This idea of a low-slung 'pancake' chassis with an easy-to-change body is not at all new. Ever see a VW Beetle (the old one, type 111) with its body lifted off? Yep, it kinda looks like a skateboard. The tallest part (other than the steering column) is the engine's cooling shroud. The 411 (squareback) type reduced it even more. Great concept, easy to manufacture, easy to fit bodies for different models (the Thing and Beetle, for example, were both 111 types.)
In contrast, the modern Beetle is a unibody design. While it shares running gear with the Golf, Jetta and other VW models, the body and chassis are unique to that model.
As much as I like modular cars (I've owned two 'old-school' VWs), guess which Beetle I'd rather count on protecting me in a crash?
Admittedly, this comparison between the old and new Beetles is unfair. Okay, so compare contemporary unibody cars to body-on-frame types (SUV's in particular). The unibody-type vehicles fare much better in crash tests. This is because the entire structure of the vehicle can work as a unit to dissipate and redirect the crash energy away from the passenger cabin. That's very hard to to well with body-on frame.
Reducing the height of the components as GM proposes is a great idea. It opens up new options for more-efficient vehicle layouts, much in the way Ferris Porsche's "People's Car" did over 50 years ago. It could, in the context of an integrated body design, actually enhance safety by allowing energy-abosorbing structures to assume optimal shapes instead of having to accomodate bulky drivetrain components.
But I think for passenger cars body-on-frame layout has (fortunately) gone the way of the dodo bird; SUV's are going that way and it won't be long before trucks finally get away from body-on-frame too (it's been done - nerd points to the person who can name the vehicle.)
There's another stupid idea I don't like in this car: putting the motors in the wheels. Even if the unsprung weight were equal to disc brakes, can you imagine the pounding these motors would have to take? (not to mention the fireworks they'd give off in a crash.)
It's interesting watching the evolution of DVD in the marketplace since I was involved in it during its infancy. I wonder how long before the grip of the DVD Consortum "Gang of Ten" is finally broken.
The history of DVD offers an object lesson in old rivalaries, protectionism and national politics, battles which still rage on today. It's as if we're still fighting WWII.
The key battle seems to be between Japan and China. The Japanese missed the boat on Video CD, only to watch Philips and C-Cube walk away with the prize in China. By fostering SVCD (Chaoji) as a low-cost (and no-license) alternative to DVD, the Chinese seemed determined to hose Japan again. Under this pressure, the Japanese countered by - slowly - offering DVD technology transfers though joint ventures and though US trade bullying on 'piracy' (which we all know is more about market control than it is about copyright.)
The DVD format is about seven years old now. As prices continue to drop and worldwide DVD player demand slackens, I have to wonder how long that lucrative (and onerous) DVD licensing scheme is going to last.
As it stands now, I think it's possible to make a DVD player without a single component from an original DVD Consortium memmber. They have no value-add anymore.
The Consortium's hammerlock on DVD persists though Hollywood's dominance of content in that format. But, Hollywood is getting more competition from indigenous material - notably in huge markets like India and China - the very material that helped propel Video CD. With Hollywood's recent product becoming increasingly parochial and cliche', one has to wonder how long before its grip, too, is softened in the non-US markets.
One way for the Consortium to add value is to offer a meaningful technology upgrade to DVD. But, there's no reason that it has to come from a DVD Consortium member. What if, for example, China mastered and deployed blue laser technology and high-density disc pressing to go with it, giving them the lead in HD format? It could be Video CD and SVCD all over again.
Here's another scenario: what if a net-new standard-def format (say, MPEG-4 with HTML-based navigation) was developed somewhere and introduced in China, as an upgrade to SVCD? What if it used its own high-density media that could be manufactured on DVD production lines? I could see China threatening exactly that.
You forgot about caches, where SRAM speed and power dissipation matters greatly.
Increasing the performance of these types of memory is pretty damn important if you ask me. Reducing the leakage and therefore heat dissipation in and around the CPU is pretty helpful, too (think L1 cache.)
... it's that all great things are built on the shoulders of giants. In other words, many brilliant people contributed to the early development of television. But, due credit must be given to the one person who had that 'something extra' to produce a real breakthrough. A relevant quote:
The creative inventor takes ideas out of their original contexts and uses them in new contexts. He turns bread-mold into penicillin, coal into electricity - or, I suppose, lead into gold - because he isn't constrained to keep each thought in its own container."
-John Lienhard
There's no doubt that Farnsworth's work doing drew on the state of the art at the time - from Baird, Zworykin, and others. However, it was Farnsworth who first put it all togther in an all-electronic system by developing not just the critcial piece - the image dissector tube - but also many technical details that we take for granted such as sync pulses, linear sweep and retrace - - all Farnsworth's inventions. (we have Vladimir Zworykin to blame for interlace;-)
Taken together, this all-electronic system was nothing short of a sea-change, a fact that most other workers in the field were quick to recognize (especially Zworykin, who after visting Farnsworth's lab in 1930 quickly set about using the ideas gleaned there to improve his Iconoscope.)
Much of the flamage here is some jingoistic rabble about Logie Baird vs. Philo Farnsworth as the presumed "Father of Television". Baird, like Farnsworth, was a brilliant, tireless engineer determined to make television work. Both men were hackers, in the best sense of that shopworn term. But, Baird stayed stuck on mechanical scanning, which ultimately saw use for telecine. Telecine is an important development but relatively invisible compared to imaging tubes.
If there's someone that deserves to be trashed, it's the meglomaniacal David Sarnoff and his well-funded PR machine determined to rob everyone else in the field of due credit.
Casetronic makes the 2677R (with PCI riser.) I don't think it comes in blue, only beige or black. But you can paint it any color you want. Its USB ports are in the back, since that's where they are on the mini-ITX board. If you want 'em on the front you'll need a different mobo and case. Find the mini-ITX and the 2677R at Leadman Electronics.
Your requirements aren't so difficult: they're pretty typical "barebones" needs.
Until recently the no-fan issue posed the biggest challenge. This is why there's so much interest in the VIA mini-ITX boards - one of them, the Eden 553MHz has no fan, while the faster C3 800 MHz does (though with a larger heatsink it probably could get away with passive cooling only.) There's a 1GHz C3 version coming later this year.
These mini-ITX boards retain the essential I/O connections for a desktop system. Either one should do the job for you as well as a larger PC.
One of the other cases shown in the article, the Casetronic ("Cubid") 2677R, is in my opinion easier to work with than the Lex they reviewed. It differs from the Lex mainly in that the PCI is 'flipped over' which improves cooling for both the PCI card and the motherboard. Also there's enough room for a less-expensive and better-performing 3.5" hard disk.
The dual-head issue would need a second VGA card (an option to consider would be to use the TV out.) Software-wise, implementing dual-head is the same as any other platform: it's whatever your OS supports. Your secondary challenge is to choose a VGA card that has no fan, which rules out the high-end models. However, if you're willing to do a bit of thermal engineering, the Casetronic case could accomdate a larger heatsink on the VGA card, perhaps making passive cooling an option for a card that otherwise needs a fan.
Wheel mouse support is the same as any other PC: USB or PS/2. By the same token, Windows and/or Citrix should be no problem (there's Ethernet on-board.)
Mike Corbin knows a lot about making things out of fiberglass. He has a well-earned reputation for making good motorcycle seats (I have one on my CBR900RR - it's great.)
But when it comes to making vehicles, I get the disinct impression that Corbin is out if his depth. It's well known that the Sparrow has been plagued with reliability and build quality problems - virually all Sparrows have been recalled muiltiple times to fix problems such as faulty power inverters. Another issue is the Sparrow's tendency to tip over due to the combination of narrow track and high CG.
These and other factors have sharply limited the bumber of Sparrows sold. This in turn led to a cash crunch at Corbin and some layoffs last year along with no small amount of acrimony between the Corbin brothers and investors.
Corbin is now beginning to roll out a V-twin engine-powered vehicle called the Merlin, and also an 'improved' Sparrow II.
My take? If the answer is the Sparrow, you should unask the question.
What good is a 'gateway' if you don't know (let alone care about) what is beyond it? I think this is the basic problem with middle-school algebra: by its nature it's such a narrow topic that it poses a challenge to tie it into 'real world' problems that are genuinely interesting.
There will always be kids who have natural aptitude for algebra and appreciate the mind exercise for its own sake. What about the rest of the kids being asked to slog though it, working on problems that have little or no 'real-world' meaning in their other coursework, let alone their lives?
I think one answer is to set up and encourage the other, non-math courses (e.g., physics, chemistry, biology, even social studies) to show algebra at work as a tool for understanding. By the same token, the core algebra course should show its relationhip to these other disciplines (as far as it can), stressing a diversity of problems with a common algebra-related thread. Yep, basic stuff, but too often badly done in textbooks and by teachers who all too often don't have a knack for math themselves.
But, like I said, middle-school algebra is so limited. How may times can you resort to the shopworn distance-rate-time problem to show how equality works?
So, don't limit it that way. Why not offer a look ahead: show algebra at work along with some advanced math solving a meatier problems.
The best example of this 'look ahead' I can think of is David Goodstein and Jim Blinn's series Mechanical Universe, where they're not at all shy about showing calculus being manipulated by algebra (illustrated with Blinn's wonderful animations) to derive the formulas for the topic at hand, such as the physics of roller coasters. Blinn makes the algebra look so easy, even fun.
The idea is to offer incentive to do well in algebra beyond just getting good grades or test scores. The way to do this is to show in the most concrete means possible how (and why) algebra is so important in so many areas. In other words, what lies beyond the gate.
However, before I would label it some sort of skunk-works / UFO hallucination, I would first keep in mind that 1.) it's very hard to establish the relative size of an object in the sky, especially at night and 2.) there are aircraft flying that have that sort of triangular looking shape, notably the B-2 bomber and FB-117. What I saw was probably a B-2.
Also, there is ongoing research in unmanned vehicles, many of which seem to be triangular in shape for low radar observability. Here's an example.
And, yes, they'd tend to be very quiet, just like the FB-117.
What you Googled is CD Video (CD-V), which happens to use a 12cm disc. This bastardized combination of PCM audio (20 minutes) and Laserdisc video (about 5 minutes) is a Pioneer creation that never really took hold.
Video CD is a very different thing. Video CD (White Book) was introduced in about 1992 by JVC and Sony (NOT Philips.)
Just to confuse things further, Philips also introduced a competing format called CD-i Video, which was playable only on CD-i players with a special expansion cartridge (although most Video CD players could find the MPEG program stream and muddle through.) CD-i is a considerably more powerful interactive format than even DVD, and because of this had some success in the education market. However, it's all but orphaned with no new players having been introduced in many years.
Both VCD and CD-i Video are based on ISO 11172. That standard was developed in '91 - early '92, heavily influenced by C-Cube and JVC.
JVC introduced the first Video CD product in early 1992 - a karaoke jukebox system for the Japanese market. Sony followed soon after with a home player.
During 1995-1996 the format really began to catch on in Asia as player prices dipped below $200, driven by low-cost A/V decoder chips from C-Cube and also by relatively low-cost encoders coming available from Sonic, FutureTel and others.
Now, as far as what format would be suitable for education, Video CD has a weak navigation system and only 352 x 240/288 resolution for video (stills are 720 x 480.) SVCD (Chaoji) improves both and adds two more audio channels, while retaining the cheap CD medium and low-cost authoring tools. DVD further improves presentation and of course offers more play time.
Speaking of DVD, DVD-R (General Media) blanks are getting cheap enough (maybe $6 now?) that the media cost isn't a significant a factor in short-run duplication when compared to production and post-production cost. In mid-volume production (1000-2000 discs), the DVD-CD cost difference becomes even less. Despite this, there is some sproadic interest in using DVD Video on CD media. The catch is, no standalone DVD player that I know of will support DVD-on-CD.
Bottom line, Video CD, SVCD and DVD are all worthy replacements for the VCR in education. They all are cheaper to own than videotape and have features that make them better presentation tools than tape. Even better, authoring systems (like Sonic's) tend to support all three disc formats, offering a range of choices depending on quality needed and available authoring skills.
From the looks of things so far, the perps of this heinous crime weren't exactly cut from technophile cloth (at least one of them allegedly spoke about the attack on a cell phone for crying out
loud.)
When it comes to this dirty business stuff, Dianne Feinstein is about as clueless as they get, and Orrin Hatch (despite his apparent enlightenment on Napster last year) isn't far behind.
These two represent a problem I've been thinking on for some time: we've become lazy, and to a certain extent, arrogant. We look for the quick-fix; the easy way out. We think that somehow technology will save us. Sorry, Senators, it won't.
Problems like terrorism are tough for us because they don't lend themselves to the quick-fix, the 'neat hack'. They take hard work, patience, and most of all, adaptability.
Bush Sr. and McCain have it right - 'human' intelligence is the way to go. Infiltrate, learn, redirect, subvert. This is hacking at the highest level.
For mostly obscure hardware reasons, early DRAM/VRAM graphics controller implementations favored horizontal resolutions that were a multiple of the row size. 1280 is divisible by 256, the row size of a 64K DRAM.
One of those obscure reasons was address translation. If you form the linear framebuffer address as (2048*y)+x, it made doing blt hardware much easier: just map x and y onto the appropriate row and column bits.
Another of those reasons was being able to load the video shift registers at the same times each line. This made the timing control easier to do in the logic of the day (think MSI counters and gates.)
Modern gfx conrollers refresh the display using periodic burst DRAM access instead of actual shift registers; and they have hardware to help deal with the x-y to linear address translation. So the whole issue of row size pretty much goes away.
I think the New Scientist article is less than meets the eye. It would be helpful if someone would volunteer to verify the details with the manufacturer.
My take: what I think is really going on is that the 'hack' probably picks off the decompressed YUV4:2:2 digital stream before the composite encoder and sends it over the SDI (otherwise known as serial D1) at 270 MBit/sec. This is pretty easy to do actually - much easier than dealing with the compressed stream and its attendant CSS issues. It also short-circuits Macrovision.
He may also have a way to combine compressed streams over the same cable for a different application, but I doubt that's what was being shown. This type of system would be better suited to transport stream anyway (you have to recover the clock somehow.)
Also, CSS still gets in the way. The DVD MPEG-2 system stream that gets sent to the MPEG decoder is CSS-scrambled. The descrambled (i.e., CSS decrypt) stream isn't visible in a DVD player: decryption is done inside the decoder, away from prying logic analyzer probes and such. So you still have to deal with CSS even if you pick off the raw 10.08 MBps stream from the DVD front-end.
There is more bogus stuff there. The article states that:
"All the manufacturers of DVD players have signed an agreement not to provide a Firewire digital output. But there is no mention of SDI."
In reality there's no mention of Firewire in the CSS procedural spec, either. In players, digital interfaces of any kind are not allowed by CSS.
Specifically, CSS-compliant, i.e., 'Protected' DVD players are allowed to have analog outputs only. Further, those analog outputs must include Macrovision. This is yet another reason CSS is evil - by contract, it also lines Macrovision's pockets.
Does CSS stop someone other than CSS licensee from 'jeeping' their player with SDI, as the article shows? Probably not. CSS applies to the player manufacturer: you have to have the license before you can buy the chips or access the key exchange method.
-dvd_tude "Excuse me, but didn't I tell you there's NO HOPE for the survival of OFFSET PRINTING?" - Zippy
Slashdot Mirror
This idea of a low-slung 'pancake' chassis with an easy-to-change body is not at all new. Ever see a VW Beetle (the old one, type 111) with its body lifted off? Yep, it kinda looks like a skateboard. The tallest part (other than the steering column) is the engine's cooling shroud. The 411 (squareback) type reduced it even more. Great concept, easy to manufacture, easy to fit bodies for different models (the Thing and Beetle, for example, were both 111 types.)
In contrast, the modern Beetle is a unibody design. While it shares running gear with the Golf, Jetta and other VW models, the body and chassis are unique to that model.
As much as I like modular cars (I've owned two 'old-school' VWs), guess which Beetle I'd rather count on protecting me in a crash?
Admittedly, this comparison between the old and new Beetles is unfair. Okay, so compare contemporary unibody cars to body-on-frame types (SUV's in particular). The unibody-type vehicles fare much better in crash tests. This is because the entire structure of the vehicle can work as a unit to dissipate and redirect the crash energy away from the passenger cabin. That's very hard to to well with body-on frame.
Reducing the height of the components as GM proposes is a great idea. It opens up new options for more-efficient vehicle layouts, much in the way Ferris Porsche's "People's Car" did over 50 years ago. It could, in the context of an integrated body design, actually enhance safety by allowing energy-abosorbing structures to assume optimal shapes instead of having to accomodate bulky drivetrain components.
But I think for passenger cars body-on-frame layout has (fortunately) gone the way of the dodo bird; SUV's are going that way and it won't be long before trucks finally get away from body-on-frame too (it's been done - nerd points to the person who can name the vehicle.)
There's another stupid idea I don't like in this car: putting the motors in the wheels. Even if the unsprung weight were equal to disc brakes, can you imagine the pounding these motors would have to take? (not to mention the fireworks they'd give off in a crash.)
- dvd_tude
It's interesting watching the evolution of DVD in the marketplace since I was involved in it during its infancy. I wonder how long before the grip of the DVD Consortum "Gang of Ten" is finally broken.
The history of DVD offers an object lesson in old rivalaries, protectionism and national politics, battles which still rage on today. It's as if we're still fighting WWII.
The key battle seems to be between Japan and China. The Japanese missed the boat on Video CD, only to watch Philips and C-Cube walk away with the prize in China. By fostering SVCD (Chaoji) as a low-cost (and no-license) alternative to DVD, the Chinese seemed determined to hose Japan again. Under this pressure, the Japanese countered by - slowly - offering DVD technology transfers though joint ventures and though US trade bullying on 'piracy' (which we all know is more about market control than it is about copyright.)
The DVD format is about seven years old now. As prices continue to drop and worldwide DVD player demand slackens, I have to wonder how long that lucrative (and onerous) DVD licensing scheme is going to last.
As it stands now, I think it's possible to make a DVD player without a single component from an original DVD Consortium memmber. They have no value-add anymore.
The Consortium's hammerlock on DVD persists though Hollywood's dominance of content in that format. But, Hollywood is getting more competition from indigenous material - notably in huge markets like India and China - the very material that helped propel Video CD. With Hollywood's recent product becoming increasingly parochial and cliche', one has to wonder how long before its grip, too, is softened in the non-US markets.
One way for the Consortium to add value is to offer a meaningful technology upgrade to DVD. But, there's no reason that it has to come from a DVD Consortium member. What if, for example, China mastered and deployed blue laser technology and high-density disc pressing to go with it, giving them the lead in HD format? It could be Video CD and SVCD all over again.
Here's another scenario: what if a net-new standard-def format (say, MPEG-4 with HTML-based navigation) was developed somewhere and introduced in China, as an upgrade to SVCD? What if it used its own high-density media that could be manufactured on DVD production lines? I could see China threatening exactly that.
- dvd_tude
You forgot about caches, where SRAM speed and power dissipation matters greatly.
Increasing the performance of these types of memory is pretty damn important if you ask me. Reducing the leakage and therefore heat dissipation in and around the CPU is pretty helpful, too (think L1 cache.)
- dvd_tude
... it's that all great things are built on the shoulders of giants. In other words, many brilliant people contributed to the early development of television. But, due credit must be given to the one person who had that 'something extra' to produce a real breakthrough. A relevant quote:
;-)
The creative inventor takes ideas out of their original contexts and uses them in new contexts. He turns bread-mold into penicillin, coal into electricity - or, I suppose, lead into gold - because he isn't constrained to keep each thought in its own container."
-John Lienhard
There's no doubt that Farnsworth's work doing drew on the state of the art at the time - from Baird, Zworykin, and others. However, it was Farnsworth who first put it all togther in an all-electronic system by developing not just the critcial piece - the image dissector tube - but also many technical details that we take for granted such as sync pulses, linear sweep and retrace - - all Farnsworth's inventions. (we have Vladimir Zworykin to blame for interlace
Taken together, this all-electronic system was nothing short of a sea-change, a fact that most other workers in the field were quick to recognize (especially Zworykin, who after visting Farnsworth's lab in 1930 quickly set about using the ideas gleaned there to improve his Iconoscope.)
Much of the flamage here is some jingoistic rabble about Logie Baird vs. Philo Farnsworth as the presumed "Father of Television". Baird, like Farnsworth, was a brilliant, tireless engineer determined to make television work. Both men were hackers, in the best sense of that shopworn term. But, Baird stayed stuck on mechanical scanning, which ultimately saw use for telecine. Telecine is an important development but relatively invisible compared to imaging tubes.
If there's someone that deserves to be trashed, it's the meglomaniacal David Sarnoff and his well-funded PR machine determined to rob everyone else in the field of due credit.
- dvd_tude
Casetronic makes the 2677R (with PCI riser.) I don't think it comes in blue, only beige or black. But you can paint it any color you want. Its USB ports are in the back, since that's where they are on the mini-ITX board. If you want 'em on the front you'll need a different mobo and case. Find the mini-ITX and the 2677R at Leadman Electronics.
- dvd_tude
Your requirements aren't so difficult: they're pretty typical "barebones" needs.
Until recently the no-fan issue posed the biggest challenge. This is why there's so much interest in the VIA mini-ITX boards - one of them, the Eden 553MHz has no fan, while the faster C3 800 MHz does (though with a larger heatsink it probably could get away with passive cooling only.) There's a 1GHz C3 version coming later this year.
These mini-ITX boards retain the essential I/O connections for a desktop system. Either one should do the job for you as well as a larger PC.
One of the other cases shown in the article, the Casetronic ("Cubid") 2677R, is in my opinion easier to work with than the Lex they reviewed. It differs from the Lex mainly in that the PCI is 'flipped over' which improves cooling for both the PCI card and the motherboard. Also there's enough room for a less-expensive and better-performing 3.5" hard disk.
The dual-head issue would need a second VGA card (an option to consider would be to use the TV out.) Software-wise, implementing dual-head is the same as any other platform: it's whatever your OS supports. Your secondary challenge is to choose a VGA card that has no fan, which rules out the high-end models. However, if you're willing to do a bit of thermal engineering, the Casetronic case could accomdate a larger heatsink on the VGA card, perhaps making passive cooling an option for a card that otherwise needs a fan.
Wheel mouse support is the same as any other PC: USB or PS/2. By the same token, Windows and/or Citrix should be no problem (there's Ethernet on-board.)
- dvd_tude
Mike Corbin knows a lot about making things out of fiberglass. He has a well-earned reputation for making good motorcycle seats (I have one on my CBR900RR - it's great.)
But when it comes to making vehicles, I get the disinct impression that Corbin is out if his depth. It's well known that the Sparrow has been plagued with reliability and build quality problems - virually all Sparrows have been recalled muiltiple times to fix problems such as faulty power inverters. Another issue is the Sparrow's tendency to tip over due to the combination of narrow track and high CG.
These and other factors have sharply limited the bumber of Sparrows sold. This in turn led to a cash crunch at Corbin and some layoffs last year along with no small amount of acrimony between the Corbin brothers and investors.
Corbin is now beginning to roll out a V-twin engine-powered vehicle called the Merlin, and also an 'improved' Sparrow II.
My take? If the answer is the Sparrow, you should unask the question.
- dvd_tude
... when these guys stumble across Misterhouse.
Move along... nothing to see here.
- dvd_tude
What good is a 'gateway' if you don't know (let alone care about) what is beyond it? I think this is the basic problem with middle-school algebra: by its nature it's such a narrow topic that it poses a challenge to tie it into 'real world' problems that are genuinely interesting.
There will always be kids who have natural aptitude for algebra and appreciate the mind exercise for its own sake. What about the rest of the kids being asked to slog though it, working on problems that have little or no 'real-world' meaning in their other coursework, let alone their lives?
I think one answer is to set up and encourage the other, non-math courses (e.g., physics, chemistry, biology, even social studies) to show algebra at work as a tool for understanding. By the same token, the core algebra course should show its relationhip to these other disciplines (as far as it can), stressing a diversity of problems with a common algebra-related thread. Yep, basic stuff, but too often badly done in textbooks and by teachers who all too often don't have a knack for math themselves.
But, like I said, middle-school algebra is so limited. How may times can you resort to the shopworn distance-rate-time problem to show how equality works?
So, don't limit it that way. Why not offer a look ahead: show algebra at work along with some advanced math solving a meatier problems.
The best example of this 'look ahead' I can think of is David Goodstein and Jim Blinn's series Mechanical Universe, where they're not at all shy about showing calculus being manipulated by algebra (illustrated with Blinn's wonderful animations) to derive the formulas for the topic at hand, such as the physics of roller coasters. Blinn makes the algebra look so easy, even fun.
The idea is to offer incentive to do well in algebra beyond just getting good grades or test scores. The way to do this is to show in the most concrete means possible how (and why) algebra is so important in so many areas. In other words, what lies beyond the gate.
- dvd_tude
"vaporware" in the truest sense of the word...
Check this press release.
I had a similar sighting experience.
However, before I would label it some sort of skunk-works / UFO hallucination, I would first keep in mind that 1.) it's very hard to establish the relative size of an object in the sky, especially at night and 2.) there are aircraft flying that have that sort of triangular looking shape, notably the B-2 bomber and FB-117. What I saw was probably a B-2.
Also, there is ongoing research in unmanned vehicles, many of which seem to be triangular in shape for low radar observability. Here's an example.
And, yes, they'd tend to be very quiet, just like the FB-117.
I didn't have to Google it. I lived it.
What you Googled is CD Video (CD-V), which happens to use a 12cm disc. This bastardized combination of PCM audio (20 minutes) and Laserdisc video (about 5 minutes) is a Pioneer creation that never really took hold.
Video CD is a very different thing. Video CD (White Book) was introduced in about 1992 by JVC and Sony (NOT Philips.)
Just to confuse things further, Philips also introduced a competing format called CD-i Video, which was playable only on CD-i players with a special expansion cartridge (although most Video CD players could find the MPEG program stream and muddle through.) CD-i is a considerably more powerful interactive format than even DVD, and because of this had some success in the education market. However, it's all but orphaned with no new players having been introduced in many years.
Both VCD and CD-i Video are based on ISO 11172. That standard was developed in '91 - early '92, heavily influenced by C-Cube and JVC.
JVC introduced the first Video CD product in early 1992 - a karaoke jukebox system for the Japanese market. Sony followed soon after with a home player.
During 1995-1996 the format really began to catch on in Asia as player prices dipped below $200, driven by low-cost A/V decoder chips from C-Cube and also by relatively low-cost encoders coming available from Sonic, FutureTel and others.
Now, as far as what format would be suitable for education, Video CD has a weak navigation system and only 352 x 240/288 resolution for video (stills are 720 x 480.) SVCD (Chaoji) improves both and adds two more audio channels, while retaining the cheap CD medium and low-cost authoring tools. DVD further improves presentation and of course offers more play time.
Speaking of DVD, DVD-R (General Media) blanks are getting cheap enough (maybe $6 now?) that the media cost isn't a significant a factor in short-run duplication when compared to production and post-production cost. In mid-volume production (1000-2000 discs), the DVD-CD cost difference becomes even less. Despite this, there is some sproadic interest in using DVD Video on CD media. The catch is, no standalone DVD player that I know of will support DVD-on-CD.
Bottom line, Video CD, SVCD and DVD are all worthy replacements for the VCR in education. They all are cheaper to own than videotape and have features that make them better presentation tools than tape. Even better, authoring systems (like Sonic's) tend to support all three disc formats, offering a range of choices depending on quality needed and available authoring skills.
From the looks of things so far, the perps of this heinous crime weren't exactly cut from technophile cloth (at least one of them allegedly spoke about the attack on a cell phone for crying out loud.)
When it comes to this dirty business stuff, Dianne Feinstein is about as clueless as they get, and Orrin Hatch (despite his apparent enlightenment on Napster last year) isn't far behind.
These two represent a problem I've been thinking on for some time: we've become lazy, and to a certain extent, arrogant. We look for the quick-fix; the easy way out. We think that somehow technology will save us. Sorry, Senators, it won't.
Problems like terrorism are tough for us because they don't lend themselves to the quick-fix, the 'neat hack'. They take hard work, patience, and most of all, adaptability.
Bush Sr. and McCain have it right - 'human' intelligence is the way to go. Infiltrate, learn, redirect, subvert. This is hacking at the highest level.
- dvd_tude
My take: Hitachi has an expensive (and therefore slow-selling) product called the E-Plate. So, someone gets the bright idea to repackage this bad boy with an even more expensive and power-hungry display solution.
And this improves on the iPaq how?
-Mr. Cranky (dvd_tude)
For mostly obscure hardware reasons, early DRAM/VRAM graphics controller implementations favored horizontal resolutions that were a multiple of the row size. 1280 is divisible by 256, the row size of a 64K DRAM.
One of those obscure reasons was address translation. If you form the linear framebuffer address as (2048*y)+x, it made doing blt hardware much easier: just map x and y onto the appropriate row and column bits.
Another of those reasons was being able to load the video shift registers at the same times each line. This made the timing control easier to do in the logic of the day (think MSI counters and gates.)
Modern gfx conrollers refresh the display using periodic burst DRAM access instead of actual shift registers; and they have hardware to help deal with the x-y to linear address translation. So the whole issue of row size pretty much goes away.
dvd_tude
"I'm ANN LANDERS!! I can SHOPLIFT!! " - Zippy
I think the New Scientist article is less than meets the eye. It would be helpful if someone would volunteer to verify the details with the manufacturer.
My take: what I think is really going on is that the 'hack' probably picks off the decompressed YUV4:2:2 digital stream before the composite encoder and sends it over the SDI (otherwise known as serial D1) at 270 MBit/sec. This is pretty easy to do actually - much easier than dealing with the compressed stream and its attendant CSS issues. It also short-circuits Macrovision.
He may also have a way to combine compressed streams over the same cable for a different application, but I doubt that's what was being shown. This type of system would be better suited to transport stream anyway (you have to recover the clock somehow.)
Also, CSS still gets in the way. The DVD MPEG-2 system stream that gets sent to the MPEG decoder is CSS-scrambled. The descrambled (i.e., CSS decrypt) stream isn't visible in a DVD player: decryption is done inside the decoder, away from prying logic analyzer probes and such. So you still have to deal with CSS even if you pick off the raw 10.08 MBps stream from the DVD front-end.
There is more bogus stuff there. The article states that:
"All the manufacturers of DVD players have signed an agreement not to provide a Firewire digital output. But there is no mention of SDI."
In reality there's no mention of Firewire in the CSS procedural spec, either. In players, digital interfaces of any kind are not allowed by CSS.
Specifically, CSS-compliant, i.e., 'Protected' DVD players are allowed to have analog outputs only. Further, those analog outputs must include Macrovision. This is yet another reason CSS is evil - by contract, it also lines Macrovision's pockets.
Does CSS stop someone other than CSS licensee from 'jeeping' their player with SDI, as the article shows? Probably not. CSS applies to the player manufacturer: you have to have the license before you can buy the chips or access the key exchange method.
-dvd_tude
"Excuse me, but didn't I tell you there's NO HOPE for the survival of OFFSET PRINTING?" - Zippy