Comment Re:Surprise surprise (Score 1) 199
Okay, look at the raspberry pie project. one of the drivers for that project and what makes it so cool is exactly that these parts are stopping becoming available to the general public.
Completely untrue. The entire electronics industry depends on availability of large quantities of parts and there are literally millions of small companies using them. Again, you seem to live in a world where all electronics is somehow restricted to 10 manufacturers. Its a fantasy land.
You cannot buy a BCM2835, fine that's broadcom, but can you as a consumer buy a Qualcomm chip, or a CSR bluetooth chip, even if you could (but I believe you can't) they will not release all the software needed to drive the hardware and reverse engineering it is something no-one has managed yet.
More nonsense. The fancy chips are needed only if you are doing something that requires both small size and complexity. All of their functions are merely a condensed version of what can be achieved with less integrated generic components.
Also, one does not need to implement any of the digital consumer protocols to exploit the analog hole. Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and any other future wireless protocol has no bearing on the matter, whatsoever.
The large corporations won't sell less than multiple thousands simply because it's not worth supporting the small producer.
Yes, that is why all of the electronic mail-order suppliers are long out of business
Some large corporations like TI might still sell their beagle boards which will help, but can you rely on that? It's getting harder with every generation.
No it is not getting harder. And yes, you can rely on it. Development boards are sold to all and sundry because there are millions of electronics engineers out there experimenting with components and all manufacturers are eager to give them toys in hopes that some of them devise some new consumer products which will result in the companies they work for ordering large volumes of the said parts. This is the fundamental method by which all sales of parts are conducted and it is not going away in any foreseeable future.
Please try and buy a raw camera module.
You buy a cheap camera and remove the CCD sensor from it. Bonus, you get optics to go along with it. Unless they start making explosive, tamper-proof cameras, you have a very large supply of sensors all around you. And that assumes that you are not using other methods such as an electro-mechanical scan or some such. Again, you forgot that your digitization device does not need to be pretty, small, portable or even 21st century technology. 1930s methods updated for modern components will do just fine, thank you.
Try and build your own PCB using parts with a ball pitch so fine that you need professional level reflow ovens to plonk the parts down(by the way modern parts are already at this stage and it's getting worse all the time too).
Err, you use pre-made PCBs that allow for mounting of SMT components on them and which have old-fashioned DIP pin layout at the bottom. And again, this only applies to specialized SMT chips. DIP packaged chips are and will remain widely available for a variety of reasons. So will discrete components.
So it's not about preventing people from doing it, it's just not worth the man hours of their engineers to put the mechanisms in place to do the purchase.
Huh? Even a few thousand of clients out of the 7 billion people on Earth is enough to get someone in China going, as amply evidenced on Alibaba.com.
We're not there yet thanks to PCs still being prevalent in the home but give it time. Now at the moment you always have the hole of a generic PC to do most of this, but as I was worried about in another post if the tablet market basically shuts down the home built PC at home then what?
There will always be a huge generic PC market. Otherwise you might as well shut down all scientific and manufacturing sectors, not to mention other business endeavours which depend on generic PCs. All that will happen is that "consumer" products will get dumber, to match their audience, but that was always inevitable anyways.
Again, your desperate attachment to "PC at home". WTF? Isn't there a whole world of applications and industries outside of "home", "consumer" crap? What's with this tunnel vision of yours?
If that doesn't happen then what about "trusted computing" what if that is successful and makes amateur PC building impossible?
TPM has no place in many industrial and business applications and as long as there are millions of factories and businesses that have no use for it or where TPM is a hindrance, there will always be general purpose computing devices without it available. But not at BestBuy and not at every idiot's "home".
That's not needed. All content is watermarked. In my scenario user generated content has a watermark embedded in it by the camcorder. Now a sophisticated watermark would include details about the license and your access rights would be monitored too, it may be possible to turn that watermark off for your content but I'm talking about the default setting that 99% of people will use being one that "protects them"
I covered this in another post upstream. Go read it. Per-user watermarks are a pipe dream. All it takes is 2 or 3 streams from different users and they are gone. Just like DRM they are fundamentally flawed. All they are going to do is to catch rank amateurs, but then again so does every other "contents protection" scheme. So expect more grandmas and single mothers of a teenager to end up in court over filming something with a TV in a background and putting on YouTube. Release groups will just laugh at it.
Show me someone who has built a home made camcorder without using items that you would find at best buy. The projects I have seen all have a reliance on commodity hardware or use vendor supplied test hardware (such as the beagle board) which do have parts of the system that you cannot touch and those are the parts that handle media codecs.
You gotta be kidding. Hardware-based codecs are only there to provide low-power, small size consumer devices. They are not neeeded to digitize contents. Raw sensor (even electro mechanical one with plain-old color filter that you change by hand to scan the movie three times) is all that is needed. General purpose CPUs do all the encoding. Of course anyone who depends on specialty hardware is going to get all the specialty hardware headaches! More specialized and convoluted the hardware, bigger the headache! That is why only an idiot (or someone with masochistic tendencies) would be despearte to "reuse" it.
Now people do write their own, but as i was trying to communicate in my last post even assuming you do that then surely you end up with a situation like happened to ogg that the only people to use it were the techie elite and therefore it never gained traction.
You seem to expect some kind of dystopia where all codecs are secret and where only secret, tamper-proof devices are capable of displaying media contents! As long as even one general-purpose CPU remains available (and if it dit not, you might as well stop all manufacturing of all mass production of all products globally, not to mention all scientific and technological progress), software codecs will allow for media playback! More restrictive the "consumer" hardware more demand there will be for the general-purpose equipment!
And who cares for "traction"? Free people will do what free people do, even if a billion or two sheeple are very comfortable in chains and under boot heel.
It soon becomes that the only people exchange in that file format are those pirating at which point it is trivial for law enforcement to find you because you suddenly stand out above the noise of other file transfers. Yes there are ways to hide this but then you're even further underground. and you end up like truecrypt where even possessing the software to hide your activities becomes grounds for search and seizure and by law having to reveal your keys.
That is merely a side effect of all societies sliding towards fascist-like state. A cycle in human history. You are confusing the cause and effect here. I frequently point out that the only way to make the "intellectual property" and DRM "work" is a totalitarian state and that anyone who promotes these ideas is in effect promoting totalitarian ideologies. But this goes far beyond a discussion of DRM.