The human link may unfortunately be one the hardest links to seal. I'd imagine that DirectTV couldn't possibly have much control of this situation. What's DirecTV supposed to do? Audit the information trail of their documents through the different organizations? Fat chance.. How would your well-established/respected/recognized lawyer react if you asked him to encrypt all your communications with PGP? At best he'd probably think you're being a complete pain-in-the-ass.
It's going to take a lot of human social engineering just to fix this weak link in an overall security system. This effort is probably much more than it would take a hacker to break the system by getting into the inner circle of an organization's political structure, as the Russian kid has demonstrated here. Security requires work effort, and society is just too lazy to naturally implement it.
DirectTV should have never released these very secret documents to their lawyers if they couldn't establish the highest levels of trust.
Now your low-bitrate files you listen on your headphones through your mobile player can now be stored with larger and higher quality files on your PC for playback on higher quality audio equipment.
Interstation interference is effectively solved in the Cell phone world by dividing regions into cells and seperating frequencies by cells. Cell methods could be applied to a larger area broadcast, as well. Stations could rent bandwidth on (upgraded) local cell towers, and since it will be digital radio/video, all that the users have to do tune into a station is to select a station call ID, which a digital receiver would be able to pick out among all the stations that it is currently receiving.
The FCC should have at least chosen a different digital modulation scheme, that although may not be backwards compatible, would enable bandwith to open up. I would rather have 500+ channels from multiple local vendors than 20 ClearChannel/ABC owned station all broadcasting the same useless fucking Eminem/Nelly song over and over. Right now the FCC is not taking applications for any more FM radio stations (although thousand try to apply). The move to digital would have allowed more people to enter the market, but instead the FCC didn't open up bandwith using a different scheme.
Also, why a proprietary audio encoding scheme? Why not open source, royalty free Ogg Vorbis? And a good digital encoding scheme doesn't need to have fixed bandwitdh requirements, either - some channels could be 8kbps mono, while other channels could be full 1Mbps surround+data/video, all using the same decoder/tuners.
Perhaps your current market is all that you should hope for.. Remember there are a lot of bands/artists out there, so what makes you think an expensive promotion campaign will be worthwile and not a waste of money? The market just can't handle a million bands trying to promote themselves over each other.
I would stick with local clubs and parties promoted through friends and contacts performed as a service... You don't need to be famous, and you'll get plenty of chicks that way.
If you really want to promote your band outside radio, I would just burn 10k CD's and hand them out to interesting people at area concerts/clubs with your bands contact info saying you'll do parties and what not. A cheap way to get famous.
It's not that useless. I have 1GB RDRAM and a cheap 128MB ATI Radeon 8500 Video card. I don't use the ATI card for any 3-D work while running linux (not yet anyways) and could use that 128 MB space for something else. My EDA processes routinely go over that 1GB memory limit and swaps all the time.
Actually, what could also be useful is if the GPU could be used as a co-processor for other tasks (besides the obvious "can render 3-D graphics" task..). Maybe I could use it to run TOP or something else. It would be interesting to see if anyone can setup a generic C compiler for the pixel/vertex shader and use that as a co-processor here. 20GB/sec bandwith on the GPU could be used here for some really fast SED or AWK or PERL script...:)
speaking of which we're really hoping that AMD would release the hammer ASAP for us EDA users. File sizes can reach dozens of gigs and runtimes of over a week to get the latest grahic chip frequencies to optimize the design to run at 500Mhz instead of 300MHz..
We seriously need cheap & fast 64 bit linux machines for some of the latest generation ASIC designs. It looks like the Itanium is not catching on for EDA. (Why is that? Too expensive? Not enough manufacturers of commodity parts?)
The coding effort to get high-quality shader effects on real materials looks difficult. I guess this is bound to happend with complex pixel shaders.. although I guess renderMonkey would be an better GFx developlement IDE than Visual C++..
Is there any effort by ATI or other vendors to just create a standard library of materials and effects without relying on coding? (ex. "object covered by material Glass 1021" insted of "dot-product sum-add mutliply")
Perhaps the 3-D modeling vendors would incorporate these libraries for artists development while seamlessly being integrated with a game engine in a standard file format that includes vertices/textures/shader algorithms..
For a better sense of proportion, consider the cost of the interrupted play - 500 people in a theatre at $25/ticket, having had the performance ruined by a cell phone ring.
So is $71 (at www.pricewatch.com) for a Radeon 9000 too much to ask? And it will probably be around $50 when DoomIII rolls around. Consider that the Radeon 8500 was $399 exactly one year ago.. Thats a hell of a price drop in one year!
Why not spend the $50 for a new vid card along with the $50 you spend on DoomIII? It should be good for a few more games, as well. I personally don't worry about system requirements when playing the latest games, because the cheap current generation hardware always seems to work fine. That way I never have to spend $400 on the latest generation video card..
By the time the law goes into effect, this is really not going to cost you more than 10 cents.
The DTV tuner will likely be integrated into the existing display controller ASIC in your TV/Monitor as simply an additional 400k gates of circuitry (4 million transistors). This is going to add maybe 1mm^2 in a.06 micron process, which will increase the price of the ASIC by about 10 cents (to about $5). Actually, this price will be offset by eliminating a lot of the traditional analog circuitry in an analog TV. It will eventually be much cheaper to go Digital.
You're going to pay more for the filters/image processors, IDE interface, hard drives, MP4/Real/WMA decoders, broadband interface, etc.. that the ASIC vendors will throw in simply because they're cool and because they're going to have sooo much extra silicon real-estate on these.06 micron processes...
Re:Spielberg annoys to the end
on
Minority Report
·
· Score: 1
I also agree speilberg blows. Although this may be one of his best sci-fi works so far, he's just not good at making Sci-Fi. He takes a perfectly good Philip K. Dick story and make it unnecessarily hollywood. His stories are like dumb Broadway musicals vs serious mind-bending sci-fi. The typical speilberg "wonder... oh!.. explanation.. action!" plot sequences are too mechanical, repetitive and boring.
Why was the over-acting all-seriousness needed in that scene where the PreCog girl tells Cruise to run??
And why not just splice in BladeRunners Chews Eye Shop scene when Tom Cruise goes to get his eyes replaced?
I would have loved if Paul Verhoeven (Total Recall, Robocop, Starship Troopers, etc..) directed this movie instead...:) A second choice would be Ridley Scott, and then maybe James Cameron. Those guys would make you think about the future simply because of their future-in-your-face directorial style.
Its sad that most people will walk away from this movie and will completely forget about the presentation about the future simply because Speilberg has to ruin the flow of the movie by inserting pointless plot devices in an attempt to keep audience attention.
For more impact, have your corporation/employer send in comments expressing why such tariffs would hurt their business. Also drop in a $1000 check for their reelection...
Dude, just learn VHDL (or Verilog). No one is going to hire you because you know JHDL. They WILL hire you because you know VHDL, because that is what people actually use to build chips. You need to be learning stuff that's applicable to solve real-problems. JHDL will not do that, since your company will not be using a PLD or an ASIC synthesis tool that has support for JHDL.
I actually work for one of the large EDA vendors that sells a high-end ASIC synthesis and everything else solution. To me it appears that VHDL and Verilog will both stick around forever. I don't see anything else displacing them as HDL anytime within the next decade, since JHDL and SystemC has no advantage over VHDL or Verilog.
VHDL isn't the hardest thing to learn, either. The process is similiar to making a schematic- start with a library of pre-defined stuff, specify the external interface signals, define your internal state signals, form some groups of logic, and start to build the logic. Look, here's a 64 bit adder that adds every clock cycle:
LIBRARY ieee;
USE ieee.std_logic_1164.all ;
USE ieee.std_logic_unsigned.all ;
ENTITY adder IS PORT (
A : IN std_logic_vector(63 downto 0);
B : IN std_logic_vector(63 downto 0);
SUM : OUT std_logic_vector(63 downto 0);
clk : IN std_logic );
END adder ;
ARCHITECTURE rtl OF adder IS
SIGNAL OPERAND_A : std_logic_vector(63 downto 0);
SIGNAL OPERAND_B : std_logic_vector(63 downto 0);
BEGIN
ADDER_LOGIC : PROCESS (clk) BEGIN
IF (clk'event AND clk = '1') THEN
OPERAND_A <= A ;
OPERAND_B <= B ;
SUM <= OPERAND_A + OPERAND_B ;
END IF ;
END PROCESS ;
END rtl ;
You can build anything you want by sticking with the above framework. Don't worry about what kind of adder you have to build (CLA? CSUM?) Advanced synthesis tools decide that for you once you specify the clock frequency. The more advanced synthesis tools let you design even more complex logic (FIR filters, for example) quite easily as well.
I'm just hoping Nvidia or ATI could at least come out with a good real time Radiosity rendering engine, it seems to be the last peice of detail missing vs. the CGI movies. Displacement mapping would also be very-good-thing, too.
Saves space in my wallet if they can link this ID card to Drivers license, Bank Accounts (cashless society), Credit cards, Discount Programs, Passport/Citizenships...
Actually, you probably wouldn't need an ID card if everywhere you went had computer terminals linked to the system, and all you needed to do was punch in your SS number to bring up your ID.
But man the fraud/abuse potential for such a system... scary!
Have Pakistan & all Islamic countries license all Madrassas and Mosques so they don't teach hate to all the impressionable youth there. I believe Egypt did this in their response to Terrorism.
Also, techniques in Advertising, Marketing, etc., could be more useful here than warfare.
But for now warfare is needed to stabilize the situation.
But it seems like an impossible goal that SSSCA is trying to acheive. They basically want to make copying a file illegal, since all data is pretty much abstracted into the file concept. How the hell are they going to do that?? That'll throw off almost all kinds things in the Computer world, not just Linux. Will Windows itself be illegal because you can copy a file??
Meanwhile, speaking as a hardware design consultant, I really don't feel like putting in triple-DES engine and 2048 bit public key cryptography system wherever I have a readable/writable register in my next Graphics Chip/CPU/Network Processor... Should I just quit and become a lawyer? Stupid fucking lawyers & Congressmen apparently think they're better engineers than the engineers themselves. Good Job with the V-Chip, morons!
Oh well I guess its time to put in more to the EFF, not just a piddly $100, maybe more like $2000. Hopefully the companies that are gonna be affected by this law (Intel, Microsoft, absolutely EVERYONE) will also put in some $$$..
Probably a better analogy is Engine RPM to Processor Clock Speed. RPM x Torque = Horsepower, in the same way the Clock Speed x Instruction per Cycle = Throughput.
You can have a really low torque car, as long as it can Rev high (Acura), or you could just build a low RPM car, as long as it's got a lot of torque (Chevy). Same thing in the end.
When rendering graphics, you can get a 2GHz CPU Pentium that runs 2 flops per cycle, resulting to 4 GFlops of throughput, or you can use a 250MHz ATI Radeon 8500, which probably gets 100 flops per cycle, resulting in 25GFlops.
CPU Speed matters, but it should also be used in context of instructions per cycle. Maybe AMD should just assign a MIPS or FLOPS rating, rather than just MHz. I would find this measurement more useful. This would be equivalent to Chevy advertising Horsepower for their Vette (low RPM, but High Torque) You don't see them advertise their RPM?
Does he get to sell customer mailing list?
on
Dot-com Liquidator
·
· Score: 1
Finding clever references would be interesting if the story was original and clever references were intermittently mixed in. Instead, we have a movie that pretty much is 60% Bladerunner, 15% other non-speilberg movies, 10% Pinocchio short story, 10% other Speilberg movies, and maybe 5% originality. I didn't find anything new in this movie that has not already been presented in other movies.
Slashdot Mirror
The human link may unfortunately be one the hardest links to seal. I'd imagine that DirectTV couldn't possibly have much control of this situation. What's DirecTV supposed to do? Audit the information trail of their documents through the different organizations? Fat chance.. How would your well-established/respected/recognized lawyer react if you asked him to encrypt all your communications with PGP? At best he'd probably think you're being a complete pain-in-the-ass.
It's going to take a lot of human social engineering just to fix this weak link in an overall security system. This effort is probably much more than it would take a hacker to break the system by getting into the inner circle of an organization's political structure, as the Russian kid has demonstrated here. Security requires work effort, and society is just too lazy to naturally implement it.
DirectTV should have never released these very secret documents to their lawyers if they couldn't establish the highest levels of trust.
-bobby
How about this:
Now your low-bitrate files you listen on your headphones through your mobile player can now be stored with larger and higher quality files on your PC for playback on higher quality audio equipment.
Better?
Why couldn't they just put 100 P-4 Laptops w/1-2GB mem each, minus screen & keyboard, and networked with a switch?
Should be a little cheaper, too...
Interstation interference is effectively solved in the Cell phone world by dividing regions into cells and seperating frequencies by cells. Cell methods could be applied to a larger area broadcast, as well. Stations could rent bandwidth on (upgraded) local cell towers, and since it will be digital radio/video, all that the users have to do tune into a station is to select a station call ID, which a digital receiver would be able to pick out among all the stations that it is currently receiving.
The FCC should have at least chosen a different digital modulation scheme, that although may not be backwards compatible, would enable bandwith to open up. I would rather have 500+ channels from multiple local vendors than 20 ClearChannel/ABC owned station all broadcasting the same useless fucking Eminem/Nelly song over and over. Right now the FCC is not taking applications for any more FM radio stations (although thousand try to apply). The move to digital would have allowed more people to enter the market, but instead the FCC didn't open up bandwith using a different scheme.
Also, why a proprietary audio encoding scheme? Why not open source, royalty free Ogg Vorbis? And a good digital encoding scheme doesn't need to have fixed bandwitdh requirements, either - some channels could be 8kbps mono, while other channels could be full 1Mbps surround+data/video, all using the same decoder/tuners.
I think its time to drop AM/FM/VHF/UHF entirely.
Perhaps your current market is all that you should hope for.. Remember there are a lot of bands/artists out there, so what makes you think an expensive promotion campaign will be worthwile and not a waste of money? The market just can't handle a million bands trying to promote themselves over each other.
I would stick with local clubs and parties promoted through friends and contacts performed as a service... You don't need to be famous, and you'll get plenty of chicks that way.
If you really want to promote your band outside radio, I would just burn 10k CD's and hand them out to interesting people at area concerts/clubs with your bands contact info saying you'll do parties and what not. A cheap way to get famous.
It's not that useless. I have 1GB RDRAM and a cheap 128MB ATI Radeon 8500 Video card. I don't use the ATI card for any 3-D work while running linux (not yet anyways) and could use that 128 MB space for something else. My EDA processes routinely go over that 1GB memory limit and swaps all the time.
:)
Actually, what could also be useful is if the GPU could be used as a co-processor for other tasks (besides the obvious "can render 3-D graphics" task..). Maybe I could use it to run TOP or something else. It would be interesting to see if anyone can setup a generic C compiler for the pixel/vertex shader and use that as a co-processor here. 20GB/sec bandwith on the GPU could be used here for some really fast SED or AWK or PERL script...
speaking of which we're really hoping that AMD would release the hammer ASAP for us EDA users. File sizes can reach dozens of gigs and runtimes of over a week to get the latest grahic chip frequencies to optimize the design to run at 500Mhz instead of 300MHz..
We seriously need cheap & fast 64 bit linux machines for some of the latest generation ASIC designs. It looks like the Itanium is not catching on for EDA. (Why is that? Too expensive? Not enough manufacturers of commodity parts?)
It's really just a case of a very large corporation finding out that massive & open file-sharing P2P networks are actually good for their business...
The coding effort to get high-quality shader effects on real materials looks difficult. I guess this is bound to happend with complex pixel shaders.. although I guess renderMonkey would be an better GFx developlement IDE than Visual C++..
Is there any effort by ATI or other vendors to just create a standard library of materials and effects without relying on coding? (ex. "object covered by material Glass 1021" insted of "dot-product sum-add mutliply")
Perhaps the 3-D modeling vendors would incorporate these libraries for artists development while seamlessly being integrated with a game engine in a standard file format that includes vertices/textures/shader algorithms..
-bobby
Well, the proposed fine is $50, not jail time.
For a better sense of proportion, consider the cost of the interrupted play - 500 people in a theatre at $25/ticket, having had the performance ruined by a cell phone ring.
A $50 ticket is reasonable.
So is $71 (at www.pricewatch.com) for a Radeon 9000 too much to ask? And it will probably be around $50 when DoomIII rolls around. Consider that the Radeon 8500 was $399 exactly one year ago.. Thats a hell of a price drop in one year!
Why not spend the $50 for a new vid card along with the $50 you spend on DoomIII? It should be good for a few more games, as well. I personally don't worry about system requirements when playing the latest games, because the cheap current generation hardware always seems to work fine. That way I never have to spend $400 on the latest generation video card..
By the time the law goes into effect, this is really not going to cost you more than 10 cents.
.06 micron process, which will increase the price of the ASIC by about 10 cents (to about $5). Actually, this price will be offset by eliminating a lot of the traditional analog circuitry in an analog TV. It will eventually be much cheaper to go Digital.
.06 micron processes...
The DTV tuner will likely be integrated into the existing display controller ASIC in your TV/Monitor as simply an additional 400k gates of circuitry (4 million transistors). This is going to add maybe 1mm^2 in a
You're going to pay more for the filters/image processors, IDE interface, hard drives, MP4/Real/WMA decoders, broadband interface, etc.. that the ASIC vendors will throw in simply because they're cool and because they're going to have sooo much extra silicon real-estate on these
I also agree speilberg blows. Although this may be one of his best sci-fi works so far, he's just not good at making Sci-Fi. He takes a perfectly good Philip K. Dick story and make it unnecessarily hollywood. His stories are like dumb Broadway musicals vs serious mind-bending sci-fi. The typical speilberg "wonder... oh!.. explanation.. action!" plot sequences are too mechanical, repetitive and boring.
:) A second choice would be Ridley Scott, and then maybe James Cameron. Those guys would make you think about the future simply because of their future-in-your-face directorial style.
Why was the over-acting all-seriousness needed in that scene where the PreCog girl tells Cruise to run??
And why not just splice in BladeRunners Chews Eye Shop scene when Tom Cruise goes to get his eyes replaced?
I would have loved if Paul Verhoeven (Total Recall, Robocop, Starship Troopers, etc..) directed this movie instead...
Its sad that most people will walk away from this movie and will completely forget about the presentation about the future simply because Speilberg has to ruin the flow of the movie by inserting pointless plot devices in an attempt to keep audience attention.
"Take a vacation from yourself!" - Total Rekall
For more impact, have your corporation/employer send in comments expressing why such tariffs would hurt their business. Also drop in a $1000 check for their reelection...
Dude, just learn VHDL (or Verilog). No one is going to hire you because you know JHDL. They WILL hire you because you know VHDL, because that is what people actually use to build chips. You need to be learning stuff that's applicable to solve real-problems. JHDL will not do that, since your company will not be using a PLD or an ASIC synthesis tool that has support for JHDL.
I actually work for one of the large EDA vendors that sells a high-end ASIC synthesis and everything else solution. To me it appears that VHDL and Verilog will both stick around forever. I don't see anything else displacing them as HDL anytime within the next decade, since JHDL and SystemC has no advantage over VHDL or Verilog.
VHDL isn't the hardest thing to learn, either. The process is similiar to making a schematic- start with a library of pre-defined stuff, specify the external interface signals, define your internal state signals, form some groups of logic, and start to build the logic. Look, here's a 64 bit adder that adds every clock cycle:
LIBRARY ieee;
USE ieee.std_logic_1164.all ;
USE ieee.std_logic_unsigned.all ;
ENTITY adder IS PORT (
A : IN std_logic_vector(63 downto 0);
B : IN std_logic_vector(63 downto 0);
SUM : OUT std_logic_vector(63 downto 0);
clk : IN std_logic );
END adder ;
ARCHITECTURE rtl OF adder IS
SIGNAL OPERAND_A : std_logic_vector(63 downto 0);
SIGNAL OPERAND_B : std_logic_vector(63 downto 0);
BEGIN
ADDER_LOGIC : PROCESS (clk) BEGIN
IF (clk'event AND clk = '1') THEN
OPERAND_A <= A ;
OPERAND_B <= B ;
SUM <= OPERAND_A + OPERAND_B ;
END IF ;
END PROCESS ;
END rtl ;
You can build anything you want by sticking with the above framework. Don't worry about what kind of adder you have to build (CLA? CSUM?) Advanced synthesis tools decide that for you once you specify the clock frequency. The more advanced synthesis tools let you design even more complex logic (FIR filters, for example) quite easily as well.
I'm sure they got something planned... :)
I'm just hoping Nvidia or ATI could at least come out with a good real time Radiosity rendering engine, it seems to be the last peice of detail missing vs. the CGI movies. Displacement mapping would also be very-good-thing, too.
Saves space in my wallet if they can link this ID card to Drivers license, Bank Accounts (cashless society), Credit cards, Discount Programs, Passport/Citizenships...
Actually, you probably wouldn't need an ID card if everywhere you went had computer terminals linked to the system, and all you needed to do was punch in your SS number to bring up your ID.
But man the fraud/abuse potential for such a system... scary!
You defeat a bad idea through Education.
Have Pakistan & all Islamic countries license all Madrassas and Mosques so they don't teach hate to all the impressionable youth there. I believe Egypt did this in their response to Terrorism.
Also, techniques in Advertising, Marketing, etc., could be more useful here than warfare.
But for now warfare is needed to stabilize the situation.
But it seems like an impossible goal that SSSCA is trying to acheive. They basically want to make copying a file illegal, since all data is pretty much abstracted into the file concept. How the hell are they going to do that?? That'll throw off almost all kinds things in the Computer world, not just Linux. Will Windows itself be illegal because you can copy a file??
Meanwhile, speaking as a hardware design consultant, I really don't feel like putting in triple-DES engine and 2048 bit public key cryptography system wherever I have a readable/writable register in my next Graphics Chip/CPU/Network Processor... Should I just quit and become a lawyer? Stupid fucking lawyers & Congressmen apparently think they're better engineers than the engineers themselves. Good Job with the V-Chip, morons!
Oh well I guess its time to put in more to the EFF, not just a piddly $100, maybe more like $2000. Hopefully the companies that are gonna be affected by this law (Intel, Microsoft, absolutely EVERYONE) will also put in some $$$..
Probably a better analogy is Engine RPM to Processor Clock Speed. RPM x Torque = Horsepower, in the same way the Clock Speed x Instruction per Cycle = Throughput.
You can have a really low torque car, as long as it can Rev high (Acura), or you could just build a low RPM car, as long as it's got a lot of torque (Chevy). Same thing in the end.
When rendering graphics, you can get a 2GHz CPU Pentium that runs 2 flops per cycle, resulting to 4 GFlops of throughput, or you can use a 250MHz ATI Radeon 8500, which probably gets 100 flops per cycle, resulting in 25GFlops.
CPU Speed matters, but it should also be used in context of instructions per cycle. Maybe AMD should just assign a MIPS or FLOPS rating, rather than just MHz. I would find this measurement more useful. This would be equivalent to Chevy advertising Horsepower for their Vette (low RPM, but High Torque) You don't see them advertise their RPM?
hope not...
Finding clever references would be interesting if the story was original and clever references were intermittently mixed in. Instead, we have a movie that pretty much is 60% Bladerunner, 15% other non-speilberg movies, 10% Pinocchio short story, 10% other Speilberg movies, and maybe 5% originality. I didn't find anything new in this movie that has not already been presented in other movies.