USB Power Delivery (for Set top Boxes) - A dream so close and yet, so far away

I’ve designed this diagram  on the eve of the approval of the USB Power Delivery standard. It drew on the EU’s Common External Power Supply’s motto: one power supply to rule them all. It took us 7 whole years, and we’re not there yet, but we’re now so close. Well, it’s also a bit weird, but I’ve worked on Set Top Boxes for most of my professional life, and my whole goal has always been the same: get rid of set top boxes. Now, it’s tremendously obvious for everyone that I’ve thus far failed. Yes, there have been some attempts …

Boeing 737 Max – The illustrated example of technical debt

What happens when Product Management, Finance and Engineering all seat at the same table and decide not to pay their debt? 346 lives are taken as collateral. How Boeing got to this point ? Ryanair gave a hand… The Boeing 737 Max is the 4th and latest interaction of the most successful airliner of all times, having sold more than ten thousand units since its introduction in 1968. That’s right, this airplane has its roots on a 51 year old base design, when airports and passengers were a lot less and jet engines were and a lot different, and smaller. The very …

DRM 101 – Introduction to DRM systems

It may seem silly, but it’s so difficult to find proper information about a DRM is, what it isn’t, and broadly, how it works. What is not a DRM Most people associate a DRM with content protection, a way to protect the content. However, stricto sensu, it isn’t. A DRM system is not about how contents are protected or encrypted. In fact, most current DRMs use exactly the same encryption methods to protect content, and again contrary to most DRM way of thinking, these methods are public and vary between AES-CTR and AES-CBC. If you find those names too familiar, it’s …

Linking to a specific Confluence page version

In short, linking to a specific Confluence page version is not possible by simply copy pasting an existing link, but it needs some manual URL editing. Here’s how to do it. EDIT: Finally Atlassian added this feature by changing the page links on page history. Unfortunately this is only valid for the cloud version, or versions 5.x onwards, whereas most hosted installs still don’t offer this option, this simply isn’t possible on version 4.x. It’s pretty obvious I’m not the biggest supporter of confluence as the enterprise knowledge management platform, but denying it grabbed the largest chunk of this market …

Playready 4 will bring closure to the DASH dream: one single OTT format to rule them all

Editor’s note: the initial version mistakenly identified AES-CTR as “AES-CTB”, which doesn’t really exist. What got us here? 2017 was a weird year. It’s not often that the OTT video industry comes together to create simplify the industry player’s lives. It was tried before and failed. Then DASH appeared, it promised to rule on the OTT format wars, by proposing a single standard format, but at the end of the day, it failed to deliver its promise. DASH is a single standard, but as any other bad standard, it allows for options, incompatible options. It’s these options which allows standard compliant …

Introduction to Multicast ABR (M-ABR) – Where it works and where it totally fails

Last year (2016), Cablelabs published a very interesting document entitled “IP Multicast Adaptive Bit Rate Architecture Technical Report“, describing how to bring together two fundamental and previously incompatible network concepts: Multicast and Adaptive Bitrate delivery, in what it call Multicast ABR (M-ABR). But, does it make sense? If it does, on which use cases it works? Let me spoil the surprise: It does make sense on one single use case. It spectacularly fails elsewhere. To start with, lets have a look at the generic M-ABR architecture:

Adobe flash won’t die on 2020, it’s been dead for years

Adobe just made the news by announcing that Flash plugin would loose support by 2020, effectively setting a deadline for all browsers to disable it definitely, and wiping it from the face of the Internet. Unfortunately, that’s simply the death certificate of something which happened long ago. People just forget to tell Adobe about it, and Adobe has since refused to bow to reality. No one can tell exactly when Flash died, but the conclusion that it is dead is unavoidable. Just looking at today’s internet describes how low it has reached. As it is obvious on the chart below: Until 2015 we …

Codec wars – Apple drops the hammer on VP9, chooses H.265 and takes a decision for the industry

It seems funny, but this year’s Apple’s WWDC was one of the most import yet, but not due to something said during the 2017’s Keynote. Instead, this low profile presentation will have far reaching implications over the next 8 to 10 years on the video delivery industry, from Google to Netflix. As Apple decided to use H.265 and WebVTT, the whole industry will be forced to follow suit. The story started back in May 2010 when Google acquired On2 technologies, and specifically all the related IP to the VP8 video codec. Google was not happy with having to rely on …

USB3 Gigabit Ethernet performance on MacOS

This is the second part of the USB3 Gigabit on MacOS series. On the first post we discussed on how to choose an USB3 Gigabit adapter. On this post we try to answer to the following question: Does USB3 on MacOS supports gigabit speeds ? Read below to find out. To start with, let’s remember why it might be important for some users how does USB3 allows for gigabit ethernet performance: most recent MacBooks lack ethernet jacks. This means that, for power users, there are only a limited set of alternatives: Thunderbolt Gigabit adapters, for those laptops which support still …

USB3 Gigabit Ethernet adapters on MacOS: Orico Vs KY-688

Edit: This is the first half of a 2 part port regarding USB3 ethernet adaptors running on MacOS. The second part looks at actual performance. There aren’t a lot of good reasons why one would care about getting an USB3 Gigabit Ethernet adapter, and all start with “I need an extra wired gigabit connection”. And this may not be as weird as it seems as most MacBooks lack a single embedded wired gigabit interface. As an alternative you get the Thunderbolt adapter (in it’s native Thunderbolt port, or using the new USB-C connectors), USB3 adapter or 802.11 WiFi connection. Current state …

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