Waht did I ever do before SlashDot.
Here's another one Slashdot | Capture MPEG From TiVo. There's also mention of an ethernet hardware hack. There's certainly been a lot of talk about this being used for piracy. At least some people have finally pointed out that the pirates won't use this, it's too much trouble. They'll just use existing MPEG 2 encoders for their PCs, it's cheaper and more reliable.
posted by TechnoMage at 4:52 AM LINK

Ah here's some good news from Slashdot | Mozilla 0.9.1 Out. Looks like I'll have to get a couple of these, on efor winbloze one for Linux. Now if they would just get that PGP/GPG support into it...
posted by TechnoMage at 2:41 AM LINK

Oops, looks like I was wrong about Prof. Felten not hiting that SDMI click through, still... Just saw this on Slashdot | EFF Files First Anti-DMCA Lawsuit. If anyone read my previous rant about SDMI, well the EFF has gotten involved on behalf of Prof. Felten. Maybe we'll get lucky and some of this DMCA mess will be cleaned up.
Nahhhh, probably not.
posted by TechnoMage at 12:33 AM LINK

Now on to 3D graphics tech. Tile based rendering vs. full scene rendering.
Tile based rendering breaks up the screen into small tiles and renders each seperatley. For each tile, all the polygons are calculated including depth then only those pixels that are visible get textured. This decreases the required texture memory bandwith to the point that cheaper ram can be used allowing for cheaper cards. Either that or it calculates the polygons pixels, checks depth, then textures visible pixels as the polygons arrive. Either way it does decrease the required texture bandwith just not as much. The Kyron II, succesor to the PowerVR, implements tile based rendering. It does not have hardware transform so the CPU must do the tranforms, this should allow it to send only the polygons visible in the current tile. If the next version does implement hardware transform then I would suspect that it would have to transfer the entire scene for each tile.
Full scene rendering of course renders the scene all at once, the scene data is sent to the card only once per frame. The original method did the texturing before the depth test so there was a lot of wasted texture bandwidth. Newer cards I believe do the depth test before texturing a pixel. If so then tile based rendering offers no significant improvement and in fact could lead to a serious decrease in performance once they start including hardware transform.
Here is a comparison of the Kyron II with a Geforce 3 TechTV | 3D Prophet 4500
posted by TechnoMage at 6:29 PM LINK

This may not be recent news but it was brought up recently.
The SDMI group had issued a chalenge to try and break any of their secure music algorithms. This chalenge was covered under an NDA that was agreed to via a click through web page. A university profesor heard about the chalenge and with the help of some other profesors proceded to break all the algoritms. They did not click through the SDMI groups NDA web page, this was completely independant. They were going to present a paper on this but the SDMI group stopped them by threatening to sue.
So SDMI has been broken and it looks like the SDMI group, or at least some of them, are against free speech.
posted by TechnoMage at 5:40 PM LINK

Now what should my first on-topic post be?... Ah.. I know, how about the fact that websites tend to forget about browsers other than IE and Netscape. If your viewin this page with Mozilla then you might have noticed that the ad block Geocities uses doesn't work in it. I know, I know who cares about suck things except the companies that use them. Well I care when it messes up the look of my pages. Of course there are plenty of other sites that don't work right because their scripts only test for IE and Netscape. You would think that since Mozilla is the source for Netscape that they would just cosider them the same, well maybe some do but others haven't done that yet.
I would ask for comments but I haven't got that set up yet.
posted by TechnoMage at 2:30 AM LINK

Well this is my second post. I think that the site rebuilding is finished. At least now I can see what it looks like.
posted by TechnoMage at 1:57 AM LINK

This is a test of my first blog.
This is only a test.
posted by TechnoMage at 11:57 PM LINK