MaximumPC 2002 09

IBM’s MS

Office

Alternative

IBM, working in conjunction

with Virtual Bridges and

Canonical, hopes to save

corporations a bundle (and

make a tidy profit itself) by

offering a virtual desktop

package that will be free

of Microsoft applications.

Virtual Bridges is supplying

the virtual desktop client

while the Linux-based OS

comes from Canonical.

The Ubuntu-based suite

will include a collection

of offi ce, messaging, and

collaboration apps, and

IBM boasts that by going

without Microsoft, companies

could save from $500 to

$800 per user on software

licenses alone; further

savings would come from

reduced hardware demands,

power consumption, and IT

costs. All told, IBM claims,

companies would see a 90

percent savings in desk-side

PC support and a 50 percent

savings in help desk and

software install costs. – T E

Maximum PC through the Ages

Google Book Search now includes complete OCR’d replicas of
Maximum PC from 1998 to the present at http://tinyurl.com/6gzl5d.

DX10 on a CPU

Microsoft’s WARP10 bypasses old

videocards

I

f your graphics card doesn’t support DirectX 10 or

10.1, don’t worry. Microsoft is working on a new

component called WARP10 (Windows Advanced

Rasterization Platform) to be included in Windows 7

that essentially ports DX10 duties to the CPU.

The upshot is that anyone who can run Vista

will have access to DX10 eye candy, even if their

hardware doesn’t support it. Minimum requirements

for WARP10 are the same as they are for Vista—an

800MHz processor and 512MB of RAM. So if you

have the hardware to run Windows 7, in theory you

should be able to enable advanced eff ects regardless

of your videocard.

Microsoft isn’t pitching WARP10 as a

replacement for graphics, though. The rasterizer

is intended as a diagnostic tool to help developers

validate any visual artifacts as being rendering

errors or problems with hardware or drivers. – P L

Imagine playing Crysis without the aid of a modern videocard!

Of course, this maga-

zine’s online presence

extends far beyond

Google’s searchable

archive; remember,

you can fi nd breaking

news, exciting fea-

tures, product reviews,

and PDF archives at

MaximumPC.com. – K S

Tom Halfhill was formerly a senior editor

for Byte magazine and is now an analyst for

Microprocessor Report.

N

o doubt you’ve heard that analog TV in

the U.S. goes off the air on February

17, replaced by digital TV. If you haven’t

heard, you must be in a coma. Four times as

much money has been spent to prepare Ameri-

cans for this transition as the U.S. government

spends on adult education each year. Who says

politicians can’t get their priorities straight?

I’m dreading the switch. I’m a diehard who

still plays vinyl records, subscribes to a daily news-

paper, and snatches free TV from the ether with

rabbit ears. And I’m not alone. Thirteen percent of

U.S. households still depend on TV antennas.

Although the DTV transition won’t affect

people who have cable or satellite TV, it does

reveal an inherent flaw of digital technology. This

flaw afflicts almost all digital media, includ-

ing the digital photos you take, the digital video

you record, and the digital music you download.

Digital data can be rendered useless by minor

damage that wouldn’t matter if the media were

in analog form.

At my home, for example, DTV is a bust.

NBC is the only network my indoor antenna can

receive. CBS, ABC, and PBS are dead air. Yet

my antenna points toward the region’s largest

hilltop broadcast tower, just 10 miles away. For

years I’ve received analog TV that’s a little snowy

but quite watchable.

The problem is that DTV signals are typical

of digital media. They are all or nothing. If any-

thing interferes with the compressed bitstream

of ones and zeroes, the error-correction algo-

rithms may not be able to reconstruct the lost

data. So, when a digital TV gets a weak signal, it

doesn’t get a snowy picture—it gets no picture.

The same errors can make digital photos, videos,

and music unreadable. I’ve seen JPEG files ir-

retrievably scrambled by a single data error.

By comparison, analog media are more

robust. I’ve scanned 100-year-old photographic

negatives that were scratched all to hell, but

they still yielded usable images. I have restored

60-year-old acetate recordings that sounded like

popcorn but were still audible.

To protect your digital media, keep multiple

backups. Although this solution doesn’t apply to

DTV, it will help preserve your digitally stored

memories.

FAST FORWARD

Requiem for Analog TV

TOM HALFHILL

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