There are 5 cables in the spec, but the descriptions are incorrect.
There 4 cables which are the 4 possible combinations of low-bandwidth (often referred to as HDMI 1.1) and high-bandwidth (capable of 1080p/60, deep color, etc., often referred to as HDMI 1.3) with the possibilities of supporting ethernet in the cable (100mbit) or not.
So there are: low-bandwidth no ethernet (effectively an HDMI 1.1 cable) high-bandwidth no ethernet (effectively an HDMI 1.3 cable) low-bandwidth with 100mbit ethernet high-bandwidth with 100mbit ethernet
Now, in reality, it's already difficult to buy an HDMI 1.1 cable, and likely few going to make a low-bandwidth cable with ethernet added, since low-bandwidth cables aren't popular already.
So that leaves two of these cables to decide between: HDMI 1.3 cable high-bandwidth with 100mbit ethernet (perhaps to gain the popular name HDMI 1.4 cable?)
and then there is one final cable, the wildcard, the automotive HDMI cable.
So 3 cables to choose from, one of which is a weirdo cable (automotive).
I don't think this will cause much of a problem.
The options listed in the article, return channel, etc, are all things added to the spec that can be there for an HDMI 1.4 device but without needing a specialized cable.
I agree with your points. Which is why I had to go to a somewhat strained example (hiring code reviewers for a section of code that your business depends on) to show how open source has a real value. And it does to some, but as you say, to many others it does not.
Even if they could fix BIND or whatever in their system, they don't want to even go through the trouble of building it, replacing the stock one and then dealing with how their distro update system screws up when it tries to download the authorized patch over it later.
Didn't you see the OpenSSH article go through over a week ago? Disclosing significant security issues that existed in OpenSSH since its existence and weren't even announced until months after they were found and fixed?
Open source also has lots of bugs in it. And many of them aren't fixed until they are posted about in a public forum.
You have an actual point here about open source. It's just Stallman's point restated, but still, it's valid. But you do a really rotten job of stating it and explaining how open source (or free software) is different.
The real value of open source (in terms of bugs) is that if you would like, you can inspect the code and then hopefully find latent bugs. And if you find them, you can fix them. For example, if your business depends very critically on a section of code being secure, you can hire someone to code review it. You can't do this with closed source. You won't necessarily find any existing problems, but at least you have some more control over your destiny.
From what MS and the military say, the militarized versions of Windows don't have different code in them, they just are configured differently to have more security features (which were already available) turned on. So the militarized versions certainly don't have everything they know about fixed. The same is true of open source/free software, many projects have enormous bug databases with lists of open (known about) bugs which are not fixed. Again, the big different with open source is that if one of those bugs is a deal-breaker for you, you can fix it yourself and not wait for the project maintainers to do it.
1. Look up any flex-fuel vehicle on fueleconomy.gov.
For example: Chevy Tahoe gets 12/19 on gas (really E10). It gets 10/14 on E85. This isn't far off what I said, I guess it is closer to 35% less mpg though.
2. Vehicles don't do what you say. Yes, it's possible. No, it doesn't happen. Ethanol race cars are often changed for ethanol though, mostly by increasing compression ratios. You're not going to match the fuel economy gas has, even with perfect compression changes and spark advance, since ethanol contains less energy per gallon. There are no flex-fuel turbocharged engines sold in the US, so your comments about what turbos can do is pointless.
Not of ethanol, I'm really skeptical of it. It takes so much energy to make, I'm not sure what the point is.
I'm more skeptical of the other things listed. An E85 vehicle typically will run on E100 with no damage. The only real issue is that if you let the engine cool down, it won't start since ethanol won't vaporize properly in a room temperature engine. But it won't cause any damage, and merely putting 100% gas in the tank (assuming there is room, pumping out ethanol if necessary) until the percentage gets high enough to start the engine is all that is needed.
Also, ethanol doesn't reduce "gas mileage" (the words used in the article) 40-60%, it reduces FUEL mileage 40-60% by volume. This is because ethanol contains less energy per gallon. So consumption goes up, but what you really want to measure is energy efficiency, and burning ethanol isn't significantly less energy efficient (note, I'm not speaking of the energy required to make the ethanol, merely the combustion in the engine). So as long as the fuel is priced correctly and you have the space for the ethanol needed, it isn't an efficiency issue.
I do have problems with E10 ("standard gas") more than E85. With E85 at least you know what you're getting into. With E10, we are made to pay regular rates (or even more!) per gallon for the fuel even though it contains 4% less energy than straight gas.
For the record, I'm against a move to E15. We'll end up paying the same amount again (per gallon), while getting another 2% worse economy (per gallon). And it doesn't seem to decrease our dependence on foreign oil, since the corn used to make it is generally grown using nitrogen fertilizers made from petroleum.
I still like the idea of flex-fuel, but we need to find better wats to make alternative fuels before they represent a real viable alternative.
Respelling a word is hardly a crime. The UK changed from "gaol" to "jail" in the early 20th century. Were there people like you calling everyone who used the word "jail" stupid?
Well, maybe it is. But it's the large number of other apps that are at risk of breaking. Even if every one were written correctly, it'd be tough to maintain 100% compatibility. Add in the fact that many are written massively incorrectly (i.e. fragile) and you have a really tough road ahead of you.
Also, breaking 30 apps is peanuts, there has to be well over a million apps for Windows.
But isn't that actually the tough part? That's the whole key to GSM.
Cloning a SIM is supposed to be non-trivial and should be nigh-impossible if you cannot get physical access to the person's SIM. I know there was an issue where the secret keys in the SIMs weren't random enough, but that's a long time ago now, newer SIMs are not subject to that problem.
As to the thing about erasable ROM, I thought something like the iPhone 1G had been completely pwned and should be as subject to an IMEI cloning hack as any of these phones.
Agreed. It has no real reasons, it mostly exists so that the author can expound about how much he loves this new Star Trek. The article says it teaches movie directors how to use special effects, but the closest it comes to explaining it is "at no time does it feel like you are watching a video game".
If this teaches movie directors about how to use special effects, how about some examples? Show us where it was used well and why those situations were good uses.
It was just too much Star Wars for me. Kirk is Luke, the chosen one, saving the human race. And blasters abound. JJ Abrams (and the author) forgot that there were lots of episodes of Star Trek in which blasters and dog fights weren't central to the story. The movie is as much a sci fi movie as Demolition Man is. Both are just action movies set in the future.
Yeah, I guess by giving an example where MS did it I implied that MS invented it. I didn't really mean to do so. I don't have any real knowledge of Sony moneyhatting Square or NAMCO (to be honest, NAMCO is was pretty much in bed with Sony of their own accord during PS1 and PS2 days). But you have a very good point about GTA. At the VERY LEAST Sony gave significant financial consideration to Rockstar for Vice City and San Andreas, if not for all 3 in the GTA3 series.
I never heard of the NES chips thing before, but it doesn't surprise me even one bit to hear it now. Games are a tough business.
After his asinine last article he comes back and writes a worse one explaining that Sony users are just mad because Sony isn't doing well for them this generation.
Whoa, weren't these two whining articles written by an angry 360 fanboy, not a PS3 fanboy?
This business has been going on since MS started moneyhatting developers to get a quick leg up on Sony's (at the time) deep roster of 1st party games (remember MS buying Bungie after Halo was first shown on a Mac?). It's not time to suddenly say it's turned to madness just because Sony's moves angers a few MS fanboys.
Purchased exclusives worked great for MS this generation. Do you really expect Sony to stand by and take it? If MS fans are angry about purchased timed exclusives, they have only themselves to blame. They bought Rock Band 2 when it came out for 360 two months before PS3 de to a purchased timed exclusive. They bought BioShock in droves. They bought GTA4 for the 360 because the DLC was exclusive.
MS fans, you've reaped what you've sown, stop whining that you've been victimized.
And again slashdot, you shouldn't give this chump a forum to do his own hating.
I'm not so sure he's talking about applying one hash to the other's output, as much as performing both hashes on the same material and storing both results, also checking both results. Then you'd have to create a collision for both hashes in order to beat the system.
So many major systems are secured with PK systems that depend on SHA-1 hashes now. If this can be broken, someone please put this to good use by making a collision that makes it possible for people to write homebrew code for the PS3 or 360.
I keep hearing about all these hash collisions and how I should be scared, but I wish I could at least get the good with the bad.
Summary says fees begin for H.264 in 2010. The article actually says that fees for H.264 started in 2005, the 2010 date is the date at which the current fee schedule ends and a new one (perhaps cheaper, perhaps more expensive) will begin.
But the problem with the groupings right now is that the content providers force certain groupings. For example, if you want to offer ESPN and ESPN2 (what cable company could afford not to), then Disney says "okay, if you want to offer ESPN and ESPN2, that'll $2.40 per month per subscriber". Which is $2.40 which goes straight to your cable bill. But then they say "well, but we have this new channel, ESPNU (or Classic or Disney Kids 5 or whatever), if you offer that channel IN THE SAME PACKAGE AS ESPN, we'll give you ESPN+ESPN2+ESPNU for only $1.40 per month per subscriber".
So each year, the providers will basically force another channel into their bundle this way. So each year, each of these content providers is raising the amount of money they get from each subscriber. And the cable companies have to offer big bundles in order to meet the requirements from the content providers.
Furthermore, it gives all the advantages to the big companies who already have lots of channels in your package. They can launch a new channel easily while the small guys are locked out since the bandwidth is already being chewed up by the big guys' new channels.
The internet is definitely the disruptive technology that will stop this. That is, if the cable companies and content providers don't find a way to prevent you from streaming video directly.
There's no technological reason why this bundling is necessary. It's just because the companies (cable and content providers) have found it to their advantage so far. I feel it would strongly benefit the customers to enforce an end to this bundling.
You're gonna need 16-bit D/A. And you don't do that with FPGAs. What you really need is a 48-bit RAMDAC. The rest is easy, you don't even need any GPU acceleration if it would be too difficult to work it out, just use the CPU.
I have written display drivers for several ARM embedded devices. I find it pretty easy, because when you make a system like that, you can get the entire spec for the display from the display controller vendor, something you can't get from NVidia or ATI.
It was nothing special at all and it definitely didn't shake the world. It didn't lead to a bunch of devices using it and it didn't lead to a new path for computing
The presence of this chip on here makes no sense to me.
Oh wait, I just got to where they talk about a Micronas MP3 decoding chip. So I guess this list is a little hit or miss.
I could hardly agree more with the Chips & Technologies AT chipset being on this list. It may have been more important to the success of the 8088 than the 8088 itself was. All of a sudden making a PC clone was easy, and inevitably it became the standard, so standard that now even Macs use the PC architecture.
'The Air Force, on the verge of renegotiating its desktop-software contract with Microsoft, met with Ballmer and asked the company to deliver a secure configuration of Windows XP out of the box. That way, Air Force administrators wouldnâ(TM)t have to spend time re-configuring, and the department would have uniform software across the board, making it easier to control and maintain patches.'
So if you'd like to do it yourself, you can secure your XP too.
I'm not sure super secure is the right word for this version of XP though, given that there are a lot of security features it is missing that Vista, Windows 7 and some other OSes have.
I've used Apple's mighty mouse. Don't act like you know me.
You cannot right click on Apple's mouse without lifting your finger off the left side of the mouse. Try it. You may be used to this, I'm not, and don't see any reason I need to learn to be used to it when only one company is dumb enough to do it this way.
Furthermore the scroll ball is tough to click without scrolling (yes, I need to click it at times) and gunks up.
I want a Bluetooth mouse because I want a Bluetooth mouse. If I wanted a cordless wave desktop I'd get a cordless wave desktop.
Slashdot Mirror
There are 5 cables in the spec, but the descriptions are incorrect.
There 4 cables which are the 4 possible combinations of low-bandwidth (often referred to as HDMI 1.1) and high-bandwidth (capable of 1080p/60, deep color, etc., often referred to as HDMI 1.3) with the possibilities of supporting ethernet in the cable (100mbit) or not.
So there are:
low-bandwidth no ethernet (effectively an HDMI 1.1 cable)
high-bandwidth no ethernet (effectively an HDMI 1.3 cable)
low-bandwidth with 100mbit ethernet
high-bandwidth with 100mbit ethernet
Now, in reality, it's already difficult to buy an HDMI 1.1 cable, and likely few going to make a low-bandwidth cable with ethernet added, since low-bandwidth cables aren't popular already.
So that leaves two of these cables to decide between:
HDMI 1.3 cable
high-bandwidth with 100mbit ethernet (perhaps to gain the popular name HDMI 1.4 cable?)
and then there is one final cable, the wildcard, the automotive HDMI cable.
So 3 cables to choose from, one of which is a weirdo cable (automotive).
I don't think this will cause much of a problem.
The options listed in the article, return channel, etc, are all things added to the spec that can be there for an HDMI 1.4 device but without needing a specialized cable.
The Nike psa]play devices came out after the iPod. They came out in 2002, iPod came out in 2001.
I agree with your points. Which is why I had to go to a somewhat strained example (hiring code reviewers for a section of code that your business depends on) to show how open source has a real value. And it does to some, but as you say, to many others it does not.
Even if they could fix BIND or whatever in their system, they don't want to even go through the trouble of building it, replacing the stock one and then dealing with how their distro update system screws up when it tries to download the authorized patch over it later.
Didn't you see the OpenSSH article go through over a week ago? Disclosing significant security issues that existed in OpenSSH since its existence and weren't even announced until months after they were found and fixed?
Open source also has lots of bugs in it. And many of them aren't fixed until they are posted about in a public forum.
You have an actual point here about open source. It's just Stallman's point restated, but still, it's valid. But you do a really rotten job of stating it and explaining how open source (or free software) is different.
The real value of open source (in terms of bugs) is that if you would like, you can inspect the code and then hopefully find latent bugs. And if you find them, you can fix them. For example, if your business depends very critically on a section of code being secure, you can hire someone to code review it. You can't do this with closed source. You won't necessarily find any existing problems, but at least you have some more control over your destiny.
From what MS and the military say, the militarized versions of Windows don't have different code in them, they just are configured differently to have more security features (which were already available) turned on. So the militarized versions certainly don't have everything they know about fixed. The same is true of open source/free software, many projects have enormous bug databases with lists of open (known about) bugs which are not fixed. Again, the big different with open source is that if one of those bugs is a deal-breaker for you, you can fix it yourself and not wait for the project maintainers to do it.
1. Look up any flex-fuel vehicle on fueleconomy.gov.
For example: Chevy Tahoe gets 12/19 on gas (really E10). It gets 10/14 on E85. This isn't far off what I said, I guess it is closer to 35% less mpg though.
2. Vehicles don't do what you say. Yes, it's possible. No, it doesn't happen. Ethanol race cars are often changed for ethanol though, mostly by increasing compression ratios. You're not going to match the fuel economy gas has, even with perfect compression changes and spark advance, since ethanol contains less energy per gallon. There are no flex-fuel turbocharged engines sold in the US, so your comments about what turbos can do is pointless.
Not of ethanol, I'm really skeptical of it. It takes so much energy to make, I'm not sure what the point is.
I'm more skeptical of the other things listed. An E85 vehicle typically will run on E100 with no damage. The only real issue is that if you let the engine cool down, it won't start since ethanol won't vaporize properly in a room temperature engine. But it won't cause any damage, and merely putting 100% gas in the tank (assuming there is room, pumping out ethanol if necessary) until the percentage gets high enough to start the engine is all that is needed.
Also, ethanol doesn't reduce "gas mileage" (the words used in the article) 40-60%, it reduces FUEL mileage 40-60% by volume. This is because ethanol contains less energy per gallon. So consumption goes up, but what you really want to measure is energy efficiency, and burning ethanol isn't significantly less energy efficient (note, I'm not speaking of the energy required to make the ethanol, merely the combustion in the engine). So as long as the fuel is priced correctly and you have the space for the ethanol needed, it isn't an efficiency issue.
I do have problems with E10 ("standard gas") more than E85. With E85 at least you know what you're getting into. With E10, we are made to pay regular rates (or even more!) per gallon for the fuel even though it contains 4% less energy than straight gas.
For the record, I'm against a move to E15. We'll end up paying the same amount again (per gallon), while getting another 2% worse economy (per gallon). And it doesn't seem to decrease our dependence on foreign oil, since the corn used to make it is generally grown using nitrogen fertilizers made from petroleum.
I still like the idea of flex-fuel, but we need to find better wats to make alternative fuels before they represent a real viable alternative.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/manchester/3079138.stm
Respelling a word is hardly a crime. The UK changed from "gaol" to "jail" in the early 20th century. Were there people like you calling everyone who used the word "jail" stupid?
I believe it was only banned for use in baby bottles.
This is because babies are probably more susceptible to BPA and because baby bottles are heated, increasing the amount leached.
I'm actually bit jealous of whomever came up with that gag. He sure got a lot of mileage out of it.
It's clearly just a riff on the "naked X-ray" controversy going around.
Well, maybe it is. But it's the large number of other apps that are at risk of breaking. Even if every one were written correctly, it'd be tough to maintain 100% compatibility. Add in the fact that many are written massively incorrectly (i.e. fragile) and you have a really tough road ahead of you.
Also, breaking 30 apps is peanuts, there has to be well over a million apps for Windows.
But isn't that actually the tough part? That's the whole key to GSM.
Cloning a SIM is supposed to be non-trivial and should be nigh-impossible if you cannot get physical access to the person's SIM. I know there was an issue where the secret keys in the SIMs weren't random enough, but that's a long time ago now, newer SIMs are not subject to that problem.
As to the thing about erasable ROM, I thought something like the iPhone 1G had been completely pwned and should be as subject to an IMEI cloning hack as any of these phones.
Agreed. It has no real reasons, it mostly exists so that the author can expound about how much he loves this new Star Trek. The article says it teaches movie directors how to use special effects, but the closest it comes to explaining it is "at no time does it feel like you are watching a video game".
If this teaches movie directors about how to use special effects, how about some examples? Show us where it was used well and why those situations were good uses.
It was just too much Star Wars for me. Kirk is Luke, the chosen one, saving the human race. And blasters abound. JJ Abrams (and the author) forgot that there were lots of episodes of Star Trek in which blasters and dog fights weren't central to the story. The movie is as much a sci fi movie as Demolition Man is. Both are just action movies set in the future.
Yeah, I guess by giving an example where MS did it I implied that MS invented it. I didn't really mean to do so. I don't have any real knowledge of Sony moneyhatting Square or NAMCO (to be honest, NAMCO is was pretty much in bed with Sony of their own accord during PS1 and PS2 days). But you have a very good point about GTA. At the VERY LEAST Sony gave significant financial consideration to Rockstar for Vice City and San Andreas, if not for all 3 in the GTA3 series.
I never heard of the NES chips thing before, but it doesn't surprise me even one bit to hear it now. Games are a tough business.
They already have Virtual Server, including migrating virtual machines from one host to another.
After his asinine last article he comes back and writes a worse one explaining that Sony users are just mad because Sony isn't doing well for them this generation.
Whoa, weren't these two whining articles written by an angry 360 fanboy, not a PS3 fanboy?
This business has been going on since MS started moneyhatting developers to get a quick leg up on Sony's (at the time) deep roster of 1st party games (remember MS buying Bungie after Halo was first shown on a Mac?). It's not time to suddenly say it's turned to madness just because Sony's moves angers a few MS fanboys.
Purchased exclusives worked great for MS this generation. Do you really expect Sony to stand by and take it? If MS fans are angry about purchased timed exclusives, they have only themselves to blame. They bought Rock Band 2 when it came out for 360 two months before PS3 de to a purchased timed exclusive. They bought BioShock in droves. They bought GTA4 for the 360 because the DLC was exclusive.
MS fans, you've reaped what you've sown, stop whining that you've been victimized.
And again slashdot, you shouldn't give this chump a forum to do his own hating.
I'm not so sure he's talking about applying one hash to the other's output, as much as performing both hashes on the same material and storing both results, also checking both results. Then you'd have to create a collision for both hashes in order to beat the system.
So many major systems are secured with PK systems that depend on SHA-1 hashes now. If this can be broken, someone please put this to good use by making a collision that makes it possible for people to write homebrew code for the PS3 or 360.
I keep hearing about all these hash collisions and how I should be scared, but I wish I could at least get the good with the bad.
Summary says fees begin for H.264 in 2010. The article actually says that fees for H.264 started in 2005, the 2010 date is the date at which the current fee schedule ends and a new one (perhaps cheaper, perhaps more expensive) will begin.
I'm not a fan of cable companies. Not in any way.
But the problem with the groupings right now is that the content providers force certain groupings. For example, if you want to offer ESPN and ESPN2 (what cable company could afford not to), then Disney says "okay, if you want to offer ESPN and ESPN2, that'll $2.40 per month per subscriber". Which is $2.40 which goes straight to your cable bill. But then they say "well, but we have this new channel, ESPNU (or Classic or Disney Kids 5 or whatever), if you offer that channel IN THE SAME PACKAGE AS ESPN, we'll give you ESPN+ESPN2+ESPNU for only $1.40 per month per subscriber".
So each year, the providers will basically force another channel into their bundle this way. So each year, each of these content providers is raising the amount of money they get from each subscriber. And the cable companies have to offer big bundles in order to meet the requirements from the content providers.
Furthermore, it gives all the advantages to the big companies who already have lots of channels in your package. They can launch a new channel easily while the small guys are locked out since the bandwidth is already being chewed up by the big guys' new channels.
The internet is definitely the disruptive technology that will stop this. That is, if the cable companies and content providers don't find a way to prevent you from streaming video directly.
There's no technological reason why this bundling is necessary. It's just because the companies (cable and content providers) have found it to their advantage so far. I feel it would strongly benefit the customers to enforce an end to this bundling.
You're gonna need 16-bit D/A. And you don't do that with FPGAs. What you really need is a 48-bit RAMDAC. The rest is easy, you don't even need any GPU acceleration if it would be too difficult to work it out, just use the CPU.
I have written display drivers for several ARM embedded devices. I find it pretty easy, because when you make a system like that, you can get the entire spec for the display from the display controller vendor, something you can't get from NVidia or ATI.
Come on slashdot.
This company reprints this press release periodically.
It was nothing special at all and it definitely didn't shake the world. It didn't lead to a bunch of devices using it and it didn't lead to a new path for computing
The presence of this chip on here makes no sense to me.
Oh wait, I just got to where they talk about a Micronas MP3 decoding chip. So I guess this list is a little hit or miss.
I could hardly agree more with the Chips & Technologies AT chipset being on this list. It may have been more important to the success of the 8088 than the 8088 itself was. All of a sudden making a PC clone was easy, and inevitably it became the standard, so standard that now even Macs use the PC architecture.
'The Air Force, on the verge of renegotiating its desktop-software contract with Microsoft, met with Ballmer and asked the company to deliver a secure configuration of Windows XP out of the box. That way, Air Force administrators wouldnâ(TM)t have to spend time re-configuring, and the department would have uniform software across the board, making it easier to control and maintain patches.'
So if you'd like to do it yourself, you can secure your XP too.
http://nvd.nist.gov/fdcc/fdcc_faq.cfm
I'm not sure super secure is the right word for this version of XP though, given that there are a lot of security features it is missing that Vista, Windows 7 and some other OSes have.
The one the internets seemed to distribute (probably via Sweden) for a week now?
MS is doing it wrong.
I've used Apple's mighty mouse. Don't act like you know me.
You cannot right click on Apple's mouse without lifting your finger off the left side of the mouse. Try it. You may be used to this, I'm not, and don't see any reason I need to learn to be used to it when only one company is dumb enough to do it this way.
Furthermore the scroll ball is tough to click without scrolling (yes, I need to click it at times) and gunks up.
I want a Bluetooth mouse because I want a Bluetooth mouse. If I wanted a cordless wave desktop I'd get a cordless wave desktop.