March 27th, 2008
Saying goodbye to ZDNet
ZDNet blogs has been my online home since 2004. With the help and a lot of guidance from David Berlind, Stephen Howard-Sarin, and David Grober, I was brought in to the world of blogging and journalism. I enjoyed my work and
all the conversations here and I hope you found it informative and entertaining.
As of March 26, 2008, I have to say goodbye to ZDNet because of some corporate restructuring. I have no ill will towards any of my managers and I hold no grudges towards the company. This will be my last and final post on ZDNet so farewell my friends.
March 26th, 2008
55W PC power supply powering the dual-core computer
Most computer builders in the world think I’m nuts for endorsing the use of 330 watt power supplies for a high-end performance computer. Conventional “wisdom” says that anything under 500 watts is inadequate for an enthusiast PC. “My power supply is bigger than your power supply” seems to be a typical mindset for many people but I’ve always had just the opposite desire to say that “my supply is smaller than yours and it works great”. So when I started building mainstream dual-core computers with 220 watt 80 Plus power supplies, people were shocked that I would even consider such a small power supply. But since I was able to build a 50W peak power dual-core computer, why not use an even smaller power supply in the sub-100 watt range?
Pictured above is the open frame fanless AC input open frame 55 watt FSP055-50LM power supply from Sparkle Power Inc with an MSRP of $39. Typically when power supplies are this small, people often use DC input power supplies with an external AC brick. Not so with this model as it’s an all in one with the standard AC power connector you get on a normal ATX PC power supply. It’s so small that it doesn’t even bother with a fan or metal casing; you have to a system-level fan yourself and provide the bracing and shielding in your computer chassis. The really nice thing about this solution is that the entire power supply including the AC conversion part is not much bigger than a DC power supply but you don’t need an external brick.
Using this 55W power supply, I took a dual-core Intel E2140 along with the bundled ECS945-GM motherboard I bought for $90 and built a computer with it using default clock speed and voltages. Unfortunately since it was missing a 4-pin power connector for the motherboard, I had to hot-wire a 4-pin CPU power connector from an older power supply to this unit to make it work. That means 2 12-volt yellow cables and 2 black ground cables had to be soldered in to place and taped up. Since these cables are safe for 10 amps each which translates to 120 watts per cable, I’m not even close to overloading the cables.
Once the computer came up, the power consumption at the plug peak out at 70W which means the output power is around 52W at 75% efficiency which is 3W under the peak output of the power supply. That is cutting it a bit close but it shows the extreme worst-case of what this PSU can handle.
In reality, the 55W PSU isn’t practical for a mainstream dual-core computer although it would be more than powerful enough for an Intel D201GLY with Celeron 115, D201GLY2 motherboard with Celeron 120, or the Via low-power ITX platforms. The upcoming Intel Centrino Atom platform with the Atom-Diamondville CPU peaks at around 4W TDP so they’re even easier to power.
The bottom line is that this is a nice little power supply for small embedded solutions but you’ll want to stick with the bigger 80 Plus closed-frame models like the Sparkle SPI220LE 220W or the SPI270LE 270W if you’re building a mainstream PC. Note that the SPI models are 1U power supplies so you’ll either need a very custom case or one that uses 1.75″ thin power supplies.
March 24th, 2008
Fixing the unfairness of TCP congestion control
Bob Briscoe (Chief researcher at the BT Network Research Centre) is on a mission to tackle one of the biggest problems facing the Internet. He wants the world to know that TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) congestion control is fundamentally broken and he has a proposal for the IETF to fix the root cause of the problem.
The Internet faced its first congestion crisis in 1986 when too much network traffic caused a series of Internet meltdowns when everything slowed to a crawl. Today’s problem is more subtle and lesser known since the network still appears to be working correctly and fairly. But underneath that facade and illusion of fairness, a very small percentage of users hog most of the Internet’s capacity suffocating all other users and applications.
Solving the first Internet meltdown crisis
In October of 1986, the Internet began to experience a serious of “congestion collapses”. So many computers were piling their traffic on to the network at the same time that the network came to a grinding halt and no one got any meaningful throughput. By mid 1987, computer scientist Van Jacobson who is one of the prime contributors to the TCP/IP stack created a client-side patch for TCP that saved the day. Every computer on the Internet - roughly 30,000 in those days - was quickly patched by their system administrators.
Jacobson’s TCP stack patch worked by causing a computer to cut the flow rate of its TCP stream in half as soon as it detects any packet loss. Packets are lost whenever the routers relaying them receive more packets than they can forward and the router begins to randomly drop packets across the board. But whenever a computer sees an acknowledgement that its packet arrived successfully, it quickly and continually increases its flow rate with every acknowledgement until it experiences another packet drop at which time it cuts its throughput in half again. This became known as the AIMD (Additive Increase Multiplicative Decrease) algorithm where the sending computer is constantly probing for the maximum allowable bandwidth by repeatedly increasing throughput until it crosses a line and gets knocked down.
Jacobson’s AIMD algorithm also allowed a new TCP stream to open up and quickly rise to equilibrium where it attains the same flow rate as all other TCP streams. Conversely when a TCP stream ended transmission, the extra bandwidth freed up would be evenly distributed amongst the remaining streams. Van Jacobson’s patch was so successful that it became a part of the TCP standards and it hasn’t fundamentally changed for over 20 years and according to Bob Briscoe, Jacobson’s algorithm is the “fifth most cited academic paper in all of computer science”.
Under Jacobson’s algorithm which sought out to balance the flow rate (throughput) of each TCP stream, the system was more or less fair to everyone who wanted to use the network so long as everyone used an equal number of TCP streams. Since people typically used one TCP stream at a time and people had limited usage on those time-sharing computers in the 1980s, Jacobson’s algorithm was adequate for the problems of that era. While it was possible for someone to open two FTP downloads or uploads at a time and get double the total throughput than anyone else, this wasn’t a big problem when applications and operating systems were mostly limited to text and computers were limited to academic and large corporate institutions. But as time went on and as the number of applications and users grew, it was only a matter of time before the fairness of the system would be exploited.
March 20th, 2008
HDMI survival guide for home theater
There’s a lot of money to be made in the HDMI cabling and switch aftermarket and unfortunately that means a lot of consumers are getting tricked in to paying outrageous prices. I’ve spent quite a bit of time helping my friends set up their home theaters recently and I thought I’d share that knowledge with my readers. If you’re tired of paying high hundreds of dollars for HDMI switches and HDMI cables, read on.
What is HDMI?
HDMI is a high speed digital interface for the transmission of high quality digital audio and digital video. So if you plug your DVD player, your PlayStation 3, your satellite or cable TV box, or even your computer up to a modern HDTV with a single HDMI cable, then the sound and picture will all work. The HDMI plug only has a single small connector so it’s nice and simple. Before HDMI, you had to hook up three separate connectors for just the video and two additional RCA plugs for stereo sound. Instead of the two RCA plugs, you could also use an S/PDIF optical cable for the sound but it still adds a lot of cable complexity and clutter compared to a single HDMI cable.
Why are there different HDMI types?
There are 4 basic versions of HDMI. You have 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3 and you can get a quick summary of the capability of each version here. The easy answer is the higher the number, the better. If you’re shopping now, try to stick with the HDMI 1.3 devices if you can.
Do I need monster HDMI cables?
No, HDMI monster cables are simply a monster rip-off. If a cable is HDMI certified, it will by definition offer you a perfect digital signal. Despite the fact that the electrical signals traversing an HDMI cable degrade as a cable gets longer, it will still offer perfect digital transmission so long as the signal loss or distortion is within a certain tolerance. Analog cables might benefit from extra thickness and insulation because there’s not much you can do to fix analog signal loss or distortion other than to amplify and maybe filter the signal a little to mitigate the bad side effects. But when it comes to digital technology, the signal is either all there or it isn’t. There is zero measurable difference in the digital signal quality between the $6 HDMI cable and the $60 monster HDMI cable.
Where do I buy cheap HDMI cables?
There are lots of online vendors that can be found via a quick Google search of “HDMI 1.3 cable”. These cables suppliers have always been reliable in my experience and they’re many times cheaper than the local retailer. Here’s a few examples I compiled.
- 3 foot HDMI 1.3a cable $5
- 15 foot HDMI 1.3a CL2 rated cable $24
- 25 foot HDMI 1.3a CL2 rated cable $42
- 30 foot HDMI 1.3a cable $64 (bought for friend’s project)
- 60 meter (197 feet) HDMI 1.3a CAT5e extender kit $199
<Next page - Can I split or switch multiple input/output HDMI sources?>
March 19th, 2008
The cheapest way to do VoIP is still analog
What happens when you want to just want a bunch of phones in your business, hotel, or organization and you don’t need a bunch of fancy and complicated features on the phone? It’s simple, just get a bunch of cheap analog phones. But how do you build a phone system to support a bunch of analog phones? It’s simple, just get a PBX (Private Branch Exchange) with a few FXS interfaces to plug in the phones. Just to rehash what an FXO and FXS phone port is and what the differences are, here’s a text representation how these devices are connected:
- Phone (FXO) - (FXS) Channel bank (FXO) - (FXS) Telco
- Phone (FXO) - (FXS) Telco
But this is where the tricky part comes in since your typical IP PBX which is essentially a computer doesn’t have any FXS interfaces so that’s where channel banks come in. A channel bank traditionally converts a T1 PRI interface in to 24 separate channels for 24 phone lines. The problem with traditional channel bank is not that they’re all that expensive, but the fact that they require a T1 PRI interface on the PBX for every 24 phone lines which are very expensive and cumbersome.
To get around this problem of having to use expensive T1 cards that are tied to a single server, Xorcom shuns T1 cards and uses good old USB 2.0 for its interface to the PC. Pictured below are some Astribank products with FXO or FXS ports along with the option for PRI ports. You just plug in your TBX to one of the Astribanks via one of the abundant USB 2.0 ports and you’re done. Simply plug it in to a USB 2.0 switch and two cheap open-source PBX appliances and you can instantly flip between the two servers in case one of them goes down for whatever reason. Any problems with one PBX server and you simply need to flip the USB switch and the other PBX is instantly lit up with all of its FXO and FXS ports. Trying to swap a PCI card with a T1 interface is far more difficult.
Pictured above is the front view of three Xorcom Astribank models ranging from 8 to 32 ports with any mixture of FXO and FXS ports. Pictured below is the back of the units showing the power and USB port in the back. The larger models also have 50 pin breakout ports so you can use your existing breakout box if you chose to do it that way.
The next two photos show all-in-one appliances designed to run Asterisk or Asterisk distributions from popular vendors like Trixbox or some other Asterisk derivative.
March 19th, 2008
Fraunhofer IIS shows audio technology at VON.x 2008
In the world where chip technology improves exponentially, acoustic engineering isn’t so simple and it presents a huge hurdle to overcome to the world of telephony and video conferencing. Fraunhofer IIS (inventors of MPEG-1 Layer 3 AKA MP3) seeks to tackle this challenge and showed off some of its research and upcoming products at VON.x 2008.
The first demonstration given to me was echo cancellation technology that prevents sound coming out of a speaker from reentering the microphone. This is one of the most annoying things about using PC telephony like Skype since Skype lacks good echo cancellation technology[update 3/20/2008 - Recent versions of Skype now have very good echo cancellation on Windows, Mac, and Linux. I still experienced some problems because the clients on the other end were using older versions of Skype.] When you connect to someone using a speaker and microphone, you can often hear yourself talking a split second after you speak and it’s incredibly annoying. With Fraunhofer’s echo cancellation technology, that problem virtually disappeared.
Now I’m fully aware that Skype is a free application but that hasn’t stopped open source solutions like Asterisk from offering licensed technology where a user for example pays $10 for the G.729 codec. I’d gladly pay a little money for some good echo cancellation software.
The other cool demonstration was the discrete multichannel sound separation technology. Normally when you’re in a room with multiple microphones being mixed in to a single sound channel and transmitted over a single audio channel, the sound is blurred. But when the sound from each microphone and each person is sent in its own channel and played back from its own speakers, you can clearly hear each person speaking at the same time. The downside of course is that each audio channel uses a separate 64 Kbps steam but that may not be a problem since it’s dwarfed by the video stream.
If you can’t spare the bandwidth and you only want to use a single 64 Kbps audio stream, Fraunhofer has another technology that can separate each person on to its own channel by marking the streams with few identifiers. Once that’s done, each person can be moved from one sector to the other in a graphical interface shown below such that their sounds come out from the corresponding speakers. While it wasn’t as pure as the discrete channel solution, it sounded almost as good because each person’s voice had its own dedicated speaker. Just the act of using a physically different speaker cone per voice seems to have a huge impact on quality.
While this technology demo used 5 speakers, there’s no reason it can’t be made to work with the more typical stereo speaker set up. I’d love to see audio conferencing bridges incorporate this technology such that multiple sound sources are marked for separate speakers so that they can be played back from separate speakers.
March 16th, 2008
Japan’s ISPs agree to ban P2P pirates
Four of Japan’s largest Internet provider organizations have come to an agreement with copyright holders on how to tackle the illegal file trading on P2P (Peer to Peer) networks. Comprised of about 1000 major and smaller Japanese Internet providers, the four organizations agreed to target flagrant copyright violators by first warning them and then banning them if their behavior doesn’t change.
According to the Daily Yomiuri Online, the Internet providers two years ago attempted to disconnect users anytime they detected the use of Winny (a popular Japanese P2P application) or any other file-sharing software. But that ran afoul of the Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications because of concerns of privacy and the providers abandoned that practice. This time the Internet providers seem to have learned from the past and they’re going to be much more targeted by going after the most obvious transgressors of illegal file trading.
When the copyright owners see a list of IP (Internet Protocol) addresses downloading their copyrighted content, they’ll send that list of violators to the ISP (Internet Service Provider) and the ISP will warn and then ban the copyright infringers if necessary. This method doesn’t involve any of that politically dreaded DPI (Deep Packet Inspection) since the copyright owner merely needs to look for their own content on the popular file trading sites and ask for a list of peers by merely participating in the file trade. Not only does this method avoid privacy concerns, it also happens to be the most practical if not the only way of attacking the problem since many file trading applications are already completely encrypted against packet snooping.
Update 5:40AM - Just to make myself extra clear since many people refuse to believe that we are not talking about deep packet inspection here. P2P in Japan like the latest “Perfect Dark” application (successor to Winny and Share) is already fully encrypted at both the protocol and data level. That’s encryption is completely bypassed since the content owners merely need to download the Winny, Share, and Perfect Dark and look for their own content that’s being pirated. Then all they need to do is connect to it as if they were a user and then download the content to see if it is indeed their content. Then they already have a list of IP addresses that participated in that file exchange. There’s no decryption, key cracking, or deep packet inspection going on here.
Japan is considered one of the most connected broadband nations on the planet with widespread 100 Mbps broadband service. Many people in this country believe that by simply offering more capacity, there would be no need to manage the network since congestion problems would be gone. But Japan teaches us that no matter how much capacity you throw at the problem, congestion will always be a problem and the vast majority of it will be caused by P2P traffic.
At the iGrowthGlobal Panel on Network Management on Capitol Hill (my recap here), I met Haruka Saito who is Counselor for Telecom Policy from the Embassy of Japan. Mr. Saito was my fellow panelist and he shared the following data with the congressional and FCC staffers in the audience. He presented the following data from the Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications which had been studying the issue of Net Neutrality in Japan for more than a year.
[Updated 3:15PM - I had incorrectly stated that 1% consumes 63% of all traffic because I read the charts wrong. The corrected text is in bold below.] As you can see, the utilization levels especially for uploads are dangerously high and that P2P traffic absolutely dominates both upload and downloads by a very large margin. Winny, WinMX, and Share (a successor of Winny) dominates the P2P usage. From this data, the P2P users that make up 10% of all Internet users in Japan hog ~75% of bandwidth resources and 1% of all Internet users in Japan consume 63% of that 75% share. That means just 1% of users consume 47% of all the Internet traffic in Japan. It’s no wonder the ISPs in Japan want a solution that cuts off the most egregious illegal file traders who also happen to be the biggest bandwidth hogs.
March 14th, 2008
AMD Shanghai won’t get HyperTransport 3
HyperTransport 3 which was once slated for AMD’s Barcelona server processors seem to be delayed again on Shanghai until some time in 2009 when it finally arrives for the “Montreal” quad- and octal-core CPUs. According to page 21 of Mario Rivas’ slides, the roadmap clearly indicates AMD’s first 45nm processor Shanghai won’t get the newer inter-processor interconnect and it will instead use the older HyperTransport 1 interconnects.
AMD’s desktop variant of the Barcelona processor called “Phenom” already has HyperTransport 3 when you use motherboards with AMD’s 770 and 790 chipset and the AM2+ socket. But ironically, the multi-socket servers which really need the higher interconnect transport speeds won’t get HypertTranport 3 for another two generations of server processors.
March 11th, 2008
Building the 200 inch 1080p HDTV
Yesterday I helped my friend build his 200 inch 1080p HDTV for his entertainment room and it was a beast of a task. But when it was all said and done, I think he was quite happy. Pictured above and below is me standing in front of the display. [See gallery for larger images.]
In the photo above, you can see how I’m dwarfed by the characters on the screen by the life-like images from the movie “300″ (HD DVD format).
Using the $2700 street price Panasonic PT-AE2000U 1920×1080 projector, we worked hard to mount it on to the ceiling. Pictured above is the projector with the mount installed on the bottom. [Update 3/14/2008 - Note that the special paint used for the reflective wall and the undercoating used cost around 300 Euros. I would imagine that the prices in the US are a little cheaper though. I should also point out that the universal projector mount costs around $150.]
Pictured above is our handy work in mounting the thing. It wasn’t easy but we got it done. Drilling through that solid concrete material destroyed 2 drill bits and it wasn’t easy until we got higher quality drill bits and a powerful drill.
This is the front of the projector hanging upside down from the ceiling. You can use software control to flip the image upside down so it’s right side up.
On top of the projector (or below in this case) are two optical lens shift dials that allow you to optically shift left/right 40% and up/down 100% without any keystoning effects or resorting to ugly digital keystone adjustments.
Here’s the back of the unit with just the power cord and HDMI 1.3 cable plugged in. We purchased a good 30 foot long HDMI 1.3 cable off a Google search for $50 and it works quite wonderfully. Remember, digital is digital is digital so long as it works. Too many people spend $150 on even shorter cables and it’s a big scam.
March 10th, 2008
Early photos of AMD Shanghai CPU
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| Credit: Fuad Abazovic, Fudzilla |
Photos of CPU-Z highlighting AMD’s 45nm Shanghai quad-core processor appeared on Fudzilla last week. It confirms that AMD’s latest processor will have a total of 2 megabytes L2 cache (512 KB per core), and 6 megabytes of shared L3 cache.
By contrast, AMD’s 65-nm Barcelona-class processors (Phenom and Opteron quad-core) only have 2 megabytes of shared L3 cache. The L2 and L3 caches will mostly be exclusive which means they will for the most part not share any content effectively making the cache size larger.
Shanghai’s core voltage of 1.15 V is equivalent to the low-voltage edition of AMD’s current 65nm quad-core processor Barcelona though it’s unclear if this particular Shanghai was operating at normal or low voltage. According to Fuad Abazovic of Fudzilla, Shanghai is expected to operate above the 3 GHz mark though the CPU-Z photo has the clock speed left out. We also need to put this in the context of Barcelona having a targeted clock speed of 2.8 GHz according to papers presented at ISSCC 2007 though actual production speeds have yet to exceed 2.3 GHz.
One other interesting note is that AMD’s Montreal 8-core processor due out after Shanghai will resort to MCM (Multi Chip Module). Montreal will be two Shanghai cores glued on to a single processor package. That means AMD will be adopting the same strategy Intel has been using on its 65nm and first-generation 45nm processors where you take two smaller cores and “glue” them on to a CPU package to have more cores per processor. Ironically, Intel will be going the opposite direction starting with Intel Nehalem. Not only will the initial Nehalem-EP 8 MB L3 cache quad-core processor be single-die, but even the much larger Nehalem-EX 8-core processor with 24 MB L3 cache will be single-die. So in 2009, watch for both companies to reverse their marketing literature touting or disparaging MCM “glue” technology.
March 7th, 2008
Asus’ 8.9″ Eee draws crowds at CeBIT
Here in CeBIT 2008, crowds descended on Hannover Germany to see the latest technologies. Germany is certainly a lovely country but there’s nothing lovable about the 5.60 Euro per gallon gas prices.
CeBIT is certainly one of the more unique conventions I’ve been to since everything is spread out over a square kilometer and it’s like going to 10 mini conventions. While you get some outdoor air between the halls, don’t expect any fresh air with all the smokers there. The temperature delta certainly makes proper attire a challenge because it’s too warm inside and freezing outside.
Asus had a massive presence in building 26 which is one of the more popular spots at CeBIT and they managed to draw crowds wanting to get a closer look at the new and improved 8.9″ Asus Eee PC. The new 8.9″ Asus Eee comes with more SSD flash storage, a bigger LCD screen with 1024×600 resolution, a better quality webcam. The same Pentium M 900 MHz CPU is the same as the original Eee. [See gallery for a close-up view.]
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The Windows XP model comes with 8 GBs of SSD flash memory when the Linux model comes with 12 GB of SSD flash memory. So far we only know that the price will be 399 Euros (which typically means it will be fewer in dollars for the US market), but we don’t know if there will be a price difference between the Linux and Windows XP model. It is possible that the price of the flash memory offsets the licensing costs of Windows XP.While holding the lightweight Eee with one hand, I tested the quality of the Mic and the Webcam and confirmed that the quality if fairly good. The Webcam is definitely much better quality than the old Eee. The Eee also comes with a wired 10/100 Ethernet port as well as 802.11g. The one down side to the Eee is that it doesn’t have a DVI output and instead has a DB-15 VGA port.
Here’s a comparison of the older 7″ Asus Eee versus the 8.9″ Eee. As you can see, the screen is much bigger and the color and contrast appears to be much better. The speakers had to be moved to the bottom of the laptop because the bigger screen pushed them off the lid. You can also see that the track pad is also larger.
I wouldn’t doubt if people buy the 12 GB Linux version and use NLite to install a trimmed down version of XP though having Linux on this device is extremely useful if you’re going to use it as a security auditing tool. The 8 GBs of SSD is more than enough to hold the OS and key applications and a $60 16 GB SDHC card is more than sufficient to hold plenty of movies and data. With the larger screen and nicer webcam and adequate microphone, it becomes a great Skype video conferencing solution. The bottom line is that the Asus Eee is very pleasing in the hands and it runs Windows XP very quickly if you keep bloatware/crapware off of it.
March 5th, 2008
AT&T’s degrading service and my landlord’s ban on Comcast
With all the negative attention headed towards Comcast lately, AT&T’s problems seem to be slipping below the radar. Unfortunately for me, those problems are first hand for me as I’m personally suffering degradations in speed. As if getting 1200 Kbps downstream on a so-called 1500 Kbps service and all those outage problems (example here and here) weren’t bad enough, my AT&T DSL service has declined. I suppose I could count myself lucky compared to my Mom’s neighbor who only got 320 Kbps service after AT&T unilaterally and without permission “upgraded” his bill to the 1500 Mbps service without upgrading his performance. Seem my DSLReports.com speed tests below.
The results above were performed at the nearest locations to my home and they were performed on idle servers with barely anyone using them. That pretty much confirms the problem is on AT&T’s end and possibly on the last mile. My Mother’s so-called 768 Kbps service only delivered about 330 Kbps but after the AT&T fixed some wiring problems outside the house, the performance went up to about 600 Kbps. I’ll have to call AT&T and see if they can do anything about my problems when I get back home.
It’s gotten so bad with my service that I’m actually starting to yearn for some of those “evil” TCP resets from Comcast to grace my router. Even more frustrating is that Comcast might actually be offering DOCSIS 3.0 with 15 Mbps downstream and 2 Mbps upstream in my area, but I live in one of these draconian housing complexes that force us to pay for bundled inferior analog cable service even though I don’t use it. The FCC has ruled against these types of exclusive contracts but I don’t think that can overturn my current situation. I think I’m finally motivated enough that I want to start a petition with the neighbors to demand the right to use Comcast. I’ll definitely have to bring this up the next time I go to Washington DC before Congress and the FCC.
Some people have told me that I should have looked at the contract before I moved in but it really isn’t that simple. There are about a thousand homes in the same multi dwelling unit and we don’t have much of a choice on where we live when an old and small home in Silicon Valley is $650,000. I do find it ironic that I’m now begging and fighting for the right to get Comcast service while others are fighting to kill Comcast.
This isn’t to say that Comcast is always good and AT&T is always bad although I’ve always gotten much better service from Comcast when I actually had a choice between the two. But it is so critical that we have competition between the two so that they have to fight for my business. The way it stands now, AT&T pretty much knows that I have no other game in my area and they have zero incentive to deploy U-Verse in my neighborhood let alone fiber-to-the-node like Verizon’s FiOS service.
What’s even more frustrating is that this isn’t a rural area problem since I’m in the heart of Silicon Valley with about 4000 homes jammed tight in a two block by two block neighborhood. It would be a Verizon FiOS installer’s dream deployment with homes packed so tightly together. With my landlord out of the way, I’d have DOCSIS 3.0 15 Mbps service to choose from and AT&T would prioritize jumping in here with U-Verse service. These are the real problems facing consumers today and not whether a few bandwidth hogs get throttled or not and I hope others will join me in a worthwhile cause.
March 3rd, 2008
A geek’s trip to Capitol Hill on Network Management
I appeared before congressional and government staffers on Capitol Hill for a panel on Network Management sponsored by iGrowthGlobal. This was my first time in Washington DC and while it was a little cold for my Californian bones, it was a beautiful city and seeing the capitol of the nation was certainly a worthwhile experience. One thing that struck me was how large and spread-out the Capitol was with so many Government buildings several miles apart.
The panel was moderated by Scott Wallsten, VP for Research and Senior Fellow of iGrowthGlobal. I met Mr. Wallsten at the Net Neutrality summit held at University of San Francisco last month where the two of us presented on separate panels. The rest of the panelists for this event were:
- Melvin Ammori, General Counsel, Free Press
- David Burstein, Editor, DSLPrime
- George Ou, Editor at Large, ZDNet
- Haruka Saito, Counselor for Telecom, Embassy of Japan
- Christopher S. Yoo, Professor of Law and Communications, University of Pennsylvania
Christopher Yoo -
After a brief introduction by Scott Wallsten who explained that the order of the presentations will be reverse alphabetical order, Christopher S. Yoo kicked off his presentation. Professor Yoo explained that networks, like roads, aren’t built for everyone to use them at the same time. Yoo gave the example that if a person wants to know how fast he can travel on a freeway, he wouldn’t know until he got there because we can’t predict exactly how many other people will be on the road at the same time. Yoo explained the difficulty in projecting network capacity and that we can’t always be right when determining whether more capacity or network management was the answer. Sometimes more capacity is the answer, sometimes network management is the answer and we shouldn’t lock ourselves in to one solution or the other.
Haruka Saito -
Next up was Mr. Haruka Saito from the Embassy of Japan. Mr. Saito explained that Japan had been studying and debating the issue of Network Neutrality in Japan for about a year and a half and he offered a lot of hard data gathered in Japan. Japan is one of if not the most connected nation in the world when it comes to broadband deployment with 100 Mbps fiber deployments and despite this abundance of capacity, even I was shocked that they were running in to congestion problems.
When the traffic chart was broken down in to color-coded regions showing application usage, P2P easily ate the lion’s share of resources and dwarfed everything else on the chart. Mr. Saito went on to explain that 1% of the users primarily through P2P consumed around 50% of the total capacity and this pretty much mirrors every other study I’ve seen elsewhere in the world regardless of capacity. The debate in Japan was who was going to pay for this excessive usage and whether the heaviest users should start paying more money.
George Ou -
Next up was me and I gave a presentation based on my Comcast versus Vuze and Comcast before the FCC article. After Mr. Saito’s presentation, it certainly made my job a lot easier showing my charts on how BitTorrent and P2P were effectively the primary bandwidth hogs. I explained that the vast majority of all web applications like Web surfing, YouTube, Apple iTunes video downloads, Xbox Live Marketplace video downloads, and other applications like email almost never use any upstream capacity. Even though there are applications like Skype High Quality Video Conferencing which can fully saturate the upstream pipe, its duration is relatively short which significantly lowers its average load on the network.
I then explained that Vuze using the P2P model shifts nearly all of its server, storage, and bandwidth costs to its customer’s computer and the broadband providers while all other video distribution services pay for their own distribution costs. Then I explained that Cable networks and Wireless networks are shared-medium networks that are constrained in capacity and that they weren’t built nor sold to be content servers for the rest of the Internet. Wireless networks are even more scarce in terms of capacity because of the scarcity of spectrum and many of the smaller ISPs would be put out of business if the Government made rules banning P2P throttling or P2P blocking. Without those smaller wireless ISPs that cover the rural areas that the larger companies don’t want to cover, those Americans living in rural America would be cut off from the Internet and possibly even their phone service. We have plenty of choices on getting content but few choices on broadband carriers and the Government must keep this in mind when making network management policies.
David Burstein -
David Burstein went up next to give his presentation though he didn’t actually have a presentation ready so he improvised the presentation. After indirectly but clearly referring to Professor Yoo as an “idiot”, Burstein told the audience that if only Comcast would upgrade to DOCSIS 3.0, then there wouldn’t be any need to manage the network. That seemed to fly in the face of the hard network traffic data that Mr. Saito presented indicating that even a 100 Mbps per home dedicated fiber network would have congestion problems due primarily to P2P traffic. Burstein continued to insist that a measly DOCSIS 3.0 network (which is 120 Mbps shared between a few hundred users) would somehow be immune to congestion problems.
Even stranger was Burstein’s testimony that it would only cost Comcast 10 cents per user per month to upgrade everyone to DOCSIS 3.0. When pressed where he got such a number, Burstein Then he admitted it was only a guess but insisted that until someone proves him wrong, then everyone should laugh in the faces of his doubters. I didn’t bother challenging Burstein on the spot since there were so many other things I wanted to say, but I will respond to him here.
If we take Burstein’s estimate at face value, then we would have to believe that a DOCSIS 3.0 CMTS (Cable Modem Termination System) along with a ~250 DOCSIS 3.0 cable modems could be had for a cheap total of $50 for the entire neighborhood per month. Now bear in mind that the typical DOCSIS 2.0 modem costs about $60 and a CMTS is about the size of a 40U rack and falls under the category of very specialized networking gear. A more common Cisco switch half the size would easily cost a quarter million dollars so it wouldn’t be surprising if a CMTS costs upwards of half a million dollars. With 500 users on a CMTS loop (Cable TV with typically half of them subscribing to cable broadband), the costs will at least be $1000 per user for just the CMTS and we haven’t even begun to look at the costs of upgrading the surrounding infrastructure to support the higher capacities and the cable modems.
[Update 3/4/2008 - Dave Burstein has asked me to issue a correction that he stated it was 10 cents per user PER MONTH. I do apologize for my error, but it doesn’t really change the fact that the correct number from Burstein has little to do with reality. At 10 cents per user per month, it would take 10,000 months or 833 years to break even on a minimal $1000/user investment.]
Marvin Ammori -
Marvin Ammori from the Free Press went up and also improvised a presentation. He kicked it off with a cheap shot saying how he was glad that Professor Yoo and I didn’t bring a busload of chair warmers and attempted to paint the two of us as industry shills. Ammori then went on to build a straw man argument that he thought my position was that YouTube didn’t pay their fair share of the Internet. Ammori obviously never saw my article from last year where I ripped Ed Whitacre’s statements that Google didn’t pay their fair share on Internet connectivity. After Ammori finished his presentation, I let my displeasure be known that I spoke as a proud American citizen who was in Washington DC for the first time with no one paying me to speak.
One other interesting tidbit was the fact that Mr. Ammori who admittedly never heard of the word “BitTorrent” up until a few months ago claimed that BitTorrent will only do 4 upstream sessions. Since Ammori told us that he heard it from Professor Edward Felton [waiting for Ammori’s clarification on who he heard it from], somehow that overturns my testimony that BitTorrent was a bandwidth hog that opened 10s of upstream sessions. The reality was that certain BitTorrent clients will default to 4 upstream sessions for each torrent, but multiple torrents meant multiples of 4. The other interesting claim that Ammori made was that BitTorrent was intelligent and kind enough to back off when your neighbor was trying to use something like a web or email application. Where exactly Ammori got this information wasn’t clear, but I’d like the Free Press to show me some documentation for a protocol that no one has ever heard before.
[UPDATE 3/4/2008 - Ammori emailed me that he didn’t say it was from Ed Felton despite the fact that he mentioned Ed Felton’s name in the closest proximity to as far as my memory is concerned. Ammori writes in his email that he had named David Reed, David Clark, and Ed Felton as the three expert witnesses he cited, but has so far refused to clarify which one told him that BitTorrent maxes out at 4 upstream sessions. Strangely, Ammori seemed a lot more confident of his source when testifying before the government to bolster his claims and discredit mine but now he refuses to clarify his source when he is shown to be wrong. At this point I don’t know if Ammori was given the wrong information or didn’t understand what he was told, but either way he gave bad testimony.
Instead of offering clarification, he took a few more shots at me the same way that he attacked Richard Bennett implying that we’re somehow not qualified and that we’re “brought in” by Comcast which has no truth. Then just as he did at the panel last Friday, he insists that his sources are better even though none of his sources have disputed anything I or Richard Bennett has said. Richard Bennett is one of the pioneers of the Internet and he’s written some very informative and articulate articles on this matter and he’s also faced off with Ed Felton in podcasts. You can hear the podcast for yourself but I think you’ll find that Richard Bennett held his own against Ed Felton and Richard has far more expertise on this particular subject matter.
During his presentation, Ammori also tried to discredit the data I showed where P2P seeding was pretty much the only application that hogged the upstream. In the context of the hard data presented by Mr. Saito from the Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications showing that P2P was undoubtedly the upstream and downstream bandwidth hog, it was shocking that Ammori would try to continue disputing that fact. Ammori basically argued that we can’t really know if the charts I used (copy here) are legitimate or not and he made a habit of trying to discredit me with no factual data to counter. It will be interesting to see if he’s willing to explain exactly which expert he was citing.]
During the informal panel debate after everyone had spoke, I brought up the fact that Comcast gives you web space to post content which operates 10 times faster than any BitTorrent seed. This apparently wasn’t good enough for Mr. Ammori and he felt that this was somehow impinging on his right to free speech since he couldn’t serve out high-definition video content from his own home. Never mind the fact that we’re in a unique time in history where for the first time user generated content on YouTube can have a huge impact on the election. Anyone can put up a political ad on YouTube and get millions of people to watch it if the video was clever enough, but the fact that Ammori couldn’t serve it in High Definition from his own home was somehow a violation of his first amendment. But the fact of the matter is that you can serve HD video from your own home if you pay for a commercial-grade Internet connection that allows you to host servers. What you don’t have the right to do is buy a cheaper residential-grade Internet connection, hog the scarce resources by serving content to the whole world and violate the terms of service.
So to sum it up, it was knee deep in politics experience but it was all worthwhile. I felt honored that I had contributed something to my Government and my Nation.
[Update 3/4/2008 - Since this post is obviously being told from my viewpoint, I will be happy to link to any of the other speaker’s blogs rehashing their experience if they write anything regardless of whether I agree with them or not.]
March 2nd, 2008
Intel christens Silverthorne as “Atom”
Intel has officially announced its new branding for the “Silverthorne” processor and the “Menlow” platform. The Silverthorne processor will be called the “Intel Atom”. The Menlow platform will be called “Intel Centrino Atom”. The Intel Atom processor will be used in the Intel Centrino Atom platform. The new Atom logos are shown below.
Intel released technical details of the new Silverthorne processor last month at ISSCC 2008. This latest announcement gives Silverthorne and Menlow their official branding and their official logos. Intel also released high resolution die shots at the right hand side of their press release. A cut down rotated version of the die shot is shown below.
Here’s a summary of the new “Atom” processor:
- Equivalent on single-threaded performance to original Pentium M “Banias” processor. Faster if SSE3 instructions are used in the application or if multiple threads are involved.
- 0.6W TDP (Thermal Design Power) to 2.5W TDP
- Up to 1.8 GHz and DailyTech says sources inside Intel are saying that the 500 MHz version goes down to 0.6W TDP.
- Idle power consumption can drop as low as 0.01W to 0.1W
- Deep power down C6 state
- Optimized register-file and cache 6T bits cells
- CMOS mode on quad-pumped FSB IO
- Split IO power supply
- Single CPU core 2-issue in-order pipeline
- SMT (Symmetric Multithread) architecture
- 25mm^2 die size (2500 CPUs per 300mm diameter wafer)
- Can achieve 2GHz core frequencies at 1.0V
- Intel VT (Virtualization Technology)
- Intel 64 architecture (formerly EM64T and compatible with AMD64)
Intel’s press release also mentions the processor codenamed “Diamondville”. DailyTech reported some leaked information that Diamondville would be released in a single and dual-core version at 4W and 8W TDP. Diamondville will be soldered on to an Intel 945GSE chipset motherboard and judging from the photo, it looks to be a replacement for the D201GLY and D201GLY2 developing market platforms. The Intel D201GLY2 uses a lower power Celeron 220 (Core Solo architecture) with a TDP of 17W so Diamondville is a huge boost in energy efficiency. The current D201GLY and D201GLY2 also utilizes a third party SIS chipset which doesn’t support S3 sleep/suspend states while the Diamondville 945GSE platform will.
Given the fact that it’s highly unlikely (too expensive) that Intel would design a whole separate CPU for this type of a solution, it is very possible that Diamondville is simply a soldered-on-motherboard derivative of Silverthorne and the dual-core version is simply an MCM (Multi Chip Module) version of Silverthorne. AnandTech’s Anand Lal Shimpi seems to agree with this theory and goes on to explain that the slightly higher TDP with slightly lower 1.6 GHz clock is simply due to a higher voltage allowing for much higher yields. Since this is for the low-cost value market segment, that theory makes a lot of sense.
At present time Intel seems to be hinting that Diamondville will also carry the “Atom” branding but they’re vague on the specifics. What is certain is that the emerging market will enter in to a whole new level of energy efficiency and the appliance/embedded do-it-yourselfers like me are drooling over Diamondville’s power specifications.
February 28th, 2008
Microsoft’s free enterprise search is a must try
At the Heroes Happens {here} event in LA yesterday which saw the launch* of Windows Server 2008, one of the relatively hidden gems of the event in my opinion was Microsoft’s free** Search Server 2008 Express. It’s is a streamline install of Office SharePoint Server 2007 with almost all the enterprise search features that most users would want and is a must download for any Windows Server shop.
Even if you didn’t own Windows Server 2003, 2003 R2, or 2008, it would seem like a great way to build a very cheap enterprise search engine appliance with a minimal Windows Server 2003 or above license and a simple 1U server for less than $2000 which is a LOT less than a $30K starting price Google Search Engine appliance with a 500K document cap. Update 7:28PM - Wiredguy in the talkback pointed out that Google’s Mini search appliance starts at $3K, but that only indexes 50K documents and it doesn’t tie in to Active Directory as seamlessly and lacks Exchange support. If you’re a Windows shop with an IIS server sitting around with low CPU utilization which is quote common, adding Microsoft’s Search Server 2008 Express costs nothing.
So why would you want an enterprise search engine for your company or organization? Windows Vista (and XP users who add Windows Desktop Search or Google Desktop Search) know how useful it is to have relatively instant indexed search results for any document or email in their computer. But those benefits stop at the local computer because you don’t want every user crawling the network data resources redundantly since it would bring the whole network and server infrastructure to a halt.
An enterprise search engine gives you a centralized intranet website where users could go to a URL like search.mycompany.com and find any document in their entire corporate LAN (and to a lesser extent the WAN and some Internet sites due to bandwidth considerations). Google’s online search engine is great but it’s stopped dead in its tracks at the corporate firewall and there’s no way it can search your Exchange or Lotus Notes mail server or your file server documents. The enterprise search engine bridges an essential gap between desktop search and google.com. Documents or emails that would have been glossed over and forgotten about instantly pop up on the enterprise search server.
The search results are security-trimmed and active directory integrated so that the user will only see the documents that they have permissions to access. With an Intranet IIS web server set for seamless Active Directory authentication, the user merely goes to the search portal and they’re logged in automatically. The server can also be tuned to crawl the network at off-peak hours with full or incremental searches.
Microsoft’s Search Server Express comes preloaded with the following search connectors.
- File servers
- Web sites
- SharePoint websites
- Exchange Server public folders
- Lotus Notes
To make Search Server 2008 Express work, you’ll either need a free SQL Server 2005 Express database backend or Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and above. Using the free SQL Express will limit the server to 1 GB and 4 GB database size. Under most document sizes, a 4 GB index should allow you to index more files than the 500K document cap imposed by the $30K edition of the Google Search Engine appliance. Buying a SQL server license will still end up being far cheaper than buying the Google appliance. No matter what your opinion of Microsoft, I think this is one of those things that’s definitely worth a try. Enterprise search is finally affordable and it should become a fixture in any company’s server room or datacenter.
* This was also a 3-month post launch party for Visual Studio 2008 and 6-month pre-launch party for SQL Server 2008.
** People who already own a copy of Windows Server 2003, 2003 R2, or 2008.
February 26th, 2008
FCC hearings: Comcast versus Vuze
The FCC held its hearing on Comcast’s Network Management practices at Harvard University yesterday. Vuze executive Gilles BianRosa whose company filed one of the two FCC complaints against Comcast reportedly told the FCC yesterday that BitTorrent does not hog bandwidth. Since most Internet experts would dispute that claim, I generated the following hard data on the bandwidth consumption of various applications that run on the Internet.
Note: Richard Bennett who was an expert panelist at yesterday’s hearings informed me that BianRosa claimed that BitTorrent didn’t exceed the contracted limit. That however ignores the explicit “no server” clause in the terms of service and no broadband service was built to be fully saturated 24×7. This is why commercial grade T1 lines that offer less than half the speed of broadband connections costing 8 times less are $400 per month.
Bear in mind that the data below is in reference to upstream (upload) bandwidth consumption in kilobits per second since that is the focus of these FCC hearings. Also note that applications like web surfing hardly use the upstream at all since it’s primarily your clicks and URLs that are being transmitted to tell the web server where you want to go.
The following is a graph of the above chart
* Corporate VPN telecommuter worker using G.722 codec @ 64 Kbps payload and 33.8 Kbps packetization overhead
** Vonage or Lingo SIP-based VoIP service with G.726 codec @ 32 Kbps payload and 18.8 Kbps packetization overhead
*** I calculated that I Sent 29976 kilobytes of mail over the last 56 days averaging 0.04956 Kbps
It is interesting to note that before the advent of P2P applications, Broadband users were primarily downloaders and rarely did they ever upload. It is for this reason that Broadband networks were built asymmetrically and heavily favored the downstream. Servers in data centers with commercial-grade Internet connections served and transmitted content and consumers consumed that content by downloading them.
If you’re downloading video from a service like Apple iTunes, Microsoft Xbox Live Marketplace, Netflix, or YouTube, you’re only downloading and not uploading anything. Those services pay a lot of money for their own datacenters filled with servers, their own bandwidth, and/or they pay services like Akamai to cache and distribute their content over the entire Internet.
Vuze on the other hand uses a different business model where they don’t pay for their own bandwidth and they expect their users to contribute their upload bandwidth to make the service work using the BitTorrent protocol. Vuze basically gets free distribution because they enlist their own customers to be their servers and bandwidth providers using their own computers and broadband connections. So instead of paying for commercial distribution, Vuze offloads their bandwidth on to the broadband providers.
<Next page - Exacerbating the Cable and Wireless spectrum scarcity>
Disclosure: Many people have asked me for the source of the data so I will put out the following disclaimer. As I already indicated in the first paragraph of this article, I am the original source of those charts and graphs. I’ve written extensively on VoIP bandwidth consumption as the former Technical Director of TechRepublic. Before TechRepublic, I built and designed networks for a living. I worked on the routing, the switching, and the traffic engineering of Intranet and Internet based networks. The in-use bitrates I cited are detailed and include packetization overhead and they can be independently verified.
February 24th, 2008
Leaked Intel Nehalem performance projections over AMD Shanghai
It appears that the rumors about Intel’s next major microprocessor “Nehalem” being a huge juggernaut may be true according to leaked documents from Sun Microsystems (removed Sunday night). The slides appear to be inadvertently placed on Sun’s publicly accessible website and “jokerman” posted the link on Aceshardware (thanks to tip from ZDNet reader JumpingJack). The slides looks like the real thing meant for Intel’s partners and they’re probably well known in the server industry.
Reliable sources have reported in the past that Intel’s Nehalem processor will have three channels of DDR3 memory per CPU versus two channels of DDR2 memory per AMD Barcelona or upcoming Shanghai processor. That would mean that AMD’s massive memory bandwidth advantage will turn in to a large memory bandwidth. So what does this mean for Intel Nehalem’s performance? Take a look at the following charts I generated after carefully measuring the length of the performance bars on a pixel level.
Since Intel’s charts were normalized to an Intel E5160 dual-core processor on SPECint_rate_base2006 and SPECfp_rate_base2006, I had to start somewhere and make some guesses on the base performance. I used Intel’s highest published SPEC CPU integer and floating point score of 60.8 and 45.1 for the E5160 processor as of 2/23/2007. This is probably not the exact reference point that Intel used so the numbers might be off a little.
When I compared my extrapolated numbers to the published SPECint scores for all of the shipping products other than the E5160, I found that Integer performance was 2% to 7% too low and the average was 4%. When I compared with published SPECfp scores other than the E5160, I found that my extrapolated numbers were all 4% too high for all models except the Opteron 2220 extrapolation which was 12% too high. To adjust for this, I raised the SPECint estimates 4% and dropped the SPECfp estimates 5% and generated the following chart which is a closer match to the published scores.
I tend to believe that the second adjusted chart is more accurate. We’ll most likely know by the end of this year what the actual scores are, but I doubt they will be more than 5% to 10% off from these estimated projections.
So how can Intel pull off such a massive performance boost over their current reigning champion “Harpertown” X5482 processor? Consider the fact that Intel’s current generation 45nm Harpertown processors lead the benchmarks despite the memory bandwidth disadvantage because of a much faster execution engine and larger cache. Then we factor in the fact that Intel will implement SMT (dual threads per CPU core), improve the already-fast execution engine of Harpertown, and feed it with three channels of DDR3 memory per CPU instead of the old shared front side bus. AMD’s Shanghai on the other hand is essentially a die shrink, a cache size boost, and a clock speed boost. Taking all these things in to consideration would easily explain how Intel could widen the lead so far.
I would also note that Intel’s leaked slides compare these processors in pairs where the Opteron 2220 DC (Dual Core) faces off with the Intel E5160 DC processor and the 2222 faces the X5365. These two pairs represent a snapshot in time to when the products competed against each other. The last two pairings on top may be generous to AMD since Barcelona processors aren’t shipping yet because of the TLB bug whereas Intel launched the X5482 in November 2007. AMD’s Shanghai processor didn’t have first silicon until four months after Intel showed off their first silicon at spring IDF 2007 in September, but the difference is that Intel has showed the Nehalem running a real Operating System while AMD has not done the same for Shanghai.
Since it usually takes one year from first silicon to production parts, it’s a bit hard to believe that Shanghai will ship at the same time as Nehalem. But even if it does ship at the same time as Nehalem, the competition from Intel looks very daunting if these estimates are anywhere close to being accurate.
February 23rd, 2008
Why Satellite Internet service is so slow
I was reading in the news today about an experimental geosynchronous communications satellite being launched by Japan and I got to wondering about why Satellite Internet service has such horrendous latency and is so slow. So I drew up a little diagram above (click to see full resolution) and did some calculations on the distance traveled and how long it takes for light to take the four-way journey. That’s because you have to go up to the satellite, then back down to the service provider, then back up to the satellite, and finally back down to you. Seeing that circle represent the planet Earth gives you some perspective how far and high a geosynchronous orbit is.
Here are some interesting numbers I compiled and estimated
- 35,780 kilometer geosynchronous altitude
- 12,756.32 kilometer diameter of earth at the equator
- 12,715.43 kilometer diameter of earth at the poles
- 299792.458 km/s is the speed of light in a vacuum
- Just the speed of light delay is between 477 ms to 556 ms delay
- With equipment delay and congestion, we’re looking at 500 ms to 1000 ms delay for satellite Internet service.
- ~199862 km/s is the speed of light in glass
(assuming glass is 1.5x slower than in vacuum) - 39.6 ms theoretical ping from California to New York
- 80 ms is the realistic ping from California to New York
- 90.8 ms theoretical ping from California to Germany
- 180 ms is the realistic ping from California to Germany
- 100.8 ms theoretical ping from California to China
- 200 ms is the realistic ping from California to China
February 19th, 2008
One year till death of analog TV in USA
Analog TV will no longer be broadcast one year from today on February 19th 2009, are you ready for the conversion to digital TV? This may or may not affect you so here’s what you need to know to avoid losing TV reception!
The first question to answer is whether this government mandated change to over-the-air digital TV will affect you. If you have any older TV that depends on rabbit ears or external UHF/VHF antennas for analog TV reception, you will no longer get any TV reception a year from today. If you’re already using cable or satellite for TV reception, you have nothing to worry about. If you have a newer TV that supports the ATSC standard for either standard definition and/or high definition reception, then skip the coupon section below to the antenna section.
If you have an older TV that relies on analog TV signals, there is good news for you but you better act fast. The US government has a $40 coupon program that can either cover some or all of the cost of a converter box. You need to apply for it here and each household is entitled to two coupons but there are a finite number of coupons so you need to act before they run out. Once you’ve obtained the coupons in the mail, you can buy one of these certified converter boxes priced between $40 and $70. Update 7:15AM - There are a total of 33.5 million coupons available and as of right now for this update, roughly 3.3 million coupons have already been ordered. Last week the count was 2.9 million ordered.
You’re not home free yet since your existing rabbit ears on your TV set won’t work anymore. At the very least you’ll need an indoor passive antenna or a powered indoor antenna like this Philips amplified UHF/VHF antenna which sells for as little as $20 online or $48 at Circuit City. If you already have one of these antennas you can hook it up and give it a try as soon as you get the coupon and converter box and see if you can get all the digital TV channels you want.
Ideally, you need an outdoor UHF antenna which typically sell for $40 to $80 but the hard part is running the coax cable from the roof to the TV. You’ll typically need around 100 feet or more of RG-6 cabling to attach the outdoor antenna to your TV which costs around $20 online. If you already have a roof antenna and the cabling in place, you’re really in luck. AntennaWeb.org has some great information on choosing antennas and others pointed out that http://tvfool.com is great too. With a good antenna in place, it will allow you to receive free standard definition digital television over the air. You can even get high definition digital reception with any of the HDTVs sold in the last year for as little as $400.
February 19th, 2008
Cracking open a Toshiba HD-A30 HD DVD player
Updated 3:00AM - By now the news is out that the end of HD DVD might be near since Toshiba is considering its options that may include the possibility of stopped production on HD DVD products is confirmed dead. There are more than a million HD DVD owners, two exclusive HD DVD studios, and the adult movie industry who are now left holding the bag on an optical disk format with no future.
While it may be a sad day that the more affordable and fully-baked format lost, I know many friends who bought one of these sub-$150 players as a great 1080i or 1080p up-converting DVD player which happen to come with 7 HD DVD movies. A common consensus is that while Blu-ray may have “won” the format wars, a lot of people aren’t in the mood to jump over to the $300 Blu-ray set-top boxes that can’t be upgraded to Blu-ray profile 2.0 next year and they’ll be left with another obsolete high definition player.
Since I have the opportunity to review my friend’s Toshiba HD-A30 which is the pinnacle of HD DVD set-top boxes and might be the last production HD DVD drive ever, I thought I’d crack it open and take a look inside. See higher resolution gallery here.
This $150 1080p up-converting HD DVD player comes with 2 HD DVD movies (300 and Borne Identity) out of the box. It also has a coupon offer for an additional 5 free HD DVD movies. Given the fact that a discount HD DVD movie goes for $15 while the newer ones are $25, this seems to be worth at least $105 in HD DVD movies. The fact that existing DVDs look great on it when played on a 1080i or 1080p display seems to be a nice bonus.
Just what we need, another remote control to add to my collection of dozens of remote controls. This remote seems to be a simple and straight forward infrared remote with no backlighting and it works well enough. The menus in the HD DVD titles are fairly responsive and they work and overlay the main feature while the movie is playing.
Here’s the Toshiba HD-A30 unit sitting on a table and it’s fairly small and light weight. I measured idle power consumption to be around 22 watts and peak consumption around 28 watts during HD DVD playback which is a vast improvement over the first generation HD DVD players which consumed around 60 to 80 watts. Boot times still seem a bit disappointing at one minute long and there’s no low-power sleep state with instant wake but this seems to be a problem with the Blu-ray set-top boxes as well.
After popping off a few screws on the Toshiba HD-A30, the cover came off. You can also see what the back looks like. It comes with an RCA audio/video standard definition output, an HDMI HDCP output, an analog component HD output, and a S/PDIF digital audio output. The Ethernet port is standard on all HD DVD players for future upgradeability and interactive features.
Here’s a topside view of the Toshiba HD-A30 with the covers off. It’s a fairly simple device with an embedded motherboard with CPU and graphics processors on the right, an HD DVD ROM drive on the left, and an open frame power supply on the lower left. The very first Toshiba HD DVD drive used a Pentium 4 2.4 GHz processor while this one uses something that has much lower power consumption with passive cooling. Since the CPU heat sink was glued on, I didn’t want to rip it off and damage my friend’s unit so I didn’t see what the chip was. The memory, GPU, and CPU are all soldered directly on to the motherboard. In theory, this would make a decent $150 media extender that hooks up to any high-definition monitor if we could put in a hacked operating system. In theory it could be turned in to a computer but it lacks USB ports for hooking up input devices.
The Toshiba HD-A30 seems to be using a miniature 40-pin PATA IDE connector for the optical drive and a small 3.5″ floppy drive power connector. You can see the thin 40-pin ribbon taped down to the chassis.
This is a close-up of the motherboard.
George Ou is Technical Director of ZDNet. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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