Greg In The Desert

Intel has a slide show on Tom’s Hardware on how Processors are made. I found it to be well done but I have to wonder if this is some sort of advertisement for Intel.

The ingot is then moved onto the slicing phase where individual silicon discs, called wafers, are sliced thin. Some ingots can stand higher than five feet. Several different diameters of ingots exist depending on the required wafer size. Today, CPUs are commonly made on 300 mm wafers.

The Blu-Ray consortium has decided to choose three different techniques to prevent copying content (primarily movies and music). Blu-ray is a contender to be the replacement for the current DVD standards. Let’s take a look at the three methods:

• BD-ROM: This is some sort of watermark that is put on “genuine” disk created by the manufacturer. Copies wouldn’t have this nor would the blank disk you buy to make a back up or those evil pirates in Asia.
• AACS: The is the Advanced Access Content System which will require that your blu-ray player call the mother ship before playing a disk. It checks your disk and if it doesn’t meet the security standards of the mother ship, then the player becomes unusable. Yes, your player becomes useless and it will always need a connection to the internet.
• BD+: This is a system that allows the encryption scheme be kept on the disk, not on the player. So if someone hacks through the encryption, they can make new disks with new schemes. With current DVDs, every player has the encryption scheme built in. Once it was hacked all disks were vulnerable.

Not only will you not have control over the media that you purchased, your won’t have control over your player. However, I have no doubt that there will be either crack or work around all these techniques. Either by hacking the player or the disks.

See also these articles: Register, Tom’s Hardware. The other contender is HD DVD.