The short history is that VESA became a political organization unable to get anything passed through to replace analog VGA (e.g. NAVI). The Digital Display Working Group, led by Silicon Image, defined the DVI standard and never looked back, eventually defining HDCP encryption and adding onto DVI by defining HDMI. The only meaningful thing prior to DisplayPort and after analog VGA that VESA contributed to was the mounting hardware for monitors. You'll also notice that Samsung was not part of the original HDMI working group.
The problem was that consumer electronics and computer manufacturers didn't want to pay Silicon Image skim for its patents on TMDS that's used in DVI, HDMI and the now-dead UDI. Samsung, having been left out in the cold, led the charge to DisplayPort alongside HP and a few others. They defined the open standard using PCI-Express PHY and a new link layer with lots of resolutions, audio support, and anything you could imagine. They were ready to put it out the market with its own proprietary encryption scheme called DPCP when Intel led the Hollywood charge against it. They basically said DisplayPort had to use HDCP, which was about the only concession VESA made to them. Ironically, HDCP is far weaker than the AES-128 used in the original DPCP, but they wanted it anyway and got it. Bear in mind that VESA is essentially the DisplayPort working group today. This is also the primary reason why Samsung is the first one out the gate with it.
So, this is the product that we have today. Intel has pretty much left Silicon Image to twist in the wind. However, DisplayPort has one other use, and that's to protect the video links on a system board. Today, virtually all LCD panels use LVDS signaling, which is power hungry and requires big wide wiring harnesses between the board output and the panel input. DisplayPort was also designed for a chip-to-chip and board-to-board link so that people couldn't bypass copy protection by taking their TV's LVDS output to the LCD and building a converter board to unencrypted digital format. DisplayPort solves all of these problems plus allows for modes such as 120Hz and 240Hz panel refresh rates to combat motion blur and judder (which would require quad-link LVDS just for 120Hz at current 85MHz LVDS raw transmission rates). As a side note, Silicon Image touts iTMDS for a similar purpose, but it will never gain mass acceptance for the reasons already stated.
It's my guess that, in the next 4-5 years, LVDS will be supplanted by DisplayPort in all the "big 5" LCD manufacturers (LG/Philips, Sony/Samsung, CMO, AUO, and Sharp). AMD/ATI, nVidia and Intel mobos/GPUs will likely adopt this on a bigger scale starting next year. The one thing that's for sure is that all of the manufacturers not aligned to Silicon Image (read: everyone) are hell-bent on pushing through DisplayPort, no matter how painful or how long it takes. And all of us will get dragged along with it.
It's easily cracked.
For some mysterious reason *COUGH*Intel*COUGH*, DisplayPort's original copy protection (the far better AES-128) had the kaibosh put on it. That's fine - 40 exposed keys cracks the whole system, as my link says.
Many contracts limit your ability to sue in a real court. They exist in everything from vehicle purchase contracts to fitness club contracts. The best thing consumers can do is to read the contracts, know their rights, reject contracts where such provisions can't be removed and tell the salespeople why this isn't acceptable.
Any business that forces a customer into binding arbitration in a contract can't be trusted.
Unfortunately, the courts might tend to view a EULA as a Contract of Adhesion. In other words, it's "take it or leave it".
There's nothing that can be done about these types of contracts that force you into binding arbitration in the context of software other than what this man has argued and similar. In fact, your best realistic choice is to exercise your rights and use the option of not agreeing to the EULA, and shipping the machine back at their expense.
By doing this, the company incurs significant restocking and repackaging expenses and will eventually (hopefully) learn that such agreements are not worth the cost. This is especially true when you specifically tell them that binding arbitration terms are the primary reason you are returning the unit. Only in this way do we have any hope of stopping these kinds of unfortunately increasingly common practices (other than, of course, legislation).
AT&T and all the big telcos can have their net neutrality repealed.
In return, AT&T and all the telcos will give back all of the government's money, adjusted for inflation and bearing the prime rate of interest, that was given to them as investments, tax breaks, and other "incentives" to build up their network.
Shake on it?
I'm still amiss as to how people can still get their personal data stolen and their lives ruined by thieves in this way. To me, the biggest problem is the credit reporting agencies themselves who are very anti-consumer. By that, I mean they will very easily and quickly put on a bad credit remark, but are slow to remove it if it's a mistake. Even then, the whole idea of verifying identity in financial transactions is very loose to these guys who only require a name and SSN.
This is one of the problems that requires long-overdue federal legislation to remedy. It needs to consist of the following:
* Complete elimination of the use of SSNs by non-governmental agencies to track individuals, including employers and insurers
* Disallowing tracking numbers for enumeration of individuals to remain the same across any two or more private organizations
* Requirement of independently-verifiable photo and/or hashed/digitally-signed/analog biometric verification of the purchaser for large purchases on credit (not all of the above necessarily - even an original copy of a fingerprint plus a photograph of the person with the contract would be sufficient)
* Increased onus on creditors to prove that the alleged debtor was, in fact, the person responsible for the purchase or transgression in question via the identification as above
* Severe criminal penalties (up to life imprisonment) and civil penalties ($250,000 or triple the value of the offense, whichever is greater, per offense) for those who purposely attempt to steal identities, subvert the security measures for the purpose of identity theft, or facilitate the reporting of false information on debtors for which adequate steps have not been taken to verify identity
* Mandatory FIPS-based security for the storage of personal information
* Withholding of derogatory credit information that is in dispute during the time that affected individuals are making a proper challenge to said derogatory information
Do all of that, and what you'll find is that this problem will vaporize overnight. It won't prevent other problems such as outright credit card theft (for which there are separate solutions anyway), but it will cut this problem off where it needs to be cut off.
Any of your doubts as to why your software continues to be pirated, cracked, or otherwise made available to those who you think have no desire to pay is in part directly because of your continued arbitrary restrictions against otherwise legitimate users.
Having worked in the high-end DTV and image processing space, our rule of thumb was that the vast majority of people will not distinguish between 1080p and WXGA/720p at normal viewing distances for up to around a 37"-40" screen UNLESS you have native 1920x1080 computer output. It only costs about $50 more to add 1080p capability to the same size glass, but even that is too expensive for many people because of some of the other implications (i.e. more of and more expensive SDRAM for the scaler/deinterlacer especially for PiP, more expensive interfaces like 1080p-capable HDMI and 1080p-capable analog component ADCs, etc.). These few dollars are not just a few dollars in an industry where panel prices are dropping 30% per year. Designers of these "low-end" DTVs are looking to squeeze pennies out of every design. For this reason alone, it'll be quite a while before you see a "budget" 1080p panel in a 26"-40" screen size.
At some point, panel prices will stabilize, but most people won't require this either way. And, as I mentioned, very few sources will output 1080p anyway. The ones I know of: Xbox360/PS3, HD-DVD, Blu-Ray and PCs. All broadcast infrastructure is capable of 10-bit 4:2:2 YCbCr color sampled 1920x1080, but even that is overkill and does not go out over broadcast infrastructure (i.e. ATSC broadcasts are max 1080i today). The other thing to distinguish is the frame rate. When most people talk about 1080p, they often are implying 1080p at 60 frames per second. Most Hollywood movies are actually 1080p but at 24fps which can be carried using 1080i bandwidths and using pulldown. And you don't want to change the frame rate of these movies anyway because it's a waste of bandwidth and, if you frame rate convert it using motion compensated techniques, you lose the suspension of reality that low frame rates give you. The TV's deinterlacer needs to know how to deal with pulldown (aka "film mode") but most new DTVs can do this fairly well.
In other words, other than video games and the odd nature documentary that you might have a next-gen optical disc for on a screen size greater than 40" and for the best eyes in that case, 1080p is mostly a waste of time. I'm glad the article pointed this stuff out.
More important things to look for in a display: color bit depth (10-bit or greater) with full 10-bit processing throughout the pipeline, good motion adaptive deinterlacing tuned for both high-motion and low-motion scenes, good scaling with properly-selected coefficients, good color management, MPEG block and mosquito artifact reduction, and good off-axis viewing angle both horizontally and vertically. I'll gladly take a WXGA display with these features over the 1080p crap that's foisted on people without them.
If you're out buying a DTV, get a hold of the Silicon Optix HQV DVD v1.4 or the Faroudja Sage DVDs and force the "salesperson" to play the DVD using component inputs to the DTV. They have material that we constantly used to benchmark quality, and that will help you filter out many of the issues people still have with their new displays.
Greece has far more advanced infrastructure, much higher literacy rates and a much better overall standard of living than Turkey. Obviously "mschuyler" has never bothered to make any substantial visit to Greece.
I used to live in the US, and when I got my driver's license I got summoned for jury duty. Well, you think these idiots would know that a non-citizen has no business dealing in the judicial or legislative process of another country. It's simply not morally right.
But, by the same token, I would ask Senator Feinstein to PLEASE FUCK RIGHT OFF. I didn't serve on jury duty in your goddamned state, so don't ask our Prime Minister to do your dirty work for you.
It isn't inconceivable that someone could redirect these sites to their own "special" versions in order to get the username and password for a banking or other login, then display another page that the login didn't work or to come back later due to maintenance. Then the perp can go in and do the damage.
The latest versions of TrueCrypt suggest not using SHA-1 and instead using RIPEMD-160 or Whirlpool. It wasn't because of the work done by this professor; rather, it was because they felt that there was some "mild" risk because of inherent weaknesses and collisions in SHA-1 that could make it easier to crack.
In a lot of advanced image processing where you want to upscale an image, you can actually use a wavelet-based scaling technique that recovers amazing amounts of detail. In most digital TVs these days, they use a two-dimensional polyphase finite impulse response filter tuned for a certain degree of Gibbs phenomenon (ringing around harder edges) versus detail loss. But this has its limits, and it doesn't intelligently reconstruct the image details. In addition, it's notoriously difficult to tune properly for all content.
In contrast, wavelet based scaling can actually reconstruct phenomenal amounts of detail from a degraded image. For digital TV applications where you have DVDs or standard definition content displayed on a high-definition fixed-resolution display, wavelet-based scaling can actually make real details re-emerge where they weren't there before. The bottom line explanation is understanding and interpreting the influence of adjacent pixels with a minimum of error as the article's author demonstrates (although, as the parent post explains, he's going about it in a convoluted way). I've actually seen the preliminary results that some engineers had shown me that makes it look like something a government agency would use to enhance satellite or surveillance camera images. It makes DVDs look almost exactly like HD-DVD or Blu-Ray HD content. In fact, I expressed my concern that this scaling method could be used on digital TVs to actually "unmask" blurred or blocked faces on TV shows and introduce liability issues.
Nevertheless, it is possible to reconstruct a LOT of detail from blocked out or blurred faces or pretty much any content. Doing it in real time on HD resolution displays is a different matter altogether as it requires enormous computing power. But it is coming in the next 3-5 years. If you're really interesting in blocking out content on digital photos, use a solid black color over the part you don't want recognized.
Your biggest problem with a projector will be the environment you view it in. Most people don't have the ability to shut everything off in a primary room just to watch their show. Even if you do, you gloss over the fact that the projection screen itself has a great deal to do with image quality and contrast. A $200 projection screen is great for overhead transparencies, but if you want to get a good quality image you'll need to spend an order of magnitude more. Also, don't get me started on the off-axis viewing problems of rear projection, though I'm assuming we're not talking about that here. Another common problem to both is rainbow effect for a DLP projector, unless you're willing to spend big $$$ on 3LCD or 3DLP.
Nothing beats a direct view unless you absolutely need an insane screen size.
Unlike the FCC which mandated digital tuners and HD-capable sets (even if they downscale to SD resolutions), Industry Canada/CRTC has NOT mandated any such change. Their attitude is "let the market decide" which is going to leave Canada behind in terms of technology advancement for televisions. The CBC itself is a government-run organization without a clear mandate for the future. Sure, production costs are more costly for HD programming, but welcome to 2006. Every asshole with a DV camcorder won't be giving you all your programming any more, and they're moving on to HDV, HDCAM and the like. To top that off, you won't be able to buy a standard definition analog-only TV in the stores in just a few short years, but who cares when your fearless leaders don't push for technology advancement? It's another case of the fish rotting from the head down.
1. It is inherently a projector technology, which means:
a. For a front projection situation, DLP image quality is directly dependent upon the illumination within the room and the screen.
b. For a rear projection situation (i.e. the one that looks like a stand-alone TV), DLP requires a screen that has inherently poor viewing angles, particularly when viewed above or below the vertical screen limits. Even older LCDs without the "180 degree" viewing angle are far better than any DLP RPTV screen.
2. It is a technology dependent upon light sources that (currently) have inherently poor lifetimes. Lamps are expensive replacements. When LEDs and lasers come more into the fold, this should alleviate this problem.
(Note: this could also be construed as an advantage since you'd have all new luminance and you can't replace the CCFL backlight in an LCD which has a tendency to degrade unevenly over time).
3. It is a technology that, unless you use three separate DLP chips for the primary colors, will be prone to rainbow effects. Even in the 3DLP setups, convergence can also become an issue.
DLP is good for certain applications but will never be the primary volume driver of the market. Two years ago, it was the only way to get a decent screen size for HD, but not any more. The whole industry has dogpiled onto LCD direct-view, and it'll only get cheaper from here.
SGI hasn't exactly been doing so well lately. One of the guest speakers in business school told me straight out: have good legal representation because, when the chips are down, that's all you may have left. All this lawsuit is is a manifestation of that principle and the "cornered animal" principle.
I think companies, including Apple but especially Dell, have issues with squeezing their suppliers just a bit too hard. They negotiate one price for a given volume and simply short-change the supplier. Then the supplier has to decide between (a) taking legal action to recover their money and thus kill their relationship, or (b) eat the margin. That's how companies like Dell figure it.
Unfortunately, there is an option (c) that basically says they will cut just a few too many corners so that they can only just meet the bare minimum requirements and stick it back to their abusive customer. This is, at least in part, what you're seeing today.
As a Canadian who has worked for years both in Canada and the United States, and having taken the plunge 18 months ago to come back to Canada to work, I can say that it has been an unpleasant experience.
Healthcare up here is abysmal. Trying to find a family doctor is nearly impossible, and there are long wait times for elective procedures and medical imaging. One of our family friends died of a heart attack after waiting nearly a year for bypass surgery. I'm paying more for health care up here than I ever did in the US due to my premiums.
Education is a joke up here too. Ontario, for example, passes ALL children unless they basically hand in nothing or choose to do nothing throughout the year. My neighbor's son got straight "R" grades ("F" is no longer politically correct), yet somehow passed to Grade 5 last year. That'll keep happening until he graduates high school, even though this kid still can't read a basic "See Jane Run" type book.
Daily life is ok, but there are some things you have to be aware of. Although the overall murder rate is lower in Canada, per-capita rates of rape and property crime are all higher than in the United States. I feel less safe here than I did in the San Francisco Bay area and much less safe than in the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania. Try rolling through Toronto and see what it's like these days. Forget about the unbelievably bitter cold, excessive snow if you live in Eastern Canada, and generally longer winters. Weather counts for a lot.
Then there's the financial aspect of it. Sure, people don't get bankrupted here, but if you're not chronically or seriously ill you are better off in the US. I've paid more for health care here since my employer doesn't cover my premiums (yes, we pay premiums, $60/month/person). Auto insurance is 50% more expensive than what I paid for in California, plus I can't remove tickets from my record with traffic school. House prices are insane; I can't buy a fully-detached house with two car garage for under $400k, and I can't deduct my mortgage interest or property taxes from my federal taxes. I get paid less in equivalent dollars than any job in the US, and all of my Canadian friends who have worked both places want to go back south unless they have significant family obligations north of the 49th. I pay more in taxes, especially at the till (15% sales tax on a car is insane!). The government's overly-liberal immigration policies make unemployment consistently 2% higher at a minimum than in the United States so I'm always looking over my shoulder thinking when my time might be next.
Finally, there's the government. Lots of/.ers think that Canada is some magical place of freedom. It's not. Freedom of speech is curtailed as we have laws against "hate speech" that the US would consider violations of the First Amendment. Freedom of the press is a joke, since several times reporters were spied on, wiretapped or just simply had their personal files confiscated without a warrant by corrupt police who feel that due process is an inconvenience. Our Senate isn't elected nor provides regional representation, but is an expensive rubber stamp with no real power. Heck, we didn't even have our full independence from the United Kingdom until April 19, 1982! We have sexist and racist government departments that purposely exclude white males from positions supposedly in the name of diversity. There are 36,000 deportation orders on illegal immigrants that can't be executed because the government doesn't know where they are. They let the families of Somali warlords and Sikh terrorists stay in this country. And, in general, the majority of people here have been lulled into utter stupidity by the clever social engineering of Pierre Trudeau's liberal party over the last 35 years that has their party about to be voted back into power that has stolen billions of dollars from taxpayers (Adscam, HRDC et al). Not to mention that Canada is the only major industrialized nation in the world to
I was chatting with one of the engineers regarding this at the National Association of Broadcasters show this year. Apparently, they were just getting things finished off and ready for what was their latest generation of holographic storage. One thing that was interesting is that the maximum data rate was just under the data rate for 720p/1080i (around 680Mbit/s versus ~750Mbit/s). I mentioned to him that he should really try to get the data rate up so that they could record and play back live HD material, but things were apparently wrapped up pretty well by the time I had talked to him. He mentioned a large network that wanted to use this for long-term storage and retrieval of video, presumably to reduce the necessity for large tape robots like StorageTek provides.
A couple of other interesting facts about the device - the rotational rate of the device is actually extremely slow. You wouldn't see it spinning or even barely moving unless you really looked at it. They use Ultra320SCSI as an electrical interface to the discs. These guys were co-promoting with Maxell in the Maxell booth itself on the media that's in these large cartridges similar to the old MO discs, but larger. The holodiscs themselves were about half an inch thick and were completely transparent, and had excellent archival characteristics and stability (>100 years IIRC). The drives themselves were about the size of a two-drive external SCSI drive box, but fairly long (probably around a foot or slightly longer) and black in color. Media was something like $179 per disc and the drives themselves were $6k-$10k, IIRC. Finally, I asked him why they wouldn't just put the disc into a cube format (read: all your information on your keychain), but he mentioned that the translational control of the cube to read and write the information would be overly complicated electromechanically though it could technically be done.
My guess is that you won't see this technology filter down to the average joe for at least 5-7 years. Hopefully it'll be worth the wait.
The filing in US District Court for the Northern District of California asks the court to prevent Lynn and Black Hat from "further disclosing proprietary information belonging to Cisco and ISS," said John Noh, a Cisco spokesman.
"It is our belief that the information that Lynn presented at Black Hat this morning is information that was illegally obtained and violated our intellectual-property rights," Noh added.
Ok, let's look at this objectively, shall we?
Proprietary information belonging to Cisco and ISS is nonsense. That information should belong to the customers who bought the router so they can take the appropriate steps; for example, a customer should be able to replace an affected router with something else if they're concerned about the problem, or modify the software on the router to alleviate the problem itself (and this is again another example of where OSS is so important).
In terms of violating intellectual property rights, what about violating the property rights of the people who own the router? What rights do they have in this whole situation? Are they expected to sit their with their collective thumbs up their collective asses and wait randomly for a fix? Don't the people who use the routers have the right to uninterrupted network services? What happens if this router belongs to a large ISP and a DoS attack brings the router down? Are they supposed to be stuck with the bill? I'll tell you this much - if this happened, Cisco would never credit them with the cost of service refunds to their end customers. Of course, this would be hypocritical on Cisco's part for obvious reasons, but I digress.
Silicon Optix ASTROTURF? Naw, it couldn't be...
on
When is 720p Not 720p?
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· Score: 2, Informative
Did anyone notice that, despite the accusation, Silicon Optix calls out NONE of their competitors for this supposed "issue"?
Gennum, Pixelworks, Genesis, Oplus (now Intel), and several others make their own scaler/deinterlacer chips. Most of these have already found their way into displays and have proper deinterlacing strategies in them. Nobody scales without deinterlacing first anyway in a modern image processor.
Silicon Optix's technology is based on offline film processors by Teranex. While they can certainly be high quality, they aren't the top of the heap either by volume or by prestige. Genesis/Faroudja had a name for a long time with their "line doublers" which are over 20 years old and their more advanced but cheap gm1601 is one of the more popular solutions for HDTVs. Gennum's GF9350 with VXP technology is currently in the largest plasma tv in the world (Samsung 80"). These and other scaler/deinterlacer chips have none of the problems that Silicon Optix claims exist. If you look at the debates that rage over at the usual enthusiast sites, you'll see that there are issues with its own technology like latency and cost that aren't present in the other solutions I mentioned.
Just like Silicon Optix's "odd film cadence technology" which requires nothing different than what everyone else has today, this reeks of a cheap PR vehicle. While the choice of scaler and deinterlacer is important, it is not the utter tragedy that SO would like to make it out nor are they the saviors of the HDTV world. If they know who the culprits are, then let them name whose image processor it is that creates these problems.
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The short history is that VESA became a political organization unable to get anything passed through to replace analog VGA (e.g. NAVI). The Digital Display Working Group, led by Silicon Image, defined the DVI standard and never looked back, eventually defining HDCP encryption and adding onto DVI by defining HDMI. The only meaningful thing prior to DisplayPort and after analog VGA that VESA contributed to was the mounting hardware for monitors. You'll also notice that Samsung was not part of the original HDMI working group.
The problem was that consumer electronics and computer manufacturers didn't want to pay Silicon Image skim for its patents on TMDS that's used in DVI, HDMI and the now-dead UDI. Samsung, having been left out in the cold, led the charge to DisplayPort alongside HP and a few others. They defined the open standard using PCI-Express PHY and a new link layer with lots of resolutions, audio support, and anything you could imagine. They were ready to put it out the market with its own proprietary encryption scheme called DPCP when Intel led the Hollywood charge against it. They basically said DisplayPort had to use HDCP, which was about the only concession VESA made to them. Ironically, HDCP is far weaker than the AES-128 used in the original DPCP, but they wanted it anyway and got it. Bear in mind that VESA is essentially the DisplayPort working group today. This is also the primary reason why Samsung is the first one out the gate with it.
So, this is the product that we have today. Intel has pretty much left Silicon Image to twist in the wind. However, DisplayPort has one other use, and that's to protect the video links on a system board. Today, virtually all LCD panels use LVDS signaling, which is power hungry and requires big wide wiring harnesses between the board output and the panel input. DisplayPort was also designed for a chip-to-chip and board-to-board link so that people couldn't bypass copy protection by taking their TV's LVDS output to the LCD and building a converter board to unencrypted digital format. DisplayPort solves all of these problems plus allows for modes such as 120Hz and 240Hz panel refresh rates to combat motion blur and judder (which would require quad-link LVDS just for 120Hz at current 85MHz LVDS raw transmission rates). As a side note, Silicon Image touts iTMDS for a similar purpose, but it will never gain mass acceptance for the reasons already stated.
It's my guess that, in the next 4-5 years, LVDS will be supplanted by DisplayPort in all the "big 5" LCD manufacturers (LG/Philips, Sony/Samsung, CMO, AUO, and Sharp). AMD/ATI, nVidia and Intel mobos/GPUs will likely adopt this on a bigger scale starting next year. The one thing that's for sure is that all of the manufacturers not aligned to Silicon Image (read: everyone) are hell-bent on pushing through DisplayPort, no matter how painful or how long it takes. And all of us will get dragged along with it.
It's easily cracked. For some mysterious reason *COUGH*Intel*COUGH*, DisplayPort's original copy protection (the far better AES-128) had the kaibosh put on it. That's fine - 40 exposed keys cracks the whole system, as my link says.
Many contracts limit your ability to sue in a real court. They exist in everything from vehicle purchase contracts to fitness club contracts. The best thing consumers can do is to read the contracts, know their rights, reject contracts where such provisions can't be removed and tell the salespeople why this isn't acceptable.
Any business that forces a customer into binding arbitration in a contract can't be trusted.
Unfortunately, the courts might tend to view a EULA as a Contract of Adhesion. In other words, it's "take it or leave it".
There's nothing that can be done about these types of contracts that force you into binding arbitration in the context of software other than what this man has argued and similar. In fact, your best realistic choice is to exercise your rights and use the option of not agreeing to the EULA, and shipping the machine back at their expense.
By doing this, the company incurs significant restocking and repackaging expenses and will eventually (hopefully) learn that such agreements are not worth the cost. This is especially true when you specifically tell them that binding arbitration terms are the primary reason you are returning the unit. Only in this way do we have any hope of stopping these kinds of unfortunately increasingly common practices (other than, of course, legislation).
AT&T and all the big telcos can have their net neutrality repealed. In return, AT&T and all the telcos will give back all of the government's money, adjusted for inflation and bearing the prime rate of interest, that was given to them as investments, tax breaks, and other "incentives" to build up their network. Shake on it?
I'm still amiss as to how people can still get their personal data stolen and their lives ruined by thieves in this way. To me, the biggest problem is the credit reporting agencies themselves who are very anti-consumer. By that, I mean they will very easily and quickly put on a bad credit remark, but are slow to remove it if it's a mistake. Even then, the whole idea of verifying identity in financial transactions is very loose to these guys who only require a name and SSN.
This is one of the problems that requires long-overdue federal legislation to remedy. It needs to consist of the following:
* Complete elimination of the use of SSNs by non-governmental agencies to track individuals, including employers and insurers
* Disallowing tracking numbers for enumeration of individuals to remain the same across any two or more private organizations
* Requirement of independently-verifiable photo and/or hashed/digitally-signed/analog biometric verification of the purchaser for large purchases on credit (not all of the above necessarily - even an original copy of a fingerprint plus a photograph of the person with the contract would be sufficient)
* Increased onus on creditors to prove that the alleged debtor was, in fact, the person responsible for the purchase or transgression in question via the identification as above
* Severe criminal penalties (up to life imprisonment) and civil penalties ($250,000 or triple the value of the offense, whichever is greater, per offense) for those who purposely attempt to steal identities, subvert the security measures for the purpose of identity theft, or facilitate the reporting of false information on debtors for which adequate steps have not been taken to verify identity
* Mandatory FIPS-based security for the storage of personal information
* Withholding of derogatory credit information that is in dispute during the time that affected individuals are making a proper challenge to said derogatory information
Do all of that, and what you'll find is that this problem will vaporize overnight. It won't prevent other problems such as outright credit card theft (for which there are separate solutions anyway), but it will cut this problem off where it needs to be cut off.
Any of your doubts as to why your software continues to be pirated, cracked, or otherwise made available to those who you think have no desire to pay is in part directly because of your continued arbitrary restrictions against otherwise legitimate users.
Having worked in the high-end DTV and image processing space, our rule of thumb was that the vast majority of people will not distinguish between 1080p and WXGA/720p at normal viewing distances for up to around a 37"-40" screen UNLESS you have native 1920x1080 computer output. It only costs about $50 more to add 1080p capability to the same size glass, but even that is too expensive for many people because of some of the other implications (i.e. more of and more expensive SDRAM for the scaler/deinterlacer especially for PiP, more expensive interfaces like 1080p-capable HDMI and 1080p-capable analog component ADCs, etc.). These few dollars are not just a few dollars in an industry where panel prices are dropping 30% per year. Designers of these "low-end" DTVs are looking to squeeze pennies out of every design. For this reason alone, it'll be quite a while before you see a "budget" 1080p panel in a 26"-40" screen size.
At some point, panel prices will stabilize, but most people won't require this either way. And, as I mentioned, very few sources will output 1080p anyway. The ones I know of: Xbox360/PS3, HD-DVD, Blu-Ray and PCs. All broadcast infrastructure is capable of 10-bit 4:2:2 YCbCr color sampled 1920x1080, but even that is overkill and does not go out over broadcast infrastructure (i.e. ATSC broadcasts are max 1080i today). The other thing to distinguish is the frame rate. When most people talk about 1080p, they often are implying 1080p at 60 frames per second. Most Hollywood movies are actually 1080p but at 24fps which can be carried using 1080i bandwidths and using pulldown. And you don't want to change the frame rate of these movies anyway because it's a waste of bandwidth and, if you frame rate convert it using motion compensated techniques, you lose the suspension of reality that low frame rates give you. The TV's deinterlacer needs to know how to deal with pulldown (aka "film mode") but most new DTVs can do this fairly well.
In other words, other than video games and the odd nature documentary that you might have a next-gen optical disc for on a screen size greater than 40" and for the best eyes in that case, 1080p is mostly a waste of time. I'm glad the article pointed this stuff out.
More important things to look for in a display: color bit depth (10-bit or greater) with full 10-bit processing throughout the pipeline, good motion adaptive deinterlacing tuned for both high-motion and low-motion scenes, good scaling with properly-selected coefficients, good color management, MPEG block and mosquito artifact reduction, and good off-axis viewing angle both horizontally and vertically. I'll gladly take a WXGA display with these features over the 1080p crap that's foisted on people without them.
If you're out buying a DTV, get a hold of the Silicon Optix HQV DVD v1.4 or the Faroudja Sage DVDs and force the "salesperson" to play the DVD using component inputs to the DTV. They have material that we constantly used to benchmark quality, and that will help you filter out many of the issues people still have with their new displays.
Greece has far more advanced infrastructure, much higher literacy rates and a much better overall standard of living than Turkey. Obviously "mschuyler" has never bothered to make any substantial visit to Greece.
I used to live in the US, and when I got my driver's license I got summoned for jury duty. Well, you think these idiots would know that a non-citizen has no business dealing in the judicial or legislative process of another country. It's simply not morally right.
But, by the same token, I would ask Senator Feinstein to PLEASE FUCK RIGHT OFF. I didn't serve on jury duty in your goddamned state, so don't ask our Prime Minister to do your dirty work for you.
It isn't inconceivable that someone could redirect these sites to their own "special" versions in order to get the username and password for a banking or other login, then display another page that the login didn't work or to come back later due to maintenance. Then the perp can go in and do the damage.
The latest versions of TrueCrypt suggest not using SHA-1 and instead using RIPEMD-160 or Whirlpool. It wasn't because of the work done by this professor; rather, it was because they felt that there was some "mild" risk because of inherent weaknesses and collisions in SHA-1 that could make it easier to crack.
In a lot of advanced image processing where you want to upscale an image, you can actually use a wavelet-based scaling technique that recovers amazing amounts of detail. In most digital TVs these days, they use a two-dimensional polyphase finite impulse response filter tuned for a certain degree of Gibbs phenomenon (ringing around harder edges) versus detail loss. But this has its limits, and it doesn't intelligently reconstruct the image details. In addition, it's notoriously difficult to tune properly for all content.
In contrast, wavelet based scaling can actually reconstruct phenomenal amounts of detail from a degraded image. For digital TV applications where you have DVDs or standard definition content displayed on a high-definition fixed-resolution display, wavelet-based scaling can actually make real details re-emerge where they weren't there before. The bottom line explanation is understanding and interpreting the influence of adjacent pixels with a minimum of error as the article's author demonstrates (although, as the parent post explains, he's going about it in a convoluted way). I've actually seen the preliminary results that some engineers had shown me that makes it look like something a government agency would use to enhance satellite or surveillance camera images. It makes DVDs look almost exactly like HD-DVD or Blu-Ray HD content. In fact, I expressed my concern that this scaling method could be used on digital TVs to actually "unmask" blurred or blocked faces on TV shows and introduce liability issues.
Nevertheless, it is possible to reconstruct a LOT of detail from blocked out or blurred faces or pretty much any content. Doing it in real time on HD resolution displays is a different matter altogether as it requires enormous computing power. But it is coming in the next 3-5 years. If you're really interesting in blocking out content on digital photos, use a solid black color over the part you don't want recognized.
Your biggest problem with a projector will be the environment you view it in. Most people don't have the ability to shut everything off in a primary room just to watch their show. Even if you do, you gloss over the fact that the projection screen itself has a great deal to do with image quality and contrast. A $200 projection screen is great for overhead transparencies, but if you want to get a good quality image you'll need to spend an order of magnitude more. Also, don't get me started on the off-axis viewing problems of rear projection, though I'm assuming we're not talking about that here. Another common problem to both is rainbow effect for a DLP projector, unless you're willing to spend big $$$ on 3LCD or 3DLP.
Nothing beats a direct view unless you absolutely need an insane screen size.
Unlike the FCC which mandated digital tuners and HD-capable sets (even if they downscale to SD resolutions), Industry Canada/CRTC has NOT mandated any such change. Their attitude is "let the market decide" which is going to leave Canada behind in terms of technology advancement for televisions. The CBC itself is a government-run organization without a clear mandate for the future. Sure, production costs are more costly for HD programming, but welcome to 2006. Every asshole with a DV camcorder won't be giving you all your programming any more, and they're moving on to HDV, HDCAM and the like. To top that off, you won't be able to buy a standard definition analog-only TV in the stores in just a few short years, but who cares when your fearless leaders don't push for technology advancement? It's another case of the fish rotting from the head down.
DLP has the following limitations:
1. It is inherently a projector technology, which means:
a. For a front projection situation, DLP image quality is directly dependent upon the illumination within the room and the screen.
b. For a rear projection situation (i.e. the one that looks like a stand-alone TV), DLP requires a screen that has inherently poor viewing angles, particularly when viewed above or below the vertical screen limits. Even older LCDs without the "180 degree" viewing angle are far better than any DLP RPTV screen.
2. It is a technology dependent upon light sources that (currently) have inherently poor lifetimes. Lamps are expensive replacements. When LEDs and lasers come more into the fold, this should alleviate this problem.
(Note: this could also be construed as an advantage since you'd have all new luminance and you can't replace the CCFL backlight in an LCD which has a tendency to degrade unevenly over time).
3. It is a technology that, unless you use three separate DLP chips for the primary colors, will be prone to rainbow effects. Even in the 3DLP setups, convergence can also become an issue.
DLP is good for certain applications but will never be the primary volume driver of the market. Two years ago, it was the only way to get a decent screen size for HD, but not any more. The whole industry has dogpiled onto LCD direct-view, and it'll only get cheaper from here.
SGI hasn't exactly been doing so well lately. One of the guest speakers in business school told me straight out: have good legal representation because, when the chips are down, that's all you may have left. All this lawsuit is is a manifestation of that principle and the "cornered animal" principle.
I think companies, including Apple but especially Dell, have issues with squeezing their suppliers just a bit too hard. They negotiate one price for a given volume and simply short-change the supplier. Then the supplier has to decide between (a) taking legal action to recover their money and thus kill their relationship, or (b) eat the margin. That's how companies like Dell figure it.
Unfortunately, there is an option (c) that basically says they will cut just a few too many corners so that they can only just meet the bare minimum requirements and stick it back to their abusive customer. This is, at least in part, what you're seeing today.
TANSTAAFL...
As a Canadian who has worked for years both in Canada and the United States, and having taken the plunge 18 months ago to come back to Canada to work, I can say that it has been an unpleasant experience.
/.ers think that Canada is some magical place of freedom. It's not. Freedom of speech is curtailed as we have laws against "hate speech" that the US would consider violations of the First Amendment. Freedom of the press is a joke, since several times reporters were spied on, wiretapped or just simply had their personal files confiscated without a warrant by corrupt police who feel that due process is an inconvenience. Our Senate isn't elected nor provides regional representation, but is an expensive rubber stamp with no real power. Heck, we didn't even have our full independence from the United Kingdom until April 19, 1982! We have sexist and racist government departments that purposely exclude white males from positions supposedly in the name of diversity. There are 36,000 deportation orders on illegal immigrants that can't be executed because the government doesn't know where they are. They let the families of Somali warlords and Sikh terrorists stay in this country. And, in general, the majority of people here have been lulled into utter stupidity by the clever social engineering of Pierre Trudeau's liberal party over the last 35 years that has their party about to be voted back into power that has stolen billions of dollars from taxpayers (Adscam, HRDC et al). Not to mention that Canada is the only major industrialized nation in the world to
Healthcare up here is abysmal. Trying to find a family doctor is nearly impossible, and there are long wait times for elective procedures and medical imaging. One of our family friends died of a heart attack after waiting nearly a year for bypass surgery. I'm paying more for health care up here than I ever did in the US due to my premiums.
Education is a joke up here too. Ontario, for example, passes ALL children unless they basically hand in nothing or choose to do nothing throughout the year. My neighbor's son got straight "R" grades ("F" is no longer politically correct), yet somehow passed to Grade 5 last year. That'll keep happening until he graduates high school, even though this kid still can't read a basic "See Jane Run" type book.
Daily life is ok, but there are some things you have to be aware of. Although the overall murder rate is lower in Canada, per-capita rates of rape and property crime are all higher than in the United States. I feel less safe here than I did in the San Francisco Bay area and much less safe than in the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania. Try rolling through Toronto and see what it's like these days. Forget about the unbelievably bitter cold, excessive snow if you live in Eastern Canada, and generally longer winters. Weather counts for a lot.
Then there's the financial aspect of it. Sure, people don't get bankrupted here, but if you're not chronically or seriously ill you are better off in the US. I've paid more for health care here since my employer doesn't cover my premiums (yes, we pay premiums, $60/month/person). Auto insurance is 50% more expensive than what I paid for in California, plus I can't remove tickets from my record with traffic school. House prices are insane; I can't buy a fully-detached house with two car garage for under $400k, and I can't deduct my mortgage interest or property taxes from my federal taxes. I get paid less in equivalent dollars than any job in the US, and all of my Canadian friends who have worked both places want to go back south unless they have significant family obligations north of the 49th. I pay more in taxes, especially at the till (15% sales tax on a car is insane!). The government's overly-liberal immigration policies make unemployment consistently 2% higher at a minimum than in the United States so I'm always looking over my shoulder thinking when my time might be next.
Finally, there's the government. Lots of
I was chatting with one of the engineers regarding this at the National Association of Broadcasters show this year. Apparently, they were just getting things finished off and ready for what was their latest generation of holographic storage. One thing that was interesting is that the maximum data rate was just under the data rate for 720p/1080i (around 680Mbit/s versus ~750Mbit/s). I mentioned to him that he should really try to get the data rate up so that they could record and play back live HD material, but things were apparently wrapped up pretty well by the time I had talked to him. He mentioned a large network that wanted to use this for long-term storage and retrieval of video, presumably to reduce the necessity for large tape robots like StorageTek provides.
A couple of other interesting facts about the device - the rotational rate of the device is actually extremely slow. You wouldn't see it spinning or even barely moving unless you really looked at it. They use Ultra320SCSI as an electrical interface to the discs. These guys were co-promoting with Maxell in the Maxell booth itself on the media that's in these large cartridges similar to the old MO discs, but larger. The holodiscs themselves were about half an inch thick and were completely transparent, and had excellent archival characteristics and stability (>100 years IIRC). The drives themselves were about the size of a two-drive external SCSI drive box, but fairly long (probably around a foot or slightly longer) and black in color. Media was something like $179 per disc and the drives themselves were $6k-$10k, IIRC. Finally, I asked him why they wouldn't just put the disc into a cube format (read: all your information on your keychain), but he mentioned that the translational control of the cube to read and write the information would be overly complicated electromechanically though it could technically be done.
My guess is that you won't see this technology filter down to the average joe for at least 5-7 years. Hopefully it'll be worth the wait.
In case you haven't heard how serious (read: messed up or funny, depending on your disposition) MMORPGs can get, have a listen to this:
http://wowseriousbusiness.ytmnd.com/
This was recorded from a voice chat on WoW. All I can say is...WOW...
http://www.opennetinitiative.net/bulletins/010/ONI -010-telus.pdf
Sorry about that...
http://www.crtc.gc.ca/RapidsCCM/Register.asp?lang= E
= E
for details on the violation.
There's a five-step form, and they'll refer the complaint. For a quick cut-and-paste snippet, go to the following:
Please be advised that Telus Corporation may be in violation of the Telecommunications Act, Section 36. Please see http://www.crtc.gc.ca/RapidsCCM/Register.asp?lang
The filing in US District Court for the Northern District of California asks the court to prevent Lynn and Black Hat from "further disclosing proprietary information belonging to Cisco and ISS," said John Noh, a Cisco spokesman. "It is our belief that the information that Lynn presented at Black Hat this morning is information that was illegally obtained and violated our intellectual-property rights," Noh added.
Ok, let's look at this objectively, shall we? Proprietary information belonging to Cisco and ISS is nonsense. That information should belong to the customers who bought the router so they can take the appropriate steps; for example, a customer should be able to replace an affected router with something else if they're concerned about the problem, or modify the software on the router to alleviate the problem itself (and this is again another example of where OSS is so important).
In terms of violating intellectual property rights, what about violating the property rights of the people who own the router? What rights do they have in this whole situation? Are they expected to sit their with their collective thumbs up their collective asses and wait randomly for a fix? Don't the people who use the routers have the right to uninterrupted network services? What happens if this router belongs to a large ISP and a DoS attack brings the router down? Are they supposed to be stuck with the bill? I'll tell you this much - if this happened, Cisco would never credit them with the cost of service refunds to their end customers. Of course, this would be hypocritical on Cisco's part for obvious reasons, but I digress.
Did anyone notice that, despite the accusation, Silicon Optix calls out NONE of their competitors for this supposed "issue"?
Gennum, Pixelworks, Genesis, Oplus (now Intel), and several others make their own scaler/deinterlacer chips. Most of these have already found their way into displays and have proper deinterlacing strategies in them. Nobody scales without deinterlacing first anyway in a modern image processor.
Silicon Optix's technology is based on offline film processors by Teranex. While they can certainly be high quality, they aren't the top of the heap either by volume or by prestige. Genesis/Faroudja had a name for a long time with their "line doublers" which are over 20 years old and their more advanced but cheap gm1601 is one of the more popular solutions for HDTVs. Gennum's GF9350 with VXP technology is currently in the largest plasma tv in the world (Samsung 80"). These and other scaler/deinterlacer chips have none of the problems that Silicon Optix claims exist. If you look at the debates that rage over at the usual enthusiast sites, you'll see that there are issues with its own technology like latency and cost that aren't present in the other solutions I mentioned.
Just like Silicon Optix's "odd film cadence technology" which requires nothing different than what everyone else has today, this reeks of a cheap PR vehicle. While the choice of scaler and deinterlacer is important, it is not the utter tragedy that SO would like to make it out nor are they the saviors of the HDTV world. If they know who the culprits are, then let them name whose image processor it is that creates these problems.