Speeds and feeds

DirecTV and TiVo: Together again

Peter Glaskowsky — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 20:15:00 GMT

Great news from a press release I received today:

EL SEGUNDO and ALVISO, Calif., Sept. 3 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ --

DIRECTV, Inc. (Nasdaq: DTV), the nation's leading satellite television service provider, and TiVo Inc. (Nasdaq: TIVO), the creator of and a leader in television services for digital video recorders (DVR), announced today that they have extended their current agreement, which includes the development, marketing and distribution of a new HD DIRECTV DVR featuring the TiVo(R) service, as well as the extension of mutual intellectual property arrangements.

Under the terms of the non-exclusive arrangement, DIRECTV and TiVo will work together to develop a version of the TiVo(R) service for DIRECTV's broadband-enabled HD DVR platform. The product will support the latest TiVo and DIRECTV features and services, including TiVo's Universal Swivel Search and TiVo KidZone. TiVo will develop the new HD DVR for an expected launch in the second half of 2009.

I had a TiVo HD DVR (the Hughes HR10-250) that worked with DirecTV's original HD channel lineup, but when DirecTV adopted the new H.264 technology to provide more channels, the HR10-250 became effectively obsolete.

I've previously explained why I've been so disappointed with the replacement DirecTV HR21-700 DVR and, more generally, with the way DirecTV pushed this product on its customers without offering the superior alternative of a true TiVo DVR.

As I mentioned in my HR21-700 review, I suspect that one of the reasons that DirecTV's DVRs are somewhat feature-deficient compared with TiVo DVRs is that TiVo, as a pioneer in the development of DVR technology, owns...

Comcast's usage cap: Is the sky really falling?

Peter Glaskowsky — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 12:01:00 GMT

When Comcast announced last week that it was instituting a formal usage cap for residential customers--a total of 250 gigabytes of data transfer (uploading plus downloading), as described here--I didn't think much of it, except to be happy they finally defined a critical element of their service guarantee. The previous level of ambiguity was annoying and arguably unlawful, as I described here last October.

Few Comcast customers will ever consume that much bandwidth, and in fact it's probably several times what Comcast's network can provide to all users anyway. If a large fraction of Comcast's customer base is now encouraged to start sharing its own high-definition home movies on peer-to-peer file-sharing services, network congestion will impose a much lower limit.

But over the weekend I read some of the news coverage and blogger opinions of the cap, and I have to say that some of it is just astonishing. People are making claims and demands that violate the basic rules of mathematics and the laws of physics. It looked like a digital form of mass panic, like the sky was falling.

In this story, the falling acorn was represented by Karl Bode at Dslreports.com, whose article announcing the cap (here) was highly speculative but still reasonable.

Blogger Om Malik volunteered for the role of Chicken Little in calling the cap "the end of the Internet as we know it," assuming other carriers follow Comcast's lead.

But Malik's analysis is preposterous. The video-on-demand services Malik claims Comcast is trying to block...

BOXX fills in for a failing SGI

Peter Glaskowsky — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 12:01:00 GMT

I miss the old SGI. Silicon Graphics was widely regarded as the greatest computer company in Silicon Valley back in the 1990s. Sometimes forgotten-- but not gone-- SGI was one of our greatest success stories and one of our greatest tragedies.

(Credit: BOXX Technologies)

Apple may have had more revenue by virtue of shipping millions of small systems, but SGI's hardware spanned the range from video-game consoles (the Nintendo 64) to workstations to supercomputers. SGI's Unix-based operating system, IRIX, was one of the most sophisticated in the industry.

I used to lust over SGI machines. I'd obsess over lists of used SGI gear, looking for a great deal that would let me have my own IRIX box at home. In 2004, I finally bought an Octane with MXI graphics... but that was years after these machines were effectively obsolete, and I paid less than 0.5% (1/200th!) of the original retail price of the machine.

In the mid-to-late 1990s, SGI was not well managed, losing huge amounts of money because its leaders would not...

Larrabee performance--beyond the sound bite

Peter Glaskowsky — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 19:30:00 GMT

Hello, Slashdot.

In a story on PC Pro, Nvidia architect John Montrym (whose name was incorrectly spelled "Mottram") quoted my recent blog post on Larrabee as concluding that "the 'large' Larrabee in 2010 will have roughly the same performance as a 2006 GPU from Nvidia or ATI."

Alas, this isn't really what I said or meant.

What I actually described as equating to "the performance of a 2006-vintage...graphics chip" was a performance standard defined by Intel itself--running the game F.E.A.R. at 60 fps in 1,600 x 1,200-pixel resolution with four-sample antialiasing.

Intel used this figure for some comparisons of rendering performance. If Larrabee ran at 1GHz, for example, Intel's figures show that...

Sci-fi pros focus on e-books at Denvention 3

Peter Glaskowsky — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 12:01:00 GMT

Earlier this month, I traveled to Denver for Denvention 3, the 66th World Science Fiction Convention. I first attended Worldcon in 1977, when it happened to take place in Miami, where I was living at the time.

Since then, I've been to 15 more Worldcons, including in Denver. (I've been pretty lucky--the Worldcon has been held in my home state six times.) I've also been to four North American Science Fiction Conventions (NASFiCs), which are held in the United States when the Worldcon is overseas.

A good fraction of the attendees at a Worldcon are San Francisco-based professionals--writers, agents, editors, publishers, artists, and others. Along with some of the more well-known fans, they participate in panel discussions on a variety of topics. These panels are my favorite part of the Worldcon.

This year, it seemed that there was a panel on issues related to e-books and electronic publishing in virtually every time slot. I went to several of these sessions. It seems to me that there's a serious conflict between the preferences of some professionals and...

Samsung's showcase in San Fran

Peter Glaskowsky — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 12:01:00 GMT

Samsung Electronics, an arm of the giant Korean company (second only to General Electric in annual revenue among conglomerates), held a press event in San Francisco last week to show off its products for the coming holiday season.

Samsung's new Series 9 LCD HDTVs use LED backlights to improve contrast and color quality

(Credit: Samsung Electronics)

I'd been looking for an excuse to go up to the city, so off I went-- taking Caltrain rather than driving. Conveniently, the Samsung event was just a few blocks from the train station in San Francisco.

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Intel's Larrabee--more and less than meets the eye

Peter Glaskowsky — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 08:30:00 GMT

Intel announced on Monday that it will be presenting a paper at Siggraph 2008 about its "many-core" Larrabee architecture, which will be the basis of future Intel graphics processors.

The paper itself, however, has already been published, and I was able to get a copy of it. (Unfortunately, as you'll see at that link, the paper is normally available only to members of the Association for Computing Machinery.)

Intel's Larrabee includes "many" cores, on-chip memory controllers, a wide ring bus for on-chip communications, and a small amount of graphics-specific logic.

(Credit: Intel)

The paper is a pretty thorough summary of Intel's motives for developing Larrabee and the major features of the new architecture. Basically, Larrabee is about using many simple x86 cores--more than you'd see in the central processor (CPU) of the system--to implement a graphics processor (GPU). This concept has received a lot of attention since Intel first started talking about it last year.

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How does Monster.com use gender and ethnicity information?

Peter Glaskowsky — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 23:25:00 GMT

I've been signing up with some of the major job sites. I started with NotchUp.com, mostly because I was curious about NotchUp's rather unusual strategy. Candidates are paid for interviews set up through NotchUp.com, while NotchUp itself gets fees from the participating companies.

NotchUp recommends that candidates ask for approximately a full day's pay for an interview. That seems like an extraordinarily high price. Companies are free to make a lower offer, though. I set my asking price well below that day's-pay level, and I'm still not surprised I've had no inquiries. I wonder if it's working for anyone else.

On the recommendation of a friend in the business (he actually works for a different jobs site), I also signed up for TheLadders.com, which specializes in jobs with salaries above $100K/year (which we in California refer to as a "subsistence wage").

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An iPhone 3G - better late than never

Peter Glaskowsky — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 17:00:00 GMT

It's been 19 days since I tried and failed to get a new iPhone 3G, but today I became eligible for the discounted price, and at 7:50am I was in line at the Apple Store at the Westfield Valley Fair mall in San Jose.

As you can read in my previous post, I couldn't get the usual low price for my new iPhone because I had 19 days left on my current 2-year AT&T service contract. Apple was willing to sell me the phone for an extra $200, but I decided I'd rather wait until today.

I was the sixth person in line, and by 8:00am when the store opened, there were five more iPhone buyers in line behind me.

As we lined up, we received cards from an Apple employee reserving the particular model we wanted. I'd estimate the fellow had about 40 cards. I asked if the number of cards corresponded with the number of iPhones in stock, but he wouldn't say. Another Apple guy followed behind, checking our AT&T upgrade eligibility. I did this myself last night, so I was sure it would be okay this time, and indeed it was.

The doors opened right at 8:00am and ...

Interesting insights from MobileBeat 2008

Peter Glaskowsky — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 12:01:00 GMT

On Thursday, I attended MobileBeat 2008, a new conference here in Silicon Valley focused primarily on cell phones broad enough to encompass closely related gizmos like Apple's iPod Touch and--at least in theory--mobile Internet devices.

The event was hosted by VentureBeat, where a great many blog posts can be found that go through all the sessions and significant announcements from the conference. (My thanks to VentureBeat writer Dean Takahashi, who invited me to the conference.)

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