I think you missed the point of my post. The article is about the fact that one can always "circumvent" any copy protection by simply doing say screen caps for dvd's. My point was that with the added features of a dvd, that the effort required to reproduce those special features would be such that many/most piraters would not bother, choosing instead to just do a simply movie copy. However, as the public gets more used to these extra features, that they would rather just spend the little extra money and get the real mccoy vs a pirated copy.
My post was not saying that those extra features made it impossible to copy the dvd, just that it adds a new twist to the amount of effort required to make the copy.
Yes, I said that many people still would just buy the copy because all they want to do is simply see the film. My statement was pointing out that as those extras become more prevelant, that more people would come to expect and want them. I know I love them, and my wife (who is not nearly the movie nut as I am) has learned to love them (she gets disapointed when we finish watching a movie and there is little to no supplemental material).
Well, sorta. One thing that you can't simply "copy" is interactivity. DVD's are an excellent example. While you could copy the film, you can't "copy" the menuing. You also can't simply "copy" the various audio tracks (directors commentary, other languages, etc) and have them selectable. Now, you could copy all these things piecemeal and then put them back together with a DVD authoring program, but who'd do all that just to save $14.99.
So I think that what we'll start seeing a lot more of is "non-linear" content. Stuff that you can't just simply "press record" to get. This combined with reasonable prices will thwart many a casual copier. Then to boot, the mass pirater gets hurt because they don't want to spend the time to make "nice" copies, so they'll just copy the movie. Which will still make them bucks because a lot of people just want to see the movie anyway. But more and more people are getting addicted to all those fancy new features. And certainly, anyone who wants to "own" a copy often will definitely want those features.
So we are in the interesting place that the media industries best weapon against piracy is to take advantage of the technology more and sell it at a reasonable price, not the worst thing in the world.
That's a HUGE assumption. Do you have access to something that can read 10 year old 5.25" disks now
Not so huge. Anyone can find access to a 5.25" disk almost anywhere. Not that you will necessarily have one in your house, but that's not what we're talking about here. Plus, if we knew that there was a huge archival storage on 5.25, then you could easily save up enough of the units to last until anyone really cared any more. That and with the proliferation of CDROMs and devices that can read CDROM's, there is no reason to think why this would be any different. It's amusing when people compare problems with hardware and archiving media where maybe 100's of the units to read/write the media existed (tapes and such from 30+ years ago) to the media formats today where 100's of thousands (maybe even millions now?) of the units exist. If you want long term archives, then simply choose a format that is popular if your primary concern is being able to access those archives at a future date.
You'd think they'd be smart and release their optimizations to GCC to help their processors perform better, but Intel doesn't think this way
Sorry, but this is the way of the "old" world. In the "new" world of VLIW, the compiler can almost be thought of as a part of the chip itself, that is how closely the two are now coupled. The ip that Intel has in the Itanic version of ICC is huge, and represents more of an investment than just a few SSE optimizations, or a scheduling trick or two. The fate of the Itanic rests soley on the performance of ICC (and of course MSVC, which you KNOW Intel has given plenty of input into. Wouldn't surprise me a bit if the IA64 version of MSVC just execs icc). So this isn't quite as cut and dry as you may think (i.e. Evil Intel holding back info from the "good guys").
Of course with the translation issue and all, the entire article was rather "interesting" (I was imagining a talking head with the English coming out, but with the lips mouthing the original Chinese). But anyway anyone else find this line very curious?
The Dragon Chip is proved to be very sound in performance, steady and reliable in operation and utterly sufficient to meet the working requirement of the server and website.
"Sound", "steady and reliable", "utterly sufficient". Huh? Sounds like Sparc market speak for "yeah our performance sucks, but it runs lots of software and you don't need that much performance anyway. Oh and just in case you do, you can get the 512 processor version when we ship it next quarter, or maybe the quarter after that...". Man, talk about double talk.
Well the beauty of RISC is the PII target performance can easily be ramped up to a P4 3G by simple manufacturing upgrades.
Ah yes, they can use Motorola's success in doing just that as an example. (OK, I know that the PPC/Power ISA is a lot less RISCy than others, but I couldn't let that statement slide;)
Well not really Digital. They were bought by a company that had already given in to Intel. Well, not actually given in, since the big Q was built on Intel to begin with.
Also, don't forget ARM, not used in "computers" but lots of pda's and whatnot. Unless of course your omission and your statement about "decent RISC architectures" are related;)
And as long as that is the case, you will never see Apple with more than a minor percentage of the Desktop market share
You don't honestly believe that Apple thinks that they can get anything more than "a minor percentage" no matter what they do? They are a niche player, always will be. They don't want to live on paper thin margins like the Dells of the world, and that is the only way to make appreciable headway in the marketshare wars. Not everyone wants to work 90 hour weeks to be a millionaire, some are satisfied with 80K a year and having time for family, success is measured in vastly different ways.
This is not a very good comparison. Having PPC does not make the Mac run unreliably, they just lack the sheer mhz numbers that pc's do. Basically we're looking at the Intel camp whose engines run at 14000 rpm vs the Mac camp whose engines run at 8000 rpm, however they produce about the same horsepower (yes, from an absolute standpoint the pc does more), but the Mac reaches max hp at 2000rpm vs 10000rpm that the PC does. Bascially just two different ways of getting from point A to point B.
Just a wee bit paranoid are we. Not that they couldn't do it, but come on, don't you think that if they wanted to, they'd already have such a beast. After all, the cameras they use for spy planes easily bested anything available for the common man for a good long time, what makes you think they don't have a 10+ megapixel digital camera now?
Now on the practical side, at 10+ megapixels running at a frame rate of say 10fps, we're talking a huge amount of processing required to do any type of facial recognition. Plus keep in mind that the problem of doing facial recognition lies not in the resolution of the images, but other things like being able to interpolate features at differing angles (both x and y), not to mention simple things like a shaved vs bearded face, hair cuts, etc, etc, etc. Remember, you only need a small set of points to match fingerprints, you don't need 400dpi scans of them to do matches. Until facial recognition makes this type of algorithmic leap, I don't think that the escalation of the resolution wars is going to help any govt find anyone.
Actually you confirmed what I said. Fact is if the Pilot did not have the feature set you required, it would not have mattered how small it was. The original Palm had an extremely limited feature set compared to the Newton, but that didn't matter, it did what it needed to do in a simplier package (in this case simplier meaning both form and function). People didn't need all the bells and whistles, and the compromises that came along with it.
Not quite so. Newton in many regards is _still_ far ahead of the Palm, at least technology wise. Remember that Palm succeeded because it was "simpler" and less tech laden than Newton (not to mention significantly cheaper). Palm is losing out to a competitor that is more expensive and more tech heavy (and resource heavy).
They were pretty close, but AFAIK Sun started working on NeWS in 85 and Jobs left Apple to create NeXT in 86. I know that I personally remember seeing Sun's running NeWS before I ever even heard of NeXT, which of course means nothing, but there you go:)
Actually, I did not imply that I snowboarded in jeans and tshirt (aamof, I don't snowboard at all), just that the concept is obvious and easy to do, which made it's newsworthyness very questionable.
I ride a motorcycle, and I'm bundled probably much more than any snowboarder, but it would make more sense to come up with a flat velcro control panel that could attach to the arm of my riding suit, or my tankbag, or my tank. This would be truely useful, not the overblown hype of "wearable" computing (give me smart ergo/form factor computing anyday). All this wearable hogwash reminds me of pen computing. It's obvious and it has it's place, but for some reason there are lots of people who want to make it into something much grander, and tons of people who follow right along.
OK, so you stich a contact based control panel into the arm of a jacket to control a player you have in the inside pocket. Ohhh, ahhhh, boy aint that too kewl, now that's some advanced tech.
Can anyone explain to me how this is so cool and why people are so impressed? You could take a 20 year old atari joystick control board and wire this puppy up yourself in about an hour.
Hell, my normal attire (work or otherwise) is a pair of shorts and a tshirt, the last thing I need is a wearable anything to clutter up my ensemble. Give me something I can clip to my shorts or stick in my pocket with decent ergos and I'm a happy man. Having a 802.11 antennae in my pocket (are you happy to see me or is that a WiFi antennae in your pocket, then again, with the size of a typical antennae, it had better be an antennae or it will be the only thing keeping you warm down there) is not my idea of enpowering, except in the literal sense.
The Motorola was because they could not get a new 68K chip fast enough
Yup, old Mot was having cpu performance problems even back then. NeXT was apparently working on a dual proccie 88K machine to solve their performance woes (though the turbo cube with NeXT Dimension rocked at the time).
OpenStep was running on both SPAC and HPPA before Apple bought NeXT
And it was also running on Intel, and they didn't "drop it". I think it was quite obvious that Sun and HP just wanted to keep tabs on the "cool" NeXTStep technology. They saw that NeXT was far ahead as far as having a unified os/development environment, and they wanted to be able to take advantage if it caught on.
On a side note, NeXT sort of "borrowed" a bit of tech from Sun when they chose to use Display Postscript, since Sun had used it for their NeWS (hmmm, notice a similarity in capitalization ?) windowing system back in the early SunOS 4 days).
Price is the big winner for manufacturers. Having a single chip solution would quickly drive the price of the phones (and other techno toys) down and facilitate the widespread move to GSM.
I assume that by "interesting possibilities" he is referring to possibly being able to imbed the chip into other types of devices cheaply (I'm thinking of having a chip in each piece of furniture that you have to assemble so it'll phone home to let the manufacturer know how big of a klutz you are and how many screws are left over).
I am Sure That I am not the only person who would love to see an integrated cpu/memory/GPU/etc on one chip
Why would you want a pc that you couldn't upgrade the memory or video on? Or end up paying to disable what you paid for originally? What you mention would be fine for your home pc drone or specialized use (PVR comes to mind), but as a chip for the cognoscenti, I can't see it flying.
Maybe I'm getting crochety in my old age, but does this seem like a monumental waste of time/technology? Hell, how difficult is furniture to put together anyway? This sounds a lot like the blinking "12:00" thing. Why not just make improvements to the design itself so it's not so complex to put together. Are we talking about putting together space shuttle command chairs here or something? I assume the next version will have blue tooth and will send you pictures of the proper installation as well as play mp3's. It will obviously have to have a change detector for the couch version that automatically updates a website with the current total, as well as a volume/mass summary of lint and crumbs.
I think it just reveals how big and ponderous that corporation is
Hardly, they sell cd-rw, dvd-r, vcr's as well. What's so new about this. They tout the ability to copy mp3's off the net onto their mini disc players. This is nothing new from a corp. position standpoint. They are first and foremost a CE company, having the content means that they yield more leverage in the CE space overall. They are constantly playing both sides of the court when it comes to IP, and yes, they often times compromise more on their hardware because of it (PS2 being the perfect example).
The point is that a major manufacturer has now endorsed the concept of connected pvr's (and Sony of all people). No one said that Sony has discovered fire, just that they've done something that currently no other major CE manufacturer has done.
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I think you missed the point of my post. The article is about the fact that one can always "circumvent" any copy protection by simply doing say screen caps for dvd's. My point was that with the added features of a dvd, that the effort required to reproduce those special features would be such that many/most piraters would not bother, choosing instead to just do a simply movie copy. However, as the public gets more used to these extra features, that they would rather just spend the little extra money and get the real mccoy vs a pirated copy.
My post was not saying that those extra features made it impossible to copy the dvd, just that it adds a new twist to the amount of effort required to make the copy.
Yes, I said that many people still would just buy the copy because all they want to do is simply see the film. My statement was pointing out that as those extras become more prevelant, that more people would come to expect and want them. I know I love them, and my wife (who is not nearly the movie nut as I am) has learned to love them (she gets disapointed when we finish watching a movie and there is little to no supplemental material).
if you can see it, you can copy it
Well, sorta. One thing that you can't simply "copy" is interactivity. DVD's are an excellent example. While you could copy the film, you can't "copy" the menuing. You also can't simply "copy" the various audio tracks (directors commentary, other languages, etc) and have them selectable. Now, you could copy all these things piecemeal and then put them back together with a DVD authoring program, but who'd do all that just to save $14.99.
So I think that what we'll start seeing a lot more of is "non-linear" content. Stuff that you can't just simply "press record" to get. This combined with reasonable prices will thwart many a casual copier. Then to boot, the mass pirater gets hurt because they don't want to spend the time to make "nice" copies, so they'll just copy the movie. Which will still make them bucks because a lot of people just want to see the movie anyway. But more and more people are getting addicted to all those fancy new features. And certainly, anyone who wants to "own" a copy often will definitely want those features.
So we are in the interesting place that the media industries best weapon against piracy is to take advantage of the technology more and sell it at a reasonable price, not the worst thing in the world.
That's a HUGE assumption. Do you have access to something that can read 10 year old 5.25" disks now
Not so huge. Anyone can find access to a 5.25" disk almost anywhere. Not that you will necessarily have one in your house, but that's not what we're talking about here. Plus, if we knew that there was a huge archival storage on 5.25, then you could easily save up enough of the units to last until anyone really cared any more. That and with the proliferation of CDROMs and devices that can read CDROM's, there is no reason to think why this would be any different. It's amusing when people compare problems with hardware and archiving media where maybe 100's of the units to read/write the media existed (tapes and such from 30+ years ago) to the media formats today where 100's of thousands (maybe even millions now?) of the units exist. If you want long term archives, then simply choose a format that is popular if your primary concern is being able to access those archives at a future date.
Just get everyone to run dual proccie Itanium2's. The things will melt before they get within a 1000ft of any suitably equipped home.
You'd think they'd be smart and release their optimizations to GCC to help their processors perform better, but Intel doesn't think this way
Sorry, but this is the way of the "old" world. In the "new" world of VLIW, the compiler can almost be thought of as a part of the chip itself, that is how closely the two are now coupled. The ip that Intel has in the Itanic version of ICC is huge, and represents more of an investment than just a few SSE optimizations, or a scheduling trick or two. The fate of the Itanic rests soley on the performance of ICC (and of course MSVC, which you KNOW Intel has given plenty of input into. Wouldn't surprise me a bit if the IA64 version of MSVC just execs icc). So this isn't quite as cut and dry as you may think (i.e. Evil Intel holding back info from the "good guys").
Of course with the translation issue and all, the entire article was rather "interesting" (I was imagining a talking head with the English coming out, but with the lips mouthing the original Chinese). But anyway anyone else find this line very curious?
...". Man, talk about double talk.
The Dragon Chip is proved to be very sound in performance, steady and reliable in operation and utterly sufficient to meet the working requirement of the server and website.
"Sound", "steady and reliable", "utterly sufficient". Huh? Sounds like Sparc market speak for "yeah our performance sucks, but it runs lots of software and you don't need that much performance anyway. Oh and just in case you do, you can get the 512 processor version when we ship it next quarter, or maybe the quarter after that
Well the beauty of RISC is the PII target performance can easily be ramped up to a P4 3G by simple manufacturing upgrades.
;)
Ah yes, they can use Motorola's success in doing just that as an example. (OK, I know that the PPC/Power ISA is a lot less RISCy than others, but I couldn't let that statement slide
HP gave in to Intel as well as Digital.
;)
Well not really Digital. They were bought by a company that had already given in to Intel. Well, not actually given in, since the big Q was built on Intel to begin with.
Also, don't forget ARM, not used in "computers" but lots of pda's and whatnot. Unless of course your omission and your statement about "decent RISC architectures" are related
And as long as that is the case, you will never see Apple with more than a minor percentage of the Desktop market share
You don't honestly believe that Apple thinks that they can get anything more than "a minor percentage" no matter what they do? They are a niche player, always will be. They don't want to live on paper thin margins like the Dells of the world, and that is the only way to make appreciable headway in the marketshare wars. Not everyone wants to work 90 hour weeks to be a millionaire, some are satisfied with 80K a year and having time for family, success is measured in vastly different ways.
This is not a very good comparison. Having PPC does not make the Mac run unreliably, they just lack the sheer mhz numbers that pc's do. Basically we're looking at the Intel camp whose engines run at 14000 rpm vs the Mac camp whose engines run at 8000 rpm, however they produce about the same horsepower (yes, from an absolute standpoint the pc does more), but the Mac reaches max hp at 2000rpm vs 10000rpm that the PC does. Bascially just two different ways of getting from point A to point B.
Just a wee bit paranoid are we. Not that they couldn't do it, but come on, don't you think that if they wanted to, they'd already have such a beast. After all, the cameras they use for spy planes easily bested anything available for the common man for a good long time, what makes you think they don't have a 10+ megapixel digital camera now?
Now on the practical side, at 10+ megapixels running at a frame rate of say 10fps, we're talking a huge amount of processing required to do any type of facial recognition. Plus keep in mind that the problem of doing facial recognition lies not in the resolution of the images, but other things like being able to interpolate features at differing angles (both x and y), not to mention simple things like a shaved vs bearded face, hair cuts, etc, etc, etc. Remember, you only need a small set of points to match fingerprints, you don't need 400dpi scans of them to do matches. Until facial recognition makes this type of algorithmic leap, I don't think that the escalation of the resolution wars is going to help any govt find anyone.
Actually you confirmed what I said. Fact is if the Pilot did not have the feature set you required, it would not have mattered how small it was. The original Palm had an extremely limited feature set compared to the Newton, but that didn't matter, it did what it needed to do in a simplier package (in this case simplier meaning both form and function). People didn't need all the bells and whistles, and the compromises that came along with it.
Not quite so. Newton in many regards is _still_ far ahead of the Palm, at least technology wise. Remember that Palm succeeded because it was "simpler" and less tech laden than Newton (not to mention significantly cheaper). Palm is losing out to a competitor that is more expensive and more tech heavy (and resource heavy).
They were pretty close, but AFAIK Sun started working on NeWS in 85 and Jobs left Apple to create NeXT in 86. I know that I personally remember seeing Sun's running NeWS before I ever even heard of NeXT, which of course means nothing, but there you go :)
Actually, I did not imply that I snowboarded in jeans and tshirt (aamof, I don't snowboard at all), just that the concept is obvious and easy to do, which made it's newsworthyness very questionable.
I ride a motorcycle, and I'm bundled probably much more than any snowboarder, but it would make more sense to come up with a flat velcro control panel that could attach to the arm of my riding suit, or my tankbag, or my tank. This would be truely useful, not the overblown hype of "wearable" computing (give me smart ergo/form factor computing anyday). All this wearable hogwash reminds me of pen computing. It's obvious and it has it's place, but for some reason there are lots of people who want to make it into something much grander, and tons of people who follow right along.
OK, so you stich a contact based control panel into the arm of a jacket to control a player you have in the inside pocket. Ohhh, ahhhh, boy aint that too kewl, now that's some advanced tech.
Can anyone explain to me how this is so cool and why people are so impressed? You could take a 20 year old atari joystick control board and wire this puppy up yourself in about an hour.
Hell, my normal attire (work or otherwise) is a pair of shorts and a tshirt, the last thing I need is a wearable anything to clutter up my ensemble. Give me something I can clip to my shorts or stick in my pocket with decent ergos and I'm a happy man. Having a 802.11 antennae in my pocket (are you happy to see me or is that a WiFi antennae in your pocket, then again, with the size of a typical antennae, it had better be an antennae or it will be the only thing keeping you warm down there) is not my idea of enpowering, except in the literal sense.
Harumphhh.
The Motorola was because they could not get a new 68K chip fast enough
Yup, old Mot was having cpu performance problems even back then. NeXT was apparently working on a dual proccie 88K machine to solve their performance woes (though the turbo cube with NeXT Dimension rocked at the time).
OpenStep was running on both SPAC and HPPA before Apple bought NeXT
And it was also running on Intel, and they didn't "drop it". I think it was quite obvious that Sun and HP just wanted to keep tabs on the "cool" NeXTStep technology. They saw that NeXT was far ahead as far as having a unified os/development environment, and they wanted to be able to take advantage if it caught on.
On a side note, NeXT sort of "borrowed" a bit of tech from Sun when they chose to use Display Postscript, since Sun had used it for their NeWS (hmmm, notice a similarity in capitalization ?) windowing system back in the early SunOS 4 days).
Price is the big winner for manufacturers. Having a single chip solution would quickly drive the price of the phones (and other techno toys) down and facilitate the widespread move to GSM.
I assume that by "interesting possibilities" he is referring to possibly being able to imbed the chip into other types of devices cheaply (I'm thinking of having a chip in each piece of furniture that you have to assemble so it'll phone home to let the manufacturer know how big of a klutz you are and how many screws are left over).
I am Sure That I am not the only person who would love to see an integrated cpu/memory/GPU/etc on one chip
Why would you want a pc that you couldn't upgrade the memory or video on? Or end up paying to disable what you paid for originally? What you mention would be fine for your home pc drone or specialized use (PVR comes to mind), but as a chip for the cognoscenti, I can't see it flying.
Ohh, not IndieBand, but "an indie band". I thought he was using some open source version of Infiniband.
....
nevermind
Maybe I'm getting crochety in my old age, but does this seem like a monumental waste of time/technology? Hell, how difficult is furniture to put together anyway? This sounds a lot like the blinking "12:00" thing. Why not just make improvements to the design itself so it's not so complex to put together. Are we talking about putting together space shuttle command chairs here or something? I assume the next version will have blue tooth and will send you pictures of the proper installation as well as play mp3's. It will obviously have to have a change detector for the couch version that automatically updates a website with the current total, as well as a volume/mass summary of lint and crumbs.
I think it just reveals how big and ponderous that corporation is
Hardly, they sell cd-rw, dvd-r, vcr's as well. What's so new about this. They tout the ability to copy mp3's off the net onto their mini disc players. This is nothing new from a corp. position standpoint. They are first and foremost a CE company, having the content means that they yield more leverage in the CE space overall. They are constantly playing both sides of the court when it comes to IP, and yes, they often times compromise more on their hardware because of it (PS2 being the perfect example).
The point is that a major manufacturer has now endorsed the concept of connected pvr's (and Sony of all people). No one said that Sony has discovered fire, just that they've done something that currently no other major CE manufacturer has done.
This makes it sound like Cocoon is the first Linux based PVR
Never got that impression from the snippet. After all, it is new, and it's Linux based, and it's from Sony. How else would you word it?