News Aopen shows its Viiv wares

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2006/01/07/aopen_wares/

All of its boards! Outrageous.

 

That little bugger with the i/o section of that full ATX board would be nice. Tell me that 4-pin molex isn't the only power... is there a 12v jack on the back and that's to use a splitter with for internal drives? That would make a bit more sense to me, anyways. If only they stuck on four SATA ports, I'd get my order in now. That's a pair of DIMMs and a mini-PCI, right? If so... seeing that the only thing really on mini-PCI is wireless, wouldn't it have made a huge amount more sense to just make the wireless integrated? Makes a bit more sense if it's to act as a media center, that way you don't have to run cable/buy another card.

I'll assume the use of "composite" should be "component"...

 

If that molex is the only power connector, imagine the potential for in-car pc's. Making a regulator for a molex should be nice and easy compared to for an atx connector. I wonter what the price will be.

 

What kind of graphics system would drive these tiny PCs? Surely, they'd have to do better than Intel's integrated to be able to produce video in full HD resolution smoothly, and with the looming requirements of Windows Vista, I could only imagine either some kickass integrated, or discrete graphics. As far as I can tell, most mini-itx form factors only include one PCI slot, or some sort of mini-pci. Perhaps they should begin including 16x PCI-e? Even if not full, perhaps an MXM?

 

Why bother with a hard disk, by the time this stuff is mainstream they're going to be streaming us all our content, who needs DRM when no-one has hard disks?

 

They'd still need some memory for an embedded operating system, and I'm sure something like that would require some sort of "user profile". True though. If they only have us a 64 MB CF card with everything preloaded in, and jammed to the max, we wouldn't be doing much pirating, even if we wanted to.

But there would probably be some determined person to find a way to install a drive/burner and copy like mad.

 

I don't know why people are DRM paranoid. If you don't like a device that has DRM don't buy it. There will always be companies that will cator to the 'pirates'.

 

People are DRM paranoid because it has been proven time and time again that if you allow one side of an equation absolute power over the other side, they'll milk it to the fullest extent that they possibly can. This is true of anything that has a self-interest in the numbers of the equation, such as companies controlling consumer rights and habits. AKA, if you allow DRM to take hold in any substantial way, the rights erode and erode. What starts out as a genuine desire to curb piracy dissolves into how this new technology can allow them to make money on every play, instead of allowing the right to buy an album and play it all you want. Etc, etc, etc.

It's not about pirating, it's about the right to control what you BOUGHT and paid for. Unless you really like the idea of leasing every single thing that exists, and the terms of that lease then fluctuating at any time with you the consumer having no rights.