An SDTV tuner (as defined by the CEA) takes the 18 ATSC formats (including the six 1080p, 1080i and 720p formats) downscales them, and outputs a 480i picture.
Oh; kind of a funny definition. I don't think those boxes are likely to be much cheaper than a full HD tuner since I would guess the cost is in the MPEG-2 decode, not the DACs and HDMI transmitter. But once analog is turned off, ATSC boxes would be in high demand and would probably be cheap ($100 BTW, many broadcast stations multicast with only one HD subchannel.
The "end-point" of the IEEE standards process is when the standard is issued, which is probably a year away in the case of 802.11n. The fact that one proposal is inching ahead of another in the voting is notable, but there's still plenty of work to be done.
Slightly off-topic, but what impact will Sun's open-sourcing of the JVM have?
An irrelevant question, since Sun has no plans to open-source their VM.
Since the Java specs are anyway open, is there any point if Sun opens up the JVM implementation?
Writing your own implementation is really, really hard. Especially since the "spec" doesn't specify everything. So in the near future Sun-derived VMs will be the only complete ones.
I guess a few years ago you would have said: With Sun, IBM, Intel, and AMD all going SMP, companies like Oracle are just milking it for all its worth before they have to cave in and charge per machine. It is inevitable.
What is so special about a socket? Why is per-socket pricing legitimate, but per-core is not?
The Blu-ray spec only includes two layers; therefore that is what Blu-ray players will support. If more layers are added to some future version of the spec, those discs still won't be playable on all Blu-ray players.
There should be several calsses of spectrum for WIFI data transit.
one spectrum range would be for station-to-station communications
one spectrum can be for user-to-station communications
one spectrum can be for user-to-user communications.
Great, so if all your traffic falls into one of those classes, you only get 1/3 throughput. Next idea, please.
The U-NII band is already divided into low-power, medium-power, and high-power subbands. It's not clear whether people are benefiting from this arrangement or not.
Finally, if you're using a bittorrent-type protocol to distribute your video, streaming doesn't work too well since everyone requests the same packets at the same time from the seed.
Only for live streaming. For on-demand streaming, downloads will be staggered and thus can take advantage of swarming.
My impression is that even low-end processors today have no trouble decoding MPEG-4 in software. But I have a G5 and an Opteron, so what do I know?
There are only two codecs in the MPEG-4 family: MPEG-4 Visual (aka part 2 aka plain MPEG-4) and H.264 (aka part 10 aka AVC). XVid is an implementation of the MPEG-4 Visual standard.
The broadcast flag does not apply to analog capture cards, like the Plextor PVR. You might want to worry about Macrovision and CGMS/A, though. I don't think hardware vendors have much incentive to tell you the truth about DRM "features" in their hardware.
An analog PVR PCI card uses about 1-2MB/s. An HDTV PCI card uses about 3MB/s. PCI has a capacity of 133MB/s shared among all the cards. USB 2.0 has maybe 40-50MB/s of usable shared bandwidth. You do the math.
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An SDTV tuner (as defined by the CEA) takes the 18 ATSC formats (including the six 1080p, 1080i and 720p formats) downscales them, and outputs a 480i picture.
Oh; kind of a funny definition. I don't think those boxes are likely to be much cheaper than a full HD tuner since I would guess the cost is in the MPEG-2 decode, not the DACs and HDMI transmitter. But once analog is turned off, ATSC boxes would be in high demand and would probably be cheap ($100 BTW, many broadcast stations multicast with only one HD subchannel.
Which is the one that most people want to watch.
The boxes decode HD because that is what is being broadcast. An OTA SD box is useless (in the US).
The "end-point" of the IEEE standards process is when the standard is issued, which is probably a year away in the case of 802.11n. The fact that one proposal is inching ahead of another in the voting is notable, but there's still plenty of work to be done.
Right now there is no demand for them. Once analog is turned off the price will come down.
They already did that; it's called OpenCable/CableCard.
Joe Sixpack doesn't burn DVDs right now because of this silliness.
I disagree. My mom knows nothing about DVD +/- formats, but she burns DVDs just fine because she has a dual-format burner.
Slightly off-topic, but what impact will Sun's open-sourcing of the JVM have?
An irrelevant question, since Sun has no plans to open-source their VM.
Since the Java specs are anyway open, is there any point if Sun opens up the JVM implementation?
Writing your own implementation is really, really hard. Especially since the "spec" doesn't specify everything. So in the near future Sun-derived VMs will be the only complete ones.
Sun has 64-bit VMs for SPARC/Solaris and AMD64/Linux. IBM has 64-bit VMs for PowerPC/AIX, PowerPC/Linux, and z/Linux IIRC.
You may be able to fix this with Tor.
I think this is a FAQ and Coral plans to fix it once they move off PlanetLab.
I guess a few years ago you would have said: With Sun, IBM, Intel, and AMD all going SMP, companies like Oracle are just milking it for all its worth before they have to cave in and charge per machine. It is inevitable.
What is so special about a socket? Why is per-socket pricing legitimate, but per-core is not?
Xen is like ESX but faster and with less easy to use management tools.
Apple doesn't sell external optical drives.
The Blu-ray spec only includes two layers; therefore that is what Blu-ray players will support. If more layers are added to some future version of the spec, those discs still won't be playable on all Blu-ray players.
No, two years ago Blu-ray was using caddies. Today it does not.
What exactly is the expected propogation with 25watts at 3.xx Ghz? How far will it transmit information?
It's gotta be better than 1W at 5.8GHz that people are using now.
How fast is any proposed standard for using this spectrum?
WISPs will probably use 802.16, which can theoretically provide over 100Mbps in 50MHz.
What are the channel allocations within that same proposed standard?
It looks like there are none, so licensees can do whatever they want.
Perhaps this would allow for citywide coverage using only your 802.11g card?
No, because 802.11 does not operate in this band.
How will 802.11s come in to play here?
It won't; see above.
It would be damn nice if I could go to a coffee shop other than starbucks to get wireless internet with my morning drink.
Have you tried EDGE or EV-DO?
There should be several calsses of spectrum for WIFI data transit.
one spectrum range would be for station-to-station communications
one spectrum can be for user-to-station communications
one spectrum can be for user-to-user communications.
Great, so if all your traffic falls into one of those classes, you only get 1/3 throughput. Next idea, please.
The U-NII band is already divided into low-power, medium-power, and high-power subbands. It's not clear whether people are benefiting from this arrangement or not.
Finally, if you're using a bittorrent-type protocol to distribute your video, streaming doesn't work too well since everyone requests the same packets at the same time from the seed.
Only for live streaming. For on-demand streaming, downloads will be staggered and thus can take advantage of swarming.
P2P can be applied to streaming or caching, so I don't think that makes a difference.
My impression is that even low-end processors today have no trouble decoding MPEG-4 in software. But I have a G5 and an Opteron, so what do I know?
There are only two codecs in the MPEG-4 family: MPEG-4 Visual (aka part 2 aka plain MPEG-4) and H.264 (aka part 10 aka AVC). XVid is an implementation of the MPEG-4 Visual standard.
You mean like ESM or TMesh?
Let's say you're recording four programs and streaming four other programs over Ethernet. That's about 12MB/s, or 10% of your PCI bus.
Likewise, a single 7200 RPM hard disk should be able to easily sustain 6MB/s of writes and 6MB/s of reads.
I haven't built a PVR, so there may be other bottlenecks.
The OS X frontend is separate and uses Cocoa AFAIK.
No you don't, because the protocol has not changed.
The broadcast flag does not apply to analog capture cards, like the Plextor PVR. You might want to worry about Macrovision and CGMS/A, though. I don't think hardware vendors have much incentive to tell you the truth about DRM "features" in their hardware.
An analog PVR PCI card uses about 1-2MB/s. An HDTV PCI card uses about 3MB/s. PCI has a capacity of 133MB/s shared among all the cards. USB 2.0 has maybe 40-50MB/s of usable shared bandwidth. You do the math.