What's interesting about the rise of the mega weight models is that if you look at the smaller models of the same family you see some significant improvements over time. So there's possibly some trickle down, at least some learning from techniques that is improving things across all model classes.
The other interesting one is how some of the Chinese open weights models have changed licenses that prevent some commercial exploitation of them. That's not closing their doors, but it's some steps towards ensuring their business model is protected.
Some network guys I know prefer fibre even within the rack, just because they don't want the weight and the obstructions in the rack. Apparently more than once the weight of the DACs and the bulk of the cable bundle has caused a problem with NICs.
Personally that surprised me, but I can see where they're coming from.
If you start doing bonded links with DACs or if you have a bunch of servers, the cable management situation gets ugly in a hurry, and the usual solutions like patch panels and keystones aren't applicable. Source: my basement
Admittedly I'm not buying Enterprise Grade(TM) stuff, but...
For simplicity I just use 10G LR modules everywhere. A pair of fiber transceivers is $25. Pretty sure last batch of 3M pre-terminated fibre cables I was grabbing were like $3 a piece or something. So we'll round up and call it $30.
I can get a 3M DAC for about $20.
So yeah it's cheaper, but the price isn't _that_ different. I was using DACs in quite a few places (and still am), but in general I've found it easier just using fiber. (For one, I've had a few devices that didn't get along with various DACs but worked just fine with the fibre transceivers.)
If you do it only once and would never touch it - yes.
But the time spent on digging around and occasionally debugging what and where exactly came off and no longer links (at best) or there is still link up but the are too many errors, add some SLA on top of it... No.
Video is an electronic process for capturing images and displaying them.
Before digital video there was analogue video, and analogue video was perfectly possible without digital sampling, or computers. Heck, video pre-dates silicon chips and used to be done with CRTs and valves.
As a broadcast technology architect I agree with you a whole lot on the broader technology statements.
But as a former lecturer, I also think the promise of interactivity is dependent less on the tools than on the people. Authoring interactive learning materials is difficult and while that interactivity is engaging, it's not necessarily great at getting a density of information out there.
The Socratic method is great, but that level of interactivity presumes in advance that you know what questions the student will be asking, otherwise it's just a dumb gate. Branching stories for interactivity are highly labour intensive. I suppose if you use AI you could generate a massive number of videos to cover branching learning, but that's going to still be an intensive operation, especially if you're supervising that.
Fixed Starlink is competing with fiber/DOCSIS/DSL, though. That's orders of magnitude more bandwidth than people in areas remote enough to not warrant a terrestrial cell base station (which could itself also be backhauled over much more efficient fixed satellite).
It's definitely competing in rural areas, but Starlink does suffer from physical limitations on the number of terminals per geographic area.
This is a long standing problem with cellular in urban areas. For example at Clapham Junction train station in London, which is not a terminus but a through station with 17 platforms and around 2000 trains passing each day, the local cell towers struggle to keep up with demand because so many devices pass in and out of the station every few minutes.
For Starlink D2D they can definitely gap fill for rural areas, but people are mistaken if they think Starlink can compete with the majority of the users (who aren't rural). Less than 10% of rural folk in the USA have unreliable signal. That's still an interesting market, because that's somewhere in the region of 3-6mil people. But I want to temper the hype because people seem to think LEO satellite can take over everything, when the reality is that terrestrial connectivity is always going to be better for the majority because of physics.
Someone recommended Bunny to me and I looked at it previously based on that but didn't have a use case then. But as someone who regularly recommends vendors for v.big CDN contracts I'm not impressed with their attempts to downplay things.
Yeah, I think when people are getting hundreds, or thousands of channels cheaper from some off-brand name, or from a referral from a bloke down the pub, they know what's what.
It's like buying something from the local market, those Adidas trackies are either a knock-off copy, or knocked-off stolen, but if they're 1/4 the price then they're still going to sell to someone.
The only thing I'd point out is that a security researcher found that a significant number of those grey market pirate boxes they tested had malware on them. So using them can open you up to a whole lot of risk. After all, there's no accountability for those pirates!
As someone in the media technology business, it's very frustrating for me that the pirate streaming industry has co-opted the name IPTV for it's offerings.
But it's not the articles that are driving it, it's the pirates themselves who have done it and the articles following that nomenclature. If you go online the search results for IPTV are very much about pirate services and tools now.
In the previous work I was involved in, I was responsible for technical measures against piracy and had to get comfortable with the services being called IPTV.
YouTube channel DextersTechLab was looking at a piece of retro tech, an interface box for an early broadcast painting system, it acts as a kind of hub for serial tablet, "rat" and other devices. It was built on an x86 microprocessor, some SDRAM and an EEPROM.
Mark gave me the ROM image, I tried using more conventional decompiling methods but the chips were exotic enough that I didn't get good results and as a last resort, I put it into Claude raw. Claude was actually able to parse the binary and sort of decompile it. It was able to tell me what the ports did and what the interfacing protocols were.
It then started making stuff up, clearly trying to impress me, but after a few rounds of reprimanding it and saying how making stuff up wasn't helpful, Claude stuck to facts.
A somewhere over 10 years ago a certain Linux distro company commissioned a company I worked for to make a TV specific distro. The team built something amazing, as a DVR it would have been better than anything on the market. Think people who professionally build software for millions of TVs and STBs for years, getting told they can do anything they need to in order to build a Linux based, open-source focused distro for TVs/STBs/DVRs.
Then that well known distro company realised they couldn't get any TV company to actually license it. So they abandoned the project and asked us to remove their name from it. We then went out to the market and tried to sell it to the TV and STB manufacturers. Europe, Japan, USA, China, we visited everyone we could. I met with so many companies you'd recognise. We couldn't get anyone to license it.
We considered just releasing it, but it needed tidying up and the Distro company still had an option on it, but we didn't get an adequate answer on releasing it for free.
Eventually, under the burden of building something no one wanted to pay for, the company got sold to a Russian company for not enough. And the code was effectively lost inside that organisation.
Writing a distro for smart TVs is harder than you'd think. MStar, who makes >90% of the chipsets, has their own version of GStreamer which is not quite compatible and quite outdated (last time I was involved). Managing the lifecycle of apps in a resource constrained environment with a lean-back experience (e.g. no mouse and keyboard), requires experience. Almost all consumers want Android/AppleTV levels of simplicity, not ArchLinux with a full screen browser.
So it's good when people who know what they're doing maintain the software that goes into TVs.
But getting organisations to pay for the support and development is hard. Especially when TVs are horrifically unprofitable for most companies. And that's the key part that most people don't understand. When I was working on this strategy, most companies had 9 months to make any profit on a new TV model before the market put price pressures enough that each unit sold wasn't helping. TVs have become ridiculously cheap in the past 20 years, and every extra penny the manufacturers spend hurts their bottom line.
Ultimately, this is one of the reasons why TV manufacturers are always looking for new ways of making money (like adverts in menus), because TVs aren't a profitable business to be in. Notice how large screen PC monitors are usually much more expensive than the comparable TV but with less tech?
The other interesting one is how some of the Chinese open weights models have changed licenses that prevent some commercial exploitation of them. That's not closing their doors, but it's some steps towards ensuring their business model is protected.
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