Airgo actually supplies the chips that go into most of this pre-n gear. I'm pretty sure that the technology that is discussed in the article is an incremental improvement on that technology.
(In full disclosure I did some work with Airgo in 2001 and early 2002, and earned some stock options as a result of that work. Having said that, I haven't had any insider access since that time, which was well, well before they were shipping any product. In fact, I'm so out of the loop that this announcement came as a complete surprise to me, as did their previous announcements that companies were shipping products using their chips.)
I design wireless networks and hardware for a living.
Which makes your lack of knowledge about this stuff a little more disappointing.
not to mention that the algorithm they're probably using only works because 802.11 has fairness problems, will definitely conflict with 802.11n (which also uses MIMO), and has a kook for a CEO.
The cheap personal shot at Mr. Raleigh notwithstanding, you are aware, are you not, that Airgo is one of the primary drivers of the 802.11n standard? This is an extension of the work they are putting into that standard, in fact, and which they are already selling in 802.11-pren products manufactured and sold by Linksys, Belkin, and so forth.
This guy is talking about something no more complex than using four radios at once and he's talking like it's the Second Coming.
MIMO is a heck of a lot more than just using four radios and combining their data rates together. This is about exploiting multipath to improve spectral efficiencies without widening the channel bandwidth.
Other people, who DON'T claim to design wireless hardware, I can forgive for not seeing that this article does a poor job of explaining what MIMO is. You should know better than to assume that they're trying to pass off simple channel bonding as MIMO, if you're really in the business.
Could someone please bonk him with a hardbound copy of the 802.11n standard?
Given he and his cohorts wrote a big chunk of it, I don't think that will be necessary.
This is pre-802.11n stuff, folks.
No, it is actually post-802.11n stuff. They already have their fingers in the 802.11 pie. What this may be, in fact, is an attempt to sway the standards body towards a standard that more closely hews to the Airgo approach, by demonstrating its scalability.
Wait for the real stuff to come out from established vendors who actually contributed to the standard,
This is an even faster system than what Airgo has been selling through Belkin, Linksys, and so forth. The 802.11-pren gear is less than half the speed of this new stuff.
This isn't a channel bonding scheme. The article is a bit misleading when it says that MIMO is"a wireless technique that uses different radio channels to improve both speed and transmission quality."
Yes, it's using different channels, but not in the sense you and I typically think of it, as chunks of spectrum. Rather, it is exploiting multipath, where each path is treated as a separate channel. Multipath is usually a significant problem for traditional wireless communication, because it causes dropouts and frequency nulls and such. But it turns out that if you're clever (and these guys are) you can exploit multipath to shove more data down the same sized pipe.
So in short, they're not hogging spectrum to get these speeds; they are being good neighbors.
EXACTLY. The studios are GREEDY not sadistic. As much as your average Slashdot kiddie hates to admit it, the studios are acting in what they believer, rightly or wrongly, to be their best profit interest.
That means they are NOT going to do anything that INDISPUTABLY would make the format fail. And requiring that a HD-DVD player be connected directly to the Internet at all times would be just that. DivX failed for a reason, and they haven't forgotten that.
In fact, here is what a Fox studio rep recently said about the format:
Speaking only for Fox, we're looking forward to let people view the disc anywhere in the home on a network, or in cars or on business trips," he said. "It's an action item that's desirable, and though implementation hasn't been discussed in an open setting, people can look forward to a lot of flexibility with their content.
Now from the point of view of someone who knows that CSS is cracked and can therefore do whatever the heck they want with their content, the thought is going to be "Gee, thanks for nothing." But from the point of view of Joe Six Pack, this sounds like someone who is trying to provide a lot of flexibility so that we will be willing to accept the new copy protecetion.
This controversial technology would require that disc players maintain permanent connections to content providers via the Internet,
This would be distrurbing if it were correct. Over at the AVS Forum we have been discussing these formats for some time, and representatives of BOTH sides have specifically stated that no internet connection will ever be needed on a standalone player to play a disc.
There have been a number of questions about the viability of BD+ raised, but the notion that standalone players will require Internet connections has been beaten down so many times it's just not funny anymore.
Now having said that, apparently PC-based players will require periodic key renewal. But even these won't require permanent Internet connections. And this is true for BOTH HD formats, because it is part of the AACS standard.
Is it perhaps that in those businesses, 17% and 21% had people using Macs?
That's exactly how it reads to me. That is, if you take all the companies of, say, 250 people or more, pool their employees together, and the count the Macs among them, you'll hit 17%.
I thought more predictability was a GOOD THING in business. And in this case society too. Maybee?
That's the wrong kind of predictability. What a business needs is to be able to predict its market and act accordingly. I see no benefit for the company to have additional costs forced upon it in the name of predictability.
There might be genuine social benefits---though the unemployment rates in France and Germany suggest otherwise---but let's not fool ourselves into thinking it's good for the company to force them to keep resources they don't need.
Speaking as a citizen who votes and pays taxes, exactly what compels me to permit my government to grant you a corporate charter or a business license?
There is a balance of interests here, of course.
Sure, you can prevent IBM from laying people off if you choose. But they will also be less likely to hire in the future, or will hire less than their balance sheet might initially suggest, because the company knows it will have to retain those employees well past their usefulness, thereby increasing their expected cost to the company.
Actually I figure that mathematicians in Hell probably get to see it as well, so they can be tormented by the knowledge of just how inelegant their proofs were.
Re:If you can't see the problem, is there a proble
on
When is 720p Not 720p?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Yep, I have the same thing. The reason, I believe, is because even dropping down to 540p before upscaling to 720p leaves you a LOT more information than standard NTSC. First of all, NTSC is 480i, not 480p---so really it's reasolution is somewhere between 240p-480p due to the losses incurred by interlacing. And secondly, 1080i content has only 540 lines of chroma resolution anyway; you're really only losing luminance information. (Not to minimize that---luminance is the most important component---it's just that we're losing less that you might initially think.)
If you've ever seen high-def on a 480p EDTV plasma, you'll understand just how superior the picture STILL is compared to 480i NTSC.
Nevertheless, true 1080p deinterlacing is coming down the pike right now. Faroudja, SiliconOptix, and Gennum have all created solutions, and we should begin seeing them in external video processors and displays soon.
I don't think the parent disagrees with you---he's simply pointing out how easily the consequences of violating an NDA can multiply, since the friends are not under contract.
I saw the movie "National Treasure" on a 2048x1080 digital cinema projector. Resolution looked fine to me; it was the contrast level that suffered a bit. But overall, the image was as good as you typically get from a mainstream theater.
Subject says it all. There's something fishy about a feature film at 1080p24 compressed "losslessly" down to 100GB. That's 573GB (yes, bytes) per hour uncomrpessed, assuming 24 bits per pixel. Even D5 compression isn't lossless, and that's 5:1.
Agreed---the lack of a docking station is the single biggest shortcoming of the Powerbook IMO. My wife has a Bookendz docking station, and because it is a kludge we're always having to jimmy it to make sure it's fully docked and all the ports are connected. But now that they're putting so many ports on the sides of the computer, it's going to be pretty hard for the Bookendz folks to come through. In contrast I plop my Thinkpad down on a port replicator and suddenly I'm connected to a USB hub with several devices, a display, Ethernet, speakers, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Airgo actually supplies the chips that go into most of this pre-n gear. I'm pretty sure that the technology that is discussed in the article is an incremental improvement on that technology.
And Linksys, and Netgear, and Buffalo..
No, they're not late at all.
(In full disclosure I did some work with Airgo in 2001 and early 2002, and earned some stock options as a result of that work. Having said that, I haven't had any insider access since that time, which was well, well before they were shipping any product. In fact, I'm so out of the loop that this announcement came as a complete surprise to me, as did their previous announcements that companies were shipping products using their chips.)
I design wireless networks and hardware for a living.
Which makes your lack of knowledge about this stuff a little more disappointing.
not to mention that the algorithm they're probably using only works because 802.11 has fairness problems, will definitely conflict with 802.11n (which also uses MIMO), and has a kook for a CEO.
The cheap personal shot at Mr. Raleigh notwithstanding, you are aware, are you not, that Airgo is one of the primary drivers of the 802.11n standard? This is an extension of the work they are putting into that standard, in fact, and which they are already selling in 802.11-pren products manufactured and sold by Linksys, Belkin, and so forth.
This guy is talking about something no more complex than using four radios at once and he's talking like it's the Second Coming.
MIMO is a heck of a lot more than just using four radios and combining their data rates together. This is about exploiting multipath to improve spectral efficiencies without widening the channel bandwidth.
Other people, who DON'T claim to design wireless hardware, I can forgive for not seeing that this article does a poor job of explaining what MIMO is. You should know better than to assume that they're trying to pass off simple channel bonding as MIMO, if you're really in the business.
Could someone please bonk him with a hardbound copy of the 802.11n standard?
Given he and his cohorts wrote a big chunk of it, I don't think that will be necessary.
This is pre-802.11n stuff, folks.
No, it is actually post-802.11n stuff. They already have their fingers in the 802.11 pie. What this may be, in fact, is an attempt to sway the standards body towards a standard that more closely hews to the Airgo approach, by demonstrating its scalability.
Wait for the real stuff to come out from established vendors who actually contributed to the standard,
That would include Airgo, actually.
This is an even faster system than what Airgo has been selling through Belkin, Linksys, and so forth. The 802.11-pren gear is less than half the speed of this new stuff.
Yes, it's using different channels, but not in the sense you and I typically think of it, as chunks of spectrum. Rather, it is exploiting multipath, where each path is treated as a separate channel. Multipath is usually a significant problem for traditional wireless communication, because it causes dropouts and frequency nulls and such. But it turns out that if you're clever (and these guys are) you can exploit multipath to shove more data down the same sized pipe.
So in short, they're not hogging spectrum to get these speeds; they are being good neighbors.
That means they are NOT going to do anything that INDISPUTABLY would make the format fail. And requiring that a HD-DVD player be connected directly to the Internet at all times would be just that. DivX failed for a reason, and they haven't forgotten that.
In fact, here is what a Fox studio rep recently said about the format:Now from the point of view of someone who knows that CSS is cracked and can therefore do whatever the heck they want with their content, the thought is going to be "Gee, thanks for nothing." But from the point of view of Joe Six Pack, this sounds like someone who is trying to provide a lot of flexibility so that we will be willing to accept the new copy protecetion.
This controversial technology would require that disc players maintain permanent connections to content providers via the Internet,
This would be distrurbing if it were correct. Over at the AVS Forum we have been discussing these formats for some time, and representatives of BOTH sides have specifically stated that no internet connection will ever be needed on a standalone player to play a disc.
There have been a number of questions about the viability of BD+ raised, but the notion that standalone players will require Internet connections has been beaten down so many times it's just not funny anymore.
Now having said that, apparently PC-based players will require periodic key renewal. But even these won't require permanent Internet connections. And this is true for BOTH HD formats, because it is part of the AACS standard.
Is it perhaps that in those businesses, 17% and 21% had people using Macs?
That's exactly how it reads to me. That is, if you take all the companies of, say, 250 people or more, pool their employees together, and the count the Macs among them, you'll hit 17%.
Q: How can Google afford to give away so much for free?
A: Volume.
As a pro photographer, I'm bothered by this, though admittedly I haven't done b/w darkroom work in years.
Umm, isn't that exactly the problem? What are they supposed to do, just keep making it to satisfy your sense of nostalgia, even if you never buy it?
I thought more predictability was a GOOD THING in business. And in this case society too. Maybee?
That's the wrong kind of predictability. What a business needs is to be able to predict its market and act accordingly. I see no benefit for the company to have additional costs forced upon it in the name of predictability.
There might be genuine social benefits---though the unemployment rates in France and Germany suggest otherwise---but let's not fool ourselves into thinking it's good for the company to force them to keep resources they don't need.
Speaking as a citizen who votes and pays taxes, exactly what compels me to permit my government to grant you a corporate charter or a business license?
There is a balance of interests here, of course.
Sure, you can prevent IBM from laying people off if you choose. But they will also be less likely to hire in the future, or will hire less than their balance sheet might initially suggest, because the company knows it will have to retain those employees well past their usefulness, thereby increasing their expected cost to the company.
Actually I figure that mathematicians in Hell probably get to see it as well, so they can be tormented by the knowledge of just how inelegant their proofs were.
Yep, I have the same thing. The reason, I believe, is because even dropping down to 540p before upscaling to 720p leaves you a LOT more information than standard NTSC. First of all, NTSC is 480i, not 480p---so really it's reasolution is somewhere between 240p-480p due to the losses incurred by interlacing. And secondly, 1080i content has only 540 lines of chroma resolution anyway; you're really only losing luminance information. (Not to minimize that---luminance is the most important component---it's just that we're losing less that you might initially think.)
If you've ever seen high-def on a 480p EDTV plasma, you'll understand just how superior the picture STILL is compared to 480i NTSC.
Nevertheless, true 1080p deinterlacing is coming down the pike right now. Faroudja, SiliconOptix, and Gennum have all created solutions, and we should begin seeing them in external video processors and displays soon.
We all know what happens when people travel back in time and change the past. We've seen the Back to the Future series.
So if there IS ever a time-traveler's convention, it will be held at some point in the future AFTER time travel has been perfected.
Nor one who constantly casts Hayden Christiansen.
I once typed "rm -rf .*" in a directory just below root on an Ultrix system. Turns out it matched "..", descended into root, and blew it away.
Nor did CowboyNeal, apparently.
I don't think the parent disagrees with you---he's simply pointing out how easily the consequences of violating an NDA can multiply, since the friends are not under contract.
I saw the movie "National Treasure" on a 2048x1080 digital cinema projector. Resolution looked fine to me; it was the contrast level that suffered a bit. But overall, the image was as good as you typically get from a mainstream theater.
Duh, you are right, I should have read the article. The poster dropped the "visually" term.
Of course you are right about the marketspeak. Some of the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray testing has revealed flaws even in D5 (5:1).
Subject says it all. There's something fishy about a feature film at 1080p24 compressed "losslessly" down to 100GB. That's 573GB (yes, bytes) per hour uncomrpessed, assuming 24 bits per pixel. Even D5 compression isn't lossless, and that's 5:1.
Actually, you and he agree on the benefits of a single company-wide OS. You just disagree on which one should be used :)
Agreed---the lack of a docking station is the single biggest shortcoming of the Powerbook IMO. My wife has a Bookendz docking station, and because it is a kludge we're always having to jimmy it to make sure it's fully docked and all the ports are connected. But now that they're putting so many ports on the sides of the computer, it's going to be pretty hard for the Bookendz folks to come through. In contrast I plop my Thinkpad down on a port replicator and suddenly I'm connected to a USB hub with several devices, a display, Ethernet, speakers, etc.
They must not be as secure as you say, because these installers are having a bear of a time with them. DVI is solid.