People collect baseball cards too. Baseball cards are printed on acid paper, a lousy archival media. But the were not designed to be collectible. The first ones were designed to push bubble gum sales.
Once the store prints you a reciept of purchase, all "value" is in the eye of the beholder.
If someone was "collecting" movies, instead of simply gathering disks, one of the first prints of the film is preferred. If a digital format is desired, you would want an uncompressed feed that was used to make the DVD. With a respectable resolution those feeds could approach a terabyte in size.
That one was busy, but another feed just shows mission control. It's very somber. Every 5 minutes or so a voice over states that NASA is in a Contingency Plan, and that all of the controllers are securing data.
I mean the astronauts were probably dead before they knew something was wrong. Imagine being one of the people who are on the ground, and your job was to bring them home.
I have yet to pay more than $50 for a DVD. And I have a rule about not allowing the fuss over an inanimate object to exceed it's replacement value. I usually pay a lot less that $50 for a DVD, but I know if I said something realistic (say $30) trolls would accuse me of lowballing. (No I didn't buy all 3 LOTR disk sets. I bought the cheap one, and borrowed the others from doting relatives.)
Now, for my $50, I usually get about 4 good showing of the movie before getting bored with it and putting it on the shelf. The Matrix is an exception. Every time I tweak something on my PC I whip out the Matrix for a benchmark. A) I never get bored of watching that movie. B) There are so many scenes where the entire picture is shifting that it will immediately expose ANY flaws in a DVD playback implementation.
Now $50 buys me, on average, about 7.5 hours of enjoyment. And, if you have multiple people watching the movie, the cost is divided by the number of sets of eyes.
Now $50 is dinner and a movie for me and the wife. $50 is less than the admission for one person to an amusement park for one day. $50 is the less than the minimum charge for taking you car to the shop. $40 is a cable modem for a month. $50 is a set of fillings at the dentist. Shit, people spend more than that filling their prescriptions.
Now you are trying to tell me I should get all bent out of shape about how a flimsy plastic disk I bought for less than $50 isn't going to last forever?
Crap people, a DVD is a lossy compressed version of the original. It has no archival value. The crispest frames (every 8) use inverse cosine compression similar to JPEG, and the rest store varying levels of what changed in between frames. With some tweaks to compensate for motion. It is a consumer playtoy, to be watched and turned into a coaster when you are finished.
The problem is not the plastic. The problem is the ultra-thin layer of metal that reflects the light back. It's only a few microns thick, so it really doesn't take much to punch a hole through it.
Now with CD's they got around that with a really sweet error-correcting code. It will continue to play properly with up to 40 continuous errors in a row. The problem is that cracks tend to be a bit wider than 40 sectors on the disk. You will find that same sort of error correcting code on a lot of digital media.
Now with CD's, you were storing the virgin signal. Even when a pop occured, it was recorded at twice the frequency humans could percieve, so most of the time you just don't notice. DVD's store a highly compressed, lossy version of the signal. You don't have as much information redundancy, and you have a much higher information density, AND you have an extra layer on each playable side of the disk.
...The basic manufacturing process for DVD is similar to the current process for CD-ROM, with some exceptions. Two injection molders are required to make one DVD, which consists of two bonded 0.6 mm discs. The second additional manufacturing step is hot-melt glue bonding (single layer) or UV bonding (dual layer). For the dual layer design, a semi-reflective layer is also added to allow both information layers to be read from one side of the disc. DVD also uses a high resolution laser beam to write a glass master in addition to incorporation a new semi-reflective layer rather than the standard aluminum layer in CD-ROM.
This internal design provides DVD with the major advantage over CD. To improve the resolution and readability of two distinct layers, the minimum pit length of a single layer DVD is 0.4 micro meters, as compared to 0.83 micro meters for a CD. In addition, the DVD track pitch is reduced to 0.74 micro meters, less than half of CDs 1.6 micro meters. With the number of pits equating to capacity levels, DVDs reduced track pitch and pit size creates four times as many pits as CDs.
...[Boring bit about reading out to in instead of in to out]...
These numerous manufacturing and design differences lead to an expanded step for DVD production -- more extensive quality control. The DVD process requires optimum pit replication because smaller pits spaced closer together are more susceptible to jitter. In addition, the bonding of two discs requires no tilt in either, making the disc itself a more critical component to the production process
I personally have not had that experience, nor has anyone that I know. I know the PS/1's (the little white hockypuck version) has some overheating problems. Having owned one, I can't say I ever noticed.
Hell I drive a Ford Focus. There are websites devoted to telling you how crappy the brakes are. Well with 2 drivers (my wife and I), 2.5 years (woohoo, only 6 more payments!) and 40,000 mile later, we have not had to replace the brakes once. I might add that I, my wife, and most of her brothers and sister learned to drive stick on that car. The clutch is still going strong.
My point is that EVERY mass produced item has a few bad runs. If you produce a million of something you will have a few hundred people who will have a crappy experience. You can match horror story for horror story for any consumer product out there. I don't think people remember the bitch sessions on slashdot about the early Xboxes being DOA, or dieing in a puff of smoke.
I don't mean to take away from your suffering[sic]. I am just trying to give this thread some balance.
That would be because programmers have become the Wizards and Necromancers of our modern society. They have inherited the fantanstic ability to do the impossible. They also have a tendency to go a little loopy, and hallucinate too.
Since when was LSD-25 a spell component for SELECT INTO?
The journey of a thousand miles begins with a step.
I agree with the poster above, but I would like to add a twist. I have found that few successful programs are successful at simply programming. To be truely successful, you must be good at learning to program.
It doesn't matter how much you can do or have done. The market for programmers will always be in untested areas doing the impossible, or at least the highly improbable.
In the end, your actual training and experience is bunk, unless it used as the basis for learning more. The truely gifted programmer does not build static project. He or she builds a tome of routines and knowledge that are the foundations for code used decades later.
Screw this 3.0 or B bullshit. Sooner or later employers are going to get sick of hiring a 4.0 with a masters in Computer Science who can't make a simple database in MySQL without help. With productivity being the buzzword, and people without degress willing to work for less, they are just going to give their own "final exam" during the interview process.
It'll be just like in the good old days, when every job had an entrance exam. And maybe, just maybe, degrees will stop becoming a perfunctory sheet of velum on the wall, and go back to being a foundation for future learning.
You have to remember that at extremely small scales, different physical forces come into play.
In this case, electrical charge. The rocks and pebbles "stick" to each other as a result. Even under the effects of Earth's gravity, this stickyness factor is a greater force than weight.
If you remember, an aerospace engineer is credited with saying that bumblebees can't fly. (It's actually a misquote.) At that scale, air resistance is a greater influence than weight. They are constantly falling, but their terminal velocity is so rediculously slow that their puny little wings can push them up at a greater rate. Kind of like a blimb with a negative bouyancy.
Why Humans Move Slow in Space
on
Ants... In... Space
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Human are trained to move artificially in space. The first few times astronauts tried to work in space, they kept losing control. (Hell Cernin had to abort the second gemini EVA because he became so overheated that his helmet fogged up.)
It wasn't until Buzz Aldrin's EVA during the last Gemini mission that they had worked out a set of maneuvers and restraints to make sure that when an astronaut turned a knob, he didn't turn instead.
Now, an ant is never free floating. She always has something to hold onto, the tunnel. But if we have learned anything in space, you really can't assume anything. You have to observe it and see how it actually behaves.
Take fire for instance. You take it for granted here on earth that you can see the flames. Well, flames are caused by convection, which does't happen in micro-gravity. Hot air has the same "weight" as cold air. Instead the plasma forms a sphere that is tricky to see. Smoke does not rise from the fire for the very same reason.
With that sort of information, NASA found they had to design completely new fire detection systems for the ISS.
...
CADE. I thank you, good people- there shall be no money; all shall
eat and drink on my score, and I will apparel them all in one
livery, that they may agree like brothers and worship me their
lord.
DICK. The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.
CADE. Nay, that I mean to do. Is not this a lamentable thing, that
of the skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment? That
parchment, being scribbl'd o'er, should undo a man? Some say the
bee stings; but I say 'tis the bee's wax; for I did but seal once
to a thing, and I was never mine own man since. How now! Who's
there? ...
-- William Shakespear (Henry IV Part II, Act IV, Scene IV)
As I said in my previous reply, the army trains in the desert because they need clear radio channels and to be AWAY from populated area. Kind of a tall order in the United States. And they have been training there since the 1980's. The OPFOR was originally playing the part of the Soviets, but since we are buddies with them they now play the Kraznovians. (A made up country by the way.)
If you don't believe me that the real NTC is in the desert, get the
Video tape[A&E's Online Store].
Grr. I've been trying to find the episode of Modern Marvels that featured the center. It's not available for sale yet on the History Channel's website.
My brother was in OPFOR when they shot it, and is in a few scenes. (He is the 6'4" blonde in the crowd scenes.)
Slashdot Mirror
Once the store prints you a reciept of purchase, all "value" is in the eye of the beholder.
If someone was "collecting" movies, instead of simply gathering disks, one of the first prints of the film is preferred. If a digital format is desired, you would want an uncompressed feed that was used to make the DVD. With a respectable resolution those feeds could approach a terabyte in size.
I mean the astronauts were probably dead before they knew something was wrong. Imagine being one of the people who are on the ground, and your job was to bring them home.
If anyone can drop get be a vidclip, I have 2 T1 line at my disposal and no bandwidth cap. I'll be happy to share.
So now we really never know if ants can sort tiny screws in space.
Thank god for public libraries. No, wait, they are working on that one[zdnet].
Now, for my $50, I usually get about 4 good showing of the movie before getting bored with it and putting it on the shelf. The Matrix is an exception. Every time I tweak something on my PC I whip out the Matrix for a benchmark. A) I never get bored of watching that movie. B) There are so many scenes where the entire picture is shifting that it will immediately expose ANY flaws in a DVD playback implementation.
Now $50 buys me, on average, about 7.5 hours of enjoyment. And, if you have multiple people watching the movie, the cost is divided by the number of sets of eyes.
Now $50 is dinner and a movie for me and the wife. $50 is less than the admission for one person to an amusement park for one day. $50 is the less than the minimum charge for taking you car to the shop. $40 is a cable modem for a month. $50 is a set of fillings at the dentist. Shit, people spend more than that filling their prescriptions.
Now you are trying to tell me I should get all bent out of shape about how a flimsy plastic disk I bought for less than $50 isn't going to last forever?
Crap people, a DVD is a lossy compressed version of the original. It has no archival value. The crispest frames (every 8) use inverse cosine compression similar to JPEG, and the rest store varying levels of what changed in between frames. With some tweaks to compensate for motion. It is a consumer playtoy, to be watched and turned into a coaster when you are finished.
Now with CD's they got around that with a really sweet error-correcting code. It will continue to play properly with up to 40 continuous errors in a row. The problem is that cracks tend to be a bit wider than 40 sectors on the disk. You will find that same sort of error correcting code on a lot of digital media.
Now with CD's, you were storing the virgin signal. Even when a pop occured, it was recorded at twice the frequency humans could percieve, so most of the time you just don't notice. DVD's store a highly compressed, lossy version of the signal. You don't have as much information redundancy, and you have a much higher information density, AND you have an extra layer on each playable side of the disk.
This internal design provides DVD with the major advantage over CD. To improve the resolution and readability of two distinct layers, the minimum pit length of a single layer DVD is 0.4 micro meters, as compared to 0.83 micro meters for a CD. In addition, the DVD track pitch is reduced to 0.74 micro meters, less than half of CDs 1.6 micro meters. With the number of pits equating to capacity levels, DVDs reduced track pitch and pit size creates four times as many pits as CDs.
These numerous manufacturing and design differences lead to an expanded step for DVD production -- more extensive quality control. The DVD process requires optimum pit replication because smaller pits spaced closer together are more susceptible to jitter. In addition, the bonding of two discs requires no tilt in either, making the disc itself a more critical component to the production process
Hell I drive a Ford Focus. There are websites devoted to telling you how crappy the brakes are. Well with 2 drivers (my wife and I), 2.5 years (woohoo, only 6 more payments!) and 40,000 mile later, we have not had to replace the brakes once. I might add that I, my wife, and most of her brothers and sister learned to drive stick on that car. The clutch is still going strong.
My point is that EVERY mass produced item has a few bad runs. If you produce a million of something you will have a few hundred people who will have a crappy experience. You can match horror story for horror story for any consumer product out there. I don't think people remember the bitch sessions on slashdot about the early Xboxes being DOA, or dieing in a puff of smoke.
I don't mean to take away from your suffering[sic]. I am just trying to give this thread some balance.
Yeah, Necromancers. How many times has someone come to you asking to revivce as dead machine or restore a delete file?
Since when was LSD-25 a spell component for SELECT INTO?
I agree with the poster above, but I would like to add a twist. I have found that few successful programs are successful at simply programming. To be truely successful, you must be good at learning to program.
It doesn't matter how much you can do or have done. The market for programmers will always be in untested areas doing the impossible, or at least the highly improbable.
In the end, your actual training and experience is bunk, unless it used as the basis for learning more. The truely gifted programmer does not build static project. He or she builds a tome of routines and knowledge that are the foundations for code used decades later.
Meditate on this, Grasshopper
What good are these CPU hogging, network lagging programs if they aren't delivering pirated software and p0rn? I won't stand for this abomination!
Well, at least until the next time I need to download the newest slackware...
What we need is some gateway product to get young kids hooked on programming.
It'll be just like in the good old days, when every job had an entrance exam. And maybe, just maybe, degrees will stop becoming a perfunctory sheet of velum on the wall, and go back to being a foundation for future learning.
Amen
That and they have to be redesigned for each mission.
In this case, electrical charge. The rocks and pebbles "stick" to each other as a result. Even under the effects of Earth's gravity, this stickyness factor is a greater force than weight.
If you remember, an aerospace engineer is credited with saying that bumblebees can't fly. (It's actually a misquote.) At that scale, air resistance is a greater influence than weight. They are constantly falling, but their terminal velocity is so rediculously slow that their puny little wings can push them up at a greater rate. Kind of like a blimb with a negative bouyancy.
It wasn't until Buzz Aldrin's EVA during the last Gemini mission that they had worked out a set of maneuvers and restraints to make sure that when an astronaut turned a knob, he didn't turn instead.
Now, an ant is never free floating. She always has something to hold onto, the tunnel. But if we have learned anything in space, you really can't assume anything. You have to observe it and see how it actually behaves.
Take fire for instance. You take it for granted here on earth that you can see the flames. Well, flames are caused by convection, which does't happen in micro-gravity. Hot air has the same "weight" as cold air. Instead the plasma forms a sphere that is tricky to see. Smoke does not rise from the fire for the very same reason.
With that sort of information, NASA found they had to design completely new fire detection systems for the ISS.
Launch Preparations: $130 million
Anti-Grav Ant Colony: $2000
The fact that 30 years after we put man on the moon, this is the best NASA can come up with: Unfathomible.
You know, how about we try seeing how ants tunnel in Lunar Regolith, or Martian soil. That would be intersting.
This is great for the kids, but I think it just shows how far NASA has NOT come.
CADE. I thank you, good people- there shall be no money; all shall
eat and drink on my score, and I will apparel them all in one
livery, that they may agree like brothers and worship me their
lord.
DICK. The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.
CADE. Nay, that I mean to do. Is not this a lamentable thing, that
of the skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment? That
parchment, being scribbl'd o'er, should undo a man? Some say the
bee stings; but I say 'tis the bee's wax; for I did but seal once
to a thing, and I was never mine own man since. How now! Who's
there?
-- William Shakespear (Henry IV Part II, Act IV, Scene IV)
If you don't believe me that the real NTC is in the desert, get the Video tape[A&E's Online Store].
My brother was in OPFOR when they shot it, and is in a few scenes. (He is the 6'4" blonde in the crowd scenes.)
That gag hit an artery I think...
I like it.