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Technology Stocks : C-Cube -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: BillyG who wrote (24426)	10/26/1997 6:47:00 PM
From: John Rieman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50808

PC MAG. This will make you choke. I hope the Indians don't choke, but PC MAG says software decode, ATI All-In-Wonder card, and a DVD drive save $150, over hardware decode....................... zdnet.com All-In-Wonder costs $329. You will still have to buy a DVD-Rom drive, and any titles that you package with it, That's between $150 and $250, with prices dropping. Plus $150 means hardware decode, DVD-ROM costs over $700!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! atitech.ca Inside Track By John C. Dvorak November 4, 1997 Look for a reemergence of disk drive wars later this year and continuing into 1998. They will be triggered by the final entrantinto the magnetoresistive (MR) head club, Western Digital. The MR head increases the capacity of hard disks by a factor of five to ten, and Western Digital has been the last holdout. Western Digital is the company that drives prices down. I'm told by disk manufacturers that it's even likely that the 9GB drive will be standard issue in 1998, and one person told me to expect to see 20GB drives selling for under $500 by late 1998. The first MR drive from Western Digital will incorporate 2.16GB on a single platter. My primary drive is a 9GB Micropolis drive, and it's a welcome relief to have such capacity available. And, in case you haven't noticed, software bloat is worsening. Readers' Challenge Dept.: It looks as if Moore's Law applies to disk drives just as it does to processor performance. Moore's Law says that performance will double every 18 months. I wonder what the law implies about software bloat? If any engineer out there can show me the bloat factor of software since 1976 (or before!) I'd be interested to see if it follows Moore's Law. Early word processors, such as the Electric Pencil, easily fit on 70K floppy disks. I'll reprint the results (with credit) to anyone submitting solid evidence matching bloat to Moore's Law and rename it Moore's Bloat. The DVD-RAM situation keeps fluctuating. It's quite annoying, but the 4.7GB writable format may be the one to get. This seems to be the most likely format to be compatible with the most drives. But that will probably change next week. So--uh--never mind. Microsoft Is Up to Something Dept.: Remember the Microsoft operating system called Bob? Well, now Microsoft is introducing a product called "Bob and Weave," which has nothing to do with Bob. Bob and Weave, a part of Microsoft's Entertainment PC 98 specification, is a couple of algorithms designed to make viewing full-motion video from movies on DVD doable on the PC at resolutions higher than normal. The idea is that with the higher resolutions of a modern PC monitor, you should be able to get a "better" television experience than you can with a standard or even an enhanced TV. I suspect that this idea will be carried over to the upcoming generation of digital TVs and projection systems. A report in EE Times indicated that Bob and Weave may be similar to the pricey Faroudja Laboratories Line Doubler and Super NTSC system, which makes any NTSC signal approach HDTV quality using mathematical trickery. I'm always skeptical when Microsoft tries to get into the home space. Microsoft started years ago with the MSX fiasco, whereby it was going to key into a slew of consumer electronics products interfaced to computers, based on 8-bit technologies. Nothing came of it. More recently there was the hyped Microsoft at Home and the subsequent Microsoft at Work. Although many knowledgeable designers felt that these specifications were wondrous pieces of design, they fell flat. Nobody was interested. Now we have the Entertainment PC 98 specification. We'll probably hear more about this next year. Do these people at Microsoft ever sleep? Another company working in this arena is ATI Technologies, one of the leading display-card makers. It's committed to multimedia--and DVD in particular. ATI has finished work on a soft DVD system that bypasses the need for MPEG-2 chips on the graphics cards or motherboard. Currently, you'll need a Pentium II running at 233 MHz for full 24-frame-per-second decoding of a DVD video stream. We can assume that software MPEG-2 decoding will dominate the PC market, since it saves the consumer around $150 per machine. ATI has recently released the All-In-Wonder Pro, a very cool graphics controller, which incorporates a TV tuner on the card itself, as well as a slew of 3-D and other functions. Highly recommended. Genuinely Interesting Hardware Dept.: If you're looking for a set of fantastic-sounding speakers for your PC, I recommend the incredible $100 PCWorks system from Cambridge SoundWorks. You get two satellite speakers, a subwoofer, and a built-in bi-amplification system. It's an amazing deal, and I was stunned by the quality. Cambridge SoundWorks sells both direct through its catalog and through 27 factory stores located mostly in New England and California. Call the company at 617-332-5936 to find a nearby store or to get the catalog. Heck, just order these speakers. They're fabulous. I've always believed that Cambridge SoundWorks' operation should be copied by computer companies. There should be Gateway 2000 stores, for example. Computer companies have been reluctant to do this because of the failure of the CompuAdd stores, which were simply too big to sustain themselves. Mistakes were made. Cambridge SoundWorks stores are comparatively small and efficient. No major computer company has tried this, despite the fact that small Taiwanese-owned clone shops thrive on the West Coast and elsewhere. Moore's Law says that performance will double every 18 months. I wonder what the law implies about software bloat? If anyone can show me the bloat factor of software since 1976 I'd be interested to see if it follows Moore's Law.