Verbatim's QIC-eXtra was the worst scam... bundled backup software that barely worked, and bundled recovery software with so many bugs, you basically *had* to buy their expensive premium version to have any hope of recovering more than a few random files... and even then, it broke with every new version of Win9x, and wasn't compatible with NT unless you bought their even MORE expensive "enterprise" edition. And some thirdparty backup tools would happily create backups on QIC-Xtra tapes, then crash after restoring the first few files (because they made assumptions that were broken by the longer tapes).
IMHO, QIC-eXtra was the. single. worst. backup. medium. EVER.
What I *really* want: a 100-disc carousel-type jukebox (like the ones they made for audio CDs in the late 90s), with BD-R optics instead and a non-proprietary API that encourages support by open-source backup software. 25-gig BD-R discs are fairly cheap now, and a 100-disc carousel could give you 2.5TB of ransomware-proof WORM storage.
Hopefully, for the first time in years, we'll have a backup medium with the capacity to do a true full backup of everything... that's also fast enough to finish the job in less time than it takes to render the backup almost moot, with enough capacity to include plenty of forward error correction.
Of course, if it satisfies the capacity, speed, and reliability criteria, it'll probably cost at least ten times as much as the computer it's being used to back up, and will thus effectively not exist for non-enterprise users.
QIC was dreadful in every meaningful way. In some ways, the false sense of security it gave was almost worse than having no backup at all.
DDS ("dat") was ok, but by the time it finally became semi-affordable, we were back to needing dozens of tapes to back up a single hard drive.
By the time LTO replaced DDS, its capacity was hopelessly outstripped by hard drive capacity (nominal 800GB tapes, vs 4TB+ cheap hard drives).
15 years ago, I had an idea for low-cost in-home distribution of HD video that I wanted to try in the worst way, but didn't have the resources or knowledge to actually build it myself.
The general idea: take the three HD analog component video signals, and modulate them as wideband FM. Do the same for the two SD S-video signals (approx 5MHz apiece), the SPDIF signal (approx 3MHz), and the stereo audio (except do the stereo audio just like FM radio, on a frequency like 89.5MHz so it can also be tuned directly by a FM radio). Now combine all of those wideband FM signals, and inject them into the coax (for obvious reasons, it would have to be dedicated to this task & couldn't coexist with signals from the cable company or satellite TV). Maybe add another copy of the SD signal, modulated as NTSC channel 3, just to make it available on other TVs without needing an additional box.
At the other end, decode the wideband FM signals back to component video, s-video, SPDIF, and analog stereo.
I figured that a single 720p60 or 1080i60 source would need about 200MHz total, which would be totally do-able with in-wall coax. It would have required dedicated coax (ie, it absolutely could NOT have shared a coax cable with cable TV or satellite), but circa 2005, that wasn't a big deal anyway... the house had the old RG59 cable in the walls that the original builder used (that I would have used for this purpose), and both Comcast and DirecTV ran new RG6 cables anyway.
Why was the s-video part so important? Because I always used HD cable/satellite boxes, even for my non-HDTVs, and used the box's S-video output (with the HD channels) instead of the SD channels to get DVD-quality TV instead of blocky, shit-quality TV.
Not quite. Two speakers are only adequate if they're headphones... and even then, they won't give you the same satisfaction as a system with a good subwoofer (or a "Buttkicker(tm)" mounted to the seat), because low frequencies are felt as much as heard.
There's a HUGE difference between well-mastered 5.1 surround and ANYTHING you can derive with analog Dolby surround.
The old Dolby Surround (introduced in the late 70s or early 80s) had three channels... left, right, and "rear surround", encoded into two analog stereo signals. Dolby ProLogic uses digital signal processing to turn those three signals into 5 (plus low-frequency effects). The catch is, the third (rear/surround) channel isn't acoustically-independent of the left and right channels... at best, anything you play from the rear/surround channel is ALSO going to bleed from the front left & right channels (and the derived center channel) at roughly half the volume of what's playing from the rear channel. Put another way, there's no way to encode something like a sine wave playing exclusively from the rear with total silence playing from the front speakers... the rear channel is going to "bleed through", because it's encoded INTO the left and right channels (and sounds kind of like reverb if you listen to it without a decoder).
In contrast to analog Dolby Surround and ProLogic, Dolby Digital 5.1 allows you to encode 6 fully-independent channels (front left, front center, front right, rear right, rear left, and low-frequency effects). DD+ adds a second chunk of data that tells the DSP how to transform 5.1's two surround channels into four.
6.1-channel sound came about in the early 2000s and didn't last long. The idea was to take 5.1, then add a sixth speaker channel centered behind the listeners. The problem was, it didn't work very well in real life... it rarely sounded better than 5.1, and usually sounded worse than 5.1 surround. Why? Mostly, phase errors and other artifacts. The sound from the rear speaker ended up neutralizing or reinforcing the sound coming from the three front speakers in unintended ways, and usually messed up the stereo imaging.
The leap from 7.1 to 10.1 was to enable the sound to give a sense of height as well as surround, but the reason for using more than 10+sub speakers is because movie soundtracks are mixed for a playing environment that's impossible to precisely replicate with speakers alone in a home. Theaters put the "front" speakers behind an acoustically-transparent screen -- something you can't (presently) do with a LCD display. So... to approximate the sound you'd get in a theater (with speakers behind the screen), you'd put three speakers along the screen's lower bezel, three speakers along the screen's upper bezel, three more high above the screen, plus the four surround & rear speakers and subwoofer (or two).
Two subwoofers are used instead of one mainly in home theater setups with small front speakers. Traditionally, subwoofers were only used for frequencies below 60-80hz... 100-120hz if your setup was REALLY ghetto. In such a setup, the sound coming from the subwoofer is almost completely nondirectional. Now, however, it's commonplace to have home theaters with tiny speakers that can't even handle 150hz without distortion, so modern subwoofers are often forced to handle frequencies up to 180-200hz... frequencies that aren't HIGHLY directional, but aren't quite NON-directional, either. So with small speakers, having two subwoofers usually sounds better.
As for it being a "dick pull", I disagree. I find myself increasingly unable to even enjoy movies with non-surround sound... it just sounds dead & lifeless to me. I kind of annoy my friends when they come over to watch a movie or TV & I spend the first 5-20 minutes constantly tweaking the sound settings to get them "just right" (TV shows are the hardest to adjust, because big-budget Hollywood movies tend to have consistently-good surround, mixed by recording engineers with top-grade hardware & software who try to match standard profiles... TV shows usually don't).
Using coax w/adapters to transmit pcm2.0 (stereo) is a great idea.
Using coax w/adapters to transmit DD5.1 (Dolby Digital 5.1-channel surround) from a source that outputs DD5.1 over SPDIF is another good idea.
If the audio source is HDMI (e.g., Roku, most recent Blu-Ray players, Wii-U), it's somewhere between "frustrating" and "literally impossible".
Problem 1: if a HDMI source sees even a single HDMI sink ANYWHERE in the chain whose EDID advertises PCM2.0, it will fall back to PCM2.0 for everything.
Problem 2: If a HDMI source outputs PCM5.1 or PCM7.1, no box I'm aware of can transcode it to Dolby Digital (5.1) or DD+ (7.1). SPDIF doesn't have enough bandwidth to carry PCM 5.1 or 7.1. So even if you have a HDMI-to-SPDIF audio extractor that can spoof DD5.1 and DD+7.1 EDIDs, you'll get either silence or downmixed stereo from a PCM 5.1 or 7.1 source.
Problem 3: most sources that support ONLY DD+ (like Roku) can't/won't fall back to DD unless the streaming service allows it (Netflix explicitly doesn't).
I learned #1 and #2 the hard way. I have a non-HDMI receiver that supports DD5.1 & DTS5.1. I discovered problem #1 when I bought my Wii-U (which, due to Nintendo's fucking cheapness, didn't license any Dolby technology, so it can't even fall back to goddamn ProLogic... it's PCM5.1, or no surround at all). I tried to fix it by buying a HDMI-to-SPDIF audio extractor.
Problem #2 bit me after the extractor arrived. I bought ANOTHER one that could also spoof 5.1 and 7.1. It fixed the problem (sort of) for Amazon-from-Roku, but not for Netflix-from-Roku or my Wii-U.
I learned #3 while trying to find SOMETHING useful to do with the hdmi audio extractor I bought. Some (not all) Amazon Instant Video content can bitstream DD5.1 (as long as the HDMI EDID is properly spoofed), but Netflix will ONLY bitstream DD+ 7.1. If your amp supports DD+, it can downmix it to 5.1, but if your amp is an older one with DD only, you'll (usually) get... nothing. Or plain stereo. Which sucks, because digitally transcoding a DD+ stream to DD is trivial (DD+ is actually ENCODED as 5.1 with a substream adding extra channels).
Oh, and everything above notwithstanding, if your TV outputs SPDIF audio from the HDMI source, it will -- by licensing mandate -- be downmixed to PCM2.0 by the TV itself. A few TVs circa 2009 could extract & output DD5.1, but most can't. So to have any hope of working at all, the extractor MUST be BETWEEN the TV an source.
TL/DR: HDMI really fucks up your ability to get surround sound unless pretty much EVERYTHING in the pipeline was bought after ~2012. Lots of things can go wrong, any of which will cause it to drop down to PCM stereo.:-(
OpenMoko's designers also made a shortsighted, fatal mistake by omitting support for EDGE, which eliminated the US & Canada as a viable market.
The sad thing is, at the time, most baseband processor chips even came in two pin-compatible variants... one that was GPRS-only, and one that could do EDGE and only cost about $10/chip more. Lack of 3G was a drawback, but lack of EDGE was a deal-breaking fatal flaw.
Back in 2007, the US was a small, backwards market for GSM phones in terms of devices sold per year... but it STILL accounted for at least half of the world's most influential developers & journalists. Even in 2007, no self-respecting American developer would have settled for a phone that couldn't do much more than voice calls & SMS... and generally sucked at those functions, too.
Back in 2007, we settled for dysfunctional voice & SMS on Windows Mobile phones because it was the opportunity cost of having a pocket-sized laptop with wireless internet connectivity. Take away that, and you've eliminated the whole reason to even *have* an advanced phone.
> Buy a Sony Xperia, then unlock (manufacturer supported), > clone the manufacturer gits and off you go
Does Sony still permanently cripple the camera module (with no way to ever restore its original functionality, not even by reflashing to stock) if you unlock?
1. British Airways and Air France themselves wouldn't have been allowed to operate the flights between the US and Japan. The flights would have had to be made by an American or Japanese airline.
2. Boeing was apparently determined to keep US airlines from buying Concorde jets (basically, THEY weren't interested in the SST market, but they didn't want anybody ELSE to have the US market for SST jets, either). And both countries would have probably insisted that the jets be manufactured IN the US and Japan. And Airbus didn't exist as a single entity yet, so there would have been an additional pissing match between the French and British parent companies that eventually became Airbus over which entity should build/own/run the factory in each country.
That said, Eastern Airlines supposedly had relatively well-developed plans to buy three Concorde jets to use for JFK-Miami flights. For Eastern, the deathblow wasn't the Arab Oil Embargo & fuel costs... it was the cancellation of what was supposed to be Miami's new airport (the proposed Everglades Jetport), mostly due to opposition from environmentalists.
Technically, Eastern could have legally run two Concorde flights per day out of Miami International Airport (Concorde exceeded the legal noise limits, but the airport was [and probably still is] authorized to grant noise waivers for two arrivals and two departures per day). But Eastern knew it was hopeless to even fantasize about breaking even (let alone make a profit) with only two SST round trips per day between their only pair of viable domestic airports. I suppose they could have tried to rationalize it by planning to later flip the jets AND their two noise waivers to PanAm or TWA, but the business risk would have been staggering (and frankly, insane).
Before someone brings up Orlando as a destination, remember... this was the late 60s. Orlando was still a backwater surrounded by orange groves and retirees waiting to die.
These jets won't get purchased by big airlines like American, Delta, and United... they'll get purchased by companies like NetJets.
NetJets customers don't stand in line to go through TSA security and deal with crowded airport terminals... they use general-aviation airports like FXE (Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport), so they can literally drive (or be driven) to the jet on the tarmac, park, board, and fly away (or land, disembark, get in the car, and drive away) without drama or ceremony.
Put another way, if terminal, security, and baggage-claim delays are a major factor in the time it takes you to travel from place to place, you aren't part of the target market for these jets.
It's more like going out of your way to make your house look cool & unique, then having your neighbor copy it brick-for-brick, simultaneously making YOUR house look like a tacky clone AND devaluing it in the process.
Infringement isn't theft. Infringement is infringement. Its closest legal analogue is trespass.
That said, the US has *radically* expanded the scope of IP law over the past 50 years, and much of that expansion has been at the specific behest of Disney. So on one hand... they deserve it. On the other hand, a Disney defeat will ultimately make things even worse for everyone. The ideal, delicious irony would be for Disney to have to spend millions overturning a bad law they caused in the first place. My guess: if the plaintiff is remotely willing to be reasonable, Disney will suck it up, settle out of court, and view it off as an investment in preserving a law they might want to use in the future.
Robust firmware-signing isn't the problem... robust firmware-signing that requires a key not under your own control is the problem.
That's my #1 beef with Android... Google is happy to bitch about my unlocked bootloader, but forces me to choose between leaving it unlocked, or locking it WITH THEIR FIRMWARE ONLY. I want to be able to flash my own firmware AND re-lock the bootloader with MY OWN key.
It's also why I don't particularly object to things like AACS implemented directly by a discrete codec chip, but hate when mfrs. rely on the OS & CPU to enforce it. If it's embedded in the codec chip, I can ignore its existence and just not use it. If it depends on the CPU for implementation, the mfr. is going to try and lock down the entire device. It's the difference between being forced to own a black box you can bury in a hole in the back yard & ignore, vs living in a police state where you're forced to live IN a black box under somebody else's control.
> There is no security by obscurity by using hardware everyone has (and can cut open)
Er... considering that it took about 25 years for amateurs to reverse-engineer a 6502, and around 17 to successfully de-pot a Votrax SC-02 module... yeah, obscurity probably *will* buy them at least 3-5 years against determined & well-funded state espionage agencies, 10-25 years against organized crime, and 25-50 years against amateur hackers.
What AMD is counting on is keeping it secret long enough to discover their own vulnerabilities first & quietly fix them, so that by the time any vulnerabilities become public, the product in question will have been EOL'ed for a decade or two.
The problem with relying on public scrutiny & bug bounties as a security strategy is the assumption that discovered vulns even *can* be fixed in-place on an existing device.
Gaming is one motive, but gaming-oriented PCs tend to emphasize GPUs over brute-force CPU, gigabytes of RAM, etc. And GPUs are unfortunately "1.25-trick" ponies that, outside of mining, do basically nothing for non-games.
Moore's law isn't quite dead yet, but Gresham's law will probably render it moot long before we get to the point of needing liquid nitrogen to run a future 16-core i7-descended CPU (with a gig or two of L1 & L2 cache) at 5 or 6 GHz without going up in literal blue smoke.
The problem with your logic is that right now, the market for PC hardware is in a literal death spiral. Consumers see no reason to buy anything besides shit, so hardware that ISN'T shit is becoming harder and harder to buy.
If you can't give semi-normal consumers who (by your definition) don't **need** workstation-class hardware to perform "demanding work", you won't be able to afford YOUR next workstation-class computer, because it'll cost as much as a new car.
The fact is, realtime-raytraced glass translucency/refraction effects are just about the only thing we have LEFT to offer mass-market consumers and give them a reason to junk their old computers wholesale and buy new ones.
YOU can always turn the raytraced eye candy off and use the extra computing power for something else. The point is, motivating millions of OTHER people to buy comparably high-end hardware will reduce the amount YOU ultimately have to pay for it, increase your selection, and give you more purchase options.
The nice thing about realtime-raytraced glass effects is that they're instantly visible to anyone looking at the screen. So in time, even people who don't personally care about seeing raytraced glass effects (or have any idea what raytracing even IS) will start to care, just because of peer pressure. The kids at school will make fun of them for being poor and using an old laptop that doesn't have translucent window chrome, and they'll find ways to convince Mom & Dad to buy them a new laptop for Christmas.
It's nice being elite, but realize this: we're in an existential crisis right now. If we can't come up with good reasons for normal people to buy ultra high-end computers, there won't be affordable high-end computers available for US to buy down the road, either. Our ability to buy affordable high-end hardware depends upon our ability to convince normal people to think they have a reason to buy it, too.
Believe it or not, spinning it off into a new branch of the military is a GOOD thing for American civilians. Why? The military operates under constraints, scrutiny, and civilian oversight that increasingly seem to NOT apply to "mere" law enforcement agencies (especially post-9/11).
I have a SteelSeries Rival gaming mouse, currently sampling at 1000hz and 3200dpi. It makes the problem much better than a "standard" mouse sampling at 125hz and 400dpi, but there's a point where the distance the mouse has to physically move to span all three displays exceeds the distance you can comfortably move your arm, but is already past the point where grabbing a single-pixel resize bar in something like Android Studio becomes REALLY HARD.
The fact is, attempting to inflict a single UI on those two wildly-divergent use cases (small screen with blunt fingertips, vs multiple large high-res screens with a high-precision mouse) has been a complete, total disaster. And it's a disaster that Microsoft is only partially to blame for (just look at the disaster in Ubuntu-land known as "Unity", and Apple's ongoing attempts to turn future Macbooks into glorified iPads).
And let's not even get into Microsoft's own use of Dark UI patterns, like hiding desirable options behind seemingly-plain text (that magically works when you click it) while making it APPEAR that the user's only choices are "bad" and "worse".
It's not that PC/Desktop is a "dead" market, it's simply no longer a mass CONSUMER market. We don't need more underpowered $199 1.1GHz laptops with 2gb and 64mb flash drives... we need more $2,000-4,000 laptops with specs that would have been absolutely jaw-dropping for a high-end workstation 5 years ago, and pushing the bleeding edge of high-end NOW. And Microsoft needs to concede that the needs of workstation users aren't the same as the needs of someone watching cat videos on the toilet using a tablet, even if it means requiring software to handle two different UI scenarios (high-res mouse, vs low-res touch).
The fact is, Microsoft has done a piss poor job of putting large, high-res displays to good use... something that's absolutely FUNDAMENTAL to workstation users:
* Gigantic ribbons, mostly dedicated to options Workstation users either don't care about, or learned the keyboard shortcuts for YEARS ago. Yeah, I'm looking at YOU, "Copy"...
* Tiny non-ribbon click zones that can almost require single-pixel aiming precision with some apps... IDEs, in particular...
* Mouse acceleration hasn't scaled well to scenarios where you have three 2560x1440 or larger monitors... disable it, and you'll need more mouse-movement space than your arm can reach to move the pointer from the left edge of the leftmost display to the right edge of the rightmost display. Enable it, and you'll be left feeling like you're constantly fighting with the mouse. The truth is, I don't know the solution to this problem... but if anyone has the resources to tackle it and find a good solution, it's Microsoft.
Note to Microsoft: get a copy of WinSplit Revolution, and learn from it. It's not perfect, but it's an app that basically MAKES multi-monitor Windows USABLE for lots of Workstation users.
And give manufacturers a reason to start pushing expensive, but high-powered computers again... let's call it, "Aero Diamond" (basically, Aero Glass, but with realtime-raytraced refraction and translucency). Let tablet and netbook users continue to rot with "Modern". Give us Aero Diamond so we can make those tablet and netbook users jealous & get THEM to buy high-end hardware too (so low-end shit won't soak up 99% of the economies of scale, and leave workstation users with $10,000 hardware that's only slightly better than $250 hardware).
"(...something...) failed. Please try again later." (when in reality, it will NEVER work without outside intervention).
If you don't want to acknowledge that an account exists or has been locked out, at least have the decency to note that possibility somewhere in the error message. Like, "(...something...) failed. If the username and password you entered was indeed valid, it's possible that the account might be locked out, in which case you'll have to contact tech support at 800-999-9999 for assistance before it will ever work again."
Error messages that lazily tell you to "contact your administrator". Goddamn it, if I'm logged in AS an administrator, there should AT LEAST be something in the error message to point me in the right direction (like, "Please check the Windows Security Event log for item 277382438 for additional details").
Telling a user to "try again later" does NOTHING for security (an attacker already knows it's a lie), but frustrates end users ENORMOUSLY by sending them on a wild goose chase and wasting their time. And telling them to "contact their administrator" (without giving them the specific contact info) is unhelpful (they might not have any idea who the Administrator *IS*). Even MORESO when they are, in fact, logged on AS a goddamn Administrator.
I might be mistaken, but I'm pretty sure that CygnusEd (circa 1990) ran in its own Screen, not an Intuition-managed window.
With a Screen, you could use Copper lists to change the screen pointer during horizontal retrace after a specific scanline, so you could treat screen ram as a ring buffer. Instead of physically rewriting the pixels, you'd just point at whatever offset corresponded to your current top row, then change it to wrap around to the buffer's start for the remaining scanlines. That way, you only had to physically redraw the newly-exposed rows of text, and maybe redraw the scroll bar. This was a big deal, because the blitter was actually quite slow (it could shovel around about a million pixels/second, MAX... usually less..), so the best strategy for good performance was to avoid redrawing as much as possible & just change pointers on the fly instead.
Chiclet keyboards don't necessarily *have* to suck, as long as the keyswitches are well-designed & high quality. A modern Thinkpad chiclet keyboard is still a net improvement over 97% of current non-mechanical keyboards (but inferior to the best laptop keyboards circa 2000). Modern laptop keyboards suck mainly because their switches are shit. Compaq (pre-HP) laptops used to have *fantastic* keyboards (at least, on their enterprise-class laptops like the Armada circa 2000).
Bonus points if you intentionally craft the phone/laptop's browser history with embedded Javascript to pwn the agent's own computer when s/he goes to view it using some badly-written viewer that naively renders it straight into an IE window. And plenty of JPEG cat images crafted to exploit buffer overflow vulnerabilities.
Or, if you just want a free ticket to Defcon next year as a speaker, make an image backup of your hard drive & any embedded firmware onto immutable media (like BD-R) prior to passing through customs, let CBP have fun installing malware on it, then diff your homemade honeypot against that backup when you get home and reverse-engineer any changes they made.
I'd love to see *anyone* -- young OR old -- type 100+wpm (and few errors) with anything less than a good, tactile mechanical keyboard. At least, not without lord of autocorrect Eris...
Firefox has really gone to shit over the past few years. When IE 6 was the norm, Firefox was the clean, shiny, compromise-free new browser, and IE was a hot mess of legacy kludges. Now, Firefox is the lava-hot mess of legacy kludges... except that NOW, the alternatives all suck too (just in slightly different ways... like Chrome's refusal to let you block thirdparty cookies or disable autoplaying sound/video... or Edge's continued flakiness).
* mechanical clicky keyboard (as-yet unknown how satisfying it'll be, but still likely to be a huge improvement over everything besides *maybe* a Thinkpad)
Everything else available now or in the pipeline is uninspiring, glued/sealed Apple-like crap that's a step down from what I have now (Precision m4800), or at best, an uninspiring step sideways.
People will start buying new laptops every 2-3 years again when manufacturers start making real leaps forward and break the stagnation that's gripped the industry for at least 6-8 years. And Microsoft chucks Metro in the trash & gives us "Aero Diamond" (with realtime-raytraced translucency & refraction).
Windows 8 made a bad situation worse, but the downward spiral of crap netbooks, tablets, and $299 walmart laptops have done even more damage.
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Verbatim's QIC-eXtra was the worst scam... bundled backup software that barely worked, and bundled recovery software with so many bugs, you basically *had* to buy their expensive premium version to have any hope of recovering more than a few random files... and even then, it broke with every new version of Win9x, and wasn't compatible with NT unless you bought their even MORE expensive "enterprise" edition. And some thirdparty backup tools would happily create backups on QIC-Xtra tapes, then crash after restoring the first few files (because they made assumptions that were broken by the longer tapes).
IMHO, QIC-eXtra was the. single. worst. backup. medium. EVER.
What I *really* want: a 100-disc carousel-type jukebox (like the ones they made for audio CDs in the late 90s), with BD-R optics instead and a non-proprietary API that encourages support by open-source backup software. 25-gig BD-R discs are fairly cheap now, and a 100-disc carousel could give you 2.5TB of ransomware-proof WORM storage.
Hopefully, for the first time in years, we'll have a backup medium with the capacity to do a true full backup of everything... that's also fast enough to finish the job in less time than it takes to render the backup almost moot, with enough capacity to include plenty of forward error correction.
Of course, if it satisfies the capacity, speed, and reliability criteria, it'll probably cost at least ten times as much as the computer it's being used to back up, and will thus effectively not exist for non-enterprise users.
QIC was dreadful in every meaningful way. In some ways, the false sense of security it gave was almost worse than having no backup at all.
DDS ("dat") was ok, but by the time it finally became semi-affordable, we were back to needing dozens of tapes to back up a single hard drive.
By the time LTO replaced DDS, its capacity was hopelessly outstripped by hard drive capacity (nominal 800GB tapes, vs 4TB+ cheap hard drives).
15 years ago, I had an idea for low-cost in-home distribution of HD video that I wanted to try in the worst way, but didn't have the resources or knowledge to actually build it myself.
The general idea: take the three HD analog component video signals, and modulate them as wideband FM. Do the same for the two SD S-video signals (approx 5MHz apiece), the SPDIF signal (approx 3MHz), and the stereo audio (except do the stereo audio just like FM radio, on a frequency like 89.5MHz so it can also be tuned directly by a FM radio). Now combine all of those wideband FM signals, and inject them into the coax (for obvious reasons, it would have to be dedicated to this task & couldn't coexist with signals from the cable company or satellite TV). Maybe add another copy of the SD signal, modulated as NTSC channel 3, just to make it available on other TVs without needing an additional box.
At the other end, decode the wideband FM signals back to component video, s-video, SPDIF, and analog stereo.
I figured that a single 720p60 or 1080i60 source would need about 200MHz total, which would be totally do-able with in-wall coax. It would have required dedicated coax (ie, it absolutely could NOT have shared a coax cable with cable TV or satellite), but circa 2005, that wasn't a big deal anyway... the house had the old RG59 cable in the walls that the original builder used (that I would have used for this purpose), and both Comcast and DirecTV ran new RG6 cables anyway.
Why was the s-video part so important? Because I always used HD cable/satellite boxes, even for my non-HDTVs, and used the box's S-video output (with the HD channels) instead of the SD channels to get DVD-quality TV instead of blocky, shit-quality TV.
Not quite. Two speakers are only adequate if they're headphones... and even then, they won't give you the same satisfaction as a system with a good subwoofer (or a "Buttkicker(tm)" mounted to the seat), because low frequencies are felt as much as heard.
There's a HUGE difference between well-mastered 5.1 surround and ANYTHING you can derive with analog Dolby surround.
The old Dolby Surround (introduced in the late 70s or early 80s) had three channels... left, right, and "rear surround", encoded into two analog stereo signals. Dolby ProLogic uses digital signal processing to turn those three signals into 5 (plus low-frequency effects). The catch is, the third (rear/surround) channel isn't acoustically-independent of the left and right channels... at best, anything you play from the rear/surround channel is ALSO going to bleed from the front left & right channels (and the derived center channel) at roughly half the volume of what's playing from the rear channel. Put another way, there's no way to encode something like a sine wave playing exclusively from the rear with total silence playing from the front speakers... the rear channel is going to "bleed through", because it's encoded INTO the left and right channels (and sounds kind of like reverb if you listen to it without a decoder).
In contrast to analog Dolby Surround and ProLogic, Dolby Digital 5.1 allows you to encode 6 fully-independent channels (front left, front center, front right, rear right, rear left, and low-frequency effects). DD+ adds a second chunk of data that tells the DSP how to transform 5.1's two surround channels into four.
6.1-channel sound came about in the early 2000s and didn't last long. The idea was to take 5.1, then add a sixth speaker channel centered behind the listeners. The problem was, it didn't work very well in real life... it rarely sounded better than 5.1, and usually sounded worse than 5.1 surround. Why? Mostly, phase errors and other artifacts. The sound from the rear speaker ended up neutralizing or reinforcing the sound coming from the three front speakers in unintended ways, and usually messed up the stereo imaging.
The leap from 7.1 to 10.1 was to enable the sound to give a sense of height as well as surround, but the reason for using more than 10+sub speakers is because movie soundtracks are mixed for a playing environment that's impossible to precisely replicate with speakers alone in a home. Theaters put the "front" speakers behind an acoustically-transparent screen -- something you can't (presently) do with a LCD display. So... to approximate the sound you'd get in a theater (with speakers behind the screen), you'd put three speakers along the screen's lower bezel, three speakers along the screen's upper bezel, three more high above the screen, plus the four surround & rear speakers and subwoofer (or two).
Two subwoofers are used instead of one mainly in home theater setups with small front speakers. Traditionally, subwoofers were only used for frequencies below 60-80hz... 100-120hz if your setup was REALLY ghetto. In such a setup, the sound coming from the subwoofer is almost completely nondirectional. Now, however, it's commonplace to have home theaters with tiny speakers that can't even handle 150hz without distortion, so modern subwoofers are often forced to handle frequencies up to 180-200hz... frequencies that aren't HIGHLY directional, but aren't quite NON-directional, either. So with small speakers, having two subwoofers usually sounds better.
As for it being a "dick pull", I disagree. I find myself increasingly unable to even enjoy movies with non-surround sound... it just sounds dead & lifeless to me. I kind of annoy my friends when they come over to watch a movie or TV & I spend the first 5-20 minutes constantly tweaking the sound settings to get them "just right" (TV shows are the hardest to adjust, because big-budget Hollywood movies tend to have consistently-good surround, mixed by recording engineers with top-grade hardware & software who try to match standard profiles... TV shows usually don't).
Using coax w/adapters to transmit pcm2.0 (stereo) is a great idea.
Using coax w/adapters to transmit DD5.1 (Dolby Digital 5.1-channel surround) from a source that outputs DD5.1 over SPDIF is another good idea.
If the audio source is HDMI (e.g., Roku, most recent Blu-Ray players, Wii-U), it's somewhere between "frustrating" and "literally impossible".
Problem 1: if a HDMI source sees even a single HDMI sink ANYWHERE in the chain whose EDID advertises PCM2.0, it will fall back to PCM2.0 for everything.
Problem 2: If a HDMI source outputs PCM5.1 or PCM7.1, no box I'm aware of can transcode it to Dolby Digital (5.1) or DD+ (7.1). SPDIF doesn't have enough bandwidth to carry PCM 5.1 or 7.1. So even if you have a HDMI-to-SPDIF audio extractor that can spoof DD5.1 and DD+7.1 EDIDs, you'll get either silence or downmixed stereo from a PCM 5.1 or 7.1 source.
Problem 3: most sources that support ONLY DD+ (like Roku) can't/won't fall back to DD unless the streaming service allows it (Netflix explicitly doesn't).
I learned #1 and #2 the hard way. I have a non-HDMI receiver that supports DD5.1 & DTS5.1. I discovered problem #1 when I bought my Wii-U (which, due to Nintendo's fucking cheapness, didn't license any Dolby technology, so it can't even fall back to goddamn ProLogic... it's PCM5.1, or no surround at all). I tried to fix it by buying a HDMI-to-SPDIF audio extractor.
Problem #2 bit me after the extractor arrived. I bought ANOTHER one that could also spoof 5.1 and 7.1. It fixed the problem (sort of) for Amazon-from-Roku, but not for Netflix-from-Roku or my Wii-U.
I learned #3 while trying to find SOMETHING useful to do with the hdmi audio extractor I bought. Some (not all) Amazon Instant Video content can bitstream DD5.1 (as long as the HDMI EDID is properly spoofed), but Netflix will ONLY bitstream DD+ 7.1. If your amp supports DD+, it can downmix it to 5.1, but if your amp is an older one with DD only, you'll (usually) get... nothing. Or plain stereo. Which sucks, because digitally transcoding a DD+ stream to DD is trivial (DD+ is actually ENCODED as 5.1 with a substream adding extra channels).
Oh, and everything above notwithstanding, if your TV outputs SPDIF audio from the HDMI source, it will -- by licensing mandate -- be downmixed to PCM2.0 by the TV itself. A few TVs circa 2009 could extract & output DD5.1, but most can't. So to have any hope of working at all, the extractor MUST be BETWEEN the TV an source.
TL/DR: HDMI really fucks up your ability to get surround sound unless pretty much EVERYTHING in the pipeline was bought after ~2012. Lots of things can go wrong, any of which will cause it to drop down to PCM stereo. :-(
OpenMoko's designers also made a shortsighted, fatal mistake by omitting support for EDGE, which eliminated the US & Canada as a viable market.
The sad thing is, at the time, most baseband processor chips even came in two pin-compatible variants... one that was GPRS-only, and one that could do EDGE and only cost about $10/chip more. Lack of 3G was a drawback, but lack of EDGE was a deal-breaking fatal flaw.
Back in 2007, the US was a small, backwards market for GSM phones in terms of devices sold per year... but it STILL accounted for at least half of the world's most influential developers & journalists. Even in 2007, no self-respecting American developer would have settled for a phone that couldn't do much more than voice calls & SMS... and generally sucked at those functions, too.
Back in 2007, we settled for dysfunctional voice & SMS on Windows Mobile phones because it was the opportunity cost of having a pocket-sized laptop with wireless internet connectivity. Take away that, and you've eliminated the whole reason to even *have* an advanced phone.
> Buy a Sony Xperia, then unlock (manufacturer supported),
> clone the manufacturer gits and off you go
Does Sony still permanently cripple the camera module (with no way to ever restore its original functionality, not even by reflashing to stock) if you unlock?
There are several major problems:
1. British Airways and Air France themselves wouldn't have been allowed to operate the flights between the US and Japan. The flights would have had to be made by an American or Japanese airline.
2. Boeing was apparently determined to keep US airlines from buying Concorde jets (basically, THEY weren't interested in the SST market, but they didn't want anybody ELSE to have the US market for SST jets, either). And both countries would have probably insisted that the jets be manufactured IN the US and Japan. And Airbus didn't exist as a single entity yet, so there would have been an additional pissing match between the French and British parent companies that eventually became Airbus over which entity should build/own/run the factory in each country.
That said, Eastern Airlines supposedly had relatively well-developed plans to buy three Concorde jets to use for JFK-Miami flights. For Eastern, the deathblow wasn't the Arab Oil Embargo & fuel costs... it was the cancellation of what was supposed to be Miami's new airport (the proposed Everglades Jetport), mostly due to opposition from environmentalists.
Technically, Eastern could have legally run two Concorde flights per day out of Miami International Airport (Concorde exceeded the legal noise limits, but the airport was [and probably still is] authorized to grant noise waivers for two arrivals and two departures per day). But Eastern knew it was hopeless to even fantasize about breaking even (let alone make a profit) with only two SST round trips per day between their only pair of viable domestic airports. I suppose they could have tried to rationalize it by planning to later flip the jets AND their two noise waivers to PanAm or TWA, but the business risk would have been staggering (and frankly, insane).
Before someone brings up Orlando as a destination, remember... this was the late 60s. Orlando was still a backwater surrounded by orange groves and retirees waiting to die.
These jets won't get purchased by big airlines like American, Delta, and United... they'll get purchased by companies like NetJets.
NetJets customers don't stand in line to go through TSA security and deal with crowded airport terminals... they use general-aviation airports like FXE (Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport), so they can literally drive (or be driven) to the jet on the tarmac, park, board, and fly away (or land, disembark, get in the car, and drive away) without drama or ceremony.
Put another way, if terminal, security, and baggage-claim delays are a major factor in the time it takes you to travel from place to place, you aren't part of the target market for these jets.
No, because you still have the bricks.
It's more like going out of your way to make your house look cool & unique, then having your neighbor copy it brick-for-brick, simultaneously making YOUR house look like a tacky clone AND devaluing it in the process.
Infringement isn't theft. Infringement is infringement. Its closest legal analogue is trespass.
That said, the US has *radically* expanded the scope of IP law over the past 50 years, and much of that expansion has been at the specific behest of Disney. So on one hand... they deserve it. On the other hand, a Disney defeat will ultimately make things even worse for everyone. The ideal, delicious irony would be for Disney to have to spend millions overturning a bad law they caused in the first place. My guess: if the plaintiff is remotely willing to be reasonable, Disney will suck it up, settle out of court, and view it off as an investment in preserving a law they might want to use in the future.
Robust firmware-signing isn't the problem... robust firmware-signing that requires a key not under your own control is the problem.
That's my #1 beef with Android... Google is happy to bitch about my unlocked bootloader, but forces me to choose between leaving it unlocked, or locking it WITH THEIR FIRMWARE ONLY. I want to be able to flash my own firmware AND re-lock the bootloader with MY OWN key.
It's also why I don't particularly object to things like AACS implemented directly by a discrete codec chip, but hate when mfrs. rely on the OS & CPU to enforce it. If it's embedded in the codec chip, I can ignore its existence and just not use it. If it depends on the CPU for implementation, the mfr. is going to try and lock down the entire device. It's the difference between being forced to own a black box you can bury in a hole in the back yard & ignore, vs living in a police state where you're forced to live IN a black box under somebody else's control.
> There is no security by obscurity by using hardware everyone has (and can cut open)
Er... considering that it took about 25 years for amateurs to reverse-engineer a 6502, and around 17 to successfully de-pot a Votrax SC-02 module... yeah, obscurity probably *will* buy them at least 3-5 years against determined & well-funded state espionage agencies, 10-25 years against organized crime, and 25-50 years against amateur hackers.
What AMD is counting on is keeping it secret long enough to discover their own vulnerabilities first & quietly fix them, so that by the time any vulnerabilities become public, the product in question will have been EOL'ed for a decade or two.
The problem with relying on public scrutiny & bug bounties as a security strategy is the assumption that discovered vulns even *can* be fixed in-place on an existing device.
Gaming is one motive, but gaming-oriented PCs tend to emphasize GPUs over brute-force CPU, gigabytes of RAM, etc. And GPUs are unfortunately "1.25-trick" ponies that, outside of mining, do basically nothing for non-games.
Moore's law isn't quite dead yet, but Gresham's law will probably render it moot long before we get to the point of needing liquid nitrogen to run a future 16-core i7-descended CPU (with a gig or two of L1 & L2 cache) at 5 or 6 GHz without going up in literal blue smoke.
The problem with your logic is that right now, the market for PC hardware is in a literal death spiral. Consumers see no reason to buy anything besides shit, so hardware that ISN'T shit is becoming harder and harder to buy.
If you can't give semi-normal consumers who (by your definition) don't **need** workstation-class hardware to perform "demanding work", you won't be able to afford YOUR next workstation-class computer, because it'll cost as much as a new car.
The fact is, realtime-raytraced glass translucency/refraction effects are just about the only thing we have LEFT to offer mass-market consumers and give them a reason to junk their old computers wholesale and buy new ones.
YOU can always turn the raytraced eye candy off and use the extra computing power for something else. The point is, motivating millions of OTHER people to buy comparably high-end hardware will reduce the amount YOU ultimately have to pay for it, increase your selection, and give you more purchase options.
The nice thing about realtime-raytraced glass effects is that they're instantly visible to anyone looking at the screen. So in time, even people who don't personally care about seeing raytraced glass effects (or have any idea what raytracing even IS) will start to care, just because of peer pressure. The kids at school will make fun of them for being poor and using an old laptop that doesn't have translucent window chrome, and they'll find ways to convince Mom & Dad to buy them a new laptop for Christmas.
It's nice being elite, but realize this: we're in an existential crisis right now. If we can't come up with good reasons for normal people to buy ultra high-end computers, there won't be affordable high-end computers available for US to buy down the road, either. Our ability to buy affordable high-end hardware depends upon our ability to convince normal people to think they have a reason to buy it, too.
Believe it or not, spinning it off into a new branch of the military is a GOOD thing for American civilians. Why? The military operates under constraints, scrutiny, and civilian oversight that increasingly seem to NOT apply to "mere" law enforcement agencies (especially post-9/11).
I have a SteelSeries Rival gaming mouse, currently sampling at 1000hz and 3200dpi. It makes the problem much better than a "standard" mouse sampling at 125hz and 400dpi, but there's a point where the distance the mouse has to physically move to span all three displays exceeds the distance you can comfortably move your arm, but is already past the point where grabbing a single-pixel resize bar in something like Android Studio becomes REALLY HARD.
The fact is, attempting to inflict a single UI on those two wildly-divergent use cases (small screen with blunt fingertips, vs multiple large high-res screens with a high-precision mouse) has been a complete, total disaster. And it's a disaster that Microsoft is only partially to blame for (just look at the disaster in Ubuntu-land known as "Unity", and Apple's ongoing attempts to turn future Macbooks into glorified iPads).
And let's not even get into Microsoft's own use of Dark UI patterns, like hiding desirable options behind seemingly-plain text (that magically works when you click it) while making it APPEAR that the user's only choices are "bad" and "worse".
It's not that PC/Desktop is a "dead" market, it's simply no longer a mass CONSUMER market. We don't need more underpowered $199 1.1GHz laptops with 2gb and 64mb flash drives... we need more $2,000-4,000 laptops with specs that would have been absolutely jaw-dropping for a high-end workstation 5 years ago, and pushing the bleeding edge of high-end NOW. And Microsoft needs to concede that the needs of workstation users aren't the same as the needs of someone watching cat videos on the toilet using a tablet, even if it means requiring software to handle two different UI scenarios (high-res mouse, vs low-res touch).
The fact is, Microsoft has done a piss poor job of putting large, high-res displays to good use... something that's absolutely FUNDAMENTAL to workstation users:
* Gigantic ribbons, mostly dedicated to options Workstation users either don't care about, or learned the keyboard shortcuts for YEARS ago. Yeah, I'm looking at YOU, "Copy"...
* Tiny non-ribbon click zones that can almost require single-pixel aiming precision with some apps... IDEs, in particular...
* Mouse acceleration hasn't scaled well to scenarios where you have three 2560x1440 or larger monitors... disable it, and you'll need more mouse-movement space than your arm can reach to move the pointer from the left edge of the leftmost display to the right edge of the rightmost display. Enable it, and you'll be left feeling like you're constantly fighting with the mouse. The truth is, I don't know the solution to this problem... but if anyone has the resources to tackle it and find a good solution, it's Microsoft.
Note to Microsoft: get a copy of WinSplit Revolution, and learn from it. It's not perfect, but it's an app that basically MAKES multi-monitor Windows USABLE for lots of Workstation users.
And give manufacturers a reason to start pushing expensive, but high-powered computers again... let's call it, "Aero Diamond" (basically, Aero Glass, but with realtime-raytraced refraction and translucency). Let tablet and netbook users continue to rot with "Modern". Give us Aero Diamond so we can make those tablet and netbook users jealous & get THEM to buy high-end hardware too (so low-end shit won't soak up 99% of the economies of scale, and leave workstation users with $10,000 hardware that's only slightly better than $250 hardware).
Error messages that lie:
"(...something...) failed. Please try again later." (when in reality, it will NEVER work without outside intervention).
If you don't want to acknowledge that an account exists or has been locked out, at least have the decency to note that possibility somewhere in the error message. Like, "(...something...) failed. If the username and password you entered was indeed valid, it's possible that the account might be locked out, in which case you'll have to contact tech support at 800-999-9999 for assistance before it will ever work again."
Error messages that lazily tell you to "contact your administrator". Goddamn it, if I'm logged in AS an administrator, there should AT LEAST be something in the error message to point me in the right direction (like, "Please check the Windows Security Event log for item 277382438 for additional details").
Telling a user to "try again later" does NOTHING for security (an attacker already knows it's a lie), but frustrates end users ENORMOUSLY by sending them on a wild goose chase and wasting their time. And telling them to "contact their administrator" (without giving them the specific contact info) is unhelpful (they might not have any idea who the Administrator *IS*). Even MORESO when they are, in fact, logged on AS a goddamn Administrator.
I might be mistaken, but I'm pretty sure that CygnusEd (circa 1990) ran in its own Screen, not an Intuition-managed window.
With a Screen, you could use Copper lists to change the screen pointer during horizontal retrace after a specific scanline, so you could treat screen ram as a ring buffer. Instead of physically rewriting the pixels, you'd just point at whatever offset corresponded to your current top row, then change it to wrap around to the buffer's start for the remaining scanlines. That way, you only had to physically redraw the newly-exposed rows of text, and maybe redraw the scroll bar. This was a big deal, because the blitter was actually quite slow (it could shovel around about a million pixels/second, MAX... usually less..), so the best strategy for good performance was to avoid redrawing as much as possible & just change pointers on the fly instead.
Chiclet keyboards don't necessarily *have* to suck, as long as the keyswitches are well-designed & high quality. A modern Thinkpad chiclet keyboard is still a net improvement over 97% of current non-mechanical keyboards (but inferior to the best laptop keyboards circa 2000). Modern laptop keyboards suck mainly because their switches are shit. Compaq (pre-HP) laptops used to have *fantastic* keyboards (at least, on their enterprise-class laptops like the Armada circa 2000).
Bonus points if you intentionally craft the phone/laptop's browser history with embedded Javascript to pwn the agent's own computer when s/he goes to view it using some badly-written viewer that naively renders it straight into an IE window. And plenty of JPEG cat images crafted to exploit buffer overflow vulnerabilities.
Or, if you just want a free ticket to Defcon next year as a speaker, make an image backup of your hard drive & any embedded firmware onto immutable media (like BD-R) prior to passing through customs, let CBP have fun installing malware on it, then diff your homemade honeypot against that backup when you get home and reverse-engineer any changes they made.
I'd love to see *anyone* -- young OR old -- type 100+wpm (and few errors) with anything less than a good, tactile mechanical keyboard. At least, not without lord of autocorrect Eris...
Firefox has really gone to shit over the past few years. When IE 6 was the norm, Firefox was the clean, shiny, compromise-free new browser, and IE was a hot mess of legacy kludges. Now, Firefox is the lava-hot mess of legacy kludges... except that NOW, the alternatives all suck too (just in slightly different ways... like Chrome's refusal to let you block thirdparty cookies or disable autoplaying sound/video... or Edge's continued flakiness).
There's ONE supposedly-upcoming laptop that genuinely excites me -- the Razer Valerie ( https://www.razerzone.com/proj... )
* 3 screens
* mechanical clicky keyboard (as-yet unknown how satisfying it'll be, but still likely to be a huge improvement over everything besides *maybe* a Thinkpad)
Everything else available now or in the pipeline is uninspiring, glued/sealed Apple-like crap that's a step down from what I have now (Precision m4800), or at best, an uninspiring step sideways.
People will start buying new laptops every 2-3 years again when manufacturers start making real leaps forward and break the stagnation that's gripped the industry for at least 6-8 years. And Microsoft chucks Metro in the trash & gives us "Aero Diamond" (with realtime-raytraced translucency & refraction).
Windows 8 made a bad situation worse, but the downward spiral of crap netbooks, tablets, and $299 walmart laptops have done even more damage.
^^^ oops, typo. The second app was Impulse Tracker, not Protracker.
reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...