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Television

DTV Is Coming and I'm Not Ready 376

Posted by kdawson from the set-top-box-advice dept.
(arg!)Styopa writes "As an early adopter, I have an HDTV-ready set without an integrated tuner. Analog television ends next February. My suspicion is that the $40 set-top box at Walmart has the minimum functionality to get by — i.e. simply a D-to-A converter and not an HDTV receiver. Three years ago I bought a UHF super-antenna (I'm about 40 mi. from the towers: borderline fringe reception) and searched for an HDTV converter to pull down HDTV OTA broadcasts. These were extremely hard to find — none at Radio Shack, Best Buy, Circuit City, or Ultimate Electronics (all the local bigboxen). I ended up buying a SIRT150 from eBay, which never found a signal, despite confirmed reception (on the set's normal tuner) of both VHF and UHF channels. So — any advice on what to look for in a set-top box? Is it going to cost me an arm and a leg, or is it not too far from the $40 Walmart special? Can I use Uncle Sam's $40 coupon towards it? I'd like very much to be able to find a physical store where I could go see the signal, before I decide if HD is worth the up-charge (if any) over simple DTV."
Graphics

Submission + - NVIDIA doubts ray tracing is the future of games (pcper.com)

Submitted by SizeWise
SizeWise writes: After Intel's prominent work in ray tracing in the both the desktop and mobile spaces, many gamers might be thinking that the move to ray tracing engines is inevitable. NVIDIA's Chief Scientist, Dr. David Kirk, seems to think otherwise as revealed in an interview on the topic of rasterization and ray tracing. Kirk counters many of Intel's claims of ray tracing's superiority such as the inherent benefit to polygon complexity while pointing out areas where ray tracing engines would falter like basic antialiasing. The interview rounds out discussion on mixing the two rendering technologies and whether NVIDIA hardware can efficiently handle ray tracing calculations as well.

Feed Privacy chief warns EU on terror laws (theregister.com)

From feed by registerfeed
Security over privacy 'becoming a mantra'

Europe's data protection chief has warned Portuguese ministers that fundamental rights to freedom are being abused in the name of security. Portugal takes over the rotating EU Presidency on 1st July.
Microsoft

Submission + - What Microsoft Could Learn from OSS and Linux (osweekly.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: An article on OSWeekly.com discusses a few things that Microsoft could learn from OSS and Linux. The article states, "As Microsoft continues to understand that open source does not mean they cannot generate a decent profit, I honestly wonder if they will eventually "get" that releasing MS Office code to the open source community is their only option. Since the whole threatening to sue thing will be met with the same fan base response, just like the RIAA, it is certainly not a wise decision. And if Microsoft thinks Open Office is a pain now, try suing people over it, then see how many people refuse to buy their products.
United States

Journal Journal: AT&T Co-operating with NSA 2

Journal by ozmanjusri
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFFF) has uncovered more documents detailing secret government surveillance of AT&T's Internet traffic.

Some of information was already publically available, but after negotiations with AT&T, EFF has found new documents describing a secret, secure room in AT&T's facilities that gave the National Security Agency (NSA) direct access to customers' emails and other Internet communications.

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Each new user of a new system uncovers a new class of bugs. -- Kernighan

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