It's part of an interactive Park Service tour kiosk which will be run directly from computers. The video was originally 1280x720 but was later reduced to 1024x576 for composition and encoded to Flash 8 at 2.2 Mbit/sec with an FLV wrapper. It looked much better than it should have - astonishing actually. We used Telestream Episode to do the compression and the biggest problems were whites getting clipped so we had to futz with that. Flash 7 wouldn't hold audio sync but Flash 8 was fine.
Ummm... I'm deflecting the lecture because I know all that. Are you answering me or the AC GP? The italicized statement in my post came from the AC I was correcting. He spewed all that crap, not me so I agree with you... those statements are bullshit. Go up a few posts and read. He didn't know the VT cluster was G5 desktops. My kid goes to VT so I'm proudly funding that project! (he was off campus when all the shooting happened)
BTW I'm more than pleased with my two Xserves and I'm getting two more soon. The oldest 1st Gen G4 Xserve DP is the is the Communigate mail server. The other G5 Xserve DP is currently the house AFP/SMB/NFS file server (video post production with two 10.5 TB Xserve RAIDS on it), the WINS server, the audio sound effects library server (you wouldn't believe what we're using), the video compression server (Cleaner watch folders), the LTO archive library controller (backing up 30 critical desktops on demand to an Overland NEO2000 on Fiber (Retrospect still works fine!)), the font server, the stock photo server, the secondary FTP server, the QTSS [QuickTime Streaming Server for all who don't know], the LDAP server, the Xgrid controller, the NetBoot image server, the Sugar CRM server and the house DHCP server. That's just one G5 Xserve machine and it doesn't even break a sweat. The new ones will run Xsan.
Apple went straight for the enterprise with OS X servers. Remember all that triumphalism a few years back about a new supercomputer being built from Xserves? How OS X was going to be the new standard for supercomputing, how all the enterprises were going to switch switch switch? Yeah, nothing came of it, so of course the fanboys rewrite history so Apple only ever aimed for the home market.
What are you reading? I don't recall any of that guff and nor should anyone else. Lets dig back in history and see what was really said: Here's a journalist's transcript of the Xserve preview event in 2002 and here's a followup a few hours later with more details, neither of which bear out any of those assertions. The stated market was Education, Creative, Biotech and Video and they sold a lot into those areas, not to mention Government (find out how many Xserves are on U.S. Navy submarines running Linux).
As far as "triumphalism", the first anyone heard of the Mac supercomputer was when it made the top 10 Supercomputer list - and those were DESKTOPS! That generated its own hooplah when, once again, the extablishment was pulling another stick out of its eye for underperforming and overbilling.
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There are a lot of Apple haters, mostly with their fortunes tied to its failure. That's not going so well. TFA is just a response to the avalanche of bought-and-paid Microsoft FUD reporters who can't seem to get the term "unbiased" right. Call for an iPhone boycott? You can always hope - suckers. This article is biased toward outing those buffoons with nothing else to do except panic. I cringe at some the venom this guy has published, but as uppity and fanboyish as Dan is, he's mostly right.
The Joker laughing out of every TV and Radio in Gotham city would be a powerful psychological win and a plausible goal for a determined enemy. What if part of a cyber war campaign was designed to replace Podcasts, Music streams, VOD Movie services, CNN Video or any internet delivered media with a message from our enemy? Could they commandeer Internet connected set-top boxes deployed by Cable providers and replace what we see and hear?
I was approached by some people recently who wanted to know exactly how someone could pull that off. By "some people", I mean someone who works with an unnamed National Security Agency of sorts. I shrugged it off at first, then thought of the potential impact. Eek. Does anyone in the media business even anticipate or have a strategy for combating such an attack?
I'll second [million] that. About one-third of the people in my company have already asked if they'll be able to access our CRM system from the iPhone. My choice is to make sure it works or face an angry mob with torches and pitchforks.
It has less to do with technology and more to do with the behavior of the owner. The history if Microsoft is to encourage the adoption and spread of technologies they control. Once they achieve ubiquity, they pull out a gun, aim it at your head and demand more money if you intend to continue using their products. They've done it time and time again so don't even start with them. The other players in the industry have a history of ensuring interoperability and fairness. Apple has several times stood in the way of the greedy record industry who wants to cut open the golden goose... YOU. They've also applied reasonable DRM methods which essentially protect the content owners and allow the consumer to opt out at the same time. It was quite a balancing act which eventually led to the decline of DRM. That's why anything Microsoft is a bad choice.
Bluray and HD-DVD will decode VC-1 if the material is encoded with VC-1. Most disks use H.264 because it's a better codec anyway and Hollywood is very skeptical about allowing Microsoft technologies to encapsulate "their" media, so it's lightly used. Most corporations have learned that any agreement with Microsoft is treacherous territory. Given the chance, they'll devour you from the inside and spit out your bones. If you examine Microsoft's history of practically any technology which is inherently interoperable, their constant effort is to distill everything work only on Windows. That's a huge problem which is working against them big time.
Microsoft found itself in a very uncomfortable situation with VC-1. They expected everyone to beat a path to their toll gate when High Definition DVDs were being developed. That didn't happen and they were the only ones who were surprised. What actually occurred was they weren't even invited to the party, so Microsoft found itself in the position of throwing the codec at standards committees, begging for ratification and it still took several years. Microsoft wanted exclusive control over the codec and that was unacceptable to those who understood the way Microsoft would eventually hold the content owners hostage. Microsoft had to provide the source code and define the royalty structure up front - something they've never had to do. This was the first time anything from Microsoft was properly standardized.
Another detractor against using Microsoft technologies was the long history of failed efforts and broken promises from Microsoft in the media business. Look at how often Microsoft has renamed existing technologies over the years because they have always culminated in some sort of train wreck. That kind of technical stability isn't something manufacturers were looking for long term. Manufacturers also had no faith in Microsoft's ability to deliver a secure product. During that time frame, the well known inverse of "Security" was "Microsoft".
The VC-1 codec is separate from Windows Media Player, literally removed from the Microsoft wrapper and offered seperately. Windows Media Player, with the possible exception of corporations which have signed exclusive deals with Microsoft, is shriveling up rapidly in favor of the MPEG4 container and H.264 codec (pronounced "QuickTime"). Many major video portals and hardware manufacturers have started shipping Flash (H.263) or MPEG4 with more on the way. Right now, Windows Media is working along side these technologies where a few years ago it was nearly alone in the field. Eventually, Windows Media may well fall away completely. The most popular format for paid media uses the interoperable and extensible MPEG4/H.264, not Windows Media (the iTunes Store).
The Windows Media Player wrapper is the shell which embodies mechanisms to track your movements, blow advertising at you, restrict your ability to view things as well as a few useful functions. Relatively, QuickTime is the crown jewel of media with far more flexibility than Windows Media could even pretend to have.
That's the universal experience with new Mac users - they suddenly "get it" once they stop fighting the computer like it was Windows.
I've introduced about 50 people at work to Macs for the first time. Some have said "this thing had changed my life", most have bought personal Macs to replace their home Windows machines and many have said "you turned me into a Mac freak!"
I didn't turn anyone into anything - I just gave them the equipment and they made up their own minds.
The "high price tag" is getting lower all the time - especially when you buy from the refub list on the Apple store under "Special Deals".
How does Apple do this? They like convert people into Apple salesmen - like zombies or something.
Funny, though... Apple's not doing this. The "hype" (call it what it is) chiefly comes from the street buzz and from zine/news columnists (and blogs and Slashdot), not so much from Apple. They're doing less to sell this product than most other manufacturers would. At the last CES, the iPhone cast a shadow on the whole show. EVERYONE was buzzing about the iPhone out of terror or excitement - and the product wasn't even close to shipping nor was Apple even there! Buzz shouldn't be confused with hype.
All Apple has done was one announcement in January and a followup in June. They also made four TV spots which have only been running for three weeks. With everyone trying to pry iPhone information out of Apple, they've kept relatively silent. Even in the Gates-Jobs thing at D5, Jobs kept the iPhone in his pocket - didn't want to talk about it. That's pretty low key. Anyone getting huge amounts of "hype" out of that hasn't been paying attention to what hype really is.
Hype, in this context, is flogging the public with vaporware and never delivering it as advertised - see: Microsoft which compensates for technical incompetence with Jedi mind tricks. By delivering one flop after another after another in the media technology market, Microsoft needs to keep renaming the same half-baked "technologies" over and over to appear innovative to the public. That's hype.
Anatomy of a fanboi:
1. discover a cause/product that seems interesting
2. become familiar and innovative with said cause/product
3. become invested in cause/product
4. have some asshat tell you your cause/product sucks compared to theirs
5. you respond with fact and experience against an onslaught of clueless asshat taunts
6. you sound like a fanboi, but all you're doing is exercising your right to choose
6a. you discover asshats are the most insecure people on the planet and you represent a threat.
No, I'm not joking. There was a distinct performance lag in G4 processors with Intel chips overcoming their long pipeline issues with raw clock speeds. Intel chips were running well over 2GHz while the G4s were barely breaking 1GHz. The G5 was also lagging, with IBM promising 3 GHz chips and only delivering 2.5 GHz, and they couldn't make the quantity required by Apple.
Fortunately, Apple could stick four G5s in a box to make a competitive machine. They could also use a really fast 64 bit wide FSB architecture friendly to multiple processors which left PCs way behind, but it still took a fist full of G5 chips to do it.
The G5 chips in the Xbox are very different from the ones in the Mac G5s, so I wouldn't give that move much credit. They're simpler chips which could suddenly run at 3.2GHz but can't execute as many instructions per clock cycle or reorder instructions. I'd also point out that the IBM G5 chips were much less expensive than the Intel offerings of the time, which makes sense if you're going to stick 3 cores worth in a product. That was probably the bigger reason for the change - cost.
Yeah, OpenGL sucks on the Mac but there's a whole collection of reasons few games exist on the Mac. I think the change to Intel was the right move at the right time, so lets hope someone helps fix the pipe shoveling polygons at the video card.
I've got a die-hard WoW player who's a PC gamer at home and a graphic artist during the day on a Mac. Any other night and some weekends, I'll find him here at work playing WoW on the Mac because he says it runs better than the screaming zonker PCs he built for games. Ok, maybe it's the Quad G5 with 4.5 gigs of RAM, nvidia 6600 and 30" monitor, but even that's an old machine and graphics card now.
BTW, he's going to buy a Mac for home and drop kick the PCs.
Interesting perspective and could be true. However, there's one thing which you did point out; the new x86 architecture. Apple was feeling the performance lag of G4 and G5 processors for several years and that hurt everything on the Mac. Games are nothing but CPU and real time render speed tests showing off all the shortcomings. Today, it doesn't really matter how you convice the Intel chip to run a compatible binary, even if it is in virtualization. The real story is that Macs can keep up with CPU speeds now and game makers are taking notice.
Saw that - Verizon somehow stuffed the Genie back in the bottle, accidentally leaving OBEX enabled on previous versions of the RAZR then cutting it off later like nothing happened... dohh-de-dohh... dumm-de-dumm... who me?
Funny, though, if your V3C RAZR has version 02 software (OBEX enabled), you can get an update to the latest 04 patch and OBEX will still work. However, if you bought an original V3M RAZR with version 03 software (OBEX disabled), running the 04 patch will not enable OBEX. So, if you had OBEX enabled already, it stays on with the 04 patch but you're out of luck otherwise. Abuse like a true monopolist. AT&T/Cingular is looking better all the time.
Slashdot Mirror
It's part of an interactive Park Service tour kiosk which will be run directly from computers. The video was originally 1280x720 but was later reduced to 1024x576 for composition and encoded to Flash 8 at 2.2 Mbit/sec with an FLV wrapper. It looked much better than it should have - astonishing actually. We used Telestream Episode to do the compression and the biggest problems were whites getting clipped so we had to futz with that. Flash 7 wouldn't hold audio sync but Flash 8 was fine.
Pow - Zoom - Right to the moon, Alice!
Huh? Shortly after Gabo Mendoza showed everyone how to do Flash on the web it was big. That was 10 years ago, waaaaay before YouTube.
Here's a demo of what he's doing now. (see site root for blog)
For one thing, Silverlight supports the VC-1 codec. This would allow embedded HD video which Flash currently can't handle.
Ever since Adobe started using the On2 codec, HD Flash is not a problem. We just shipped several HD clips in Flash for a job and they looked great.
So shipping a browser with the OS is anticompetitive and not shipping that browser with the os is anticompetitive?
Almost... tying the browser to the OS is anticompetitive.
Ummm... I'm deflecting the lecture because I know all that. Are you answering me or the AC GP? The italicized statement in my post came from the AC I was correcting. He spewed all that crap, not me so I agree with you... those statements are bullshit. Go up a few posts and read. He didn't know the VT cluster was G5 desktops. My kid goes to VT so I'm proudly funding that project! (he was off campus when all the shooting happened)
BTW I'm more than pleased with my two Xserves and I'm getting two more soon. The oldest 1st Gen G4 Xserve DP is the is the Communigate mail server. The other G5 Xserve DP is currently the house AFP/SMB/NFS file server (video post production with two 10.5 TB Xserve RAIDS on it), the WINS server, the audio sound effects library server (you wouldn't believe what we're using), the video compression server (Cleaner watch folders), the LTO archive library controller (backing up 30 critical desktops on demand to an Overland NEO2000 on Fiber (Retrospect still works fine!)), the font server, the stock photo server, the secondary FTP server, the QTSS [QuickTime Streaming Server for all who don't know], the LDAP server, the Xgrid controller, the NetBoot image server, the Sugar CRM server and the house DHCP server. That's just one G5 Xserve machine and it doesn't even break a sweat. The new ones will run Xsan.
So there.
Apple went straight for the enterprise with OS X servers. Remember all that triumphalism a few years back about a new supercomputer being built from Xserves? How OS X was going to be the new standard for supercomputing, how all the enterprises were going to switch switch switch? Yeah, nothing came of it, so of course the fanboys rewrite history so Apple only ever aimed for the home market.
What are you reading? I don't recall any of that guff and nor should anyone else. Lets dig back in history and see what was really said: Here's a journalist's transcript of the Xserve preview event in 2002 and here's a followup a few hours later with more details, neither of which bear out any of those assertions. The stated market was Education, Creative, Biotech and Video and they sold a lot into those areas, not to mention Government (find out how many Xserves are on U.S. Navy submarines running Linux).
As far as "triumphalism", the first anyone heard of the Mac supercomputer was when it made the top 10 Supercomputer list - and those were DESKTOPS! That generated its own hooplah when, once again, the extablishment was pulling another stick out of its eye for underperforming and overbilling.
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That was quick.
There are a lot of Apple haters, mostly with their fortunes tied to its failure. That's not going so well. TFA is just a response to the avalanche of bought-and-paid Microsoft FUD reporters who can't seem to get the term "unbiased" right. Call for an iPhone boycott? You can always hope - suckers. This article is biased toward outing those buffoons with nothing else to do except panic. I cringe at some the venom this guy has published, but as uppity and fanboyish as Dan is, he's mostly right.
The Joker laughing out of every TV and Radio in Gotham city would be a powerful psychological win and a plausible goal for a determined enemy. What if part of a cyber war campaign was designed to replace Podcasts, Music streams, VOD Movie services, CNN Video or any internet delivered media with a message from our enemy? Could they commandeer Internet connected set-top boxes deployed by Cable providers and replace what we see and hear?
I was approached by some people recently who wanted to know exactly how someone could pull that off. By "some people", I mean someone who works with an unnamed National Security Agency of sorts. I shrugged it off at first, then thought of the potential impact. Eek. Does anyone in the media business even anticipate or have a strategy for combating such an attack?
I'll second [million] that. About one-third of the people in my company have already asked if they'll be able to access our CRM system from the iPhone. My choice is to make sure it works or face an angry mob with torches and pitchforks.
You are my hero!
When is your execution scheduled?
It has less to do with technology and more to do with the behavior of the owner. The history if Microsoft is to encourage the adoption and spread of technologies they control. Once they achieve ubiquity, they pull out a gun, aim it at your head and demand more money if you intend to continue using their products. They've done it time and time again so don't even start with them. The other players in the industry have a history of ensuring interoperability and fairness. Apple has several times stood in the way of the greedy record industry who wants to cut open the golden goose... YOU. They've also applied reasonable DRM methods which essentially protect the content owners and allow the consumer to opt out at the same time. It was quite a balancing act which eventually led to the decline of DRM. That's why anything Microsoft is a bad choice.
I'd recommend reading this for a good overview of how Windows Media and QuickTime grew out of the muck.
Bluray and HD-DVD will decode VC-1 if the material is encoded with VC-1. Most disks use H.264 because it's a better codec anyway and Hollywood is very skeptical about allowing Microsoft technologies to encapsulate "their" media, so it's lightly used. Most corporations have learned that any agreement with Microsoft is treacherous territory. Given the chance, they'll devour you from the inside and spit out your bones. If you examine Microsoft's history of practically any technology which is inherently interoperable, their constant effort is to distill everything work only on Windows. That's a huge problem which is working against them big time.
Microsoft found itself in a very uncomfortable situation with VC-1. They expected everyone to beat a path to their toll gate when High Definition DVDs were being developed. That didn't happen and they were the only ones who were surprised. What actually occurred was they weren't even invited to the party, so Microsoft found itself in the position of throwing the codec at standards committees, begging for ratification and it still took several years. Microsoft wanted exclusive control over the codec and that was unacceptable to those who understood the way Microsoft would eventually hold the content owners hostage. Microsoft had to provide the source code and define the royalty structure up front - something they've never had to do. This was the first time anything from Microsoft was properly standardized.
Another detractor against using Microsoft technologies was the long history of failed efforts and broken promises from Microsoft in the media business. Look at how often Microsoft has renamed existing technologies over the years because they have always culminated in some sort of train wreck. That kind of technical stability isn't something manufacturers were looking for long term. Manufacturers also had no faith in Microsoft's ability to deliver a secure product. During that time frame, the well known inverse of "Security" was "Microsoft".
The VC-1 codec is separate from Windows Media Player, literally removed from the Microsoft wrapper and offered seperately. Windows Media Player, with the possible exception of corporations which have signed exclusive deals with Microsoft, is shriveling up rapidly in favor of the MPEG4 container and H.264 codec (pronounced "QuickTime"). Many major video portals and hardware manufacturers have started shipping Flash (H.263) or MPEG4 with more on the way. Right now, Windows Media is working along side these technologies where a few years ago it was nearly alone in the field. Eventually, Windows Media may well fall away completely. The most popular format for paid media uses the interoperable and extensible MPEG4/H.264, not Windows Media (the iTunes Store).
The Windows Media Player wrapper is the shell which embodies mechanisms to track your movements, blow advertising at you, restrict your ability to view things as well as a few useful functions. Relatively, QuickTime is the crown jewel of media with far more flexibility than Windows Media could even pretend to have.
The best security is not having the damn wires there in the first place.
Ahhh yes... the air-gap firewall - works better than anything.
I'm sure Cisco has one for $40,000 they can sell the DHS (empty box with two RJ-45s). They need it.
That's the universal experience with new Mac users - they suddenly "get it" once they stop fighting the computer like it was Windows.
I've introduced about 50 people at work to Macs for the first time. Some have said "this thing had changed my life", most have bought personal Macs to replace their home Windows machines and many have said "you turned me into a Mac freak!"
I didn't turn anyone into anything - I just gave them the equipment and they made up their own minds.
The "high price tag" is getting lower all the time - especially when you buy from the refub list on the Apple store under "Special Deals".
How does Apple do this? They like convert people into Apple salesmen - like zombies or something.
Funny, though... Apple's not doing this. The "hype" (call it what it is) chiefly comes from the street buzz and from zine/news columnists (and blogs and Slashdot), not so much from Apple. They're doing less to sell this product than most other manufacturers would. At the last CES, the iPhone cast a shadow on the whole show. EVERYONE was buzzing about the iPhone out of terror or excitement - and the product wasn't even close to shipping nor was Apple even there! Buzz shouldn't be confused with hype.
All Apple has done was one announcement in January and a followup in June. They also made four TV spots which have only been running for three weeks. With everyone trying to pry iPhone information out of Apple, they've kept relatively silent. Even in the Gates-Jobs thing at D5, Jobs kept the iPhone in his pocket - didn't want to talk about it. That's pretty low key. Anyone getting huge amounts of "hype" out of that hasn't been paying attention to what hype really is.
Hype, in this context, is flogging the public with vaporware and never delivering it as advertised - see: Microsoft which compensates for technical incompetence with Jedi mind tricks. By delivering one flop after another after another in the media technology market, Microsoft needs to keep renaming the same half-baked "technologies" over and over to appear innovative to the public. That's hype.
Why doesn't anyone pick up on that?
Anatomy of a fanboi:
1. discover a cause/product that seems interesting
2. become familiar and innovative with said cause/product
3. become invested in cause/product
4. have some asshat tell you your cause/product sucks compared to theirs
5. you respond with fact and experience against an onslaught of clueless asshat taunts
6. you sound like a fanboi, but all you're doing is exercising your right to choose
6a. you discover asshats are the most insecure people on the planet and you represent a threat.
Their strategy is censorship.
No, I'm not joking. There was a distinct performance lag in G4 processors with Intel chips overcoming their long pipeline issues with raw clock speeds. Intel chips were running well over 2GHz while the G4s were barely breaking 1GHz. The G5 was also lagging, with IBM promising 3 GHz chips and only delivering 2.5 GHz, and they couldn't make the quantity required by Apple.
Fortunately, Apple could stick four G5s in a box to make a competitive machine. They could also use a really fast 64 bit wide FSB architecture friendly to multiple processors which left PCs way behind, but it still took a fist full of G5 chips to do it.
The G5 chips in the Xbox are very different from the ones in the Mac G5s, so I wouldn't give that move much credit. They're simpler chips which could suddenly run at 3.2GHz but can't execute as many instructions per clock cycle or reorder instructions. I'd also point out that the IBM G5 chips were much less expensive than the Intel offerings of the time, which makes sense if you're going to stick 3 cores worth in a product. That was probably the bigger reason for the change - cost.
Yeah, OpenGL sucks on the Mac but there's a whole collection of reasons few games exist on the Mac. I think the change to Intel was the right move at the right time, so lets hope someone helps fix the pipe shoveling polygons at the video card.
I've got a die-hard WoW player who's a PC gamer at home and a graphic artist during the day on a Mac. Any other night and some weekends, I'll find him here at work playing WoW on the Mac because he says it runs better than the screaming zonker PCs he built for games. Ok, maybe it's the Quad G5 with 4.5 gigs of RAM, nvidia 6600 and 30" monitor, but even that's an old machine and graphics card now.
BTW, he's going to buy a Mac for home and drop kick the PCs.
Interesting perspective and could be true. However, there's one thing which you did point out; the new x86 architecture. Apple was feeling the performance lag of G4 and G5 processors for several years and that hurt everything on the Mac. Games are nothing but CPU and real time render speed tests showing off all the shortcomings. Today, it doesn't really matter how you convice the Intel chip to run a compatible binary, even if it is in virtualization. The real story is that Macs can keep up with CPU speeds now and game makers are taking notice.
It's not that Macs cost more initially, the question is "why is the same hardware worth less when it's pre-loaded with Windows?"
...a little humor there if you didn't spot it...
Anyway, long term, Macs win hands down in price/maintenance/resale. Yes, we resell Macs after 4-6 years. Most of the PCs are in the dumpster by then.
Saw that - Verizon somehow stuffed the Genie back in the bottle, accidentally leaving OBEX enabled on previous versions of the RAZR then cutting it off later like nothing happened... dohh-de-dohh... dumm-de-dumm... who me?
Funny, though, if your V3C RAZR has version 02 software (OBEX enabled), you can get an update to the latest 04 patch and OBEX will still work. However, if you bought an original V3M RAZR with version 03 software (OBEX disabled), running the 04 patch will not enable OBEX. So, if you had OBEX enabled already, it stays on with the 04 patch but you're out of luck otherwise. Abuse like a true monopolist. AT&T/Cingular is looking better all the time.