Teredo instead of the obsolete 6bone.
There's nothing stopping you from buying a low-end PC and installing a real GPU. AFAIK, most systems with integrated graphics still have a PCI Express slot so you can upgrade.
I also don't see any gouging going in in gaming PCs. I recently built a $1000 gaming PC and prebuilt models with similar specs were selling for $1100-1200, which is not much of a markup.
Haven't you heard? In Web 2.0, data integrity doesn't matter.
There aren't competing 802.11n specs. Also, adding new requirements at this point is unlikely to speed the completion of the standard.
The point is that if the CPU and baseband are consuming too much power, an AP can reduce its transmit power to compensate.
You should have patented that idea and licensed it to Wal-Mart for $1.99 per pallet.
Think of it as a business opportunity for new software to track your kids' Internet usage. :-)
Except VoIP calls use virtually no bandwidth, so even heavy Vonage users wouldn't hit the cap.
Now if you want a legitimate example, consider cable VOD vs. iTunes movie rentals.
The difference is economics. There are so many Wii users that it's worth doing an actual port. Mac gamers get Cider when the developer can't afford to do the job right.
To me, the interesting thing was embedding the OS in the BIOS.
That's not what they did. AFAIK there's one flash chip that holds a conventional BIOS and a separate flash chip that holds the Splashtop Linux installation. Instead of giving you the choice to boot from disk, CD, or USB, the BIOS gives you a choice to boot from flash, disk, CD, or USB. Technically, there's nothing to see here.
I was assuming one would buy a Motorola cable box/DVR.
Maybe you could, but the whole point of Tru2Way seems to be that you can buy a better box than the cable company offers. Right now the only better box on the market is Tivo, although Moxi is coming.
If you don't use Tivo's schedules, can you waive the subscription fee, or is it still mandatory?
AFAIK Tivo is selling the boxes below cost and making it up on the subscription.
It wasn't a typo. Tivo charges $13/month for their box in addition to all the fees you pay the cable company. (I exaggerated slightly when I said $20/month; sorry.)
will our devices report what we're watching to our cable companies now, making us all unwitting Nielsen Raters?
Yes, because switched digital video (SDV) technology requires it.
Will this just serve to lock consumers into a model like cell phones in the future?
No, we are in the cell phone model today, and Tru2way gets us out of it. Today you pay $50/month for cable and $10/month for the box, while Tru2way allows you to pay $50/month for cable, $5/month for the card, and $500 upfront plus $20/month for the box.
That Supermicro board has only six slots; how do you get 32GB? The Tyan board only has eight slots, which would require quite expensive 4GB DIMMs to get 32GB.
I think a motherboard with 16 slots would be a better choice.
"10 GbE does not equal 10 Gb FCoE."
It does when you are doing FCoE in software, which is what this thread is about. Sure, the vendors would like to sell you specialized FCoE cards which will end up costing the same as an Ethernet NIC and an FC HBA put together, but you don't have to buy them.
Not really. There was already an unofficial AMF spec, so having an official spec that says the same thing makes no difference. The problem with Gnash is that they just don't have enough coders to keep up with changes in Flash Player, so they will fall farther and farther behind.
Realistically, Mozilla can afford to pay the license fees. H.264 is only $5M per year. It would be expensive (total Firefox development costs $12M/year IIRC) and it wouldn't help the IceWeasel people, but it could work.
So Ogg will never make it back into the HTML5 spec.
I think you're missing the point. Nokia and many other companies have already paid the MPEG-4 license fees, because if they shipped a device that only supports Vorbis+Theora then customers would complain that "this thing can't play any videos that I have". In the real world, MPEG-4/H.264 is it. That's why there are a ton of HOWTOs about installing "free" MPEG-4 codecs under Linux. There are virtually no tools to encode in Theora and thus virtually no content. I doubt that will change if W3C makes Theora mandatory to implement in Web browsers. What would actually happen is that browsers would implement both "mandatory" Theora and "optional" MPEG-4 and people would go on using MPEG-4 like they do today. Thus Nokia would not save any money on patent licenses, and they'd have to spend more money on supporting a codec that no one uses.
You know, as network speeds and storage capacities have been improving so dramatically, the importance of compression has decreased in a similar fashion. MPEG-4 became pervasive because it allowed people to share movies illegally. Nowadays, you can download an ISO of a DVD and it's no big deal.
DVDs are still significantly compressed. And speak for yourself; if I downloaded DVD ISOs on a regular basis I'd fear that my ISP would come after me.
The technical inferiorities of Theora just mean your perfectly good looking video streams are a little bigger than MP4 streams. With bandwidth and storage as cheap as it is, that's cheaper to deal with than licensing for distribution.
So instead of an HD movie being 50GB, it'll be 100GB? I think broadband has a long way to go before people will stop caring about compression efficiency.
Theora video is somewhat based on H.261 and is obsolete in regards with recent developments such as H.264 and VP8 from On2. Can someone knowledgable about Theora make any comment on this assertion?
Monty (the inventor of Vorbis) can comment on it: http://web.mit.edu/xiphmont/Public/theora/demo.html
"Unlike Vorbis and Speex, legitimate best-in-class codecs, Theora's coding quality is obviously poor relative to contemporary competition. This poor performance stems both from implementation and design deficiencies."
Legal or not, there is still no business case for ISPs to install filtering equipment.
On the contrary; using IMS different "services" will be priced differently even though they are all carried over IP.
http://www.the-acap.org/project-documents.php
At first glance it appears to be a set of extensions to robots.txt that allow newspapers to specify things like:
This article will disappear from our site in N days, so it better disappear from search engines at the same time
Don't frame this article
Don't extract images or thumbnails from this article
If you show a cached copy of this article, it better include the original ads
etc.
FiOS is based on PON, which is also a bus topology. But in this case it's 622 Mbps shared by 32 homes, which still gives at least 20 Mbps per customer.