Up until a little over a year or so ago, HP was OEMing their CD-RW and maybe their CD drives from Philips Components' Optical Storage business group. Now that they aren't, and they've actually gotten out of the CD-RW drive business (HP Ditches Add-On CD-RW Market), maybe they will OEM a better mechanism.
Not that I have a particularly strong opinion about Philips...
Unfortunately, I only have a link to the FoxNews site, so excuse the decided lean to the right:
FBI to Broaden Web Wiretapping.
Stewart Baker, an attorney at the Washington D.C.-based Steptoe & Johnson and a former general consul to National Security Agency, said the FBI has plans to change the architecture of the Internet and route traffic through central servers that it would be able to monitor e-mail more easily.
This has been mentioned before, possibly even on slashdot, but it is probably worth repeating. Various comments from people who know suggest that the FBI will probably break the internet in trying to funnel it all through their Carnivore++ setup. If this really comes to pass.
Reading further down in the article, it would seem that the FBI is really just going to lean on AOL, earthlink, yahoo, hotmail/MS, etc to make sure it has unbridled access to email, but who knows for now. In the end, I'm sure it will all work out for the, um, best.
I wonder if (perhaps with prompting from AMD) the memory industry will move to proper SI units, so that you might someday pick up some 268+ Megabyte DDR SDRAM.
You should be modded down for missing the point of my original comment... the issue is not the formatted vs unformatted capacity of the drive, but the new, simpler definition of what a Gigabyte is.
In fact, the caveat on the Apple site points out the conversion factor on its own, without suggesting it has anything to do with formatted vs unformatted capacity.
There has been some controversy (though slight) of late regarding sizing of portable storage, from SanDisk (see their FAQ on this here, search for questions on Compact Flash)
and Viking for compact flash and smart media cards.
Again, it isn't a tremendous issue, but it is perhaps interesting that consumer devices (assuming CF and SM cards are aimed at cameras and mp3 players) appear to be adopting a non-technical definition of what a Gigabyte is.
My time spent with Philips Flat Displays in Philips Components allowed me time to see this and many other LCD-ish technologies. If you look here at the papers about Motion Compensation, that is the stuff I saw, and in fact, our group was working on the drive electronics to make it work. David Parker, one of the authors on a couple of those papers, is a very cool guy, as were all of the guys at PRL in Redhill, England.
Unfortunately, the LCD panel business slipped into commodity mode too quickly, where 15-inch panels and the displays containing them had to be super-cheap, and that was where Philips wanted to be, so we tabled the project. The simulations, though, showed a drastic difference is clarity and response time, resulting in sharp images suitable for television or video gaming.
As an aside, someone asked about applying voltage to get black. This works best with active matrix displays, while passives use the normally-black approach (apply voltage to get white). If you remember your old laptop displays from back then, dark vertical lines in dialog boxes and the like created vertical lines that ran the height of the screen thanks to voltage leaking to all of the dots in a column, which is not a big problem for actives.
There is a lot of cool stuff in the future of displays. LCD tech of today sorta sucks/ Look for some very cool stuff in multidomain displays and OLED/PolyLED displays.
For better or worse, Mr. Zimmermann's comments were in American English, where jihad has come to imply a struggle with more fanatical implications. Our dictionaries are based on common usage and common misusage...
Entry number 2 from its definition at
dictionary.com:
A crusade or struggle: "The war against smoking is turning into a jihad against people who smoke" (Fortune).
I would suggest, though, that PZ use something like enduring squabble in place of that other word.
After all of this explosion about crypto and backdoors and limiting the civil liberties of Americans and anyone else we can cause trouble for, it is somewhat ironic (and more than a little tragic) to find that a tremendous amount of information has been gathered through understanding relationships and actions of the perpetrators. This according to the butthead press corps in the US.
This has been pointed out elsewhere, possibly by a congressperson even, but what would our law enforcement agencies do with the tremendous amount of information they are asking to have access to, when they can't properly connect the dots that they already have in plain text right in front of them?
When something like 20 foreign nationals from the same general region of the world get truck driver licenses and apply for hazardous materials hauling permits all within a couple of months of each other, somebody in some FBI office somewhere should ask some questions. There was nothing encrypted in that transaction, and they are only now putting that together.
Besides all of this, bin Laden doesn't even use technology to communicate anymore, having resorted to no-tech messangers to avoid CIA/NSA listening posts. At least that's what our news media is telling us...
"I have got my Umax 1220U scanner working pretty nicely under Linux. I
have a small kernel driver that does control messages and bulk ins and
outs and a usermode program that does all the protocol stuff necessary to
get the scanner to do a scan. It does greyscale and color scans at 75,
150, 300 and 600 dpi and produces PGM or PPM files."
(posting continues at the link above... it is not my posting, but I do have a 1220U and will probably follow up on this myself)
I had an opportunity to see the GLV in operation up close at the offices of SLM in Sunnyvale, and I have to say that they are a great bunch of people with a really great technology.
They had always been proposing it for digital theatre presentations, rear-projection displays, and so-on, and didn't really see a way to get this sort of thing on the desktop in the near term.
I have to concur with some other posts on this thread that a "Triniron Replacement" this most likely is not.
As an aside, during the demo they gave some two years ago, they looped a rather short loop from a ram disk to project onto a wall... they had trouble getting enough moving content that was able to show off their resolution capabilities, since even HDTV content doesn't challenge it. Very cool.
The Apple Cinema Display, the 22-inch one, is made by LG in Korea. LG makes some pretty good stuff, but having worked with LCD panels from LG and Philips for a while, I have to say, I am waiting just a bit longer.
Why?
Two things are coming that will make a big difference in the quality of the display.
Motion-blur compensation electronics to make up for the long change time of an STN dot (try watching a movie with lots of panning across high-contrast scenes on that Apple display and you will see what high mean)
Multi-domain wide viewing angle dot technologies, while will give the viewing angle and image quality you find in CRTs today.
There are other things, like new forms of backlighting that are brighter and longer-lasting,
and new ways of designing the dot layout on the glass. Let's not forget front-lighting, which is already available and makes for a much better image.
Besides all this, LCDs are still expensive and not that great in general. Once LCDs make it into televisions, the production costs will come down as the yields come up (they will have to!), and it may be possible to have a nice, large LCD computer monitor for the price of a large CRT today. It better be possible, anyway.
To this point, one idea is to make flat panels more like X terminals, if you will. Rather than sending a continuous stream of screen updates for a display that is not changing (editting slashdot submissions, for example) is a waste, while sending regions for update might be a way to go.
Scaling, color correction, and so on are already in there, so perhaps more technology to keep the cutting edge prices up will move in there. Perhaps. I personally agree, that graphics cards (or their equivalents) should stay outside the monitor, but who knows what those marketing people will come up with?
Digital flat panels are already serial. They use PanelLink over a metal wire, but the spec includes support for fiber optic cable as well. Actually, if you look at the spec for DDC/EDID data, there is support in the indentification protocol for a IEEE 1394 connection (don't hold me to this, but the I think the first firewire level is supposed to support 640x480 60Hz video).
As for the other stuff, it sounds like you went buzzword-nutty. As prices go down for the displays (plasma television, lcd television, various flat monitors in general), the driving electronics must go down in cost, which means reduction in chip count, and eventually no circuit boards (yes, everything goes on the glass! That's the dream, anyway).
The goal is to have the display be an endpoint, not a point in a chain, so of course USB or 1394 are not the first choices for this sort of thing anyway, even if they were in the running. A reduced-noise, ultra-high speed single-direction channel from the host video source to the display with appropriate hardware for a completely closed and secret encryption system enabling secure content viewing and copy protection are the goals.
Search the web for the work of the Digital Display Work Group (DDWG), and note who the players are...
It's sort of like SDMI for mp3 players. If the MPAA gets behind it, and intel and others get behind it, then eventually, you will just buy a display device that has a decryption-capable chipset inside.
The only reason the MPAA and RIAA haven't been worried as much as they are now is the generational loss issue that makes large-scale content duplication a losing proposition over time. With digital copies (like DAT many years ago), suddenly the millionth copy is as good as the first (or better if you are averaging the price...).
But your question was, how are they gonna sell it to us? Proprietary connectors, encrypted source, and a desire to watch movie content will drive the purchase of new hardware.
The new "Serial Graphics Bus" referred to in this article may actually be a follow-on to the serial digital standards being pushed today for flat panels. Digial Video Interface, Plug n Display, etc, are all in various states of acceptance, and then there is always the fact that Silicon Image owns the patent for PanelLink, which is the link layer protocol that runs on the DVI/PnD connection (Intel is intimately involved in this effort, but does not own anything outright)
Also interesting is the fact that the MPAA is emphatic about an encrypted link from the source (DVD, for example), right to the display... they want to disable any possibility of copying pristine digital content-- you may have heard about this elsewhere... When I worked on flat panel stuff (at Philips, go figure), intel was definitely getting behind such an encrypted link (which would be serial).
Supporting larger, higher-density digital displays with a digital input stream will require better and better connections as well, and if a P4 is needed for better peer-to-peer networking, than certainly intel will find themselves getting involved in some "critical" way here as well.
DVD+RW is supposed to be interoperable with older DVD (you should be able to play a movie on a DVD+RW disc in your component DVD player) while this is not necessarily true of DVD-RAM.
Unfortunately, DVD+RW is an effort worked on by the likes of Sony and Philips (and others), and so it has taken forever (though they are real close now...)
2560/13.04 ~= 196.3 ppi 2048/9.9 ~= 209.4 ppi Avg 202.85 ppi
Also, they do give the physical dimensions of the PROTOTYPE, which must include the glass overhang, sheet metal enclosure, plastic, and whathaveyou. Either way, they (IBM) say specifically at the website I referenced
200 ppi 16.3 inch Active Matrix Liquid Crystal Display
diagonal viewing area
If there's one thing monitor manufacturers know to tell us now, it is the viewable area, which is not the same as monitor dimensions...
Assumeing a 4x3 ratio (which may be incorrect, they don't appear to give the dimensions other than diagonal), and using the Pythagorean theorem
(4x)^2 + (3x)^2 = (16.5)^2
x=3.3
Screen dimensions 13.2"x9.9"
2560/13.2 ~= 193.9 ppi 2048/9.9 ~= 206.8 ppi Average of those two (truncated) values 200.35ppi
Good enough for marketing...
They use pixels/inch in the description, and give all horizontal references to XGA, SXGA, etc, in pixels, not dots, which would be horizontal pixels x 3 for RGB.
This company has come up with a wacky pen/printed-code scheme that allows for all sorts of paper-to-net interaction. From the latter page:
On this paper is the "ANOTO pattern", consisting of very small dots in an imaginary grid. A minute section of the pattern will give you your exact location on the full pattern.
If it works, it would be interesting to play with, to say the least, since (from that same page) "Total pattern size: 73 000 000 000 000 A4 pages"
Slashdot Mirror
Up until a little over a year or so ago, HP was OEMing their CD-RW and maybe their CD drives from Philips Components' Optical Storage business group. Now that they aren't, and they've actually gotten out of the CD-RW drive business (HP Ditches Add-On CD-RW Market), maybe they will OEM a better mechanism.
Not that I have a particularly strong opinion about Philips...
Unfortunately, I only have a link to the FoxNews site, so excuse the decided lean to the right: FBI to Broaden Web Wiretapping.
This has been mentioned before, possibly even on slashdot, but it is probably worth repeating. Various comments from people who know suggest that the FBI will probably break the internet in trying to funnel it all through their Carnivore++ setup. If this really comes to pass.
Reading further down in the article, it would seem that the FBI is really just going to lean on AOL, earthlink, yahoo, hotmail/MS, etc to make sure it has unbridled access to email, but who knows for now. In the end, I'm sure it will all work out for the, um, best.
I wonder if (perhaps with prompting from AMD) the memory industry will move to proper SI units, so that you might someday pick up some 268+ Megabyte DDR SDRAM.
You should be modded down for missing the point of my original comment... the issue is not the formatted vs unformatted capacity of the drive, but the new, simpler definition of what a Gigabyte is.
In fact, the caveat on the Apple site points out the conversion factor on its own, without suggesting it has anything to do with formatted vs unformatted capacity.
There has been some controversy (though slight) of late regarding sizing of portable storage, from SanDisk (see their FAQ on this here, search for questions on Compact Flash) and Viking for compact flash and smart media cards.
Again, it isn't a tremendous issue, but it is perhaps interesting that consumer devices (assuming CF and SM cards are aimed at cameras and mp3 players) appear to be adopting a non-technical definition of what a Gigabyte is.
At the bottom of the tech specs page for the iPod, there is this disclaimer:
Does this mean that the 5 Gig drive is not 5 real gigabytes?
My time spent with Philips Flat Displays in Philips Components allowed me time to see this and many other LCD-ish technologies. If you look here at the papers about Motion Compensation, that is the stuff I saw, and in fact, our group was working on the drive electronics to make it work. David Parker, one of the authors on a couple of those papers, is a very cool guy, as were all of the guys at PRL in Redhill, England.
Unfortunately, the LCD panel business slipped into commodity mode too quickly, where 15-inch panels and the displays containing them had to be super-cheap, and that was where Philips wanted to be, so we tabled the project. The simulations, though, showed a drastic difference is clarity and response time, resulting in sharp images suitable for television or video gaming.
As an aside, someone asked about applying voltage to get black. This works best with active matrix displays, while passives use the normally-black approach (apply voltage to get white). If you remember your old laptop displays from back then, dark vertical lines in dialog boxes and the like created vertical lines that ran the height of the screen thanks to voltage leaking to all of the dots in a column, which is not a big problem for actives.
There is a lot of cool stuff in the future of displays. LCD tech of today sorta sucks/ Look for some very cool stuff in multidomain displays and OLED/PolyLED displays.
Can anyone imagine the trouble and strife Universal would have had to withstand if it had been discovered that they were violating the GPL as well?
For better or worse, Mr. Zimmermann's comments were in American English, where jihad has come to imply a struggle with more fanatical implications. Our dictionaries are based on common usage and common misusage...
Entry number 2 from its definition at dictionary.com:
A crusade or struggle: "The war against smoking is turning into a jihad against people who smoke" (Fortune).
I would suggest, though, that PZ use something like enduring squabble in place of that other word.
After all of this explosion about crypto and backdoors and limiting the civil liberties of Americans and anyone else we can cause trouble for, it is somewhat ironic (and more than a little tragic) to find that a tremendous amount of information has been gathered through understanding relationships and actions of the perpetrators. This according to the butthead press corps in the US.
This has been pointed out elsewhere, possibly by a congressperson even, but what would our law enforcement agencies do with the tremendous amount of information they are asking to have access to, when they can't properly connect the dots that they already have in plain text right in front of them?
When something like 20 foreign nationals from the same general region of the world get truck driver licenses and apply for hazardous materials hauling permits all within a couple of months of each other, somebody in some FBI office somewhere should ask some questions. There was nothing encrypted in that transaction, and they are only now putting that together.
Besides all of this, bin Laden doesn't even use technology to communicate anymore, having resorted to no-tech messangers to avoid CIA/NSA listening posts. At least that's what our news media is telling us...
That makes me wonder... what is the position of the NRA on encryption? Encryption is, afterall, a munition.
http://electricrain.com/lists/archive/linux-usb/20 00/01/msg00092.html
"I have got my Umax 1220U scanner working pretty nicely under Linux. I have a small kernel driver that does control messages and bulk ins and outs and a usermode program that does all the protocol stuff necessary to get the scanner to do a scan. It does greyscale and color scans at 75, 150, 300 and 600 dpi and produces PGM or PPM files."
(posting continues at the link above... it is not my posting, but I do have a 1220U and will probably follow up on this myself)
I had an opportunity to see the GLV in operation up close at the offices of SLM in Sunnyvale, and I have to say that they are a great bunch of people with a really great technology.
They had always been proposing it for digital theatre presentations, rear-projection displays, and so-on, and didn't really see a way to get this sort of thing on the desktop in the near term.
I have to concur with some other posts on this thread that a "Triniron Replacement" this most likely is not.
As an aside, during the demo they gave some two years ago, they looped a rather short loop from a ram disk to project onto a wall... they had trouble getting enough moving content that was able to show off their resolution capabilities, since even HDTV content doesn't challenge it. Very cool.
The Apple Cinema Display, the 22-inch one, is made by LG in Korea. LG makes some pretty good stuff, but having worked with LCD panels from LG and Philips for a while, I have to say, I am waiting just a bit longer.
Why?
Two things are coming that will make a big difference in the quality of the display.
There are other things, like new forms of backlighting that are brighter and longer-lasting, and new ways of designing the dot layout on the glass. Let's not forget front-lighting, which is already available and makes for a much better image.
Besides all this, LCDs are still expensive and not that great in general. Once LCDs make it into televisions, the production costs will come down as the yields come up (they will have to!), and it may be possible to have a nice, large LCD computer monitor for the price of a large CRT today. It better be possible, anyway.
To this point, one idea is to make flat panels more like X terminals, if you will. Rather than sending a continuous stream of screen updates for a display that is not changing (editting slashdot submissions, for example) is a waste, while sending regions for update might be a way to go.
Scaling, color correction, and so on are already in there, so perhaps more technology to keep the cutting edge prices up will move in there. Perhaps. I personally agree, that graphics cards (or their equivalents) should stay outside the monitor, but who knows what those marketing people will come up with?
Digital flat panels are already serial. They use PanelLink over a metal wire, but the spec includes support for fiber optic cable as well. Actually, if you look at the spec for DDC/EDID data, there is support in the indentification protocol for a IEEE 1394 connection (don't hold me to this, but the I think the first firewire level is supposed to support 640x480 60Hz video).
As for the other stuff, it sounds like you went buzzword-nutty. As prices go down for the displays (plasma television, lcd television, various flat monitors in general), the driving electronics must go down in cost, which means reduction in chip count, and eventually no circuit boards (yes, everything goes on the glass! That's the dream, anyway).
The goal is to have the display be an endpoint, not a point in a chain, so of course USB or 1394 are not the first choices for this sort of thing anyway, even if they were in the running. A reduced-noise, ultra-high speed single-direction channel from the host video source to the display with appropriate hardware for a completely closed and secret encryption system enabling secure content viewing and copy protection are the goals.
Search the web for the work of the Digital Display Work Group (DDWG), and note who the players are...
It's sort of like SDMI for mp3 players. If the MPAA gets behind it, and intel and others get behind it, then eventually, you will just buy a display device that has a decryption-capable chipset inside.
The only reason the MPAA and RIAA haven't been worried as much as they are now is the generational loss issue that makes large-scale content duplication a losing proposition over time. With digital copies (like DAT many years ago), suddenly the millionth copy is as good as the first (or better if you are averaging the price...).
But your question was, how are they gonna sell it to us? Proprietary connectors, encrypted source, and a desire to watch movie content will drive the purchase of new hardware.
The new "Serial Graphics Bus" referred to in this article may actually be a follow-on to the serial digital standards being pushed today for flat panels. Digial Video Interface, Plug n Display, etc, are all in various states of acceptance, and then there is always the fact that Silicon Image owns the patent for PanelLink, which is the link layer protocol that runs on the DVI/PnD connection (Intel is intimately involved in this effort, but does not own anything outright)
Also interesting is the fact that the MPAA is emphatic about an encrypted link from the source (DVD, for example), right to the display... they want to disable any possibility of copying pristine digital content-- you may have heard about this elsewhere... When I worked on flat panel stuff (at Philips, go figure), intel was definitely getting behind such an encrypted link (which would be serial).
Supporting larger, higher-density digital displays with a digital input stream will require better and better connections as well, and if a P4 is needed for better peer-to-peer networking, than certainly intel will find themselves getting involved in some "critical" way here as well.
But all of this is just a guess
DVD+RW is supposed to be interoperable with older DVD (you should be able to play a movie on a DVD+RW disc in your component DVD player) while this is not necessarily true of DVD-RAM.
Unfortunately, DVD+RW is an effort worked on by the likes of Sony and Philips (and others), and so it has taken forever (though they are real close now...)
some stuff at http://www.dvdrw.org/
x=3.26
2560/13.04 ~= 196.3 ppi
2048/9.9 ~= 209.4 ppi
Avg 202.85 ppi
Also, they do give the physical dimensions of the PROTOTYPE, which must include the glass overhang, sheet metal enclosure, plastic, and whathaveyou. Either way, they (IBM) say specifically at the website I referenced
If there's one thing monitor manufacturers know to tell us now, it is the viewable area, which is not the same as monitor dimensions...
Screen size is 16.5 inches DIAGONAL
Assumeing a 4x3 ratio (which may be incorrect, they don't appear to give the dimensions other than diagonal), and using the Pythagorean theorem
(4x)^2 + (3x)^2 = (16.5)^2
x=3.3
Screen dimensions 13.2"x9.9"
2560/13.2 ~= 193.9 ppi
2048/9.9 ~= 206.8 ppi
Average of those two (truncated) values
200.35ppi
Good enough for marketing...
They use pixels/inch in the description, and give all horizontal references to XGA, SXGA, etc, in pixels, not dots, which would be horizontal pixels x 3 for RGB.
So there you go.
This company has come up with a wacky pen/printed-code scheme that allows for all sorts of paper-to-net interaction. From the latter page:
If it works, it would be interesting to play with, to say the least, since (from that same page) "Total pattern size: 73 000 000 000 000 A4 pages"