This is why monopolies don't last forever.. When you get to be that large, and have so many competing priorities and dependancies even simple things take a long time..
"It will take three to five years to fully develop and deliver"
Eventually, this sort of slow response will cost them.. Those quick startups, pulling them in many different directions, will overwhelm MS.
They were probably a bit too early for the multimedia OS play.. The big push for multimedia is still building now. If Be could have provided a "killer app", like a nice PVR, it would have helped. Their OS was too general purpose to compel masses of users to try it.
BeOS would have made a nice media center, with an HDTV PVR (capable of recording multiple streams, while playing back.. their excellent multitasking and threading would be great here), iTunes-ish audio server/player, and perhaps some DV editing capabilities with DVD burning. There are only a few HDTV tuner cards available, so driver support would be a maangeable problem, and there are still no good PVR apps for HD content.
The french fries still contain flavoring from a beef source. Read "Fast Food Nation", he covers this in the book.
They used to be fried in "beef tallow" (cow fat). But, after a bit of public uproar about the extremely high fat content, they switched to vegetable oil. But, to keep the McDonald's flavor, they use highly concentrated "natural flavor" derived from that cow fat.
That's 128 data lines, not address lines. It still addresses memory as 64 bit, which is plenty of address space for the foreseeable future.
The 128 data lines let it transfer twice as much data per clock cycle.. They doubled the memory bandwidth available. (Although, in actual practice, the memory throughput is only modestly improved by this change.)
I've only been an MacOS X user for about two years now. But, all my previous upgrades have worked well. This upgrade installed fine on my Cube, but my PowerBook didn't like it at all.
My Cube installed the patch, and gave me the dialog box asking me to reboot. My PowerBook installed it, and at some point near the end of the install (maybe the "Optimizing Volume" step) it froze the machine, with the message saying "You need to reset this machine. Hold down the power button for several seconds." So, I did that and it rebooted to the login screen. When I entered my password it dropped me to the Darwin text console login screen. If I entered a password there, it denied my login and brought be back to the GUI login screen.
After monkeying with that a while, I copied my data off the machine by booting it in firewire disk mode. Then I reinstalled OS X from the restore disk. When I ran software update and tried to install it again, I got the same system freeze and reset machine message (it happened at 97% of the optimizing volume step). Fortunately, this time it rebooted fine. But, my confidence in OS X has gone down quite a bit now.
About a month ago, I got one of those annoying automated calls offering me "great new services" through Verizon. The recording said "Push 1 for more information".
So, I pushed '1' and waded went through several levels of systems until I could talk to a human. I asked him to set all my privacy preferences to prohibit any further calls or sharing of my personal information, and he was totally lost at how to proceed. He acted as if this was an unprecedented request.. "I don't have any idea how I could do that. We don't have any settings for that in the user accounts."
After spending 30 minutes on the phone with this guy, I was pissed to have wasted so much time and just wanted to hang up. But he agreed to submit some paper form that was supposed to ensure this did not happen again.. He did not inspire a lot of confidence, but I haven't gotten another call.. yet.
I think of NUMA more like the BBN Butterfly I worked on in college, where many CPU boards are connected by a relatively slow bus, and each CPU board has its own locally addressed memory. So, each CPU is a node, and for any decent performance it must use its own local memory.
In the Opteron case, the memory is still relatively local, and based on the benchmarks in the article the performance hit for accessing another CPU's memory is not huge. In general, I think these systems are treated as SMP, with one large memory space. My question is how difficult is a memory affinity implementation, and is it worth the overhead/complexity?
I assume that the open source MTAs most of us are using can quickly support this (I use postfix).
But, I'm using the DNS server from my registrars ( domaindirect and NetSol ) so, I would need them to support this. Or, I would have to host my own DNS or switch to a DNS host that supports this.
Also, another common problem of small mail servers is reverse lookup. My static DSL IP address reverse maps to a name from my ISP. Is there any dependency on this, or does it use domain names from the e-mail headers?
The board they used only had memory off of one of the CPU's in the dual Opteron systems. I wonder how much this effected performance in the compute intensive benchmarks, or even memory bandwidth benchmarks.
A benchmark with a Quad Opteron, like the Tyan Thunder K8QS would be interesting. It has memory hanging off of each of the four CPU's. (Which opens a lot of questions about how that memory is managed.. Is there some sort of memory affinity per processor? What is the performance hit if one CPU needs memory off another?)
Also, you have the 32 bit vs 64 bit stuff. It would be interesting to compare the best 32 bit optimized app against a 64 bit optimized version. Maybe something like MPEG2 compression of an HD stream.
Based on the reports I have read, the Opterons can't do CnQ because of the ECC registered memory they use. The registered memory cannot handle the voltage variations that CnQ uses.
This is the reason I went with the A64. In trying to make the quietest system I could, the CnQ feature is great.
Is it just me, or do others here find 'Enterprise' uninteresting? The plots always seem corny, and it just ends up seeming silly rather than thought provoking (which is what good sci-fi should be).
I tried watching again when they started the HDTV broadcasts.. It looked good visually, but the content was still uninspiring.
Modifying the characteristics of the show seems questionable..
I think a lot of runners would find sensor data gathered from the shoe to be more valuable. It could help with performance improvements, to record your exact pace throughout a run. It could help to diagnose or even prevent injuries - if it could tell by the impact sensors that you are pronating this could help a lot. A big part of curing/preventing running injuries is diagnosing the problem.
Combine the sensor data with GPS tracking, and you've got an excellent training tool.
Well that's the problem, isn't it. I am in the paying customer category. I buy my music, I record Off The Air HDTV for later viewing, and I don't distribute it via P2P networks.
But, with this technology I won't be able to continue the things I'm already doing - like recording The West Wing in HDTV, and downscaling it to DVD resolutions for viewing on my laptop. These DRM technologies, along with the Broadcast Flag, will stop that legitimate use (though I'm sure they'll have a solution that involves throwing away all my existing hardware and buying new improved hardware that obeys the studio masters above all else).
That's not true... you don't need to "break the encryption"...
Umm, read down to the next paragraph (which you quoted from) that's what I was saying. The weak link that people exploit is the data in the system software.
I think what you're failing to understand is that all DRM mechanisms that have so far been conceived rely on the client at some level to hide the key or the mechanism of the encryption.
But, that's the whole point. They are now moving to the hardware realm, where the security will be embedded in every aspect of the hardware. For HDTV, that means that the data won't leave the tuner card unless the system supports the security standards. It will go to the system encrypted, and be stored on disk encrypted. It will only be decrypted when it's back on the card - safely out of the reach of software. It's sort of like the smart card mechanisms out there already. The private key is stored on the card, and never is accessible outside that hardware.
And the beauty of that scheme is the data will be completely opaque. My current HDTV tuner card lets me capture the transport stream in the clear, and then downscale the video to DVD resolutions for viewing on my laptop. In this system, all of that would be impossible unless I purchased all new hardware that obeyed the studios controls. (and even then it's not clear if it would allow me to copy to my laptop.. if I can do that, I might be able to send it to the Internet - the studio's nightmare.)
Never mind that ANYTHING you can see or hear can be recorded, DRM or not, from an analog signal using advanced technology such as "sound cards" or even "tape recorders".
But, I don't want a fuzzy 720x480i recording of my HDTV program. I want the full 1920x1080i program, just as I am recording it today. The studios are perfectly happy to allow recording of the SDTV analog version of TV shows & movies. But, we have the technology to do much better than that today, and there is no reason that the systems should be crippled.
It is incorrect to assume that because past weak efforts at protection have been cracked that anything can be cracked. These new protection standards use strong proven technology. It's very unlikely that someone will find a way to beat public key and AES encryption. So, they must find ways to exploit the weak links in the system -- grab the data when it is in the clear. This is what the iTunes crackers do. But, this hardware technology aims to eliminate those weak points. They will keep the data encrypted everywhere in software, only decrypting it in the chip that does the output. So, only real criminal pirates will have the resources to crack that. Those of us just wanting fair use of the material we pay for will be screwed.
The attitude is dangerous because it encourages the people who know that this is wrong to be complacent about it. "Who cares, it will be cracked anyway." NO! it's wrong for it to happen in the first place. Do something about it, or support those that do.
It doesn't matter if the protections are crackable.
If the government has passed enough laws to make common bevaviors criminal, they can arrest whoever they want.
The keystone of all this "innovation" will be when they make it a violation of U.S. law to connect a computer to the Internet if it does not have this usage limitation hardware.
The only indication of quality in the article was this:
Mr Highfield said the quality of the programmes will be so high that the experience of watching a show on a PDA will be similar to viewing an in-flight film on screens in the backs of seats on passenger aircraft.
In-flight movies are not a real high bar to set..
I would be interested in getting episodes of "The Office" this way, if they were available in their native 16:9 format (encoded in 16:9, not letterboxed), and in a quality comparable to DVD.
You're right about the coverage being non-optimal for 16:9. There is a big difference between the evens on HDNet and one of the networks where they have to optimize it for 4:3. A couple years ago, CBS did a bunch of NCAA basketball games in 16:9. So, it looked great for HDTV, but the SDTV viewers got a letterboxed game. I guess they got a lot of complaints, because they dropped that method.
And, yes.. Fox Sports 480i->p 16:9 sports presentations suck. They are filmed with 480i cameras, so the quality just isn't there. Their filmed material, on the other hand, converts quite well to 480p, and I think it looks better than DVD. Fortunately, Fox is in the process of converting to 720p, and they are supposed to be covering up to 6 NFL games per week in 720p this season.
It does not list Fox shows, because they are broadcast in 480p widescreen, not true HD. Fox is in the process of transitioning to 720p HD. Their 480p material, while not as sharp as HD, is MUCH better than SDTV.
All the big sporting events are shown in HDTV (e.g. The Olympics, Super Bowl, NCAA Final Four, World Series, NBA Championship, etc.) and the amount of HD sports is rapidly expanding. There will be a large number of NFL regular season games in HD this year, up to 10 per week.
The lack of HD content is a myth.. maybe a few years ago it was true, but we're way past critical mass now.
Re:The problem with HDTV right now...
on
CableCARDs and HDTV
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· Score: 4, Informative
I also live in the SF Bay area, and my experience with HDTV is the opposite.
There are around 20 channels with digital broadcasts right now (depending on where you are in the Bay Area, you may be able to pick up more from Sacramento, etc. In the Peninsula, I get 20). Prior to digital TV, I couldn't get acceptable analog reception, so I paid for cable. Now, I use a simple antenna to get all the locals, so I don't need to pay for cable anymore.
As for the HDTV content.. I don't know if you're expecting all the content from the last 50 years to be magically converted to HDTV, but I think most people would expect a transition period. Currently, most of the new staged shows are done in HDTV (The West Wing, CSI, ER, Law & Order, etc.) but the "reality" shows with all the handheld cameras are still 4:3 SDTV. It will take a while before the small/cheap units used in those shows are HD.
And, almost all the big sporting events - World Series, SuperBowl, NCAA Final Four, etc. are done in HD. The amount of sports done in HDTV is rapidly expanding. ESPN is ramping up their studios and equipment and are doing more and more HD. Fox will do up to six NFL games per week in HD this year, ESPN already does their Sunday Night football game in HD, and Monday Night Football is HD. If you're an NFL fan, you'll see almost nothing but HDTV this season.
With digital signals, MPEG2 compressed, I can easily use a PCI card in my HTPC to record HDTV programs for time shifting. I record The West Wing and Malcolm in the Middle every week, and skip through the commercials on playback. All at a much higher quality than available through other means.
With all the incredibly expensive infrastructure the broadcast industry has invested in, I'm actually surprised at how fast the conversion is going. And now, as it is being seen as a competitive advantage, the momentum seems to be growing even faster.
Good suggestions.. I have a few more.
on
A Silent PC Solution?
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· Score: 2, Informative
I've spent a lot of time and money trying to quiet my system, so I'll toss in a few things I have learned. I liked most of his suggestions in the article. I was surprised he didn't go some different routes though. Such as:
- CPU: Athlon 64. It has a feature they call "Cool n Quiet" where it will run at a slower clock speed when the CPU is not under heavy load. So, as you're browsing the web, typing in the word processor, playing MP3's, etc. it will run at 800MHz. When you play a game, process video, etc. It will run at full speed. This saves a lot of heat in the system, and actually lets the fan on the CPU heat sink stop much of the time.
- Hard Drive: Seagate Barracuda (Samsung, and maybe Fujitsu also make some very quiet drives.. check spec's before buying). The Seagate drives are very quiet. In most cases, if you mount it well (rubber grommets, or suspending the drive to avoid vibration transfer) it is quiet enough to not require the drive silencer thing.
- 120mm Fans. He replaces the 80mm fans with super-quiet 80mm fans. Why not use high quality quiet 120mm fans for better airflow and lower noise?
- Power Supply. Zalman makes great products, so I assume their PSU is very quiet (but I have not used it). I have found almost every other PSU with small fans to be the loudest component in the system. There are several manufacturers that make PSU's with 120mm fans in the base. These big fans can run slower/quieter. They also give the system a fan right next to the CPU, which helps a lot. There are also expensive PSU's that have huge heat sinks, and cun run completely fanless. I plan on trying one of these next.. But, this puts more burden on the case fans.
Or, if you want it as quiet as possible, and cheaper.. go with lower-end components.
- VIA C3 CPU - Plenty of power for normal business tasks, and can be run fanless if the heat sink is large.
- Passively cooled video card - GeForce FX 5200 is not a speed demon, but it's fanless. Or, if 3D is not a concern, go for embedded video. (the 5200 will still kick up the heat inside the system.. fit the video card to your needs.)
- 2.5" Laptop hard drives. If you don't need buttloads of storage, a 20/40/80GB 2.5" drive could help a lot. Check spec's before buying, some 2.5" drives are loud. But, they run MUCH cooler than 3.5" drives (2.5W vs 15W). They are also smller, offering better airflow, and have less vibration.
And, lastly: S3 Sleep mode is your friend. The computer noise mostly bothers me when I'm not using it. I want to be able to hear the movie over the humm of my computer. So, use S3 sleep, with aggressive timeouts, to shut the thing down when not in use. It wakes up from this mode in a few seconds, and is completely silent while sleeping - saving noise, heat, power, and money.
Valenti's comments on the Broadcast Flag are a bit misleading:
The broadcast flag -- if you are in your home, then you can copy anything that's on over-the-air television to your heart's content. The only time that you will know there's a broadcast flag is if you try to take one of those copies and redistribute it on the Internet. Then, the flag says, 'No, you can't redistribute it.' But you can do everything you're doing right now -- you'll never know there's a broadcast flag. Well, why would people object to it?
The unspoken assumption here is that you have scrapped all of your existing hardware, and bought new hardware that has support for all of the DRM copy protection. So, the chipset will honor the flags, all the hardware will support the encryption, and the signal will never be available on the system while decrypted.
My current system does a fine job of HDTV recording and playback. So, it's not just a cpu power upgrade requirement. It's a purely manufactured requirement that I need to use their encryption, and have a computer that obeys their commands, not mine.
Also, the interviewer does not do a good job of making the point. He brings up some bullshit point about making his own HDTV, which Valenti easily skewers as being irrelevant to 99.999% of people. He should have made the much more valid point of the millions of TV tuner cards out there today will not be available in the digital TV world without people buying MPAA approved hardware.
(As an aside, WTF was the kid yalking about reqarding his HDTV? I'm pretty sure he didn't create his own CRT or other display device, and all supporting electronics.. that's very difficult from a manufacturing perspective. I would guess that he "made" a HDTV decoder system by plugging in a PCI card from pchdtv.com)
When SCO originally sued AutoZone, I thought they were claiming that AZ copied SCO's libraries to their Linux environment to make porting of AZ's software possible. -- This was debunked by a former AZ employee, who confirmed that the application was cleanly ported to Linux, requiring no SCO code.
But, AZ's response seems to imply that not even that was clear from SCO's claim. They don't even know if they are talking about the kernel, pieces from SCO's OS, applications, etc.
I know several companies that were scared that the Linux kernel would disallow their non-GPL modules from loading. They discussed all kinds of creative workarounds, such as improper license strings, or a GPL'd stub which loads the full module. But, these were dismissed as silly, inefficient, and anti-GPL.
But, one thing that would work is to modify the core kernel to remove the module license check, or remove warning messages so it didn't matter. The code is GPL'd, which means anyone is free to modify it to suit their needs, as long as they release their mods. So, this would be completely within their rights.
Of course, they are then dealing with their own kernel, which they would need to support. So, I think this takes care of the main gripe from the GPL/kernel people - of not being able to provide support for binary modules.
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This is why monopolies don't last forever.. When you get to be that large, and have so many competing priorities and dependancies even simple things take a long time..
"It will take three to five years to fully develop and deliver"
Eventually, this sort of slow response will cost them.. Those quick startups, pulling them in many different directions, will overwhelm MS.
They were probably a bit too early for the multimedia OS play.. The big push for multimedia is still building now. If Be could have provided a "killer app", like a nice PVR, it would have helped. Their OS was too general purpose to compel masses of users to try it.
BeOS would have made a nice media center, with an HDTV PVR (capable of recording multiple streams, while playing back.. their excellent multitasking and threading would be great here), iTunes-ish audio server/player, and perhaps some DV editing capabilities with DVD burning. There are only a few HDTV tuner cards available, so driver support would be a maangeable problem, and there are still no good PVR apps for HD content.
The french fries still contain flavoring from a beef source. Read "Fast Food Nation", he covers this in the book.
They used to be fried in "beef tallow" (cow fat). But, after a bit of public uproar about the extremely high fat content, they switched to vegetable oil. But, to keep the McDonald's flavor, they use highly concentrated "natural flavor" derived from that cow fat.
That's 128 data lines, not address lines. It still addresses memory as 64 bit, which is plenty of address space for the foreseeable future.
The 128 data lines let it transfer twice as much data per clock cycle.. They doubled the memory bandwidth available. (Although, in actual practice, the memory throughput is only modestly improved by this change.)
I've only been an MacOS X user for about two years now. But, all my previous upgrades have worked well. This upgrade installed fine on my Cube, but my PowerBook didn't like it at all.
My Cube installed the patch, and gave me the dialog box asking me to reboot. My PowerBook installed it, and at some point near the end of the install (maybe the "Optimizing Volume" step) it froze the machine, with the message saying "You need to reset this machine. Hold down the power button for several seconds." So, I did that and it rebooted to the login screen. When I entered my password it dropped me to the Darwin text console login screen. If I entered a password there, it denied my login and brought be back to the GUI login screen.
After monkeying with that a while, I copied my data off the machine by booting it in firewire disk mode. Then I reinstalled OS X from the restore disk. When I ran software update and tried to install it again, I got the same system freeze and reset machine message (it happened at 97% of the optimizing volume step). Fortunately, this time it rebooted fine. But, my confidence in OS X has gone down quite a bit now.
Verizon already phone spams their own customers.
About a month ago, I got one of those annoying automated calls offering me "great new services" through Verizon. The recording said "Push 1 for more information".
So, I pushed '1' and waded went through several levels of systems until I could talk to a human. I asked him to set all my privacy preferences to prohibit any further calls or sharing of my personal information, and he was totally lost at how to proceed. He acted as if this was an unprecedented request.. "I don't have any idea how I could do that. We don't have any settings for that in the user accounts."
After spending 30 minutes on the phone with this guy, I was pissed to have wasted so much time and just wanted to hang up. But he agreed to submit some paper form that was supposed to ensure this did not happen again.. He did not inspire a lot of confidence, but I haven't gotten another call.. yet.
But, it's not a typical NUMA architecture, is it?
I think of NUMA more like the BBN Butterfly I worked on in college, where many CPU boards are connected by a relatively slow bus, and each CPU board has its own locally addressed memory. So, each CPU is a node, and for any decent performance it must use its own local memory.
In the Opteron case, the memory is still relatively local, and based on the benchmarks in the article the performance hit for accessing another CPU's memory is not huge. In general, I think these systems are treated as SMP, with one large memory space. My question is how difficult is a memory affinity implementation, and is it worth the overhead/complexity?
I assume that the open source MTAs most of us are using can quickly support this (I use postfix).
But, I'm using the DNS server from my registrars ( domaindirect and NetSol ) so, I would need them to support this. Or, I would have to host my own DNS or switch to a DNS host that supports this.
Also, another common problem of small mail servers is reverse lookup. My static DSL IP address reverse maps to a name from my ISP. Is there any dependency on this, or does it use domain names from the e-mail headers?
The board they used only had memory off of one of the CPU's in the dual Opteron systems. I wonder how much this effected performance in the compute intensive benchmarks, or even memory bandwidth benchmarks.
A benchmark with a Quad Opteron, like the Tyan Thunder K8QS would be interesting. It has memory hanging off of each of the four CPU's. (Which opens a lot of questions about how that memory is managed.. Is there some sort of memory affinity per processor? What is the performance hit if one CPU needs memory off another?)
Also, you have the 32 bit vs 64 bit stuff. It would be interesting to compare the best 32 bit optimized app against a 64 bit optimized version. Maybe something like MPEG2 compression of an HD stream.
Based on the reports I have read, the Opterons can't do CnQ because of the ECC registered memory they use. The registered memory cannot handle the voltage variations that CnQ uses.
This is the reason I went with the A64. In trying to make the quietest system I could, the CnQ feature is great.
Is it just me, or do others here find 'Enterprise' uninteresting? The plots always seem corny, and it just ends up seeming silly rather than thought provoking (which is what good sci-fi should be).
I tried watching again when they started the HDTV broadcasts.. It looked good visually, but the content was still uninspiring.
Modifying the characteristics of the show seems questionable..
I think a lot of runners would find sensor data gathered from the shoe to be more valuable. It could help with performance improvements, to record your exact pace throughout a run. It could help to diagnose or even prevent injuries - if it could tell by the impact sensors that you are pronating this could help a lot. A big part of curing/preventing running injuries is diagnosing the problem.
Combine the sensor data with GPS tracking, and you've got an excellent training tool.
Is there any more thorough source of information on the nature of the changes in the security update?
For example, what IPSec changes were made?
Well that's the problem, isn't it. I am in the paying customer category. I buy my music, I record Off The Air HDTV for later viewing, and I don't distribute it via P2P networks.
But, with this technology I won't be able to continue the things I'm already doing - like recording The West Wing in HDTV, and downscaling it to DVD resolutions for viewing on my laptop. These DRM technologies, along with the Broadcast Flag, will stop that legitimate use (though I'm sure they'll have a solution that involves throwing away all my existing hardware and buying new improved hardware that obeys the studio masters above all else).
That's not true... you don't need to "break the encryption" ...
Umm, read down to the next paragraph (which you quoted from) that's what I was saying. The weak link that people exploit is the data in the system software.
I think what you're failing to understand is that all DRM mechanisms that have so far been conceived rely on the client at some level to hide the key or the mechanism of the encryption.
But, that's the whole point. They are now moving to the hardware realm, where the security will be embedded in every aspect of the hardware. For HDTV, that means that the data won't leave the tuner card unless the system supports the security standards. It will go to the system encrypted, and be stored on disk encrypted. It will only be decrypted when it's back on the card - safely out of the reach of software. It's sort of like the smart card mechanisms out there already. The private key is stored on the card, and never is accessible outside that hardware.
And the beauty of that scheme is the data will be completely opaque. My current HDTV tuner card lets me capture the transport stream in the clear, and then downscale the video to DVD resolutions for viewing on my laptop. In this system, all of that would be impossible unless I purchased all new hardware that obeyed the studios controls. (and even then it's not clear if it would allow me to copy to my laptop.. if I can do that, I might be able to send it to the Internet - the studio's nightmare.)
Never mind that ANYTHING you can see or hear can be recorded, DRM or not, from an analog signal using advanced technology such as "sound cards" or even "tape recorders".
But, I don't want a fuzzy 720x480i recording of my HDTV program. I want the full 1920x1080i program, just as I am recording it today. The studios are perfectly happy to allow recording of the SDTV analog version of TV shows & movies. But, we have the technology to do much better than that today, and there is no reason that the systems should be crippled.
Also.. that attitude is incorrect, and dangerous.
It is incorrect to assume that because past weak efforts at protection have been cracked that anything can be cracked. These new protection standards use strong proven technology. It's very unlikely that someone will find a way to beat public key and AES encryption. So, they must find ways to exploit the weak links in the system -- grab the data when it is in the clear. This is what the iTunes crackers do. But, this hardware technology aims to eliminate those weak points. They will keep the data encrypted everywhere in software, only decrypting it in the chip that does the output. So, only real criminal pirates will have the resources to crack that. Those of us just wanting fair use of the material we pay for will be screwed.
The attitude is dangerous because it encourages the people who know that this is wrong to be complacent about it. "Who cares, it will be cracked anyway." NO! it's wrong for it to happen in the first place. Do something about it, or support those that do.
Join now: http://www.eff.org/
It doesn't matter if the protections are crackable.
If the government has passed enough laws to make common bevaviors criminal, they can arrest whoever they want.
The keystone of all this "innovation" will be when they make it a violation of U.S. law to connect a computer to the Internet if it does not have this usage limitation hardware.
The only indication of quality in the article was this:
Mr Highfield said the quality of the programmes will be so high that the experience of watching a show on a PDA will be similar to viewing an in-flight film on screens in the backs of seats on passenger aircraft.
In-flight movies are not a real high bar to set..
I would be interested in getting episodes of "The Office" this way, if they were available in their native 16:9 format (encoded in 16:9, not letterboxed), and in a quality comparable to DVD.
You're right about the coverage being non-optimal for 16:9. There is a big difference between the evens on HDNet and one of the networks where they have to optimize it for 4:3. A couple years ago, CBS did a bunch of NCAA basketball games in 16:9. So, it looked great for HDTV, but the SDTV viewers got a letterboxed game. I guess they got a lot of complaints, because they dropped that method.
And, yes.. Fox Sports 480i->p 16:9 sports presentations suck. They are filmed with 480i cameras, so the quality just isn't there. Their filmed material, on the other hand, converts quite well to 480p, and I think it looks better than DVD. Fortunately, Fox is in the process of converting to 720p, and they are supposed to be covering up to 6 NFL games per week in 720p this season.
Here is a good site that updates HDTV listings:
http://hdtvgalaxy.com/broad.html
It does not list Fox shows, because they are broadcast in 480p widescreen, not true HD. Fox is in the process of transitioning to 720p HD. Their 480p material, while not as sharp as HD, is MUCH better than SDTV.
All the big sporting events are shown in HDTV (e.g. The Olympics, Super Bowl, NCAA Final Four, World Series, NBA Championship, etc.) and the amount of HD sports is rapidly expanding. There will be a large number of NFL regular season games in HD this year, up to 10 per week.
The lack of HD content is a myth.. maybe a few years ago it was true, but we're way past critical mass now.
I also live in the SF Bay area, and my experience with HDTV is the opposite.
There are around 20 channels with digital broadcasts right now (depending on where you are in the Bay Area, you may be able to pick up more from Sacramento, etc. In the Peninsula, I get 20). Prior to digital TV, I couldn't get acceptable analog reception, so I paid for cable. Now, I use a simple antenna to get all the locals, so I don't need to pay for cable anymore.
As for the HDTV content.. I don't know if you're expecting all the content from the last 50 years to be magically converted to HDTV, but I think most people would expect a transition period. Currently, most of the new staged shows are done in HDTV (The West Wing, CSI, ER, Law & Order, etc.) but the "reality" shows with all the handheld cameras are still 4:3 SDTV. It will take a while before the small/cheap units used in those shows are HD.
And, almost all the big sporting events - World Series, SuperBowl, NCAA Final Four, etc. are done in HD. The amount of sports done in HDTV is rapidly expanding. ESPN is ramping up their studios and equipment and are doing more and more HD. Fox will do up to six NFL games per week in HD this year, ESPN already does their Sunday Night football game in HD, and Monday Night Football is HD. If you're an NFL fan, you'll see almost nothing but HDTV this season.
With digital signals, MPEG2 compressed, I can easily use a PCI card in my HTPC to record HDTV programs for time shifting. I record The West Wing and Malcolm in the Middle every week, and skip through the commercials on playback. All at a much higher quality than available through other means.
With all the incredibly expensive infrastructure the broadcast industry has invested in, I'm actually surprised at how fast the conversion is going. And now, as it is being seen as a competitive advantage, the momentum seems to be growing even faster.
I've spent a lot of time and money trying to quiet my system, so I'll toss in a few things I have learned. I liked most of his suggestions in the article. I was surprised he didn't go some different routes though. Such as:
- CPU: Athlon 64. It has a feature they call "Cool n Quiet" where it will run at a slower clock speed when the CPU is not under heavy load. So, as you're browsing the web, typing in the word processor, playing MP3's, etc. it will run at 800MHz. When you play a game, process video, etc. It will run at full speed. This saves a lot of heat in the system, and actually lets the fan on the CPU heat sink stop much of the time.
- Hard Drive: Seagate Barracuda (Samsung, and maybe Fujitsu also make some very quiet drives.. check spec's before buying). The Seagate drives are very quiet. In most cases, if you mount it well (rubber grommets, or suspending the drive to avoid vibration transfer) it is quiet enough to not require the drive silencer thing.
- 120mm Fans. He replaces the 80mm fans with super-quiet 80mm fans. Why not use high quality quiet 120mm fans for better airflow and lower noise?
- Power Supply. Zalman makes great products, so I assume their PSU is very quiet (but I have not used it). I have found almost every other PSU with small fans to be the loudest component in the system. There are several manufacturers that make PSU's with 120mm fans in the base. These big fans can run slower/quieter. They also give the system a fan right next to the CPU, which helps a lot. There are also expensive PSU's that have huge heat sinks, and cun run completely fanless. I plan on trying one of these next.. But, this puts more burden on the case fans.
Or, if you want it as quiet as possible, and cheaper.. go with lower-end components.
- VIA C3 CPU - Plenty of power for normal business tasks, and can be run fanless if the heat sink is large.
- Passively cooled video card - GeForce FX 5200 is not a speed demon, but it's fanless. Or, if 3D is not a concern, go for embedded video. (the 5200 will still kick up the heat inside the system.. fit the video card to your needs.)
- 2.5" Laptop hard drives. If you don't need buttloads of storage, a 20/40/80GB 2.5" drive could help a lot. Check spec's before buying, some 2.5" drives are loud. But, they run MUCH cooler than 3.5" drives (2.5W vs 15W). They are also smller, offering better airflow, and have less vibration.
And, lastly: S3 Sleep mode is your friend. The computer noise mostly bothers me when I'm not using it. I want to be able to hear the movie over the humm of my computer. So, use S3 sleep, with aggressive timeouts, to shut the thing down when not in use. It wakes up from this mode in a few seconds, and is completely silent while sleeping - saving noise, heat, power, and money.
Valenti's comments on the Broadcast Flag are a bit misleading:
The broadcast flag -- if you are in your home, then you can copy anything that's on over-the-air television to your heart's content. The only time that you will know there's a broadcast flag is if you try to take one of those copies and redistribute it on the Internet. Then, the flag says, 'No, you can't redistribute it.' But you can do everything you're doing right now -- you'll never know there's a broadcast flag. Well, why would people object to it?
The unspoken assumption here is that you have scrapped all of your existing hardware, and bought new hardware that has support for all of the DRM copy protection. So, the chipset will honor the flags, all the hardware will support the encryption, and the signal will never be available on the system while decrypted.
My current system does a fine job of HDTV recording and playback. So, it's not just a cpu power upgrade requirement. It's a purely manufactured requirement that I need to use their encryption, and have a computer that obeys their commands, not mine.
Also, the interviewer does not do a good job of making the point. He brings up some bullshit point about making his own HDTV, which Valenti easily skewers as being irrelevant to 99.999% of people. He should have made the much more valid point of the millions of TV tuner cards out there today will not be available in the digital TV world without people buying MPAA approved hardware.
(As an aside, WTF was the kid yalking about reqarding his HDTV? I'm pretty sure he didn't create his own CRT or other display device, and all supporting electronics.. that's very difficult from a manufacturing perspective. I would guess that he "made" a HDTV decoder system by plugging in a PCI card from pchdtv.com)
When SCO originally sued AutoZone, I thought they were claiming that AZ copied SCO's libraries to their Linux environment to make porting of AZ's software possible. -- This was debunked by a former AZ employee, who confirmed that the application was cleanly ported to Linux, requiring no SCO code.
But, AZ's response seems to imply that not even that was clear from SCO's claim. They don't even know if they are talking about the kernel, pieces from SCO's OS, applications, etc.
I know several companies that were scared that the Linux kernel would disallow their non-GPL modules from loading. They discussed all kinds of creative workarounds, such as improper license strings, or a GPL'd stub which loads the full module. But, these were dismissed as silly, inefficient, and anti-GPL.
But, one thing that would work is to modify the core kernel to remove the module license check, or remove warning messages so it didn't matter. The code is GPL'd, which means anyone is free to modify it to suit their needs, as long as they release their mods. So, this would be completely within their rights.
Of course, they are then dealing with their own kernel, which they would need to support. So, I think this takes care of the main gripe from the GPL/kernel people - of not being able to provide support for binary modules.