ZATS: Episode 1
This is the first ever episode of ZA Tech Show! Simon Dingle, Ben Kelly, Brett Haggard, Jon Tullett and Duncan McLeod sit around on a Friday afternoon and discuss the death of HD DVD, the coming of high definition television to South Africa, the local broadband situation, Vista SP1 and other pressing technology issues.
We’d love to hear what you think of our first show - all criticism, praise and worship is welcome. Click here to mail us or alternatively leave a comment below…
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I thought this was generally a pretty cool podcast; nice to recap on things happening in the local market.
The whole bluray vs downloadable content is discussed quite widely in the media and is interesting, but the entire world is so unready for it, I dont think any serious players believe it’ll be a reality for a decade. Physical distribution probably has close on 100% global market potential (most people have access to a shop or mailorder) but HD digital distribution has a tiny market potential (arstechnica quoted avg US broadband speed at <3mbit), and it’ll be a long time until it becomes commonplace enough to be a serious contender as HDDVD plants are converted to bluray and costs start coming down with economies of scales kicking in.
I’m interested in the whole DSTV HD thing - someone on the podcast mentioned they knew someone “supplying technology for the decoder” … iirc multichoice are just licensing a PACE decoder, which will be using the h264 codec that provides excellent compression, a perfect 720p h264 stream with 5.1 DD sound is about 4mbit - we’re not doing 1080p here (yet) from what I hear, which I can live with - a lot of the world isn’t there yet, and we cant realistically expect to leap in at the top of HDTV pile - but hopefully multichoice can afford a measley 4mbit per HD channel. What are our current mpeg2 channels i wonder? Would be nice if more tech info could be found out. At a bit of a thumbsuck, I think a decent satellite mpeg2 SD stream weighs in at around 1.6mbit, this is based on the experience of old mpeg2 episode rips being around the 450meg mark, as opposed to a 720p h264 episode rip being 1.1gig. Pretty amazing difference in quality for that doubling of size!
The local bandwidth situation is indeed getting interesting and it’ll be nice to follow it as our little country’s telecomms (hopefully) blossoms into something first world soon with SEAcom coming to the party with ridiculously cheap bandwidth, it might actually make us internationally competitive in this area. My company recently got a contract mainly based on our country’s SLA-class hosting prices being less than australia, and with SEAcom coming, I would imagine we’d start tearing business out of a lot of other countries hands, with that int’l traffic charge coming down by 80%. To me, this is huge.
The OS discussion was the usual regurgitation of common misconceptions, fanboy gushing and complete lack of facts and/or understanding. I won’t go into it, as it was pretty embarrassing to listen to and it’s not really worth examining in comments… I just hope that this kind of fanboyism is kept out of future podcasts as it really did degrade an otherwise excellent production.
“The OS discussion was the usual regurgitation of common misconceptions, fanboy gushing and complete lack of facts and/or understanding. I won’t go into it…”
Please do. I think we had a lot of experience around that table, and it’s frankly insulting to hear it described as a lack of facts and understanding.
There are differing interpretations to be had, certainly, and many arguments pro and con, but I would hardly describe that panel as lacking understanding, perspective, or experience.
If you have another take on some of it which brings useful context to the discussion, super. Let’s hear them.
Nicely done chaps… Downloading now and will give you a plug on the blog.
“Please do. I think we had a lot of experience around that table, and it’s frankly insulting to hear it described as a lack of facts and understanding.”
Oh there was a lot of experience around the table, no doubting that, I liked the podcast as a whole, which is why it was disappointing that you went on a cliche vista-bashing excursion that had nothing to do with local concerns. I’m no MS fanboy, but I do enjoy their products and it’s very tiring when these misconceptions seep into common knowledge and you hear them over and over again.
Vista stability: Duncan was right on the money, it’s purely hardware/driver related, it was a problem for the first few months, but Vista is generally regarded FAR more stable than XP now that the drivers have matured. XP had the exact same problem when it came out, and Vista64 has already overtaken XP64 in driver support. If you get a bluescreen on Vista now and your drivers are up to date, you can be 95% sure you have faulty hardware in your box.
Vista vs XP speeds: hardocp did some interesting benchmarks here - vista without aero on a crap spec machine is pretty much the same as XP - you need an extra 256meg ram and a half decent gfx card to run aero, at which point it should be faster as the GUI work is unloaded from the CPU and onto a GPU that can handle it. Anyone who runs Vista on a decent spec machine (let’s say anything entry level from the past 6 months) would probably agree the responsiveness of the OS is improved, Vista has a REALLY nice CPU scheduler that makes great use of multi-cores and of course the GPU takes load off the CPU.
Can’t Roll back from Vista to XP because of lack of XP driver support: Huh?! You can’t be serious?
Needing to swap a hdd out to downgrade from Vista to XP: I assume I misunderstood what was said here, cos this is just … huh?
Vista SP1 being 1gig: 32-bit version is 440meg (okay that’s big, but still it’s not MASSIVELY far away from the 340? meg Leopard service pack, I’m wondering where the line is drawn on Service Pack size being acceptable to “an outcry” - obviously, it’s somehwere in the 340-440meg range where it goes from black to white) - the 64-bit one is almost twice the size, and yeah, that’a bit big, but 32-bit is the vast majority of the market. XP SP2 was about 250meg? And over 3 years old? I think it’s was a bigger problem downloading 250meg 3 years ago than 440meg now. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s big, but it’s really just the old winging all over again - it happened with win2k, it happened with XP, Vista and will happen with whatever comes next, yet people forget the last time it happened and XP’s sins are wiped away. Also it happend from DX8 to DX9 and is happening from DX9 to DX10 - another massively beaten up tech in Vista that really doesnt need to be beaten up.
SP1 delayed because of stability and performance issues: Dead wrong, it’s incompatible with a tiny percentage of 3rd party apps which block the install - the exact same problem that Leopard upgrade had on release if i remember correctly, and you don’t hear people winging about that.
SP1 changes a roll-up: Sure it’s no XP SP2 type update - no SP really has been, but the Vista kernel has been updated to the win2k8 server kernel in SP1, a more fundamental update you cannot get.
Vista breaking stuff in non-aero mode: I use it as much in classic mode as I do in aero, and this is just dead wrong but is something I hear a lot from mainly non-vista users that “have a friend that said…”. In fact I find that aero mode breaks more 3rd party apps than classic mode; 3rd party apps that are written for XP expecting the GUI to act like XP usually don’t fare as well in Vista - especially ones that fiddle with the title bar, etc.
Vista System Requirements: Pretty much the same as Leopard, hardocp did benchmarks and tests on this, but then again it’s always the case that MS gets beat up when Apple is guilty of the same sins.
Just about all these facts are pretty well known for anyone who follows the stories in the news, which is why it puzzles me that they were brought up and discussed in such an immature linux-irc-channel manner.
Hey Greg,
Thanks for the detailed comments. We appreciate the feedback.
Second show is in the bag. We’ve just finished recording. Should be up by early next week, once Simon’s done the editing.
Duncan
Hey guys,
Busy listening now. Just want to welcome you to the SA podisphere! I hope to see you all at PodCampSA in Bloem on the 19th of April. Oh, and don’t forget to submit the podcast to podcast.co.za.
Good luck!
~Glen
“Microsoft is the EU’s new ATM”
LMAO!!!!
@Greg:
Sorry, been in Boston or I’d have replied sooner. Thanks for taking the time to raise specific points, it’s good to have something to discuss rather than just random muck-flinging
You raise some interesting points, too. I think some of them are pretty good, but in some you’re a bit wide of the mark. But either way, it’s nice to get a discussion going - you should sit/skype in on an episode and harangue us live!
One criticism I think is fair is that it’s easy for a group of geeks, albeit fairly objective journalist geeks, to slip into “beat up Microsoft” mode. It’s such an easy target, and does a lot that’s beat-upworthy, but it doesn’t always come over in the good nature it should. Most of us use Microsoft products in some way or other, and we do have to give the company credit for some of its more impressive achievements.
But…
“Vista is generally regarded FAR more stable than XP”
Really? It’s so stable that Microsoft has rushed SP1 out so fast that it actually had to be recalled because of…drumroll…stability issues? Wow. That’s stable.
To be fair, recalling the RC was exactly the right thing to do. The circumstances, especially vis-a-vis your comment, were funny though.
Vista has achieved quite a lot, but stability? Only in certain key areas. Important key areas, to be sure, but not system-wide.
As far as drivers go, isn’t Vista the OS that’s supposed to bring userspace drivers en masse to Windows, which is part of what caused so much delay in driver support? And aren’t userspace drivers supposed to be so much more secure and stable? Hmm.
Driver support is crap, yes, but I think blaming Vista’s stability on only that is disingenuous. There are other problems too. Read the update descriptions, and you’ll see what some of them are.
“Vista without aero on a crap spec machine is pretty much the same as XP”
It is indeed. Until you actually run much in the way of actual apps, that is, especially multimedia-heavy apps. XP isn’t doing (in)sanity checks on your video output to make sure it’s not showing something with DRM protection.
In other areas, though, it IS better - indexing your local filesystem (despite not having the magic dbfs stuff) is a lot better IME, though I can’t actually point to any stats on that so you’ll have to take it as anecdotal. Hibernate and suspend support is vastly improved, no question about that.
But “time to useful” and actual app performance is definitely worse on Vista than XP in many cases. Don’t trust benchmarks: USE your systems in parallel and check your own experience. I do: I have a beefy Dell that runs Vista fairly well - it’s not slow per se, but it’s definitely not quick either. And an underpowered HP that runs XP very fast indeed. Exactly the same apps, exactly the same data. Just slower in Vista.
I’d dearly love to see the Dell running XP, only I can’t because it’s locked to Vista. Can we discuss that next?
“Vista breaking stuff in non-aero mode: I use it as much in classic mode as I do in aero, and this is just dead wrong”
Sorry, but you’re just plain wrong here. Lucky to have not have apps’ GUIs break, but wrong. Just because you don’t use these apps doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Widget handling is different in Aero than non-Aero, and that sometimes causes bizarre glitches in button and frame handling if apps aren’t explicitly handling it. The apps that I’ve seen this in all WORK, they just look funny. So is it really a problem? Well yes - the visuals are half the experience, just ask the Vista devs!
“Vista System Requirements: Pretty much the same as Leopard”
Except that for the last five releases, OSX has become FASTER on the same hardware. Now, that’s partly because the sysreqs are high to start with, it’s true - a Macbook is comparatively high spec compared to a low-end PC notebook. But it’s a notable achievement that the same OS is getting optimised with every release. So a Mac user actually sees his system requirements effectively drop with each release, where a PC user sees his jump, and jump massively. What exactly the sysreqs are is irrelevant - it’s the percentage increment (or vice versa) that people notice. And notice they did - all those people didn’t start a class action suit because Vista ran nicely on those machine marketed as “Vista Ready”.
Less contentiously:
“Vista SP1 being 1gig: 32-bit version is 440meg (okay that’s big, but still it’s not MASSIVELY far away from the 340? meg Leopard service pack, I’m wondering where the line is drawn on Service Pack size being acceptable”
700MB, I imagine. Because that’s the size of a CD, which they’ll mail out on request. Larger and the distribution cost doubles, so the outcry would be internal rather than external.
To all the people complaining about the large SP, yes, it’s a pain, but less of a pain that was anticipated (shouldn’t have been a surprise - the early release stuff is usually larger than actual release). And exactly how much has your system downloaded from Microsoft Update so far? My bet is: a lot but you don’t actually know. Until you do know and can complain on empirical grounds, shut up about 500MB that’ll be trickled down anyway. It’s not all that big a deal, Greg’s right about that.
Hi Guys,
I found episode one interesting and informative. Nice mix of topics and some amusing comments.
I shall certainly be listening to the next episode.
Good job!
Chaps - just made my way through this episode and the next. Very cool. Can you do something about the levels, I noticed ep1 and ep2 were really low when compared with oversees pods. I had to turn car sound up to 16 as opposed to 12 (if that makes ANY sense to you…)
Just a thought…