Agreed, seems to me though that most lawyers would kick us pretty quickly. I do not get the impression that lawyers want smart thoughtful people on a jury. If one side wanted you the other side would certainly likely NOT want you. Yeah, I watch ALL of the CSIs but I spend half my time bitching about the inaccuracies - watching it now actually!
That said, sounds to me like some pretty good questions were raised in this case and Hans couldn't explain them away nor could his lawyer. Perhaps if his wife is found alive he'll be more convincing but somehow I think it more likely a body will be found not far from his home - a shame really.
I find it odd you weren't modded up for this - a shame I have no mod points today. You've actually raised some interesting points - these folks are all so happy to take ideas until the shoe is on the other foot:-)
"Sorry, the OS doesn't really make any difference (assuming you have a firewall - which all current operating systems do - to protect against buffer overflows found on inbound ports). What makes the difference is secure users."
Did you just say that the firewall protects against buffer overflows on inbound ports? Block traffic? Yes. Permit traffic? Yes. Inspect for buffer overflows?..... FAIL! What O/S stopped the WMF exploit? What firewall blocked any of the numerous Flash vulns? I could go on... Did those require you to click on anything? Suggest you do a little further research before being so confident in not being infected without "doing anything" as you're a bit naive. I suspect the RE you claim to been doing could use a little work as well. Hope a network isn't relying on it somewhere.
Article is down so not able to read it but I believe you are correct. Any request to elevate privs is supposed to pop a UAC. A program sans manifest will also pop it - Vista apparently assumes if there's no manifest then the program wasn't written for Vista. Add a manifest and no UAC unless elevated privs are requested, just set it to use existing privs. Installing a service is going to need privs ergo a UAC. UAC working as designed it seems. How is this HomeLand exactly? Find a backdoor in BitLocker, then maybe I'll accept Govt. interference...
You really might want to look into just who owns the various "news outlets" in our country. Hint: they are no longer Mom and Pop shops that actually care about informing you. The chances of the RIAA or MPIAA being called out for shenanigans is just about ZERO - they woul dbe reporting upon themselves.
What would change is that you would actually have a better understanding as to what you were talking about vs simply making broad assumptions with ZERO experience. You start by assuming that air and water systems work at the same efficiency and that mounting the radiator inside the case somehow puts them there. This is not true, had you actually worked with any of this you would know how well it works even with a radiator in the case.
But hey, all of the various big guys moving to water to cool their large systems must be stupid and you know better since you grasp thermodynamics better than they do. And better than all of the folks who are documenting serious temp drops and higher overclocks using water cooling. They must all be going to this trouble for no real gain right?
Don't bother to post back with more assumptions on the thermodynamics involved, experience trumps theory.
Swiftech makes a system you might be interested in that's also self contained. The pump sits right on top of the CPU and the heat exchanger fits where your 120mm exhaust fan is normally mounted. I'm not using it and would only consider it if I were cooling my vid card too but a friend is using it and REALLY likes it - trouble free install on his box.
Intel and AMD systems are also using heat pipes just like the Shuttle XPCs and have been for a year or three now. All of the best "air" heatsinks I am aware of use some liquid in them in the same fashion. Shuttle just managed to build it such that the radiator was a little further divorced from the heatsource is all.
The clear plastic "bling" tubing is often medical grade and guess what? Over time liquid EVAPS from such systems. How? It actually manages to be absorbed by the tubing and slowly dissipate into the air, which is why this system uses a different kind of tubing and why they highlighted it's lack of evaporation issues. You haven't run a liquid cooled rig have you?
Oh and plain old water is a BAD idea in a liquid cooled PC. For one it tends to oxidize things like copper heatsinks over time and for another you get biological growth that QUICKLY kills cooling performance as the heatsinks are covered in slime. Figure two weeks on plain water before it all goes to hell. Those "bling" dyes you see are generally antibio agents too. Chlorine bleach is also effective but has other side effects, I for one prefer Water Wetter for a multitude of reasons.
The biggest issue with running a datacenter on 40C ambient air with big fans blowing it in and out the doors is that air cooling is so inefficient that the cooled components would overheat as they pick up so little temp drop from AIR. 40C WATER cooling on the other hand would bring those CPU and HDD temps down a good bit.
You're failing to understand just how much better water transfers heat vs air.
This is actually pretty amusing as when I setup my home office I designed much the same thing! Sadly I didn't put it into place but indeed it would have worked quite well I'm sure. Radiator in the crawlspace, temp sensed electric cooling fan mounted on radiator - Ford Taurus fan most likely. Copper or PVC piping up through the floor into the office in a loop with a shutoff valve in the middle to regulate bypass flow. An agro pump to move the liquid or perhaps a small pool pump. Fittings on the pipe mounted to the wall to allow lossless connection and disconnection of cooling fittings for computers. Water blocks on computers are cheap enough and no pump would be needed nor radiator inside the case. Concerns were mostly surrounding filling it, purging it, and maintaining the radiator in the crawlspace which is tight. Google a bit and you'll find a guy who DID build a system like I had intended, only his "radiator" is his swimming pool - seriously!
In the end the SO veto'd my system and the work\mess would've been a hassle but it was QUITE doable. I've built systems smaller than this and was doing it 10 years ago with Peltiers to boot in order to overclock at near freezing temps. The primary advantage I found to this was not just that it cooled so well but that it allowed me to move the heat exchange *away* from my computer. When my home office was WAY small temps climbed enough that the air exiting would trigger my thermostat - in Winter the house was cold, Summer it was freezing - except in the office.
When I water cooled my hottest computer the radiator was placed outside my window with a small fan - temps IN my office dropped dramatically as did the dB level and the CPU ran COLDER than ever. Ambient temp outside is often low enough compared to a blazing hot CPU that the temp drop is awesome. 90F outside is no biggie when your CPU inside is pushing 50+C - as my quad is next to me right now. Lots of industrial tech exists to chill water far cooler than ambient temp outside too and some datacenters likely already use it for their A/C today.
These days I water cool only a little having lost hardware to water leaks over the years - twice to be exact. I do have a system on my desk waiting to be resuscitated that ran for 2 years nearly trouble free - yes normal tubing allows evap BTW but this one was retired because it's older not from coolant loss. I am a firm believer in using water, I will use it again, but it IS more trouble and each new damned video card requires a different block than the last at notable cost. The temp drops you achieve are amazing - especially on today's hot video cards. New systems built like the one in this story and the new Swiftech stuff make water easier for laypeople who don't want maintenance.
Anyway, what I have learned with my own systems I believe can be used in a datacenter to advantage. The primary thing I've learned being that the heat exchange can be efficiently made "elsewhere" and not someplace where exchange from one machine effects another. I'd also imagine it might be nice to be able to walk into a datacenter and not sweat hearing protection as much!
Again I will point out that they didn't think they were infringing before but were found to be. Time will tell but if it were this easy one wonders why the new code was only deployed just six months ago - this suit has been far longer running.
I wasn't responding to the specific patent claim any more than the previous poster was. He claimed TIVO did nothing non-obvious and I'd say that the "obvious" ideas the likes of DISH and Direct are using in their own hardware blow, as do the various cable boxes out there. TIVO did it better and DISH built an inferior version\COPY that they claimed was just as good. Literally I might add - DISH reps stated that to me when I switched and so did Direct when I dropped their ass.
What exactly makes you think that the Echostar update claim clears them? These are the same people that claimed there was no infringement in the first place - and lost repeatedly. What would you expect them to tell their users exactly?
Thank you for saving me the trouble of explaining this! I'd point out that had TIVO simply patented what already existed and was being used by kids in a college dorm that they would never have been able to get their patent in the first place. In theory anyway. TIVO wasn't selling anything until 1997 so clearly prior art, had their patent been so simplistic, would've been easy enough to dig up for this court case - and yet wasn't.
You also do not see TIVO going after any of the software companies that make this sort of software nor have they bitched about MythTV to my knowledge - funny that. TIVO is probably one of the very few cases that make me think that perhaps software patents have some use. I'm still not convinced but for now they exist and DISH were asses about it, time to pay up. Do some digging and you'll see that DISH was no angel in this.
Nothing non-obvious? So then you thought of it first? Wow! Oh wait - you didn't?! Then sit down and shut up.
I've seen\used the other DVRs that are apparently also using the same "obvious" ideas and they SUCK while using a TIVO is actually pretty good. Gee, why is that? Could it be because TIVO has had incentive to innovate and not just give us a VCR with the tape swapped for a HDD? Perhaps because they are divorced from the service providers tit and have to work to get customers?
I like my service providing companies hungry thanks. Wake me when a providers "PVR" is worth a shit.
They used to, they are now moving to an MP4 format for some of their HD with plans to move all of their HD to it eventually. The DTIVO boxes will be unable to decode this and their HD boxes will also be obsolete. I was going to move to HD but refused for over a year after getting an HD TV because I didn't want to be trapped in this morass (I had DTIVOs). I ended up waiting long enough that FIOS came along and saved me - I now have a TIVO HD and CableCards - very happy!
I have now had two friends BEG me to fix their DTIVO boxes when drives have gone bad. See when you contact Direct they send you their own PVR as a replacement - it sucks! So after a week or three of dealing with it MY phone rings with a buddy begging to have me try to repair it. So far it's all been HDD issues and I've been successful, I also have a closet of old receivers if worse comes to worse.
So yeah, Direct was smart and signed licensing but fucking stupid to not continue to license and use the full software. I was with them for over 5 years and with DISH for as long before that until I discovered what a joy PVRs were (had\have a replay). I'd have stuck with them too since I happen to hate Verizon but they left TIVO and I left them - and said as much when retention tried to keep us. Oh well!
Umm, Direct has some licensing going on and ComCast has also licensed TIVO software from TIVO and is starting to load it on some of their own DVR STB hardware with future plans to roll it out. As for making TIVO look bad, TIVO built some innovative software and patented it. DISH *knew* this, even looked at their software to use it themselves maybe, but afterwards decided to build their own. Like them or not the software patent was there and DISH infringed, worse they built SHITTY software for which I left their service and got a DTIVO from Direct until they fucked up. Now I use a TIVO HD on FIOS, love it. ComCast and Direct are in the clear, TIVO has their asses and they have been trying to bleed TIVO dry in hopes of not paying - their time is running out.
It's easy with 20:20 hindsight to say that all of this stuff is obvious and shouldn't have been patented. Usually the person who says this didn't manage to think of it themselves first though. I agree that software patents are an issue but if TIVO didn't have them then one of the first guys to build and innovate in this market would've been long gone by now replaced by lots of mediocre clone boxes from the various "providers". I obviously love TIVO despite some of their more questionable moves and my dislike for software patents.
Umm, AMD copies Intel? You might to go back and have a peek at the whole CoreDuo crap Intel released. AMD's technology for multiple cores is or at least was better.
Sadly AMD's CPU simply aren't fast enough and they aren't on 45nm yet like Intel. The E8400 I've got hits 4Ghz but under lengthy load isn't quite stable - 3.8Ghz is stable for 20+ hour transcoding runs. Want to bet AMD's quad clocked as high as it can go couldn't beat it? The new Intel quad cores are clocking 3.4Ghz to 3.6Ghz and smoke the AMD CPUs. The 65nm Q6600 I have hits just over 3Ghz, not bad. The really crappy thing is I own a pile of AMD stock, bought because I believed in their technology. Ooops!
I've got the same board on Ubuntu 7.10 and got pretty frustrated with it. An NVIDIA 8600 card is now in it and it's running much better. If I could get the onboard stuff working well and pass SOUND over that HDMI I might pull the 8600. Are you playing back any HD video on it? Tried XBMC for Linux on it? It performed poorly with the Ubuntu drivers I had when I tried it. I'm no Linux pro and looking over the Intel driver page I was pretty confused. The Ubuntu drivers didn't cut it Any trouble getting that working?
I'm running Linux and have multithreaded decoding of H.264 - works GREAT! CABAC patch to FFMPEG is apparently what does it and no my movies don't have funky stuff done to them during encoding. Lots of converted HD-DVD and one BD so far. Take a look at XBMC on Linux to see this in action. The developers there can tell you more about what they had to do. I see multicore decoding on more than just H.264 too....
Depends on WHAT audio you want to pass. Even SPID/F doesn't have the bandwidth to pass several of the new audio CODECs. TrueHD anyone?
I have an Intel P35 or whatever ASUS board with an HDMI out, I don't use it as the Intel drivers and well just the video chipset itself sucks. For now I use an NVIDIA 8600 with an HDMI out but duh no audio on Linux. CABAC multithread H.264 decoding is awesome but I'd prefer to see the video card doing it. ENVY helps with the NVIDIA drivers BTW, the Ubuntu drivers in the repository are OLD.
Amen! I use a decent set of headphones, USB at that. Then I don't disturb the woman and I've not spent but a few bux. If I want GOOD sound from my HTPC that's as simple as hooking the optical output to my receiver - problem solved. I know it cannot do that super high end audio tracks and that HDMI is required for that but in my small living room this rocks - I don't need 7.1 worth of speakers.
To each their own, I'm just glad someone is going to perhaps provide some competition and hopefully some decent DRIVERS. Even on Windows Creative has sucked for YEARS and removing their crap damn near takes an act of GOD or a custom program written by a 3rd party. If I see Creative listed as the onboard sound for a board I'm considering I put it at the bottom of the list and if I'm forced to buy it I disable the thing in the BIOS straight away. A real shame Creative lost their way, all the better it's ASUS as I've had good luck lately with their hardware.
It's been cracked by Slysoft's AnyDVD-HD, including BD+. I rip it with eac3to to a MKV with an AC3 soundtrack, compress it using meGUI and X.266, then mux them back with MKVmerge. This is much the same as how I do HD-DVDs with some slight tweaks. Here's the process for HD-DVD which ought to help get you started on BD -> http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=135361
One thing to be aware of - a file on HD-DVD would max at about 21Gigs, files on BD are coming off at as much as 40+gigs. They also have some seamless scene changing that allows them to have multiple versions of a movie on the same disk. This means that instead of 1-3files like an HD-DVD you might have say 20 on a fancy BD. Stitching these together is doable in eac3to but figuring out the order for the stream you wanted, say theatrical vs director's cut, is a PITA....
Anyway, when done my BD and HD-DVD are about 13-15Gigs MAX and play VERY nice using XBMC on Linux. GL and feel free to ask questions on Doom9, Slysoft's forums, and on the AVS foprums - lots of info out there. I'm buying up HD-DVD like mad right now:-)
Oh I DO know them and Gutmann is Chicken Little when it comes to Vista! You're talking about a guy who hasn't even actually USED the OS yet goes on and on and on about "tilt bits" he's dreamed up from whitepapers! What a complete crock of crap. If these tilt bits are half the problem he claims I wouldn't be able to play high quality HD video on my Vista box without praying to the DRM gods. And yet I and many *many* others have no problems whatsoever ripping high def video and playing it. So much for reducing the content to the snowy resolution produced from analog TVs huh?
Gutmann is full of it when it comes to Vista, it's not even funny. How many times is he going change that paper of his? You do know he didn't just publish it and leave it alone right? That it's gone through a few iterations? Every time someone debunks him he throws a fit too, it's a riot. Do a little research for yourself, maybe even USE the O/S, and you'll find that he doesn't know what he's talking about. Pretty damned amusing that every time someone talks about DRM and Vista they trot out his pile of steaming dung like it's gospel neverminding that no one takes him seriously. Think for yourself and do some independent research. He put just enough truth in that document to get people to nod their heads, sadly in the end most of it was worthless FUD.
Agreed, seems to me though that most lawyers would kick us pretty quickly. I do not get the impression that lawyers want smart thoughtful people on a jury. If one side wanted you the other side would certainly likely NOT want you. Yeah, I watch ALL of the CSIs but I spend half my time bitching about the inaccuracies - watching it now actually!
That said, sounds to me like some pretty good questions were raised in this case and Hans couldn't explain them away nor could his lawyer. Perhaps if his wife is found alive he'll be more convincing but somehow I think it more likely a body will be found not far from his home - a shame really.
I find it odd you weren't modded up for this - a shame I have no mod points today. You've actually raised some interesting points - these folks are all so happy to take ideas until the shoe is on the other foot :-)
"Sorry, the OS doesn't really make any difference (assuming you have a firewall - which all current operating systems do - to protect against buffer overflows found on inbound ports). What makes the difference is secure users."
..... FAIL! What O/S stopped the WMF exploit? What firewall blocked any of the numerous Flash vulns? I could go on... Did those require you to click on anything? Suggest you do a little further research before being so confident in not being infected without "doing anything" as you're a bit naive. I suspect the RE you claim to been doing could use a little work as well. Hope a network isn't relying on it somewhere.
Did you just say that the firewall protects against buffer overflows on inbound ports? Block traffic? Yes. Permit traffic? Yes. Inspect for buffer overflows?
Article is down so not able to read it but I believe you are correct. Any request to elevate privs is supposed to pop a UAC. A program sans manifest will also pop it - Vista apparently assumes if there's no manifest then the program wasn't written for Vista. Add a manifest and no UAC unless elevated privs are requested, just set it to use existing privs. Installing a service is going to need privs ergo a UAC. UAC working as designed it seems. How is this HomeLand exactly? Find a backdoor in BitLocker, then maybe I'll accept Govt. interference...
You really might want to look into just who owns the various "news outlets" in our country. Hint: they are no longer Mom and Pop shops that actually care about informing you. The chances of the RIAA or MPIAA being called out for shenanigans is just about ZERO - they woul dbe reporting upon themselves.
What would change is that you would actually have a better understanding as to what you were talking about vs simply making broad assumptions with ZERO experience. You start by assuming that air and water systems work at the same efficiency and that mounting the radiator inside the case somehow puts them there. This is not true, had you actually worked with any of this you would know how well it works even with a radiator in the case.
But hey, all of the various big guys moving to water to cool their large systems must be stupid and you know better since you grasp thermodynamics better than they do. And better than all of the folks who are documenting serious temp drops and higher overclocks using water cooling. They must all be going to this trouble for no real gain right?
Don't bother to post back with more assumptions on the thermodynamics involved, experience trumps theory.
Swiftech makes a system you might be interested in that's also self contained. The pump sits right on top of the CPU and the heat exchanger fits where your 120mm exhaust fan is normally mounted. I'm not using it and would only consider it if I were cooling my vid card too but a friend is using it and REALLY likes it - trouble free install on his box.
Intel and AMD systems are also using heat pipes just like the Shuttle XPCs and have been for a year or three now. All of the best "air" heatsinks I am aware of use some liquid in them in the same fashion. Shuttle just managed to build it such that the radiator was a little further divorced from the heatsource is all.
The clear plastic "bling" tubing is often medical grade and guess what? Over time liquid EVAPS from such systems. How? It actually manages to be absorbed by the tubing and slowly dissipate into the air, which is why this system uses a different kind of tubing and why they highlighted it's lack of evaporation issues. You haven't run a liquid cooled rig have you?
Oh and plain old water is a BAD idea in a liquid cooled PC. For one it tends to oxidize things like copper heatsinks over time and for another you get biological growth that QUICKLY kills cooling performance as the heatsinks are covered in slime. Figure two weeks on plain water before it all goes to hell. Those "bling" dyes you see are generally antibio agents too. Chlorine bleach is also effective but has other side effects, I for one prefer Water Wetter for a multitude of reasons.
You haven't actually ever built and run a water cooled rig have you?
The biggest issue with running a datacenter on 40C ambient air with big fans blowing it in and out the doors is that air cooling is so inefficient that the cooled components would overheat as they pick up so little temp drop from AIR. 40C WATER cooling on the other hand would bring those CPU and HDD temps down a good bit.
You're failing to understand just how much better water transfers heat vs air.
This is actually pretty amusing as when I setup my home office I designed much the same thing! Sadly I didn't put it into place but indeed it would have worked quite well I'm sure. Radiator in the crawlspace, temp sensed electric cooling fan mounted on radiator - Ford Taurus fan most likely. Copper or PVC piping up through the floor into the office in a loop with a shutoff valve in the middle to regulate bypass flow. An agro pump to move the liquid or perhaps a small pool pump. Fittings on the pipe mounted to the wall to allow lossless connection and disconnection of cooling fittings for computers. Water blocks on computers are cheap enough and no pump would be needed nor radiator inside the case. Concerns were mostly surrounding filling it, purging it, and maintaining the radiator in the crawlspace which is tight. Google a bit and you'll find a guy who DID build a system like I had intended, only his "radiator" is his swimming pool - seriously!
In the end the SO veto'd my system and the work\mess would've been a hassle but it was QUITE doable. I've built systems smaller than this and was doing it 10 years ago with Peltiers to boot in order to overclock at near freezing temps. The primary advantage I found to this was not just that it cooled so well but that it allowed me to move the heat exchange *away* from my computer. When my home office was WAY small temps climbed enough that the air exiting would trigger my thermostat - in Winter the house was cold, Summer it was freezing - except in the office.
When I water cooled my hottest computer the radiator was placed outside my window with a small fan - temps IN my office dropped dramatically as did the dB level and the CPU ran COLDER than ever. Ambient temp outside is often low enough compared to a blazing hot CPU that the temp drop is awesome. 90F outside is no biggie when your CPU inside is pushing 50+C - as my quad is next to me right now. Lots of industrial tech exists to chill water far cooler than ambient temp outside too and some datacenters likely already use it for their A/C today.
These days I water cool only a little having lost hardware to water leaks over the years - twice to be exact. I do have a system on my desk waiting to be resuscitated that ran for 2 years nearly trouble free - yes normal tubing allows evap BTW but this one was retired because it's older not from coolant loss. I am a firm believer in using water, I will use it again, but it IS more trouble and each new damned video card requires a different block than the last at notable cost. The temp drops you achieve are amazing - especially on today's hot video cards. New systems built like the one in this story and the new Swiftech stuff make water easier for laypeople who don't want maintenance.
Anyway, what I have learned with my own systems I believe can be used in a datacenter to advantage. The primary thing I've learned being that the heat exchange can be efficiently made "elsewhere" and not someplace where exchange from one machine effects another. I'd also imagine it might be nice to be able to walk into a datacenter and not sweat hearing protection as much!
Again I will point out that they didn't think they were infringing before but were found to be. Time will tell but if it were this easy one wonders why the new code was only deployed just six months ago - this suit has been far longer running.
I wasn't responding to the specific patent claim any more than the previous poster was. He claimed TIVO did nothing non-obvious and I'd say that the "obvious" ideas the likes of DISH and Direct are using in their own hardware blow, as do the various cable boxes out there. TIVO did it better and DISH built an inferior version\COPY that they claimed was just as good. Literally I might add - DISH reps stated that to me when I switched and so did Direct when I dropped their ass.
What exactly makes you think that the Echostar update claim clears them? These are the same people that claimed there was no infringement in the first place - and lost repeatedly. What would you expect them to tell their users exactly?
Thank you for saving me the trouble of explaining this! I'd point out that had TIVO simply patented what already existed and was being used by kids in a college dorm that they would never have been able to get their patent in the first place. In theory anyway. TIVO wasn't selling anything until 1997 so clearly prior art, had their patent been so simplistic, would've been easy enough to dig up for this court case - and yet wasn't.
You also do not see TIVO going after any of the software companies that make this sort of software nor have they bitched about MythTV to my knowledge - funny that. TIVO is probably one of the very few cases that make me think that perhaps software patents have some use. I'm still not convinced but for now they exist and DISH were asses about it, time to pay up. Do some digging and you'll see that DISH was no angel in this.
Nothing non-obvious? So then you thought of it first? Wow! Oh wait - you didn't?! Then sit down and shut up.
I've seen\used the other DVRs that are apparently also using the same "obvious" ideas and they SUCK while using a TIVO is actually pretty good. Gee, why is that? Could it be because TIVO has had incentive to innovate and not just give us a VCR with the tape swapped for a HDD? Perhaps because they are divorced from the service providers tit and have to work to get customers?
I like my service providing companies hungry thanks. Wake me when a providers "PVR" is worth a shit.
They used to, they are now moving to an MP4 format for some of their HD with plans to move all of their HD to it eventually. The DTIVO boxes will be unable to decode this and their HD boxes will also be obsolete. I was going to move to HD but refused for over a year after getting an HD TV because I didn't want to be trapped in this morass (I had DTIVOs). I ended up waiting long enough that FIOS came along and saved me - I now have a TIVO HD and CableCards - very happy!
I have now had two friends BEG me to fix their DTIVO boxes when drives have gone bad. See when you contact Direct they send you their own PVR as a replacement - it sucks! So after a week or three of dealing with it MY phone rings with a buddy begging to have me try to repair it. So far it's all been HDD issues and I've been successful, I also have a closet of old receivers if worse comes to worse.
So yeah, Direct was smart and signed licensing but fucking stupid to not continue to license and use the full software. I was with them for over 5 years and with DISH for as long before that until I discovered what a joy PVRs were (had\have a replay). I'd have stuck with them too since I happen to hate Verizon but they left TIVO and I left them - and said as much when retention tried to keep us. Oh well!
Umm, Direct has some licensing going on and ComCast has also licensed TIVO software from TIVO and is starting to load it on some of their own DVR STB hardware with future plans to roll it out. As for making TIVO look bad, TIVO built some innovative software and patented it. DISH *knew* this, even looked at their software to use it themselves maybe, but afterwards decided to build their own. Like them or not the software patent was there and DISH infringed, worse they built SHITTY software for which I left their service and got a DTIVO from Direct until they fucked up. Now I use a TIVO HD on FIOS, love it. ComCast and Direct are in the clear, TIVO has their asses and they have been trying to bleed TIVO dry in hopes of not paying - their time is running out.
It's easy with 20:20 hindsight to say that all of this stuff is obvious and shouldn't have been patented. Usually the person who says this didn't manage to think of it themselves first though. I agree that software patents are an issue but if TIVO didn't have them then one of the first guys to build and innovate in this market would've been long gone by now replaced by lots of mediocre clone boxes from the various "providers". I obviously love TIVO despite some of their more questionable moves and my dislike for software patents.
Umm, AMD copies Intel? You might to go back and have a peek at the whole CoreDuo crap Intel released. AMD's technology for multiple cores is or at least was better.
Sadly AMD's CPU simply aren't fast enough and they aren't on 45nm yet like Intel. The E8400 I've got hits 4Ghz but under lengthy load isn't quite stable - 3.8Ghz is stable for 20+ hour transcoding runs. Want to bet AMD's quad clocked as high as it can go couldn't beat it? The new Intel quad cores are clocking 3.4Ghz to 3.6Ghz and smoke the AMD CPUs. The 65nm Q6600 I have hits just over 3Ghz, not bad. The really crappy thing is I own a pile of AMD stock, bought because I believed in their technology. Ooops!
I've got the same board on Ubuntu 7.10 and got pretty frustrated with it. An NVIDIA 8600 card is now in it and it's running much better. If I could get the onboard stuff working well and pass SOUND over that HDMI I might pull the 8600. Are you playing back any HD video on it? Tried XBMC for Linux on it? It performed poorly with the Ubuntu drivers I had when I tried it. I'm no Linux pro and looking over the Intel driver page I was pretty confused. The Ubuntu drivers didn't cut it Any trouble getting that working?
I'm running Linux and have multithreaded decoding of H.264 - works GREAT! CABAC patch to FFMPEG is apparently what does it and no my movies don't have funky stuff done to them during encoding. Lots of converted HD-DVD and one BD so far. Take a look at XBMC on Linux to see this in action. The developers there can tell you more about what they had to do. I see multicore decoding on more than just H.264 too....
http://xbmc.org/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=52/ XBMC needs more deelopers too guys, help them out - it's an awesome project! Now running on Linux, OSX, and Windows using SDL!
Depends on WHAT audio you want to pass. Even SPID/F doesn't have the bandwidth to pass several of the new audio CODECs. TrueHD anyone?
I have an Intel P35 or whatever ASUS board with an HDMI out, I don't use it as the Intel drivers and well just the video chipset itself sucks. For now I use an NVIDIA 8600 with an HDMI out but duh no audio on Linux. CABAC multithread H.264 decoding is awesome but I'd prefer to see the video card doing it. ENVY helps with the NVIDIA drivers BTW, the Ubuntu drivers in the repository are OLD.
C'mon NVIDIA - get with it!
Amen! I use a decent set of headphones, USB at that. Then I don't disturb the woman and I've not spent but a few bux. If I want GOOD sound from my HTPC that's as simple as hooking the optical output to my receiver - problem solved. I know it cannot do that super high end audio tracks and that HDMI is required for that but in my small living room this rocks - I don't need 7.1 worth of speakers.
To each their own, I'm just glad someone is going to perhaps provide some competition and hopefully some decent DRIVERS. Even on Windows Creative has sucked for YEARS and removing their crap damn near takes an act of GOD or a custom program written by a 3rd party. If I see Creative listed as the onboard sound for a board I'm considering I put it at the bottom of the list and if I'm forced to buy it I disable the thing in the BIOS straight away. A real shame Creative lost their way, all the better it's ASUS as I've had good luck lately with their hardware.
It's been cracked by Slysoft's AnyDVD-HD, including BD+. I rip it with eac3to to a MKV with an AC3 soundtrack, compress it using meGUI and X.266, then mux them back with MKVmerge. This is much the same as how I do HD-DVDs with some slight tweaks. Here's the process for HD-DVD which ought to help get you started on BD -> http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=135361
:-)
One thing to be aware of - a file on HD-DVD would max at about 21Gigs, files on BD are coming off at as much as 40+gigs. They also have some seamless scene changing that allows them to have multiple versions of a movie on the same disk. This means that instead of 1-3files like an HD-DVD you might have say 20 on a fancy BD. Stitching these together is doable in eac3to but figuring out the order for the stream you wanted, say theatrical vs director's cut, is a PITA....
Anyway, when done my BD and HD-DVD are about 13-15Gigs MAX and play VERY nice using XBMC on Linux. GL and feel free to ask questions on Doom9, Slysoft's forums, and on the AVS foprums - lots of info out there. I'm buying up HD-DVD like mad right now
Oh I DO know them and Gutmann is Chicken Little when it comes to Vista! You're talking about a guy who hasn't even actually USED the OS yet goes on and on and on about "tilt bits" he's dreamed up from whitepapers! What a complete crock of crap. If these tilt bits are half the problem he claims I wouldn't be able to play high quality HD video on my Vista box without praying to the DRM gods. And yet I and many *many* others have no problems whatsoever ripping high def video and playing it. So much for reducing the content to the snowy resolution produced from analog TVs huh?
Gutmann is full of it when it comes to Vista, it's not even funny. How many times is he going change that paper of his? You do know he didn't just publish it and leave it alone right? That it's gone through a few iterations? Every time someone debunks him he throws a fit too, it's a riot. Do a little research for yourself, maybe even USE the O/S, and you'll find that he doesn't know what he's talking about. Pretty damned amusing that every time someone talks about DRM and Vista they trot out his pile of steaming dung like it's gospel neverminding that no one takes him seriously. Think for yourself and do some independent research. He put just enough truth in that document to get people to nod their heads, sadly in the end most of it was worthless FUD.