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The Type I was originally an old USA 220v design. It's the standard Type A, but with the prongs slanted so you can't mistakingly plug 110v into 220v or vice versa, plus with an earth pin added (but you can still use a 2-pin Type I plug in a 3-pin socket, just like you can use a Type A plug in a Type B socket). Plus, for those distribution systems that use phase/neutral, if makes sure that the phase plug goes into the phase socket. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....

So they haven't even established procedures for evaluating human exposure of 5G radiation (6 GHz-100 GHz) but hey don't let a little microwave radiation get in the way of 'progress'

RJ-point-5 is a trade mark. The draft standard is IEC 61076-3-121. The documents are paywalled so that's all I know. http://www.iec.ch/dyn/www/f?p=...

There were no cars capable of 250k charging and the standard itself is limited to 80kW, so it was a stunt only. I have no idea where you got the 2008 date, the official international ChADeMO standard was released in 2011 ( http://www.iec.ch/dyn/www/f?p=... ).

Standards are not made by some aliens, but by people interested in them. The fact that Chademo standard wasn't finalized to the last detail until some years later doesn't mean compatible chargers didn't existed before.
http://www.japanfs.org/en/news...
http://www.greencarcongress.co...
http://www.chademo.com/wp/wp-c...
As Tesla has chosen to fragment market in "DVD regions" style and do not participate, their needs for more power were not addressed. It doesn't mean it is not possible with the same or compatible plug. You can always extend software protocol for more power options and leave it backwards compatible. Changing plugs of existing widespread infrastructure is next to impossible. Chademo plug geometry allows up to 200 A, likely more if you use different alloy to handle higher temperature. It means 80kW at 400V or 160kW at 800V.

And anyway, it's being deprecated in favor of another shitty standard (from SAE this time).

Exactly. Some shitty "standard" was invented by German/US automakers to drag down Japanese EVs. Some FUD was spread that competitors are "deprecated" and it worked, you repeat it now. Tesla had option to use common open standard at that time and CCS may be not have happened. Like in Japan BMW i3 is sold with Chademo outlet instead of CCS:
http://insideevs.com/bmw-i3-ge...

And no, Tesla network do not use one standard. In Europe and China their plug is completely different and not compatible with American version.

They are not completely different. They just use different wiring arrangements and can be adapted by a simple wiring adapter.

I don't think they sell such adapter, and I wouldn't be sure they would start charging when VIN from other region would be sent to supercharger, and you already may be carrying a dozen different adapters in your trunk or frunk. What a hassle. Well, next year we will see GM Bolt, and most likely GM's own (CSS or whatever) fast charging infrastructure will follow, more wider as GM (plus others) is bigger player, and Tesla will be left on isolated island. Isn't that what they wanted?

Model S are prevented from use superchargers as they check VIN when you plug in. Do you really want to say all this is good business ethics?

Since Tesla actually foots the electricity bills and funds the network rollout - that's perfectly fine. Also, superchargers are more powerful than ANY of the deployed standards out there right now.

It is called abuse in my book but as the are trying "to save the world" they are entitled to do anything in they eyes of their fans. Most evil things in the human history were done by people fighting "for greater good". They receive lots of subsidized loans/credits/all kinds perks from all taxpayers and it isn't exactly correct that they foot all the bills or that it is impossible for them to charge others for use of their network to recoup all reasonable costs. Such practice may be even become illegal in Europe soon, there is bill proposed that publicly accessible charging stations should not be discriminating against other EVs. How about gas stations with different hoses and owned by GM, Toyota, BMW, each incompatible with each other? Do you imagine what absurd waste of resour

And no, Tesla network do not use one standard. In Europe and China their plug is completely different and not compatible with American version.

They are not completely different. They just use different wiring arrangements and can be adapted by a simple wiring adapter.

Model S are prevented from use superchargers as they check VIN when you plug in. Do you really want to say all this is good business ethics?

Since Tesla actually foots the electricity bills and funds the network rollout - that's perfectly fine. Also, superchargers are more powerful than ANY of the deployed standards out there right now.

The best known standard quip about standards itself has multiple versions and attributions. How meta:

"The nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from." - Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Computer Networks, 2nd ed., p. 254

"The nicest thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from." -- Ken Olsen

“The wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from.” -- Grace Murray Hopper

See also:

Obligatory (but who set that standard?): xkcd : Standards
Why are there so many plugs and sockets?

‘Mediocrity finds safety in standardization.’ -- Frederick Crane
‘It is not enough that X be standard, it should also be good.’ -- Rob Pike (Window Systems Should Be Transparent)
The two above can be found on the cat -v page on standards"
"Standards are like toothbrushes. Everybody wants one but nobody wants to use anybody else’s." -- Connie Morella

The firm touts the efficiency of its algorithm, saying that a bog standard PC can search through 1,000 hours video in just one second. Quite what the firm's definition of a "home-class" PC would be interesting to know as we can't quite figure out how even a dual core 3GHz box can go through the 104 billion checks for 1,000 hours of video in a mere second.

1000 hours of video has close to 104 million frames; that would yield around 60 cycles per frame on a dual core (i.e. old) box.

The innumeracy of the author aside, what does this technology even do? Apparently altering the video, even minutely, will alter the "signature." Much like...CRC-32...very cutting-edge. We should name this startling development; I nominate the word "hash." Stupefied by the summary and the "article," I turned to the actual press release to find out what the technology really (purportedly) does.

1. Accurate detection of copied or altered video content Video signatures are extracted for each frame based on differences in the luminance between sets of sub-regions on a frame that are defined by a variety of locations, sizes, and shapes. Video signatures represent a unique fingerprint that can be individually detected frame by frame. This technology is capable of accurately detecting video content with that was created with such editing operations as analog capturing (*3), re-encoding (*4) and caption overlay (*5), which was conventionally very difficult to detect.
...
4. Compatibility with home PCs By designing a compact signature size of 76 bytes per frame, the storage memory required for the matching process is minimized. As a result, a home-class PC (*8) can match approximately 1,000 hours of video in 1 second.

It turns out that a home-class PC ("A single core CPU with 3GHz clock speed was used for testing purposes. Signatures were stored in the main memory.") is able to match 1000 hours that have already been hashed in a single second. No doubt it takes considerably longer to actually calculate the signatures. The power of the algorithm is that when the video is altered (in human-recognizable ways) the signature doesn't change much. Ah, things are starting to actually make sense. The truth is (surprise!) the opposite of the linked phrase in the summary.

This technology may allow automated, accurate matching of copyrighted video on youtube or other video sites...who cares? That is already being done, only less accurately. The law would have to change rather drastically for it to be mandated that everyone includes correct hashes in their MPEG-7 video. That is hardly necessary--I'm sure someone will spare the cycles to hash the videos and inform content owners. Like they do now...only better. Maybe next time we can all have fun panicking about the "FaceRecognition descriptor" (only the TOC/summary is free) instead. Really, the 76-byte signature is just an implementation of the metadata schema for MPEG-7. The algorithm should work for any format, however (otherwise it would be rather trivial to evade!).

The only interesting thing I have learned is that NEC's algorithm uses robust, compactly representable edge detection (maybe) to compare short clips of video with extremely high accuracy; yay, computer science. All of this escaped Lawrence Latif, author of TFA (such as it is), who didn't see fit to RTFA himself before he started blogging his paranoid fantasies as fact. I wonder just who the "anonymous reader" that submitted the summary was?

VHS was widely licensed by JVC from the beginning, Betamax was only licensed by Sony after they noticed all the other manufacturers licensing VHS. Both specifications ended up as IEC standards over time, as typically happens with tape formats.

VHS ended up as IEC 60774-1 (1994) "Helical-scan video tape cassette system using 12,65 mm (0,5 in) magnetic tape on type VHS - Part 1: VHS and compact VHS video cassette system".

Betamax ended up as IEC 60767 (1983) "Helical-scan video-tape cassette system using 12.65 mm (0.5 in) magnetic tape on type beta-format"

VHS was widely licensed by JVC from the beginning, Betamax was only licensed by Sony after they noticed all the other manufacturers licensing VHS. Both specifications ended up as IEC standards over time, as typically happens with tape formats.

VHS ended up as IEC 60774-1 (1994) "Helical-scan video tape cassette system using 12,65 mm (0,5 in) magnetic tape on type VHS - Part 1: VHS and compact VHS video cassette system".

Betamax ended up as IEC 60767 (1983) "Helical-scan video-tape cassette system using 12.65 mm (0.5 in) magnetic tape on type beta-format"

The gap resides not only in the engine efficiency by itself. Transmission of electric power is still prone to leakage. When putting on the statement of hybrids as environment-friendly technology, points like that are conveniently omitted. http://www.iec.ch/news_centre/onlinepubs/efficient_transmission/ You should be aware of the energy loss inherent at every conversion at the process.

GiB is a made-up term.
No programmer/engineer/nerd worth their salt (bandwidth?) uses it.

Yeah, those programmers/engineers/nerds at NIST and IEC need more salt. Possibly pepper too.

http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html
http://www.iec.ch/

"1 MW" has always meant 1,000,000 watts. "9.6 kbps" has always meant 9,600 bits per second. A "500 GB" hard drive still means 500,000,000,000 bytes.

There are relatively few places where this is screwed up, most of which fall into these categories:

• RAM or things derived from RAM (e.g. page sizes) where the physical layout imply powers of 2
• Microsoft

The latter doesn't even get it consistent. "1.44 MB" floppies are actually 1440 * 1024 bytes.

"Current industry usage" is to be ambiguous; 17 MB means "somewhere between 16 and 18 megabytes". The people you call "ivory tower types", including the IEC, are trying to use more precise language.

The term "octet" does exactly the same thing that the binary prefixes do: They indicate more precisely what is being talked about.

As someone else in this thread said, "just because some people made the mistake, decades ago, of choosing to equal kilo to 1024 doesn't mean they were right."

Roger Frost
Manager
Communication Services
ISO
Tel. + 41 22 7490111
E-mail frost@iso.org

Jonathan Buck
Director of Communications
IEC
Tel. + 41 22 9190211
E-mail jjb@iec.ch

It's easy to blame the National Bodies for voting the way they did (and sometimes they deserve that blame) but the ISO ran the Fast Track process and could have stopped it earlier. They continued on, and received funding from their vendor.

I mean just read this pleasant ISO review of the meeting that participants describe as a sham and disgusting process abuse. The ISO are in denial that there's any abuse going on.

We need to keep telling people the real story here. They can't be allowed to forget this. Their reputation is in the drain, but they must be held accountable.

A CD is any plastic disc with pits on a reflective layer physically organized in a manner conforming to the requirements set forth by Philips and Sony. If I buy Britney's latest "CD" at the store, guess what. It really is a CD.

This International Standard describes the MPEG-2 audio non-backwards compatible standard called MPEG-2
Advanced Audio Coding, AAC [1], a higher quality multichannel standard than achievable while requiring
MPEG-1 backwards compatibility.

Try http://www.iec.ch/zone/fsafety/scope.htm. I also recommend looking at MISRA C http://www.misra.org.uk/index.htm.

Unlike coding standards that merely make your surce look pretty, these standards actually help improve quality by improved design. They are well worth looking at if you can buy (or find) a copy.

The IEC TC 110 WG/4 recently agreed in April 2004 to call them all OLED now. Here's a news report, in Korean. I can't find any links in English though.

Actually, the *bi prefixes are IEC (60027-2), and IEEE (1541-2002) standards, and a proposed ISO standard.

Philips wants five thousand dollars for the Red Book, and requires that you sign an NDA. But if you want to learn the details you can buy the actual international standard, IEC standard 60908, for CHF 226 (about $156).

Other good sources of technical detail about the CD Audio format are:

• The Art of Digital Audio by John Watkinson
• Principles of Digital Audio by Ken Pohlmann

As you may know if you've been following recent IEC and IEEE standards (or if you've ever bothered to figure out exactly how large a terabyte is), what disk manufacturers call a terabyte and what this article calls a terabyte differ slightly.

When used in the standard way, the "tera" prefix means 1 * 10^12, so a terabyte would be 1 000 000 000 000 bytes. Unfortunately, computer systems don't use base 10 ("decimal"), they use base 2 ("binary"). When trying to express computer storage capacities, somebody noticed that the SI prefixes kilo, mega, giga, tera, and so on (meaning 10^3, 10^6, 10^9, 10^12, ...) were about the same as 2^10, 2^20, 2^30, 2^40, and so on, so used the terms as multiples of 1024 rather than the usual 1000. On the other hand, many hardware manufacturers (especially hard disk manufacturers) use these prefixes in the standard way to mean exactly multiples of 1000.

This discrepancy causes some confusion. For instance, if you could afford to purchase such a 2 terabyte hard disk, you might well be annoyed when your system tells you your disk is almost 200 gigabytes (2 * (2^40 - 10^12)) smaller than you thought it would be (most systems would report a 2 terabyte disk as a 1.8 terabyte disk).

The moral of the story is one of:

1. don't buy 2 terabyte hard disks (blame the hard disk manufacturers)
2. complain about it then continue the current ambiguity
3. use the standard terminology for binary units
   

Interestingly the Slashdot community seems to think it should be a combination of 1 and 2.

IEC 61508: "Functional safety of electrical/electronic/programmable electronic safety-related systems".
This standard, which also applies to software (see 61508-3: Software requirements), defines some very stringent requirements for systems that have anything to do with safety, i.e. where a failure of the system could endanger life.
See the IEC's website for more...

surprised that no-one has mentioned knuth's suggestion yet

i've mirrored knuth's discussion and suggestion for a solution below - link can be found here, on his news for 1999 page.

~~~~~~~mirrored text of donald knuth~~~~~~~~

Many people (and many online dictionaries) claim that a kilobyte (kB or KB) is 2^10 bytes, and that a megabyte (MB) is 2^10 kilobytes, etc.

I'm a big fan of binary numbers, but I have to admit that this convention flouts the widely accepted international standards for scientific prefixes.

Therefore I propose a simple way to resolve the dilemma and the ambiguity: Let us agree to say that

2^10 bytes is a large kilobyte, abbreviated KKB;

2^20 bytes is a large megabyte, abbreviated MMB;

and so on up the line: Large giga-, tera-, peta-, exa-, zetta-, and yottabytes are GGB, TTB, PPB, EEB, ZZB, and YYB, taking us up to 2^80. (Notice that doubling the letter connotes both binary-ness and large-ness.)

These proposals were motivated by the suggestions in 1995 of IUPAC-IDCNS (the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry's Interdivisional Committee on Nomenclature and Symbols), which were extended by IEC TC 25 (Technical Committee 25 of the International Electrotechnical Commission), chaired by Anders J. Thor. According to those committees, 2^20 bytes should be called a "mebibyte" and abbreviated MiB; 2^40 bytes should be called a "tebibyte" and abbreviated TiB; etc. The members of those committees deserve credit for raising an important issue, but when I heard their proposal it seemed dead on arrival --- who would voluntarily want to use MiB for a maybe-byte?! So I came up with the suggestion above, and mentioned it on page 94 of my Introduction to MMIX. Now to my astonishment, I learn that the committee proposals have actually become an international standard. Still, I am extremely reluctant to adopt such funny-sounding terms; Jeffrey Harrow says "we're going to have to learn to love (and pronounce)" the new coinages, but he seems to assume that standards are automatically adopted just because they are there. Surely a huge number of standards for other computer things, like networking protocols, have been replaced by better ideas when they came along. Thus I hope it still isn't too late to propose what I believe is a significantly better alternative, and I still think it unlikely that people will automatically warm to "mebibytes". Indeed, the last time I looked (June 28), names like "mebibyte.com" were being offered for sale but with no takers! I might, however, want to buy into a name like mmegabyte.com... And even in the unlikely event that mebibytes do catch on, MMB surely wins over MiB as their abbreviation. [See also the discussion by Kevin Walsh.]

1) How will you automate separating the tracks? If you are recording from spdif it's all going to be one long mp3. I'm sure you could write a filter to do silence detection, but that doesn't work even close to 100%, many song have pauses in them.

Most SPDIF receiver chips (e.g., those from Crystal Semiconductor) provide a way for a processor to examine the Channel and User bits. I have no idea whether common PC sound cards have this capability. Wiring up an ISA card with a Crystal Semi receiver chip would be pretty easy.

For details, I recommend

• The Art of Digital Audio by John Watkinson. 2nd edition had detailed coverage of CD subcode in section 12.18 and of SPDIF User bits in section 7.11. These may have moved in the third edition, but I expect that they're still present.
• Principles of Digital Audio by Ken Pohlman. Chapter 9 has good coverage of CD subcode. Chapter 10 includes information on the SPDIF User bits for CD sources, but not in as much detail as in Watkinson's book.
• IEC standard 60908. The definitive reference on the CD-Audio format, including the subcode. Not available free, but it's not too expensive (CHF 228.00, about US $133), and you can buy a PDF file online.