Simon Zambrovski

The continously changing quality of television is an intersting phenomena. Most European countries plan, develop or already introduce high quality television systems. The current quality standard is called HDTV (Full HD 1080p) and is a standard for digital audio/video signal. This quality can be delivered used special equipment. This short post gives a little overview about the subject.

The Screen

In order to view the beautiful pictures delivered from the source, you need a TV set. In my childhood we had a monochrome Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) TV set, a huge box, incredible heavy, full of electrical components. Produced in Russia, its handle broke and we had nippers near the TV set in order to switch the channels (they were switched by rotating the handle). The next TV set we had could reproduce color but had approximately 12″ screen size. Its channels could be switched using small buttons. In the nineties, the time of big CRTs begun. A normal person could effort a 30″ CRT and of course it had a remote control. I saw my first plasma screen on an exhibition in Germany – I was thrilled by its relative small depth in comparison to a CRT. But the plasma screens of the nineties were heavy, consumed about 400W and had about 8 fans, which were pretty loud. Finally, the time of LCDs began and now the technology seem to be one of the main technologies in the market of TV sets. It is difficult to find a store selling CRTs in Germany. Read the rest of this entry »

Google seems to have a funny interpretation of the search and an interesting strategy for advertisements. I was looking for a repository to get Subclipse, because the tigris.org page was down for maintenance. So I opened Google (the German version of it http://www.google.de/) to look for “Sublipse p2″. On the right side of the page, the ad has been displayed… (The translation of it from German is: Buy Eclipse p2, thousands of offers. Eclipse p2: low prices guaranteed…)

It is impressive, since I was not searching for Eclipse, but the Big Brother was able to establish the semantic link between Sublipse and Eclipse and look for Eclipse & p2. It turns out that p2 is Pentium II and Eclipse is the Fujitsu Siemens Notebook.

For all non-geeks among us: Eclipse is a the famous software platform and integrated development environment built on top of it. P2 is the system for provisioning and installation of components inside of Eclipse. Eclipse is the example for the open-source development and is available free of charge.

Just posted an article on packaging of RCP application on TechJava. I wanted to include more enterprise systems-related stuff in it, but somehow it is more about general RCP packaging. The main difference between standard packaging and the one described is the fact that the additional feature with framework plug-ins is used. At any rate, have a look on it… By the way, the TechJava blog is now aggregated in PlanetEclipse.