That it works just like existing cable video-on-demand systems? That it's not too different from renting a movie from Blockbuster? It's not such a bad idea IMO.
I realize that it's deliberate, but if all the standards are only developed by grad students and hobbyists, then they might end up much weaker than the proprietary non-standard formats that they must compete against. That might lead to the standards being ignored in favor of proprietary stuff, which sounds like a worse result.
Re:Yeesh! Didn't they learn from Unisys
on
JPEG Patent Challenged
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Real products are a distraction for these people. Forgent got millions out of various companies without developing anything. Since the legal fees (costs) are much less than the licensing revenue, it's a self-perpetuating system. The RIAA settlements are the same way; each settlement pays for N new lawsuits to be filed and the profit rises exponentially.
I suspect companies would adopt an MPAA-style defense to that idea: If you don't let us patent standards, then we won't contribute anything to standards organizations.
When RSA got popular and people realized that it was patented, there was a large effort to switch to DSA. Right about the time that all the pieces of DSA support were in place, the RSA patent expired so people just kept using RSA.
When GIF got popular and people realized that LZW was patented, PNG was created. By the time PNG was actually supported more-or-less correctly in browsers, the LZW patent expired.
I suspect if this JPEG madness keeps up, people will try to switch to JPEG 2000 (which is still patented, but at least the patent holders appear friendly). But it looks like the JPEG patent expires around 2007, which does not leave enough time to switch to anything.
And all they'd have to do is have the unlocked content stream from the card into the system. At that point the OS is just a "dumb" path for the signal to be displayed via a media player.
No, at that point the OS is a dumb path for the signal to be recorded and BitTorrented. They don't want to allow this, thus there must be DRM at every point in the system.
CableCard requires strong DRM -- much stronger than is possible in XP. I suspect it will require the "Protected Environment" feature in Windows Vista.
About the broadcast flag, it only applies to TV that is broadcast over the air, not cable. Cable has copy control information (CCI) embedded in it, and FireWire does obey CCI -- if the content is marked as "copy once" or "copy never" then the cable box will re-encrypt the data with DTCP before sending it over the FireWire port. Since computers do not support DTCP/FireWire (on purpose), premium cable content is generally not recordable by PCs. (However, in the short term many cable networks/boxes are "broken" and don't properly enforce this.)
If its basically a DVD compatible thing that PCs can play with a codec/firmware tweak, then it is only a matter of time before the dirt cheap $50 DIVX/MPEG4/DVD players add support as a firmware change.
There are two problems with that:
No amount of firmware will upgrade an old Sigma or MediaTek chip to decode HD H.264. The chips are not powerful enough, period.
A licensed Blu-ray player must play every Blu-ray disc, even the blue-laser ones.
Be sure to include price, power consumption, and floor space in your engineering comparison. Vector processors are fast, but if you can only amortize the design cost over 5,120 units instead of 50M they get pretty expensive.
As far as the Top500 is concerned, I think the answer is yes. (And this explains why SETI@HOME does not count as a supercomputer for the purpose of compiling the Top500 list.)
J. E. Moreira, G. Almási, C. Archer, R. Bellofatto, P. Bergner, J. R. Brunheroto, M. Brutman, J. G. Castaños, P. G. Crumley, M. Gupta, T. Inglett, D. Lieber, D. Limpert, P. McCarthy, M. Megerian, M. Mendell, M. Mundy, D. Reed, R. K. Sahoo, A. Sanomiya, R. Shok, B. Smith, and G. G. Stewart: Blue Gene/L programming and operating environment.
The definition of "supercomputer" these days seems to be "a collection of hardware that can run an MPI job". So BlueGene/L is a cluster of 64K computers, but it counts as one supercomputer.
My conspiracy theory is that every few years they will increase the cap a little bit and tell all the customers "you're now getting more Internet for the same price; aren't we nice?"
"Power Architecture is an umbrella term for the PowerPC® and POWER4(TM) and POWER5(TM) processors produced by IBM, as well as PowerPC processors from other suppliers."
Well, the PPE is a PowerPC. Whether you call the PPE a "controller" or "main system processor" is really just a matter of definitions (I think both terms are simultaneously applicable).
Does IPv6 have a equivalent function for NAT that is widely used now? Everyone is waving their hands saying it would be a good thing for eveyrone to use a "real" address on all equipment. But no one has discussed the processes that will be needed for an authority to pass out those addresses to ALL users.
It's called DHCP Prefix Delegation. I might as well explain how it works.
Right now the ISP is granted a block of addresses and they assign one of those to the end user. The end user setups a NAT firewall/router and puts all kinds of equipment behind it.
In the Glorious IPv6 Future, the ISP will have a huge block of addresses, and then the user will plug in a v6 home router/firewall, which will be assigned one "upstream" v6 address using stateless autoconfig or DHCP. Then the router will use DHCP-PD to request one or more subnets from the ISP, and will advertise those subnet(s) on its "downstream" interface(s).
And any good net admin knows that you ask for more than you currently need because things grow.
In IPv6 all subnets are the same size (/64) and since they never fill up, you need exactly one subnet per LAN.
So how fast is all that IPv6 addressing going to last with people asking for big chunks of addressing and companies asking for even larger portions?
The plan is for each person to get 2^16 subnets; there will still be plenty of space left over.
On top of that it is going to require a central organization (ICANN?) to pass out the address blocks. They are not going to do that for free.
There already is a central organization to manage IP addresses (IANA/ICANN), and they already charge fees. But the fees are pretty small.
So now the individual user that wants to setup an IPv6 network at home will have to pay an annual fee for his block of addresses.
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No, it doesn't. Maybe you were confused since it has two dice (one for the GPU core and one for the framebuffer).
What were they thinking?
That it works just like existing cable video-on-demand systems? That it's not too different from renting a movie from Blockbuster? It's not such a bad idea IMO.
What is the practical difference between selling the copyright and exclusively licensing?
I realize that it's deliberate, but if all the standards are only developed by grad students and hobbyists, then they might end up much weaker than the proprietary non-standard formats that they must compete against. That might lead to the standards being ignored in favor of proprietary stuff, which sounds like a worse result.
Real products are a distraction for these people. Forgent got millions out of various companies without developing anything. Since the legal fees (costs) are much less than the licensing revenue, it's a self-perpetuating system. The RIAA settlements are the same way; each settlement pays for N new lawsuits to be filed and the profit rises exponentially.
I suspect companies would adopt an MPAA-style defense to that idea: If you don't let us patent standards, then we won't contribute anything to standards organizations.
We've seen this before.
When RSA got popular and people realized that it was patented, there was a large effort to switch to DSA. Right about the time that all the pieces of DSA support were in place, the RSA patent expired so people just kept using RSA.
When GIF got popular and people realized that LZW was patented, PNG was created. By the time PNG was actually supported more-or-less correctly in browsers, the LZW patent expired.
I suspect if this JPEG madness keeps up, people will try to switch to JPEG 2000 (which is still patented, but at least the patent holders appear friendly). But it looks like the JPEG patent expires around 2007, which does not leave enough time to switch to anything.
I don't agree that binary drivers would be enough to satisfy the OpenCable robustness requirements. For example, Windows Vista includes a whole set of DRM features in the OS. Implementing similar features on Linux would be either a huge amount of work or impossible.
And all they'd have to do is have the unlocked content stream from the card into the system. At that point the OS is just a "dumb" path for the signal to be displayed via a media player.
No, at that point the OS is a dumb path for the signal to be recorded and BitTorrented. They don't want to allow this, thus there must be DRM at every point in the system.
It took two years to negotiate the DRM licensing to allow CableCard PCI tuners to exist.
CableCard requires strong DRM -- much stronger than is possible in XP. I suspect it will require the "Protected Environment" feature in Windows Vista.
About the broadcast flag, it only applies to TV that is broadcast over the air, not cable. Cable has copy control information (CCI) embedded in it, and FireWire does obey CCI -- if the content is marked as "copy once" or "copy never" then the cable box will re-encrypt the data with DTCP before sending it over the FireWire port. Since computers do not support DTCP/FireWire (on purpose), premium cable content is generally not recordable by PCs. (However, in the short term many cable networks/boxes are "broken" and don't properly enforce this.)
BitTorrent uses SHA-1.
No, HD DVD supports H.264, VC-1, and MPEG-2 while Blu-ray supports H.264, VC-1, and MPEG-2.
Actually, it will just piggyback off the built-in rootkit in Vista.
If its basically a DVD compatible thing that PCs can play with a codec/firmware tweak, then it is only a matter of time before the dirt cheap $50 DIVX/MPEG4/DVD players add support as a firmware change.
There are two problems with that:
No amount of firmware will upgrade an old Sigma or MediaTek chip to decode HD H.264. The chips are not powerful enough, period.
A licensed Blu-ray player must play every Blu-ray disc, even the blue-laser ones.
Be sure to include price, power consumption, and floor space in your engineering comparison. Vector processors are fast, but if you can only amortize the design cost over 5,120 units instead of 50M they get pretty expensive.
As far as the Top500 is concerned, I think the answer is yes. (And this explains why SETI@HOME does not count as a supercomputer for the purpose of compiling the Top500 list.)
May I suggest the following paper:
J. E. Moreira, G. Almási, C. Archer, R. Bellofatto, P. Bergner, J. R. Brunheroto, M. Brutman, J. G. Castaños, P. G. Crumley, M. Gupta, T. Inglett, D. Lieber, D. Limpert, P. McCarthy, M. Megerian, M. Mendell, M. Mundy, D. Reed, R. K. Sahoo, A. Sanomiya, R. Shok, B. Smith, and G. G. Stewart: Blue Gene/L programming and operating environment.
Summary: It's not all Linux.
The definition of "supercomputer" these days seems to be "a collection of hardware that can run an MPI job". So BlueGene/L is a cluster of 64K computers, but it counts as one supercomputer.
My conspiracy theory is that every few years they will increase the cap a little bit and tell all the customers "you're now getting more Internet for the same price; aren't we nice?"
Big companies re-image every new computer they buy, and have been doing so for years. That's how they kept using W2K even after XP started shipping.
"Power Architecture" is PowerPC.
What is Power Architecture technology?
"Power Architecture is an umbrella term for the PowerPC® and POWER4(TM) and POWER5(TM) processors produced by IBM, as well as PowerPC processors from other suppliers."
Well, the PPE is a PowerPC. Whether you call the PPE a "controller" or "main system processor" is really just a matter of definitions (I think both terms are simultaneously applicable).
Does IPv6 have a equivalent function for NAT that is widely used now? Everyone is waving their hands saying it would be a good thing for eveyrone to use a "real" address on all equipment. But no one has discussed the processes that will be needed for an authority to pass out those addresses to ALL users.
It's called DHCP Prefix Delegation. I might as well explain how it works.
Right now the ISP is granted a block of addresses and they assign one of those to the end user. The end user setups a NAT firewall/router and puts all kinds of equipment behind it.
In the Glorious IPv6 Future, the ISP will have a huge block of addresses, and then the user will plug in a v6 home router/firewall, which will be assigned one "upstream" v6 address using stateless autoconfig or DHCP. Then the router will use DHCP-PD to request one or more subnets from the ISP, and will advertise those subnet(s) on its "downstream" interface(s).
And any good net admin knows that you ask for more than you currently need because things grow.
In IPv6 all subnets are the same size (/64) and since they never fill up, you need exactly one subnet per LAN.
So how fast is all that IPv6 addressing going to last with people asking for big chunks of addressing and companies asking for even larger portions?
The plan is for each person to get 2^16 subnets; there will still be plenty of space left over.
On top of that it is going to require a central organization (ICANN?) to pass out the address blocks. They are not going to do that for free.
There already is a central organization to manage IP addresses (IANA/ICANN), and they already charge fees. But the fees are pretty small.
So now the individual user that wants to setup an IPv6 network at home will have to pay an annual fee for his block of addresses.
A large ISP in North America would pay no more than $36,000/year for IP addresses. Divided by a few million customers, it comes out to about zero per customer per year.
And based on the previous message you would want to own your own block of addressing since in theory you can take it anywhere you want to go.
Sorry; end users aren't allowed to own IP addresses.
The same way you (don't) get them for IPv4.