Well, in a sense, yes. When courts rule on something, they establish a precedent on which further decisions will be made upon. So really, what this means is, until the courts make a decision, it is not proven legal. When the courts prove BT legal, then all courts in all cases usually do decide that BT is legal, for example.
I was actually really surprised when the New York Times article about DivX enabled high definition capability wasn't slashdotten long ago when the New York Times touted a third possible competitor in the High Definition consumer electronic device market for High Definition viability. You can find the article here.
(sorry, this does require a free subscription)
IO-Data offers their DivX HD Certified AvelLinkplayer2 for around US $250.00 and is quite capable and you can get it NOW. There should be more players on the way - from my understanding, Sigma Designs EM8620L Chips are more than capable of DivX High Definition. I also believe KiSS has showed off a similar DivX High Definition Video-On-Demand player at CeBIT. (scroll down, you'll see it).
The principle behind SIMD, or, rather, Single Instruction Multiple Data, is that you can process wide arrays of values in a single instruction. With the PowerPC version of SIMD, also known as AltiVec, you can issue an instruction and have it work with a 128-bit wide register. These registers may contain up to 4 32-bit numbers, 8 16-bit numbers or 16 8-bit numbers. For example, I can load two AltiVec registers with 16 unsigned chars, add them together using Vec_Add() and have it return its results to an AltiVec register. So this in essense is adding 16 values at once and in theory it's good enough for markeing to claim a 16X speedup, but this is rarely the case.
I think this prediction may go to far saying that all mechanical systems will be the same, but at this time we're seeing some parallelisms in modern electronics.
I belive it may be Toshiba that sells three DVD+R DL capable drives that have the exact same hardware, but some are crippled at the firmware level so that the drives will behave as if they can't handle a DVD+R DL. I've also noticed that certain Power Macintosh G5 computers ship with a Pioneer DVR-108 SuperDrive and do not burn DVD+RL as they are crippled in firmware. I own that same model drive and it works fine for DL burning. I would imagine that making a single hardware solution would be cheaper than designing and manufacturing many products at varying functionality and price points. Then why not just sell one model that does it all? Royalties. By crippling functionality in software/firmware, the manufacturer does not have to pay sometimes obnoctious royalties thus reducing the bottom line. Oh yeah, and you also get to market one product as being functionally superior and thus deserves a premium. I can't recall prices exactly, but a sunroof option on a Lexus ES300 costs more than it does on a Toyota Camry, although they are in essense the same car.
A few years back, I was looking at the differences between a Cadillac Seville SLS and STS. Although basically the same car, the price of the STS was US $5,000 higher due to a differently tuned engine, a shorter final drive ratio, and 5,000 lines of additional suspension code! So in essense, we have seen here a change of model based on a software difference.
But then, with IBM's prediction, all cars would have to look the same. You can't change the body styling by changing a few lines of code... yet... Ricers would love this...
I won't be impressed, however, until I see a car without an engine and without wheels, but something entirely different.
There was an article that hit the New York times back in the fall of 2004 mentioning Professor Bringsjord and having a computer program write fiction. Perhaps this is to better write stories for elected officials to tell?
Processing power, storage space and download time
on
Mac mini All About Movies?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The processing power for playing back those touted AVC H.264 movies should be borderline on the Mac Mini as this advanced media format is quite processor intensive. MPEG/ITU-T marketing papers have indicated that AVC/H.264 roughly takes 4x the decoding power for real time playback as MPEG-2 and AVC/H.264 offers the same quality at half the bitrate as MPEG-2. Using new builds of mplayer that support AVC/H.264 playback take up 70% of my G5's processor time at 420p, although other implementations take up less time as Apple claims 1080p is capable on a dual 2GHz PowerMac G5. It's hit or miss on a G4, depending on the extent of optimizations used and the bitrate of the encoding.
Apple has used a bitrate of 7.5mbps on their WWDC showcase of the 720p Troy trailer in H.264 and this quite a hefty amount of data to store locally and transfer over the internet as this article makes clear that "this is the year of HD." Doing the math, a 90 minute HD movie encoded at 7.5mbps should take roughly 5GB and on a 40GB drive you can store around 5 movies, 10 if you have an 80GB drive. These drives seem to be lacking in this department. As for internet transmission, if you were lucky enough, you'd have Optimum Online's 10mpbs download and a clear unobstructed path between the two endpoints you may be able to watch this in real time as if this is a variable bitrate encode, action scenes will require considerably more bandwidth to download in real time. I doubt the national average for broadband is near what Optimum Online provides.
An online store with HD H.264 movies may be wishful thinking for those with a Mac Mini, although my one problem with the Mac Mini as a media center is the lack of digital audio output. An M-Audio Sonica should take care of that...
I'm under the impression that this is exactly what venture capital is all about. I've had good friends look for VC in starting up engineering firms and the answers from potential investors have been, "outsource the engineering to Asia and beef up your marketing and business development."
Of course there is much talent in the art of marketing and business development, but selling thin air seems to be the most profitable of anything.
The motion artifacts you see are from the digital MPEG-2 source. In time of motion, you'll see some "blocking" due to how digital video is compressed (Macroblock/Discrete Cosine Transform). You'll also see ringing (halos or "mosquito" noise) due to the discarded frequencies that take place in MPEG quantization. Motion puts an added stress of digital video compression. The accuracy of LCD and Plasma displays help to show these more than a blurry CRT.
I agree.
While there may be issues of color fidelity and brightness, LCD and Plasma displays have a pixel match of 1:1. With the CRT electron gun, while it may be very accurate, measuring the accuracy directly would in a sense violate the Heisenberg Uncertainty Priciple. Being a scanning gun direcly influenced by outside sources, getting a 1:1 pixel match of source transmission and actual picture will be slightly off especially if you have the budget to buy large speakers for your surround system. LCD and Plasma won't suffer or at least not to this extent. So I'd have to say the pixel accuracy in Plasma LCD is much closer if not 1:1.
That being said, I'd like to use my beer goggle analogy. With more accuracy, it's much easier to see the flaws in any given picture. With less accuracy, just as beer googles, it's much more difficult to see flaws. Unfortunately, a lot of people are repulsed by flaws. If you can't see them due to the CRT goggles, they're not there so the source looks better. Imagine you have a member of your preferred sex that has supermodel features but has an acne problem. Given enough blur (CRT or BEER) you won't be able to see the acne so he/she will ber very good looking. Remove the googgles and you'll tell them to see a dermatologist. It's as simple as that.
I totally agree with you. I have a double degree in Computer Science and Computer and Systems Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute as well as a two-time Apple WWDC student scholarship winner (experience)- I have only been able to get an interview at companies with people I knew on the inside. The job market is very competitive today for young graduates as experience is key - the only problem seems to be the endless cycle of needing experience to get more experience. I've seen 4.0 QPA computer science students get turned down from entry-level jobs because they weren't "technical" enough. I've known similar people get *a response* from an employer for every 40 resumes sent out.
I can't judge for sure on how much a degree from a top school will get you because I haven't seen any benefits from mine yet, other than a hell of a lot of respect from certain academics. I definately recommend staying for the completion of your degree - many people do well without one, deservedly so, but it is embarassing for me when a self proclaimed computer guru makes simple mistakes that are quite well published in many textbook's "Fallacies and Pitfall" sections. I'm sure many holding an M.S. in Computer Science would make the same mistakes too. One last great thing about having a piece of paper is that companies will generally pay you more than without one even if you work the same job (I know this first hand). Oh, and don't forget the connections you made in college (and handily put in your rolodex/palm)...
Some ways to build experience: 1. Open Source - Write Something and publish it! 2. Research (this may be where a top university may help out) 3. Co-op/Internship (yet, most of these look for people with experience, oddly enough)
And be careful not to make the person giving you the technical interview angry: I made this mistake when an interviewer asked me why I was using libxml instead of the Java XML capabilities in an a Cocoa/Objective-C application that I wrote in my Junior year of University as a side project...
I want to patent sales in general. It was my idea to sell stuff.
Well, not really, but I think that caveman wish'd there were a patent office back then.
I somehow think running OS X on an iPod would be more useful.
Besides, how big were the hard drives back when the Centris machines were out? Certainly no bigger than 500MB. Did they even get up to 128MB of RAM?
Hey I use a Mac and I swear by Naim. One of the slickest and quickest interfaces to use for instant messaging and not to mention screen makes it easy to run it on your home computer so the guys at work can't detect it as easily.
If you want to go to a school that thinks anything faster than 10mbit half duplex is only good for spreading viruses and taking up all the bandwidth of dual OC-3's, go there.
Oh did I mention they disabled Multicast on their residential network so iTunes sharing doesn't work?
Hehe, had one of those 600E's too when I started at RPI. My first battery lasted for just under a year before I got it replaced by the repair center in the VCC. My second battery died within the next three months. Through the grapevine, I heard that there was a known problem with the 600E batteries and issuing a recall. The repair place at RPI did in fact mention a recall, but since I had already gotten my battery replaced once, I was not able to get a replacement. But still, after 3.5 years, my 600E is working quite niceley, especially after I upgraded the hard drive to 30 GB. I used it not only for school, but at work with UCAID. I've actually given it to my little brother, and of course he uses it to surf the web for pornagraphy.
But this whole battery life issue... I must say that I'm not happy with it, and my little brother certainly is not; the laptop won't even stay on after a full charge and the plug is pulled out of the wall! Needless to say, i bought a PowerBook G4 and haven't looked back since.
Back when I was 13 (about 8 years ago), I was coming onto the scene of instant message and chat room chatting. I remember how much it would piss me off when I saw people substituting numbers and letters for complet words and strings of words. I would ask them why they did that, and usually they said, "it gets the point across qwicker." Ok, how much quicker is it to type "you" than "u"... to the experienced typist, it's negligable. But obviously, these kids spend hours and hours hovering above the keyboard, but still type with one or two fingers, so for them, yes, it may be faster. So, a possible partial solution for this, would be to actually teach these kids how to type!
From the Mac DivX Lord at the DivX.com forums...
It's funny though, DivX.mp4 files play on most Media Players for Windows. Other than that, a filehandler for QT6 would not be too difficult to create...
Slashdot Mirror
Only the Sith speak in extremes.
I guess they couldn't have Apple release it first under the Developer Tools for Tiger :)
Well, in a sense, yes. When courts rule on something, they establish a precedent on which further decisions will be made upon. So really, what this means is, until the courts make a decision, it is not proven legal. When the courts prove BT legal, then all courts in all cases usually do decide that BT is legal, for example.
I was actually really surprised when the New York Times article about DivX enabled high definition capability wasn't slashdotten long ago when the New York Times touted a third possible competitor in the High Definition consumer electronic device market for High Definition viability. You can find the article here.
(sorry, this does require a free subscription)
IO-Data offers their DivX HD Certified AvelLinkplayer2 for around US $250.00 and is quite capable and you can get it NOW. There should be more players on the way - from my understanding, Sigma Designs EM8620L Chips are more than capable of DivX High Definition. I also believe KiSS has showed off a similar DivX High Definition Video-On-Demand player at CeBIT. (scroll down, you'll see it).
All publicity is good publicity. He must want to get sued again so he can start another company.
The principle behind SIMD, or, rather, Single Instruction Multiple Data, is that you can process wide arrays of values in a single instruction. With the PowerPC version of SIMD, also known as AltiVec, you can issue an instruction and have it work with a 128-bit wide register. These registers may contain up to 4 32-bit numbers, 8 16-bit numbers or 16 8-bit numbers. For example, I can load two AltiVec registers with 16 unsigned chars, add them together using Vec_Add() and have it return its results to an AltiVec register. So this in essense is adding 16 values at once and in theory it's good enough for markeing to claim a 16X speedup, but this is rarely the case.
Apple has had AltiVec optimized libraries for DSP and such since the early releases of OS X.
I think this prediction may go to far saying that all mechanical systems will be the same, but at this time we're seeing some parallelisms in modern electronics.
I belive it may be Toshiba that sells three DVD+R DL capable drives that have the exact same hardware, but some are crippled at the firmware level so that the drives will behave as if they can't handle a DVD+R DL. I've also noticed that certain Power Macintosh G5 computers ship with a Pioneer DVR-108 SuperDrive and do not burn DVD+RL as they are crippled in firmware. I own that same model drive and it works fine for DL burning. I would imagine that making a single hardware solution would be cheaper than designing and manufacturing many products at varying functionality and price points. Then why not just sell one model that does it all? Royalties. By crippling functionality in software/firmware, the manufacturer does not have to pay sometimes obnoctious royalties thus reducing the bottom line. Oh yeah, and you also get to market one product as being functionally superior and thus deserves a premium. I can't recall prices exactly, but a sunroof option on a Lexus ES300 costs more than it does on a Toyota Camry, although they are in essense the same car.
A few years back, I was looking at the differences between a Cadillac Seville SLS and STS. Although basically the same car, the price of the STS was US $5,000 higher due to a differently tuned engine, a shorter final drive ratio, and 5,000 lines of additional suspension code! So in essense, we have seen here a change of model based on a software difference.
But then, with IBM's prediction, all cars would have to look the same. You can't change the body styling by changing a few lines of code... yet... Ricers would love this...
I won't be impressed, however, until I see a car without an engine and without wheels, but something entirely different.
There was an article that hit the New York times back in the fall of 2004 mentioning Professor Bringsjord and having a computer program write fiction. Perhaps this is to better write stories for elected officials to tell?
Somebody call?
The processing power for playing back those touted AVC H.264 movies should be borderline on the Mac Mini as this advanced media format is quite processor intensive. MPEG/ITU-T marketing papers have indicated that AVC/H.264 roughly takes 4x the decoding power for real time playback as MPEG-2 and AVC/H.264 offers the same quality at half the bitrate as MPEG-2. Using new builds of mplayer that support AVC/H.264 playback take up 70% of my G5's processor time at 420p, although other implementations take up less time as Apple claims 1080p is capable on a dual 2GHz PowerMac G5. It's hit or miss on a G4, depending on the extent of optimizations used and the bitrate of the encoding.
Apple has used a bitrate of 7.5mbps on their WWDC showcase of the 720p Troy trailer in H.264 and this quite a hefty amount of data to store locally and transfer over the internet as this article makes clear that "this is the year of HD." Doing the math, a 90 minute HD movie encoded at 7.5mbps should take roughly 5GB and on a 40GB drive you can store around 5 movies, 10 if you have an 80GB drive. These drives seem to be lacking in this department. As for internet transmission, if you were lucky enough, you'd have Optimum Online's 10mpbs download and a clear unobstructed path between the two endpoints you may be able to watch this in real time as if this is a variable bitrate encode, action scenes will require considerably more bandwidth to download in real time. I doubt the national average for broadband is near what Optimum Online provides.
An online store with HD H.264 movies may be wishful thinking for those with a Mac Mini, although my one problem with the Mac Mini as a media center is the lack of digital audio output. An M-Audio Sonica should take care of that...
I am itching to see what Jobs & Co make of this.
I'm under the impression that this is exactly what venture capital is all about. I've had good friends look for VC in starting up engineering firms and the answers from potential investors have been, "outsource the engineering to Asia and beef up your marketing and business development." Of course there is much talent in the art of marketing and business development, but selling thin air seems to be the most profitable of anything.
This just seems to be another iceberg to hit the Itanic.
The motion artifacts you see are from the digital MPEG-2 source. In time of motion, you'll see some "blocking" due to how digital video is compressed (Macroblock/Discrete Cosine Transform). You'll also see ringing (halos or "mosquito" noise) due to the discarded frequencies that take place in MPEG quantization. Motion puts an added stress of digital video compression. The accuracy of LCD and Plasma displays help to show these more than a blurry CRT.
I agree. While there may be issues of color fidelity and brightness, LCD and Plasma displays have a pixel match of 1:1. With the CRT electron gun, while it may be very accurate, measuring the accuracy directly would in a sense violate the Heisenberg Uncertainty Priciple. Being a scanning gun direcly influenced by outside sources, getting a 1:1 pixel match of source transmission and actual picture will be slightly off especially if you have the budget to buy large speakers for your surround system. LCD and Plasma won't suffer or at least not to this extent. So I'd have to say the pixel accuracy in Plasma LCD is much closer if not 1:1. That being said, I'd like to use my beer goggle analogy. With more accuracy, it's much easier to see the flaws in any given picture. With less accuracy, just as beer googles, it's much more difficult to see flaws. Unfortunately, a lot of people are repulsed by flaws. If you can't see them due to the CRT goggles, they're not there so the source looks better. Imagine you have a member of your preferred sex that has supermodel features but has an acne problem. Given enough blur (CRT or BEER) you won't be able to see the acne so he/she will ber very good looking. Remove the googgles and you'll tell them to see a dermatologist. It's as simple as that.
I totally agree with you. I have a double degree in Computer Science and Computer and Systems Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute as well as a two-time Apple WWDC student scholarship winner (experience)- I have only been able to get an interview at companies with people I knew on the inside. The job market is very competitive today for young graduates as experience is key - the only problem seems to be the endless cycle of needing experience to get more experience. I've seen 4.0 QPA computer science students get turned down from entry-level jobs because they weren't "technical" enough. I've known similar people get *a response* from an employer for every 40 resumes sent out.
I can't judge for sure on how much a degree from a top school will get you because I haven't seen any benefits from mine yet, other than a hell of a lot of respect from certain academics. I definately recommend staying for the completion of your degree - many people do well without one, deservedly so, but it is embarassing for me when a self proclaimed computer guru makes simple mistakes that are quite well published in many textbook's "Fallacies and Pitfall" sections. I'm sure many holding an M.S. in Computer Science would make the same mistakes too. One last great thing about having a piece of paper is that companies will generally pay you more than without one even if you work the same job (I know this first hand). Oh, and don't forget the connections you made in college (and handily put in your rolodex/palm)...
Some ways to build experience:
1. Open Source - Write Something and publish it!
2. Research (this may be where a top university may help out)
3. Co-op/Internship (yet, most of these look for people with experience, oddly enough)
And be careful not to make the person giving you the technical interview angry: I made this mistake when an interviewer asked me why I was using libxml instead of the Java XML capabilities in an a Cocoa/Objective-C application that I wrote in my Junior year of University as a side project...
I want to patent sales in general. It was my idea to sell stuff. Well, not really, but I think that caveman wish'd there were a patent office back then.
"Brush your teeth kids, or we'll know exactly where to find you!"
You know, I'd love to hook up a digital video camera to that 1394 port and pray that the car can use it as its eyes and drive for me :)
I somehow think running OS X on an iPod would be more useful. Besides, how big were the hard drives back when the Centris machines were out? Certainly no bigger than 500MB. Did they even get up to 128MB of RAM?
Hey I use a Mac and I swear by Naim. One of the slickest and quickest interfaces to use for instant messaging and not to mention screen makes it easy to run it on your home computer so the guys at work can't detect it as easily.
If you want to go to a school that thinks anything faster than 10mbit half duplex is only good for spreading viruses and taking up all the bandwidth of dual OC-3's, go there. Oh did I mention they disabled Multicast on their residential network so iTunes sharing doesn't work?
Hehe, had one of those 600E's too when I started at RPI. My first battery lasted for just under a year before I got it replaced by the repair center in the VCC. My second battery died within the next three months. Through the grapevine, I heard that there was a known problem with the 600E batteries and issuing a recall. The repair place at RPI did in fact mention a recall, but since I had already gotten my battery replaced once, I was not able to get a replacement. But still, after 3.5 years, my 600E is working quite niceley, especially after I upgraded the hard drive to 30 GB. I used it not only for school, but at work with UCAID. I've actually given it to my little brother, and of course he uses it to surf the web for pornagraphy.
But this whole battery life issue... I must say that I'm not happy with it, and my little brother certainly is not; the laptop won't even stay on after a full charge and the plug is pulled out of the wall! Needless to say, i bought a PowerBook G4 and haven't looked back since.
Back when I was 13 (about 8 years ago), I was coming onto the scene of instant message and chat room chatting. I remember how much it would piss me off when I saw people substituting numbers and letters for complet words and strings of words. I would ask them why they did that, and usually they said, "it gets the point across qwicker." Ok, how much quicker is it to type "you" than "u"... to the experienced typist, it's negligable. But obviously, these kids spend hours and hours hovering above the keyboard, but still type with one or two fingers, so for them, yes, it may be faster. So, a possible partial solution for this, would be to actually teach these kids how to type!
From the Mac DivX Lord at the DivX.com forums... It's funny though, DivX .mp4 files play on most Media Players for Windows. Other than that, a filehandler for QT6 would not be too difficult to create...