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tion, one new cool implementation.
Go back 75 years to the early days of radio. People complained,
“You can’t do music on radio!” But guess what? Radio sold music.
Technology builds markets. Point to any technical breakthrough in media, and you can point next to a market that got created by that breakthrough. Look at videotape. Netflix. Blockbuster.
Little independent video rental places. Did the VCR kill the movie market? No. It created a new market for movies. The same thing will happen to television.
To seek relief on the last day of the show, I went over to the newly renovated Alexis Park Hotel, which for the last sev-eral years has been the home of the High Performance Audio corner of CES. In the old days, exhibitors suffered exhibiting in the cavernous and noisy main halls. In the Alexis Park, each exhibitor has its own small hotel suite. Sound isolation is remarkably good, considering.
I went there looking for Linux stories and also because, many years ago, I was an audiophile. This was back when vac-uum tubes were going out of fashion; they’re back with a vengeance now. I built Dynaco pre-amps and power amps from kits and knew the virtues and failings of countless brands of turntables, amplifiers and tuners. I could never afford to be a high-end customer and still can’t, so I did the next-best thing—
retailing. I worked as a salesman and a manager at several audio “salons”, as they called them back then.
Although I expected to see and hear some far-out and high-priced audio gear at the Alexis Park, I didn’t expect to it to be a delightfully silo-free zone. As with the freelance Linux hack-er ecosystem, high-end audio is inhabited mostly by smart and resourceful do-it-yourself builders, all making whatever they feel like making, any way they want to make it, without restrictions by any “platform” vendors. Instead, they all regard-ed the big-name vendors, Sony, Technics, Bose—everything sold in Circuit City and Best Buy—with disdain.
What’s more, these gear hackers all were pursuing perfec-tion—they call it that—with products built mostly from stan-dards-based components and in a mostly open way. They bragged and argued about approaches, implementations and results, in large measure because their materials and building methods are open to inspection and discussion. Not surprisingly, this included their use of Linux. Rodomir “Boz” Bozovic, PhD, of Tact Audio Labs told me his shop uses Linux in its pursuit of “acoustical room correction, measurement and monitoring”.
Mark Doehman, Chief Designer at Continuum Audio Laboratories in Victoria, Australia, told me the company’s radical-looking turntable benefited from software that did “wave shaping” and other stuff that sounded cool but I don’t remember.
With luck they’ll make it into a future story in Linux Journal.
My favorite component was the RCA 833A vacuum tube, which is the size of a pickle jar and was a workhorse for decades in radio transmission and industrial heating applica-tions. A number of speaker makers drove boxes the size of coffins that cost more than luxury cars with WAVAC HE-833A single-ended monoblock amplifiers, which sell for $38,000 US.
One speaker maker told me, with pride and admiration for the WAVAC, that the 833A tube costs less than $50. Like every other amplifier I saw at the Alexis Park, it was differentiated
by the quality and uniqueness of design, construction and, especially, by the unique personalities behind the products.
Sound familiar?
So, what does this say about Linux and third parties? I asked Jeff Wiegand, a veteran independent Web developer now working for the St. Louis City Government, if the term third party makes any sense to him. “It’s only manufacturers and clients now”, he replied. Then he went on to define manufac-turer as “anybody who makes anything that’s useful.”
I did find some other examples back in the main halls at CES. For example, I had long conversations with several executives at Frey Technologies, which makes SageTV media centers. Among other things, they were launching a new Linux version of the company’s media center that “offers the reliability and affordability of Linux without Windows licens-ing fees or the more expensive hardware required to deploy Windows-based systems”. CEO Dan Kardatzke told me the company started out working with Microsoft but decided there was far more room to grow and compete outside the Windows silo. “It was an economic decision to begin with.
The OEM cost of MC—the Media Center edition of Windows XP—is $89 US. But there are also these really high hardware costs, for processors and graphics chip sets and so on. We can run on a 600MHz Pentium III. There’s also stability, reliability, networkability....”
Alan Graham also told me home entertainment battles will be won, eventually, by the most open systems. He finds hope, for example, in the relatively open ecosystem surrounding the Linux-based Replay TV:
Replays are just wonderful—far more flexible and capable than TiVos. They have lots of inputs on the back and lots of ways they let you control them, rather than vice versa. You can have several Replays in your house, plug them all into a 100baseT network or a wireless one, but you want wired for speed. You can swap out or add bigger drives. And you can hack the whole thing into one big system with DVArchive, which is a free Java program you can run on Linux or anything else. You can set all your Replay recording schedules for whatever you want to record. You can set DVArchive to move videos off the Replays and onto your central server to archive there.
You can also use the VLC media player to play them. VLC is free open-source software. It runs on every platform you can name, including all the Linux distros and even little handheld Linux devices. It recognizes the Replay format, pulls off two reference files and the video file. The beauty is you can take these Replay files and play them in the VLC player, on the go. If you can plug in an Ethernet cable and do minimal command-line work, you can do home entertainment automation. You can build a video server system. Today. So much stuff is already here. Not just Replay, DVArchive and VLC, but proximity through Bluetooth and pres-ence through XMPP. Consider the possibilities.
It’s a lot easier to consider those possibilities if you’re a pioneering member of the No-Party system.
Resources for this article:www.linuxjournal.com/article/
8067.
Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal.
n L I N U X F O R S U I T S
T
he Egyptians invented geometry, the mathematical basis of surveying. The Nile’s annual floods removed markers and forced those tidy bureaucrats to re-mea-sure roads, fields and other features of the landscape.Gunpowder came to western hands, and long-range artillery was invented. This required precisely locating naval and artillery guns, as well as their targets. So, the military has had a longtime interest in the art of locating things, and they have refined the techniques that the Egyptians first pioneered.
In the 1970s, the US Department of Defense (DoD) started work on the Global Positioning System (GPS). This put a con-stellation of 24 satellites in low-Earth orbit. GPS allowed instantaneous fixes accurate to within a few tens of meters. The Soviets launched a similar system, Glonass, which Russia still maintains. And, the EU has begun work on an improved sys-tem of its own, Galileo, to be deployed in 2008.
The military is happy; they now can locate targets with much greater accuracy. However, as with another DoD project, the Internet Protocol, the civil spinoffs may far outweigh any military benefits. We can now use GPS to locate errant hikers, help distressed vessels and search for oil wells far more pre-cisely and cheaply than with previous techniques. Indeed, the EU sees Galileo primarily as a commercial venture.
All three systems are based on atomic clocks aboard the satellites. The receiver uses time signals to tell its distance from each satellite. Spherical geometry tells us that three satel-lites give a fix in two dimensions. A fix in three dimensions requires a minimum of four satellites. Modern GPS receivers can track as many as 12 satellites, the most they can see at any one time.
Because of the frequencies and signal strengths at which GPS operates, the major constraint on GPS receivers these days is that one must be outdoors, or nearly so, or have a remote antenna, in order to track satellites.
What Is GpsDrive?