One point might help understand why EDGE doesn't always mean higher bitrates: EDGE (Enhanced Data rates for Gsm Evolution) adds new channel coding schemes that allow you to push more data through per timeslot. As usual, TANSTAAFL, and the downside is that the new coding schemes have less robust error protection. The end result is, that to get the higher EDGE-enabled data rates, you'll need to have a good connection to the base station. If there are a lot of errors in the air interface, the system will drop to more robust coding schemes and you'll get lower bandwidth, even though the number of timeslots stays the same.
It's of course also possible that not every base station has EDGE support yet, even if the operator claims they have an EDGE-capable network. Then your bandwidth may vary depending on the base station you happen to use. And, finally, (E)GPRS currently doesn't give you bandwidth guarantees, so depending on the amount of traffic your bandwidth may vary even under ideal radio conditions.
Re:Which formats are the most durable?
on
Video Codec Comparison
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Actually, the 'official' container format for MPEG-4 is Apple's.mov format used in QuickTime..MP4 files are usually just raw MPEG-4 bitstreams dumped into a file with no real container format.
This is incorrect. MP4 is a container file format, originally based on the QuickTime.MOV format. Google: mp4 file format, or see ISO/IEC 14496-1, "Information technology - Coding of audio-visual objects - Part 1: Systems" (MPEG/4 systems specification).
Re:NOT XBA! Display accelerator for mobile devices
on
Bitboys Silicon Sighted
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The chip was very clearly marked, it's an Altera APEX EP20K400C... That means it's got between ~400,000 and 1,051,648 gates, not 20-30k.
Yeah, well, the 20-30k figure was from their presentation (might have been 22k, don't remember exactly). Nothing forces you to use everything on the chip... Obviously we have no way of checking the claims, but I don't think they have a big reason to give misinformation in that area. The people they need to convince are the mobile device manufacturers, not a bunch of demo coders.
There is no "their" silicon for the mobile accelerator in the usual sense of having an NVidia chip. There probably never will be either -- something like this would be integrated into existing silicon in a device, not put into a separate chip. If you open a modern mobile phone, you don't find separate CPUs, DSPs etc, everything that can be intergated is.
Having said that, I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for the first device with this graphics hardware to ship... The Bitboys don't exactly have a stunning track record in that area.:-)
Yeah, but the demo unit they showed was the relative size of a tank to a Yugo...they want to put THIS into a MOBILE device?
You don't put new chips into mobile phones. The accelerator would be integrated to the same silicon with the CPU or the display controller (which might be on the same chip anyway). From that perspective it makes sense to develop and demo it on an FPGA, since it would be licensed as an IPR block anyhow.
The XBA stuff and this mobile accelerator are two different things. So, no, the mobile stuff doesn't have "insane resolution and bandwidth".
If you check the photos, it seems that the had a real PC accelerator on display as well. I missed that at the party, since they didn't demo it or talk about it during the presentation. It may well be the XBA thing. I don't know how complete it is, but it might well be working -- heck, I've even seen Pyramid 3D running Tomb Raider.:-)
The hardware driving the display is the mobile accelerator they demoed. I guess it is probably a standard FPGA test board, which is why it has both a PCI connector and USB interface. I don't recall the display type or resolution (if they even mentioned it), but it is probably something in the range of a Nokia 7650 (176x208) or PocketPC (240x320).
NOT XBA! Display accelerator for mobile devices
on
Bitboys Silicon Sighted
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Having seen the demo at Assembly 2002, some clarifications are in order: The demonstration and presentation was about their new display acceleration solution for mobile devices, such as mobile phones and PDAs. It is a basic graphics accelerator with support for vector graphics (polygons, beziers) with anti-aliasing, double-buffering and transparency. Even texturing is optional.
The demo they showed was indeed an FPGA. It has around 20k-30k gates, and was running at around 25MHz or so. The demonstration animated filled polygons and bezier curves, with various effects such as transparency at around 30-50 fps.
Obviously we are not talking about something that would run Doom 3! Having said that, their solution looked very interesting from a mobile point of view, since it could provide acceleration for UI, SVG and simple games with a very low cost, in terms of gates and power consumption.
Our local telephone/cable tv/younameit monopoly charges 41.21EUR for a 512/128 kbit/s cable modem connection. I do tend to get the 512k download speeds from local sources using SSH, but their international connections are fairly bad, web proxy is often broken (and they rate-limit HTTP connections that don't use the proxy) and service is pretty bad. No inbound TCP connections, no additional IPs, even if you were prepared to pay. Not bad if all you want to do is browse the web.
Want a real connection? Buy ADSL. 256k/256k is 77EUR without inbound TCP connections, 88EUR with connections from inside Finland enabled and a whopping 140EUR for international connections. Connection speeds up to 2M/512k are available, but cost a lot more. ADSL availability is widespread, cable modem currently very limited to certain parts of the city.
I can't wait for some real competition. The problem is a single company owns pretty much all the copper, both cable TV and telephone lines. Theoretically, they have now been split to Local Cable Monopoly Inc and Local Service Monopoly Inc, but it remains to be seen if it will actually result in real competition.
Having worked in a game-development company (although telecommuting) and watching the industry quite a while, I have to mostly agree. Although my experience was good as a whole, and I have absolutely no hard feelings towards the company or the industry in general, I could see a lot of the problems the author lists.
I think to succeed in the gaming industry you REALLY have to love the stuff. I mean A LOT. Live and breathe games. Anything else and you'll get tired and burned out soon. I personally don't care much about games, and realizing that was one of the main reasons I left. I find the technology behind them pretty interesting, but the games themselves tend to bore me quickly. This is NOT good. Even if you only do engine/technology development, a lot of the stuff is still tedious tracking of Microsoft's API-revision-of-the-day.
Interesting technology is not limited to games, although a lot of people seem to think that software is either cool games or boring financial database stuff, maybe add internet-java-perl-hype nowadays. Myself, I'm nowadays working on some very cool embedded stuff, and getting paid more for it too. It would take a lot to get me back to the game-development world.
Please remember that the flaming MS/BSD/KDE/Mac/whatever-haters you see around Slashdot are not the free software community -- they are the Slashdot flamer community. It is very rare to see posters who are actually active in an important free software project, apparently those have better things to do than flaming everybody else.
If you haven't already done so, read JonKatz's "Luring the Lurkers"-column from a while back (http://slashdot.org/features/98/12/28/1745252.sht ml). Apart from implying that most lurkers are newbies, I agree with him pretty much 100%. I have been reading Slashdot myself for around half a year or so, and this is my second or third post during that time. Why? Usually I have nothing to say on the subject, and if I have, I don't want to get involved in the typical flame-fest that is going on around here.
And no, I don't claim to be an important figure either. Apart from an occasional patch and port, I haven't been involved in any major free software projects. That doesn't mean that I have to justify myself by flaming here either -- I have better things to do, thank you very much.
Don't get me wrong, I think Slashdot is a wonderful resource. You just need to install a huge mental filter before reading the comments.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.symbian.com/news/pr/2007/pr20078776.htm l
Interestingly, I believe this is the first UIQ phone without a touchscreen.
I agree though that the screenshots look more like S60 than UIQ to me.
One point might help understand why EDGE doesn't always mean higher bitrates: EDGE (Enhanced Data rates for Gsm Evolution) adds new channel coding schemes that allow you to push more data through per timeslot. As usual, TANSTAAFL, and the downside is that the new coding schemes have less robust error protection. The end result is, that to get the higher EDGE-enabled data rates, you'll need to have a good connection to the base station. If there are a lot of errors in the air interface, the system will drop to more robust coding schemes and you'll get lower bandwidth, even though the number of timeslots stays the same.
It's of course also possible that not every base station has EDGE support yet, even if the operator claims they have an EDGE-capable network. Then your bandwidth may vary depending on the base station you happen to use. And, finally, (E)GPRS currently doesn't give you bandwidth guarantees, so depending on the amount of traffic your bandwidth may vary even under ideal radio conditions.
This is incorrect. MP4 is a container file format, originally based on the QuickTime .MOV format. Google: mp4 file format, or see ISO/IEC 14496-1, "Information technology - Coding of audio-visual objects - Part 1: Systems" (MPEG/4 systems specification).
The chip was very clearly marked, it's an Altera APEX EP20K400C ... That means it's got between ~400,000 and 1,051,648 gates, not 20-30k.
Yeah, well, the 20-30k figure was from their presentation (might have been 22k, don't remember exactly). Nothing forces you to use everything on the chip... Obviously we have no way of checking the claims, but I don't think they have a big reason to give misinformation in that area. The people they need to convince are the mobile device manufacturers, not a bunch of demo coders.
There is no "their" silicon for the mobile accelerator in the usual sense of having an NVidia chip. There probably never will be either -- something like this would be integrated into existing silicon in a device, not put into a separate chip. If you open a modern mobile phone, you don't find separate CPUs, DSPs etc, everything that can be intergated is.
Having said that, I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for the first device with this graphics hardware to ship... The Bitboys don't exactly have a stunning track record in that area. :-)
Yeah, but the demo unit they showed was the relative size of a tank to a Yugo...they want to put THIS into a MOBILE device?
You don't put new chips into mobile phones. The accelerator would be integrated to the same silicon with the CPU or the display controller (which might be on the same chip anyway). From that perspective it makes sense to develop and demo it on an FPGA, since it would be licensed as an IPR block anyhow.
The XBA stuff and this mobile accelerator are two different things. So, no, the mobile stuff doesn't have "insane resolution and bandwidth".
:-)
If you check the photos, it seems that the had a real PC accelerator on display as well. I missed that at the party, since they didn't demo it or talk about it during the presentation. It may well be the XBA thing. I don't know how complete it is, but it might well be working -- heck, I've even seen Pyramid 3D running Tomb Raider.
The hardware driving the display is the mobile accelerator they demoed. I guess it is probably a standard FPGA test board, which is why it has both a PCI connector and USB interface. I don't recall the display type or resolution (if they even mentioned it), but it is probably something in the range of a Nokia 7650 (176x208) or PocketPC (240x320).
Having seen the demo at Assembly 2002, some clarifications are in order: The demonstration and presentation was about their new display acceleration solution for mobile devices, such as mobile phones and PDAs. It is a basic graphics accelerator with support for vector graphics (polygons, beziers) with anti-aliasing, double-buffering and transparency. Even texturing is optional.
The demo they showed was indeed an FPGA. It has around 20k-30k gates, and was running at around 25MHz or so. The demonstration animated filled polygons and bezier curves, with various effects such as transparency at around 30-50 fps.
Obviously we are not talking about something that would run Doom 3! Having said that, their solution looked very interesting from a mobile point of view, since it could provide acceleration for UI, SVG and simple games with a very low cost, in terms of gates and power consumption.
Our local telephone/cable tv/younameit monopoly charges 41.21EUR for a 512/128 kbit/s cable modem connection. I do tend to get the 512k download speeds from local sources using SSH, but their international connections are fairly bad, web proxy is often broken (and they rate-limit HTTP connections that don't use the proxy) and service is pretty bad. No inbound TCP connections, no additional IPs, even if you were prepared to pay. Not bad if all you want to do is browse the web.
Want a real connection? Buy ADSL. 256k/256k is 77EUR without inbound TCP connections, 88EUR with connections from inside Finland enabled and a whopping 140EUR for international connections. Connection speeds up to 2M/512k are available, but cost a lot more. ADSL availability is widespread, cable modem currently very limited to certain parts of the city.
I can't wait for some real competition. The problem is a single company owns pretty much all the copper, both cable TV and telephone lines. Theoretically, they have now been split to Local Cable Monopoly Inc and Local Service Monopoly Inc, but it remains to be seen if it will actually result in real competition.
Having worked in a game-development company (although telecommuting) and watching the industry quite a while, I have to mostly agree. Although my experience was good as a whole, and I have absolutely no hard feelings towards the company or the industry in general, I could see a lot of the problems the author lists.
I think to succeed in the gaming industry you REALLY have to love the stuff. I mean A LOT. Live and breathe games. Anything else and you'll get tired and burned out soon. I personally don't care much about games, and realizing that was one of the main reasons I left. I find the technology behind them pretty interesting, but the games themselves tend to bore me quickly. This is NOT good. Even if you only do engine/technology development, a lot of the stuff is still tedious tracking of Microsoft's API-revision-of-the-day.
Interesting technology is not limited to games, although a lot of people seem to think that software is either cool games or boring financial database stuff, maybe add internet-java-perl-hype nowadays. Myself, I'm nowadays working on some very cool embedded stuff, and getting paid more for it too. It would take a lot to get me back to the game-development world.
Petteri
Please remember that the flaming MS/BSD/KDE/Mac/whatever-haters you see around Slashdot are not the free software community -- they are the Slashdot flamer community. It is very rare to see posters who are actually active in an important free software project, apparently those have better things to do than flaming everybody else.
t ml). Apart from implying that most lurkers are newbies, I agree with him pretty much 100%. I have been reading Slashdot myself for around half a year or so, and this is my second or third post during that time. Why? Usually I have nothing to say on the subject, and if I have, I don't want to get involved in the typical flame-fest that is going on around here.
If you haven't already done so, read JonKatz's "Luring the Lurkers"-column from a while back (http://slashdot.org/features/98/12/28/1745252.sh
And no, I don't claim to be an important figure either. Apart from an occasional patch and port, I haven't been involved in any major free software projects. That doesn't mean that I have to justify myself by flaming here either -- I have better things to do, thank you very much.
Don't get me wrong, I think Slashdot is a wonderful resource. You just need to install a huge mental filter before reading the comments.
Petteri