Since the late 70s there was a continual migration away from OTA antenna reception onto cable and later to satellite services. But, there is a small, but growing, trend back towards antenna.
Digital TV services offer high visual quality high definition broadcasts from the local broadcasters (ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, Fox). The digital reception is a big improvement over the old analog stuff. As long as you can get a strong enough signal (which may require a bit of initial antenna tweaking) you get a perfect picture.. no static, shadows, etc.
If there were more OTA DVR options available (like the HD Tivo, but at a decent price) I think many people would be completely satisfied with OTA-only. With a DVR, you can replace the need for a bunch of channels to surf through with a queue of pre-recorded programs to browse through. Theoretically, those pre-recorded programs should be closer to your viewing preferences than the random garbage on cable.
There are some good roll-your-own options, like MythTV. But, few people want that much effort for TV viewing. Sony and LG both made OTA/ATSC DVRs, but they weren't very popular. Maybe this will be more of a hobbyist thing for a while.
The fanboy label gets thrown around a lot.. If you show a liking for anything, someone will label you a fanboy. But, sometimes a product really can just be a good product. Recognizing that fact doesn't automatically make you a fanboy.
For example, people here are quick to call Walt Mossberg (tech columnist for the Wall Street Journal) biased for Apple -- a fanboy, because he has given good ratings to a lot of Apple products. But, when I read the columns, I see them as taking care to fully analyze the product and providing a fair evaluation.
I happen to agree that Apple has made a lot of the right moves over the last five years. As a longtime Unix/Linux user, I loved NextStep but couldn't afford one of their machines. Mac OS X continues that bloodline to what I consider the best personal Unix machines going today. But, whenever I state something to that effect here, childish slashdotters are quick to dismiss it as fanboy-ism.
This is not to say I don't think there are Apple fanboys.. I have been really disappointed with a lot of iPhone issues (Cingular-only, two year commitment without any subsidy, no (real) third party app development). And, when I voice those Apple-critical opinions, there are many people who react as if I've insulted their mother.
So, yes.. doggedly defending a company without any critical thinking or logic = Fanboy.
But, no.. just expressing that a product is good or meets your needs does not mean that you're a fanboy.
It seems that Intel very rarely mentions clock speed in any of their roadmap briefings. The clock speed increases over the last five years or so have been pretty minimal. Moore's law talks about the rate transistor density increases. But, clock speed has followed a similar curve until recently. The last 4-5 years has to be the longest plateau in the history of the industry.
Yes, I know they changed to a new architecture that put less emphasis on raw clock speed. But, given that more efficient architecture, clock speed increases are still going to be a major benefit.
So, what's the story? Has the industry hit a wall? How long will it take to get back to above 3GHz for a mainstream processor, or even to the 4GHz levels that the old Pentium IVs were pushing.
Don't get me wrong, I am a huge fan of the power efficiencies of the new chips. For my primary purposes (laptop, HTPC) the new chips are a godsend. And, the thought of specialized "accelerator" cores is fantastic (a video decoder core for MPEG2 & H.264, please). But, doing that same thing at 4GHz is even more compelling (of course, with the speedstep++ stuff to shut down cores when not needed, and throttle back to low GHz to save power).
Of course, the vast majority of us would be paying cell charges anyway. So, you can chalk up $600 of that to an existing cost for average cell phone service. We'll see what the basic level of service requirement is for the iPhone. Maybe it's $60, maybe $80.. hopefully not $100.
I was all ready to purchase an iPhone on day one. But, I'm taking a wait and see approach, considering the combination of the silly "HTML as SDK for iPhone" thing, the two year service requirement -- with no phone subsidy, the unknown call/data plan, and any other unknown restrictions.
Yes, I agree -- when we're talking about an uncontrolled environment like a user PC. But, his question specifically stated "I am planning to sell embedded-like boxes with an OS (Linux or BSD) and this code." So, he is completely controlling the environment, in which case dynamic linking and managing files should not be a big deal. In fact, it's probably preferred.. If you need to update some library you can just do that one small file. When statically linking, you need to update your whole blob rather than just the one library.
I think the reason behind it is to poke at a point where GPL zealots get worked up.. Dynamic linking is pretty clearly agreed upon to be okay with GPL code. It's a library, the separation is obvious, my closed code doesn't overlap with GPL code at all. But, when you statically link, the separation is not clear, and you're distributing one binary with both closed and GPL code.
So, this is why I think that the whole setup and questions are contrived, just to aggravate GPL zealots.
> 2. Can I statically link the code with Linux libraries? (My own experience shows that dynamic linking is too much to bear.)
Huh? Dynamic linking, in a controlled environment, is too much to bear?
This guy is obviously a troll trying to whip up the GPL fanboys and show what an irrational bunch they are. The way the question was phrased made me suspect it, but this question clinches it... this guy is a troll.
I bet that went over like a turd in a punch bowl. Talking to a bunch of Cocoa developers at WWDC, who have been listening to Apple sing the praises of Cocoa for years, and then heard about how iPhone was running "real Mac OS X" "with Cocoa" in the iPhone announcement.
Now, Apple is telling us nice job learning Cocoa. But, for what we consider our biggest product ever, you should forget that and use Ajax. Welcome to web development.
Also.. sorry about delaying Leopard, but look at why we had to delay it.. We've got Safari for Windows!!!
>... The new 7050PV chipset would be perfect for a high-definition...
Yeah, they have all kinds of great hardware features, none of which are available in Linux. As a long-time HDTV/HTPC user, I've bought my last piece of hardware based on advertised capabilities not yet available in Linux. As soon as there are Linux drivers to use it, I'll buy it, short of that I'm not interested. Even when they add new features to their drivers, I'll still be hesitant. NVidia's XvMC on their X86-64 drivers had a known initialization bug for over two years that caused me some headaches. Closed source drivers suck.
> I wish Intel would release a standalone video card. This would be perfect for my workstation: an enthusiast motherboard for overclocking, but an ordinary video card (since I don't game on this machine). The problem is, the best overclocking motherboards rarely have onboard video.
Yup, Intel's never gonna do an overclocker board. But, I value stability a lot more than a couple percentage performance gain (or $20 saved on buying the cheaper CPU model). I can see overclocking for gamers, but video processing works at a fixed rate, e.g. 59.94 frames per second, cranking up the CPU speed isn't going to matter unless you can't keep up with the frame rate at the normal clock speed.
There have been some rumblings about intel doing an add-in card. But, I kinda doubt it.. that's a crowded market, where they don't want to piss off their good partners like NVidia. But, as a completely non-gamer, I'm happy with the integrated GPU.. low power, low heat, low noise(no fans), no additional card in the PC case. If/when Intel enables the video acceleration hardware in Linux, I'll be first in line to get a board & build my new MythTV frontend. Their open source drivers, and video acceleration API effort are definitely on the right track.
As a Myth user, trying to improve my HDTV output, I'm interested in the video acceleration capabilties of their components. NVidia provides some basic MPEG2 acceleration support (XvMC) but it doesn't seem to be too robust, there are tons of problem reports on the Myth mailing list. This is one area that could _really_ benefit from open source access to the drivers. But, we know how likely that is.
From TFA, regarding video accell:
Q:... People seem to be especially interested in better 2D acceleration, hardware MPEG-4/H264 acceleration...
A: (Nothing Related to video acceleration)
So, continued lack of suppport for all their hardware Video Acceleration capabilities in Linux. The only possibility it seems was touched on in the next question:
Q2) People would like to use their powerful GPUs for their own processing intensive applications (eg. video compression or math formulas computation). Can we expect some SDK to make this happen?
A: For NVIDIA GPU programmability, there are several options: for graphics-oriented applications within the context of OpenGL, NVIDIA supports Cg and GLSL for higher-level programming
GLSL could theoretically be used to accelerate video decoding. But, that's quite an undertaking, and is only supported on the newest chips.
Instead, I think the way to go is with Intel integrated GPUs. They don't have MPEG acceleration yet, but they are working on APIs and drivers to greatly improve this (the hardware has very good video support). I'm hoping Intel GPUs quickly become the far and away best option for Myth users.. let open source prevail.
Yeah, I agree with what you're saying.. The potential of that box is pretty impressive, and I'll be first in line to buy one when it is usable. But that seems like a long way out.
I think they would have gotten a lot more users on board if they started with a point that was already usable (e.g. accelerated video overlay) and then with many people using it for that, there would be a lot more joining the effort to extend the capabilities and take advantage of the huge power of the cells. Things like scaling, deinterlacing, etc. could be done in the cell processors - working from the existing framework of an app like Myth. As it is now, the PS3 is not getting much traction with the MythTV crowd because it is seen as crippled.
The Mac may not be the ultimate PVR. But, then again, with PVR functionality, I'm not doing a lot of channel surfing.. I'm recording programs and watching them later -- skipping all comercials. So, one could make a case that power beyond that to decode an HD stream is not needed.
But, then again, the compute power of the PS3's cells could be used in the Myth structure for the CPU hog functions, like transcoding video to H.264, or doing commercial flagging on HD video streams -- tasks normally handled by the backend server.
> Sony won't be improving Linux's video support, but rather it's up to us to port apps to the parallel DSPs Sony sells us so cheap.
The minimal support for a decent PVR is video overlay support. Without that, the PS3 will never be a good HD video platform, no matter how fast the cell processors can crank through the video data. Rather than mess with a platform with limited support, I looked for a system I could do whatever I needed with. I ended up with the Core Duo Mac Mini. It's small, quiet, and low power. It has a built-in IR receiver. I can run much of what I want, like Myth Frontend, in Mac OS X, or I can install Linux on it. And it doesn't cost much more than the PS3.
I agree that the cell offers interesting potential. But, I disagree that this can be a decent _HD_ playback platform without accelerated video overlay.. That slow PowerPC core just won't be able to keep up with painting the video without it. But, with some slight improvements from Sony, the PS3 could be a very strong competitor.
Yeah, you're right.. That's the problem when the people doing everything are developers, they are so focused on the bits & bytes they become a bit myopic and need to step back and look at thing from a normal user's viewpoint. That's why software companies have marketing people, which OSS projects could benefit from.
MythTV is an open source PVR -- Think completely open version of Tivo. Slap as much disk as you want in it, add more tuners; export video to DVD, transcode to iPod video, automatically skip commercials, see listings & schedule recordings through www interface, etc...
MythDora is a Linux distribution intented to make it easy to install and setup a MythTV server.
MythTV's frontend app has already been ported to run on the PS3. MythTV doesn't have a special codec, it uses MPEG2 for most video (e.g. broadcast HD in the U.S. is MPEG2).
But, it doesn't support HD playback. The problem is not CPU power, it's video hardware. Linux runs in a VM on the PS3, which does not offer virtualized accelerated video playback, so it cannot do HD. If Sony ever improves the video support for Linux, the PS3 would make an excellent frontend.
The XBox can not support playback of HD video (broadcast HD, 1080i or 720p MPEG2). So, aside from being fairly large, and fairly loud, it's too slow to do HD.. not exactly the ideal myth frontend.
The best one I have found, albeit quite a bit more expensive, is the Mac Mini. It rans a full Myth Frontend app, with full support for HD video and surround sound.
While the MP3 market is pretty large, it's nowhere near the market of Operating Systems or Web Browsers.. Many millions of people use the latter products.
There is a big difference between a large dominant player (Microsoft) selling a million, and an upstart (Firefox, Linux) getting market share. Microsoft has existing agreements with a lot of companies, which can be leveraged to get the Zune out there (e.g. We'll give you better pricing on our other products if you carry the Zune). MS has the ability to get a late to market "me-too" version of an MP3 player sold and displayed prominantly at Target, Walmart, Best Buy, and many others. A non-Behemoth company would have no such luck without producing a truly revolutionary product or first proving the demand for the product in the market (which is what Apple had to do before getting the iPod carried in those major retailers).
So, Yes, there is a huge difference between 10% of a smaller market by a monopoly leveraging their clout, and 10% of a huge market by companies needing to compete based on quality.
If there is one thing Internet services do not need, it's tighter video integration.
A text article gives me the option to quickly scan it and get the bits I need, or skip it entirely because I'm not interested. This all takes a second or so. If it is interesting to me, I can read the full text for more thorough treatment of the issue.
All this video junk takes us back to TeeVee mode. Bullshit commercials, intro from reporter, setup, then the actual item. This takes much longer, even when disregarding any network delays, load times, application problems, bandwidth limits, etc.
I have largely stopped reading cnn.com, because half of their linked articles on the front page are video.
So, are my neighbors trespassing by sending their wide open 802.11g signal into my house? I have accidentally connected to my neighbor's network in the past. I was wondering why my connection was so damn slow and looked at my settings and found I was connected to their network. I had connected to someone else's ssid=linksys network earlier in the day, then when I opened my laptop at home, it connected to their ssid=linksys network rather than my preferred WPA secured home network.
I can easily unintentionally "break the law". But, if that's a problem for them, they should take measures to protect their network. I've certainly taken steps to keep their dumb asses off of mine.
I have a couple systems capable of writing dual layer DVDs, which would be a pretty nice data backup option at ~ 8.5GB per disk.
But, you almost never see dual layer disks available for purchase. The few times I have seen them, they were ridiculously expensive. I heard that this was because of the patent holder limiting production or charging too high licensing. But, I don't know if that's true.
Are Dual Layer DVDs an option? Will they be coming down in price, or will we be skipping right to BR/HD-DVD writing?
I'm not a frequent MS Word user, and I almost never send docs in Word format -- for this reason, among others. But, I sometimes work with other people who prefer Word. Anyone got good links explaining how to make sure I'm not exposing more than I want to?
I think newer versions have more features around warning you about this. But, I primarily use Office 2004 for Mac OS X, is there a way to clean files in that version? How about Office 2000 for Windows? That's the version I have in my Parallels VM, for emergency use.
Linux has a lot of great VM options. VMware is a great free (cost) option, and KVM has become a great option very quickly. OpenVZ and VServer are interesting light weight OS "jail" virtualizations. They each have pros and cons, depending on your requirements and apps being used.
I'm setting up my "next generation" home linux server, and looking into the virtualization options for that. Probably a bigger factor than performance is the setup and manageability. I have found Xen to be pretty primitive compared to VMWare.. setup is a pain, documentation is spotty, and support is minimal. The one advantage of Xen is that you can (and often must) do everything with it from the command-line. The GUI tools are weak at best.
I am now leaning towards using VMWare server. But, I still need to do some testing with KVM.. articles I have read about it sound very impressive. KVM paravirtualization performance is supposed to be excellent. But, I don't know about management.
- Convenience. I don't want to hunt around to find the content I'm looking for, deal with different codecs and quality issues, and try to get it working on my Mac (my attempts thus far to view things like the NCAA basketball tournament games, or portions of The Masters, have been wildly unsuccessful.)
- Viewing Experience. Nobody wants to watch these on their computer. Apple already has the AppleTV, or even Mac Mini as good settop box options.
- Familiarity. The existing iTMS user base is huge, we already have accounts there and are exposed to the video choices, making it easy to take the leap into video.
- Integration. There is value in having the option to view the content on my laptop, iPod, as well as my TV -- without jumping through hoops and transcoding. This will be even more important as the next generation of iPods, with iPhone interface and widescreens, become available. having the video on a portable device becomes even more useful / usable.
I'm not saying iTMS is the pinnacle of multimedia.. but it's the best thing going right now. I am hoping that free/legal options become more common in the future. But, I'm thinking something along the lines of MythTV, except easy to set up and use. Record HDTV programs for free with an antenna, convert them to a good format for use on a variety of devices, and integrate with a nice settop box for TV playback. MythTV can do this today, if you're willing to spend the time/effort and acquire the knowledge necessary. This is definitely an area ripe for a startup.. but it needs to be one that is willing to live without exploiting all the lock-ins that everyone else attempts with this sort of thing.
Yes, but it's also a large tactical error. If he was trying to discredit the other side's point of view, nothing could do that like Eric Raymond. He should have been encouraging Raymond to speak at length about his views on the subject. Enough lazy reporters would have quoted him and his batshit ideas to completely discredit the Linux world.
A quick search on this shows a lot of polarized information.. Depending on the writer's bias, CFLs are either evil and nasty or the savior of humanity. It's like getting news from Ann Coulter and Michael Moore.
The pro-CFLs say more mercury will be released by powering an incandescent bulb. But, not all power is from Coal plants, and what about the so-called "Clean Coal", which presumably reduces the amount of mercury pollution?
How does the 4-5mg of Mercury compare to other household or common industrial sources?
How about comparisons with recent improvements in incandescents, or improvements in LED lighting?
I already use CFLs. But, when I first bought them I wasn't aware of the possible hazards. I don't know what local options I have for disposal.
Slashdot Mirror
Since the late 70s there was a continual migration away from OTA antenna reception onto cable and later to satellite services. But, there is a small, but growing, trend back towards antenna.
Digital TV services offer high visual quality high definition broadcasts from the local broadcasters (ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, Fox). The digital reception is a big improvement over the old analog stuff. As long as you can get a strong enough signal (which may require a bit of initial antenna tweaking) you get a perfect picture.. no static, shadows, etc.
If there were more OTA DVR options available (like the HD Tivo, but at a decent price) I think many people would be completely satisfied with OTA-only. With a DVR, you can replace the need for a bunch of channels to surf through with a queue of pre-recorded programs to browse through. Theoretically, those pre-recorded programs should be closer to your viewing preferences than the random garbage on cable.
There are some good roll-your-own options, like MythTV. But, few people want that much effort for TV viewing. Sony and LG both made OTA/ATSC DVRs, but they weren't very popular. Maybe this will be more of a hobbyist thing for a while.
The fanboy label gets thrown around a lot.. If you show a liking for anything, someone will label you a fanboy. But, sometimes a product really can just be a good product. Recognizing that fact doesn't automatically make you a fanboy.
For example, people here are quick to call Walt Mossberg (tech columnist for the Wall Street Journal) biased for Apple -- a fanboy, because he has given good ratings to a lot of Apple products. But, when I read the columns, I see them as taking care to fully analyze the product and providing a fair evaluation.
I happen to agree that Apple has made a lot of the right moves over the last five years. As a longtime Unix/Linux user, I loved NextStep but couldn't afford one of their machines. Mac OS X continues that bloodline to what I consider the best personal Unix machines going today. But, whenever I state something to that effect here, childish slashdotters are quick to dismiss it as fanboy-ism.
This is not to say I don't think there are Apple fanboys.. I have been really disappointed with a lot of iPhone issues (Cingular-only, two year commitment without any subsidy, no (real) third party app development). And, when I voice those Apple-critical opinions, there are many people who react as if I've insulted their mother.
So, yes.. doggedly defending a company without any critical thinking or logic = Fanboy.
But, no.. just expressing that a product is good or meets your needs does not mean that you're a fanboy.
It seems that Intel very rarely mentions clock speed in any of their roadmap briefings. The clock speed increases over the last five years or so have been pretty minimal. Moore's law talks about the rate transistor density increases. But, clock speed has followed a similar curve until recently. The last 4-5 years has to be the longest plateau in the history of the industry.
Yes, I know they changed to a new architecture that put less emphasis on raw clock speed. But, given that more efficient architecture, clock speed increases are still going to be a major benefit.
So, what's the story? Has the industry hit a wall? How long will it take to get back to above 3GHz for a mainstream processor, or even to the 4GHz levels that the old Pentium IVs were pushing.
Don't get me wrong, I am a huge fan of the power efficiencies of the new chips. For my primary purposes (laptop, HTPC) the new chips are a godsend. And, the thought of specialized "accelerator" cores is fantastic (a video decoder core for MPEG2 & H.264, please). But, doing that same thing at 4GHz is even more compelling (of course, with the speedstep++ stuff to shut down cores when not needed, and throttle back to low GHz to save power).
Of course, the vast majority of us would be paying cell charges anyway. So, you can chalk up $600 of that to an existing cost for average cell phone service. We'll see what the basic level of service requirement is for the iPhone. Maybe it's $60, maybe $80.. hopefully not $100.
I was all ready to purchase an iPhone on day one. But, I'm taking a wait and see approach, considering the combination of the silly "HTML as SDK for iPhone" thing, the two year service requirement -- with no phone subsidy, the unknown call/data plan, and any other unknown restrictions.
Yes, I agree -- when we're talking about an uncontrolled environment like a user PC. But, his question specifically stated "I am planning to sell embedded-like boxes with an OS (Linux or BSD) and this code." So, he is completely controlling the environment, in which case dynamic linking and managing files should not be a big deal. In fact, it's probably preferred.. If you need to update some library you can just do that one small file. When statically linking, you need to update your whole blob rather than just the one library.
I think the reason behind it is to poke at a point where GPL zealots get worked up.. Dynamic linking is pretty clearly agreed upon to be okay with GPL code. It's a library, the separation is obvious, my closed code doesn't overlap with GPL code at all. But, when you statically link, the separation is not clear, and you're distributing one binary with both closed and GPL code.
So, this is why I think that the whole setup and questions are contrived, just to aggravate GPL zealots.
> 2. Can I statically link the code with Linux libraries? (My own experience shows that dynamic linking is too much to bear.)
Huh? Dynamic linking, in a controlled environment, is too much to bear?
This guy is obviously a troll trying to whip up the GPL fanboys and show what an irrational bunch they are. The way the question was phrased made me suspect it, but this question clinches it... this guy is a troll.
I bet that went over like a turd in a punch bowl. Talking to a bunch of Cocoa developers at WWDC, who have been listening to Apple sing the praises of Cocoa for years, and then heard about how iPhone was running "real Mac OS X" "with Cocoa" in the iPhone announcement.
Now, Apple is telling us nice job learning Cocoa. But, for what we consider our biggest product ever, you should forget that and use Ajax. Welcome to web development.
Also.. sorry about delaying Leopard, but look at why we had to delay it.. We've got Safari for Windows!!!
Except this time they're doing it directly, rather than through their shill:
http://lwn.net/Articles/73592/
> ... The new 7050PV chipset would be perfect for a high-definition ...
Yeah, they have all kinds of great hardware features, none of which are available in Linux. As a long-time HDTV/HTPC user, I've bought my last piece of hardware based on advertised capabilities not yet available in Linux. As soon as there are Linux drivers to use it, I'll buy it, short of that I'm not interested. Even when they add new features to their drivers, I'll still be hesitant. NVidia's XvMC on their X86-64 drivers had a known initialization bug for over two years that caused me some headaches. Closed source drivers suck.
> I wish Intel would release a standalone video card. This would be perfect for my workstation: an enthusiast motherboard for overclocking, but an ordinary video card (since I don't game on this machine). The problem is, the best overclocking motherboards rarely have onboard video.
Yup, Intel's never gonna do an overclocker board. But, I value stability a lot more than a couple percentage performance gain (or $20 saved on buying the cheaper CPU model). I can see overclocking for gamers, but video processing works at a fixed rate, e.g. 59.94 frames per second, cranking up the CPU speed isn't going to matter unless you can't keep up with the frame rate at the normal clock speed.
There have been some rumblings about intel doing an add-in card. But, I kinda doubt it.. that's a crowded market, where they don't want to piss off their good partners like NVidia. But, as a completely non-gamer, I'm happy with the integrated GPU.. low power, low heat, low noise(no fans), no additional card in the PC case. If/when Intel enables the video acceleration hardware in Linux, I'll be first in line to get a board & build my new MythTV frontend. Their open source drivers, and video acceleration API effort are definitely on the right track.
As a Myth user, trying to improve my HDTV output, I'm interested in the video acceleration capabilties of their components. NVidia provides some basic MPEG2 acceleration support (XvMC) but it doesn't seem to be too robust, there are tons of problem reports on the Myth mailing list. This is one area that could _really_ benefit from open source access to the drivers. But, we know how likely that is.
... People seem to be especially interested in better 2D acceleration, hardware MPEG-4/H264 acceleration ...
From TFA, regarding video accell:
Q:
A: (Nothing Related to video acceleration)
So, continued lack of suppport for all their hardware Video Acceleration capabilities in Linux. The only possibility it seems was touched on in the next question:
Q2) People would like to use their powerful GPUs for their own processing intensive applications (eg. video compression or math formulas computation). Can we expect some SDK to make this happen?
A: For NVIDIA GPU programmability, there are several options: for graphics-oriented applications within the context of OpenGL, NVIDIA supports Cg and GLSL for higher-level programming
GLSL could theoretically be used to accelerate video decoding. But, that's quite an undertaking, and is only supported on the newest chips.
Instead, I think the way to go is with Intel integrated GPUs. They don't have MPEG acceleration yet, but they are working on APIs and drivers to greatly improve this (the hardware has very good video support). I'm hoping Intel GPUs quickly become the far and away best option for Myth users.. let open source prevail.
If you see this as the same as Sony putting a rootkit on peoples' PCs, you might need to re-assess the situation.
If you have an example of a Sony or Microsoft program that gave unrestricted access to media, please offer it up.
Yeah, I agree with what you're saying.. The potential of that box is pretty impressive, and I'll be first in line to buy one when it is usable. But that seems like a long way out.
I think they would have gotten a lot more users on board if they started with a point that was already usable (e.g. accelerated video overlay) and then with many people using it for that, there would be a lot more joining the effort to extend the capabilities and take advantage of the huge power of the cells. Things like scaling, deinterlacing, etc. could be done in the cell processors - working from the existing framework of an app like Myth. As it is now, the PS3 is not getting much traction with the MythTV crowd because it is seen as crippled.
The Mac may not be the ultimate PVR. But, then again, with PVR functionality, I'm not doing a lot of channel surfing.. I'm recording programs and watching them later -- skipping all comercials. So, one could make a case that power beyond that to decode an HD stream is not needed.
But, then again, the compute power of the PS3's cells could be used in the Myth structure for the CPU hog functions, like transcoding video to H.264, or doing commercial flagging on HD video streams -- tasks normally handled by the backend server.
> Sony won't be improving Linux's video support, but rather it's up to us to port apps to the parallel DSPs Sony sells us so cheap.
The minimal support for a decent PVR is video overlay support. Without that, the PS3 will never be a good HD video platform, no matter how fast the cell processors can crank through the video data. Rather than mess with a platform with limited support, I looked for a system I could do whatever I needed with. I ended up with the Core Duo Mac Mini. It's small, quiet, and low power. It has a built-in IR receiver. I can run much of what I want, like Myth Frontend, in Mac OS X, or I can install Linux on it. And it doesn't cost much more than the PS3.
I agree that the cell offers interesting potential. But, I disagree that this can be a decent _HD_ playback platform without accelerated video overlay.. That slow PowerPC core just won't be able to keep up with painting the video without it. But, with some slight improvements from Sony, the PS3 could be a very strong competitor.
Yeah, you're right.. That's the problem when the people doing everything are developers, they are so focused on the bits & bytes they become a bit myopic and need to step back and look at thing from a normal user's viewpoint. That's why software companies have marketing people, which OSS projects could benefit from.
MythTV is an open source PVR -- Think completely open version of Tivo. Slap as much disk as you want in it, add more tuners; export video to DVD, transcode to iPod video, automatically skip commercials, see listings & schedule recordings through www interface, etc...
MythDora is a Linux distribution intented to make it easy to install and setup a MythTV server.
MythTV's frontend app has already been ported to run on the PS3. MythTV doesn't have a special codec, it uses MPEG2 for most video (e.g. broadcast HD in the U.S. is MPEG2).
But, it doesn't support HD playback. The problem is not CPU power, it's video hardware. Linux runs in a VM on the PS3, which does not offer virtualized accelerated video playback, so it cannot do HD. If Sony ever improves the video support for Linux, the PS3 would make an excellent frontend.
The XBox can not support playback of HD video (broadcast HD, 1080i or 720p MPEG2). So, aside from being fairly large, and fairly loud, it's too slow to do HD.. not exactly the ideal myth frontend.
The best one I have found, albeit quite a bit more expensive, is the Mac Mini. It rans a full Myth Frontend app, with full support for HD video and surround sound.
Well, a few things..
While the MP3 market is pretty large, it's nowhere near the market of Operating Systems or Web Browsers.. Many millions of people use the latter products.
There is a big difference between a large dominant player (Microsoft) selling a million, and an upstart (Firefox, Linux) getting market share. Microsoft has existing agreements with a lot of companies, which can be leveraged to get the Zune out there (e.g. We'll give you better pricing on our other products if you carry the Zune). MS has the ability to get a late to market "me-too" version of an MP3 player sold and displayed prominantly at Target, Walmart, Best Buy, and many others. A non-Behemoth company would have no such luck without producing a truly revolutionary product or first proving the demand for the product in the market (which is what Apple had to do before getting the iPod carried in those major retailers).
So, Yes, there is a huge difference between 10% of a smaller market by a monopoly leveraging their clout, and 10% of a huge market by companies needing to compete based on quality.
If there is one thing Internet services do not need, it's tighter video integration.
A text article gives me the option to quickly scan it and get the bits I need, or skip it entirely because I'm not interested. This all takes a second or so. If it is interesting to me, I can read the full text for more thorough treatment of the issue.
All this video junk takes us back to TeeVee mode. Bullshit commercials, intro from reporter, setup, then the actual item. This takes much longer, even when disregarding any network delays, load times, application problems, bandwidth limits, etc.
I have largely stopped reading cnn.com, because half of their linked articles on the front page are video.
So, are my neighbors trespassing by sending their wide open 802.11g signal into my house? I have accidentally connected to my neighbor's network in the past. I was wondering why my connection was so damn slow and looked at my settings and found I was connected to their network. I had connected to someone else's ssid=linksys network earlier in the day, then when I opened my laptop at home, it connected to their ssid=linksys network rather than my preferred WPA secured home network.
I can easily unintentionally "break the law". But, if that's a problem for them, they should take measures to protect their network. I've certainly taken steps to keep their dumb asses off of mine.
I have a couple systems capable of writing dual layer DVDs, which would be a pretty nice data backup option at ~ 8.5GB per disk.
But, you almost never see dual layer disks available for purchase. The few times I have seen them, they were ridiculously expensive. I heard that this was because of the patent holder limiting production or charging too high licensing. But, I don't know if that's true.
Are Dual Layer DVDs an option? Will they be coming down in price, or will we be skipping right to BR/HD-DVD writing?
I'm not a frequent MS Word user, and I almost never send docs in Word format -- for this reason, among others. But, I sometimes work with other people who prefer Word. Anyone got good links explaining how to make sure I'm not exposing more than I want to?
I think newer versions have more features around warning you about this. But, I primarily use Office 2004 for Mac OS X, is there a way to clean files in that version? How about Office 2000 for Windows? That's the version I have in my Parallels VM, for emergency use.
Linux has a lot of great VM options. VMware is a great free (cost) option, and KVM has become a great option very quickly. OpenVZ and VServer are interesting light weight OS "jail" virtualizations. They each have pros and cons, depending on your requirements and apps being used.
I'm setting up my "next generation" home linux server, and looking into the virtualization options for that. Probably a bigger factor than performance is the setup and manageability. I have found Xen to be pretty primitive compared to VMWare.. setup is a pain, documentation is spotty, and support is minimal. The one advantage of Xen is that you can (and often must) do everything with it from the command-line. The GUI tools are weak at best.
I am now leaning towards using VMWare server. But, I still need to do some testing with KVM.. articles I have read about it sound very impressive. KVM paravirtualization performance is supposed to be excellent. But, I don't know about management.
- Convenience. I don't want to hunt around to find the content I'm looking for, deal with different codecs and quality issues, and try to get it working on my Mac (my attempts thus far to view things like the NCAA basketball tournament games, or portions of The Masters, have been wildly unsuccessful.)
- Viewing Experience. Nobody wants to watch these on their computer. Apple already has the AppleTV, or even Mac Mini as good settop box options.
- Familiarity. The existing iTMS user base is huge, we already have accounts there and are exposed to the video choices, making it easy to take the leap into video.
- Integration. There is value in having the option to view the content on my laptop, iPod, as well as my TV -- without jumping through hoops and transcoding. This will be even more important as the next generation of iPods, with iPhone interface and widescreens, become available. having the video on a portable device becomes even more useful / usable.
I'm not saying iTMS is the pinnacle of multimedia.. but it's the best thing going right now. I am hoping that free/legal options become more common in the future. But, I'm thinking something along the lines of MythTV, except easy to set up and use. Record HDTV programs for free with an antenna, convert them to a good format for use on a variety of devices, and integrate with a nice settop box for TV playback. MythTV can do this today, if you're willing to spend the time/effort and acquire the knowledge necessary. This is definitely an area ripe for a startup.. but it needs to be one that is willing to live without exploiting all the lock-ins that everyone else attempts with this sort of thing.
Yes, but it's also a large tactical error. If he was trying to discredit the other side's point of view, nothing could do that like Eric Raymond. He should have been encouraging Raymond to speak at length about his views on the subject. Enough lazy reporters would have quoted him and his batshit ideas to completely discredit the Linux world.
A quick search on this shows a lot of polarized information.. Depending on the writer's bias, CFLs are either evil and nasty or the savior of humanity. It's like getting news from Ann Coulter and Michael Moore.
The pro-CFLs say more mercury will be released by powering an incandescent bulb. But, not all power is from Coal plants, and what about the so-called "Clean Coal", which presumably reduces the amount of mercury pollution?
How does the 4-5mg of Mercury compare to other household or common industrial sources?
How about comparisons with recent improvements in incandescents, or improvements in LED lighting?
I already use CFLs. But, when I first bought them I wasn't aware of the possible hazards. I don't know what local options I have for disposal.