During an exclusive technology briefing at Fox Studios in LA, Chief Technologist Danny Kaye downplayed Avatar’s anticipated 3D debut, telling HCC: ‘Do not make the assumption that Avatarwill be the first 3D Blu-ray from Fox.’

The standard Fox window from theatrical to disc is four months. This putsAvatar on schedule for a launch in April 2010. With Panasonic’s first 3D Blu-ray player and TV range unlikely to start shipping until early summer, this puts the blockbuster out of sync with any initial hardware rollout.

A far better bet is Fox’s other 3D blockbuster Ice Age 3D. The 2D version debuted on Blu-ray last November, leaving a respectable gap (and plenty of product development time) for an Ice Age 3D Special Edition to be released alongside any hardware introductions in 2010. It seems reasonable to assume that Avatar will follow the same double-dip path, with a 3D Special Edition released after the standard 2D release.

According to 20th Century Fox, the 3D blockbuster earned over $350m (£217m) in the US and over $670m (£415m) outside of the US in its first 17 days on screens.

A question of cost

It also seems unlikely that 3D movies will ship with free 3D glasses, as has been the practice with anaglyph movie releases. Fox’s Danny Kaye says it’s down to cost. ‘I’m guessing that the TV manufacturers are going to put glasses in the box, as well as bundle the new 3D players with glasses. These (new) 3D glasses don’t cost 50c or a dollar each. Eighteen months ago a pair of active shutter glasses for the home would cost well over 100 dollars, today they are around 25 dollars.’

But he doesn’t think this will limit the availability of 3D eyewear. ‘You’re going to see designer companies getting involved, making cool looking and comfortable glasses. I’ve seen styles that can be worn by people that already wear glasses, because the nose bridge moves. You’ll be able to buy glasses for a six year or a 40 year old. Everyone intends to give consumers easy access.’

Panasonic, along with Samsung, Sony and others will reveal their first 3D hardware lines at CES this week. According to market analysts DisplaySearch, the 3D TV market could be worth as much as $22 billion by 2018.

Via Home Cinema Choice

The developers behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution aim to significantly improve boot performance. Their ambitious goal for 2010 is to reduce total boot time to 10 seconds.

The growing adoption of the Linux operating system on netbook devices has compelled Linux distributors to focus on improving startup performance. Ubuntu 9.04, which was released last month, is one distribution where these improvements are particularly noticeable.

In a presentation at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Barcelona, developer Scott James Remnant noted that boot time decreased from 65 seconds in version 8.10 to only 25 seconds in 9.04. This is already a substantial improvement, but he believes that there is still room for more aggressive optimization. Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, will continue pushing the limits of boot performance during the upcoming development cycle for Ubuntu 9.10, which is codenamed Karmic Koala. According to Remnant, the company aims to achieve a ten-second boot time next year for Ubuntu 10.04, the release that will follow after Karmic.

In a message posted to the Ubuntu developer mailing list, Remnant describes how the additional boot performance improvements will be achieved. An important part of their speedy startup strategy will be getting the Xorg display server up and running as soon as possible. This means that a big part of the focus will be cutting down the amount of time that is needed to bring up the components that have to be in place before Xorg can start—the udev device manager and initramfs, a temporary filesystem that is loaded into system memory to facilitate the startup process.

Initramfs is mostly responsible for mounting the root filesystem and loading the requisite kernel modules. It also plays a role in the logic for software RAID, disk encryption, booting from a network filesystem, and a bunch of other similar tasks. Remnant wants to slim it down and remove some of the unnecessary “cruft” that is bogging down the startup.

There are established time budgets for individual parts of the boot process. Those targets will have to be met in order to fulfill the goal of a ten second boot. Remnant says that loading the kernel and initramfs should take two seconds, driver loading, filesystem mounting, and other “plumbing” should take two seconds, launching Xorg should take two seconds, and the remaining four seconds should be used to launch the desktop environment and other services that are part of the user’s session. The computer should be fully booted and ready to use at the end of ten seconds, he says.

One of the side effects of starting Xorg sooner, he says, is that the boot splash and associated progress bar will no longer be displayed at all. That’s a pretty surprising revelation and it should give you an idea of just how substantial the performance improvement will be from a user’s perspective.

“In the default case, there will be no splash screen,” he wrote. “I hope to demonstrate that X can be started sufficiently fast that we don’t need one.”

The reference hardware for benchmarking is the Dell Mini 9, a netbook that is available with Ubuntu preinstalled. Although a single netbook has been selected as the benchmark target for the purpose of consistency, it’s important to note that the ten second goal is for the regular desktop Ubuntu installation. Remnant expects that they can go even further with hardware-specific versions of Ubuntu that are customized for netbook devices.

“10 [seconds] is a good number, especially for a generic, hardware agnostic, non-stripped down Linux distribution. From that starting point, development teams will be able to customise and tailor Ubuntu for specific hardware—and the OEM team will be able to produce custom Remixes of Ubuntu that boot even faster,” he wrote. “I think it likely that we’ll match Moblin’s 5 [second] benchmark on similar hardware, with a device-tailored Moblin-based remix of Ubuntu.”

This emphasis on boot performance will make Ubuntu a more competitive option for hardware makers who are seeking a fast and lean distribution to preinstall on netbook devices. It will also improve the Live CD and desktop user experience. This aspect of system performance will continue to grow in relevance as Linux expands to other kinds of mobile and embedded devices in a multitude of different form factors.

Its really difficult to upgrade machines that don’t come with a CD or DVD drive. Trying to deal with such tricky situations, Microsoft has been thinking of convenient ways to offer Windows 7, one of them being on a thumb drive so that Netbook owners could easily upgrade their machines.

The thumb drive option, however, is still under consideration.

In the past, Windows Vista never worked well on netbooks and Microsoft was forced to sell Windows XP as its answer to the low-cost notebook phenomenon.
Alternative?

The other option is to sell a downloadable version of Windows7 which will allow users to put the OS on their own thumb drive.
Not as simple as it sounds

Most Netbooks run on Windows XP. If the user has to make a switch from Windows XP, then before he could upgrade, he will have to:

• Back up all data

• Do a clean installation of the operating system

• Then reload the applications.

The same applies for all XP owners and those looking to move from a higher-end version of Vista to a lower-end version of Windows 7.

Microsoft recently also officially announced the initial pricing for Windows 7, saying that the prices for the Windows 7 operating system are more or less in line with those for Vista.

Let’s wait and watch what comes along with the final distribution release.