I think part of the confusion here is that you're confusing the word "backup" with the word "archive". They're not the same thing, though a lot of IT people try to use backups as archives, which is why folks cling to archaic technology like tape.
Hard-drives aren't intended for long-term storage, but that's okay because backups don't have to last long-term. Backups are short-term, by definition. They just have to last long enough to guarantee that you have two or three complete backups of the data, preferably with a couple of those backups off-site and offline at any given time.
Archives, by contrast, provide the ability to fetch an ancient version of some file. Although those can be implemented using tape, they can also be implemented through a version control system. Doing so has the advantage of more rapid availability of the old data, lower overhead (you don't have to call somebody from IT to go digging through a tape vault for an ancient backup tape), and eliminating the need for long-term storage entirely because now even the old versions of the files are being backed up regularly---backups that really only need to last until the drives have their next turn in the backup rotation....
The thing is, SSDs are expensive primarily because of economies of scale. If a lot of major manufacturers started making these drives available for $100 bucks as a feature, you'd see much wider adoption, and it would be more profitable to build additional fabrication plants that would bring the costs down immensely. Even now, 32 GB USB flash sticks cost on the order of $70. SSDs cost twice as much solely because the controllers are made in such limited quantities.
I have drives that are still running after 12 years in continuous use. I also have drives that were replaced after as little as 9 months because they failed suddenly (spin up and right back down, make grinding noises, or won't spin up at all). I've experienced both extremes from most of the major hard drive vendors (every vendor I've bought drives from). There's a wide degree of variation between drive models when it comes to how long they last, and sometimes even wide discrepancies between batches of a given drive model. Some drives are even predictable as far as how long they will last (within +/- tens of hours). Those are the scary ones.
The only safe hard drive is one containing the fifth copy of your data, buried in a lead-lined concrete vault in the middle of a Utah salt flat with armed guards, guard dogs, razor wire, and no electrical connection to the outside world.
Particularly when the silicon runs on a fraction of that voltage, so you have all that conversion loss at the far end.
In fact, IIRC, it's the exact opposite. Most electronics like CPUs and RAM run cooler on lower voltage (at least up until the point where they start to misbehave at the desired clock speed).
The worst part about this law? Personal electronics in the cockpits of small planes make then safer when used for flight-related purposes, and using personal electronics for purposes unrelated to flying is already against the rules, so this law can't possibly do anything but cause harm. I can't tell you how many stories I've heard about:
pilots using cell phones/PDAs to check weather.com or wunderground.com or whatever so they can actually see the weather system
pilots using cell phones to talk to the tower after a radio failure
pilots using laptops for various flight operations calculations or to more rapidly search the operator manuals for an esoteric problem or...
Might as well provide a link to professional pilot discussion on the subject. To sum up the thread, they mostly think our Congress are a bunch of morons. Usually if the people you are regulating think you are utterly incompetent, that's a clear sign that you should take a step back, pull your head out of your backside, and rethink your position.
Sadly, Congress in their infinite ineptitude, will almost certainly blaze ahead and pass this law, thus dooming some flight a few years from now that could have been saved with personal electronics in the cockpit. And, of course, they'll never know that the flight could have been saved because they aren't smart enough to recognize the hundreds of times this has already happened.
I think we need a constitutional "cooling off period" amendment that says that with the exception of laws to provide financial relief, no law may be passed in response to any accident, catastrophe, or other incident, whether of natural or human cause, for a minimum of one year (or even two) after the incident in question. Such a law would have prevented so many of Congress's worst screw-ups. Hmm. I think I've said this before.
We can get legislation to ban laptops, but we can't get the HORRENDOUSLY dangerous rest regulations fixed.
One plane harmlessly overshot its target because somebody was paying attention to a laptop, and now all personal electronics are a threat to our safety and national security. The stewards/stewardesses noticed that they were later than expected, asked the pilots what was up, and they realized their mistake and corrected it. No one was ever in any real danger because we already have safety rules to ensure that there are enough people on the plane to limit the danger posed by these sorts of mistakes. The system worked. But Congress just isn't capable of understanding that. They need someone to blame because the incident got media attention.
Unfortunately, Congress really is that simple-minded. Whenever something bad happens, their primary goal is to find someone or something to blame, then try to come up with a change to the law that will at least appear to thwart whatever scapegoat they chose, all while failing to address any of the real problems, simply because they aren't sufficiently aware of what those problems are to be making these sorts of policy decisions.
The FAA should be making these rules, not Congress. That's why we have federal regulatory agencies. If they aren't making the right rules, Congress should ask the President to replace the head of the agency with someone else. As soon as Congress gets into the regulatory business, we all get screwed. The only role Congress should be playing in this is approving the budget for the new equipment if it was requested by the FAA. If it wasn't requested by the FAA, then the whole bill is crap. Either way, the rest of it is crap.
The point was that it is possible for a mic input with the gain boost disabled to serve as a line in, as lots of hardware does this already. Whether the cheap, crappy sound hardware built into a laptop will actually bother is another question, but clearly it's possible.:-)
I'm not talking about the bandgap. I'm talking about the fact that the surfaces of most CMOS chips have a series of narrow slots through which the light must pass. Call it gaps, call it slots, call it circuit traces, call it whatever. These parts don't have such structures, and that significantly changes the angles of light that these sorts of parts can detect.
And I reiterate the question: do the benefits of absorbing all light (including light from near-parallel angles) outweigh the problems that this causes?
Fair enough, but we're talking about modern digital gear here. Also, I would argue that specifying the input levels as power into a given load is really just specifying sensitivity by a different name; at 600 ohms of input impedance, 1 dBm = 1 dBu, IIRC.
Also, my second paragraph was backwards in that the diffraction increases as the aperture gets smaller. The smaller sensor thus compounds the problem further.
Just to clarify, I wasn't referring to the lens diameter. I'm well aware that you get a more focused image with larger optics. I was referring to the diameter of the iris, and was confusing the depth of field with the focus.
An output has a power measurement. An input has a sensitivity measurement. The term "power" has no meaning in the context of an input unless you're talking about the DC phantom power voltage that some mic inputs provide.
The word you're looking for is "gain", not "power". Some microphones also require power (either of the low-voltage "plug-in power" variety or full 48V phantom power), but if you plug those devices into a line input, you'll get no sound at all.
As for the differences in grades of gear, yes, to some degree, that's true, with the caveat that some $10/channel hardware will outperform the $100/channel hardware and other $10/channel hardware will be utter excrement. In the audio space, there's often more correlation between price and marketing costs than between price and product quality, IMHO....
More to the point, the older the gear, the more expensive it has to be before you are likely to get good sound. There are exceptions, but in general, as the costs of the underlying components decrease, it becomes more practical to build higher quality gear for less money. Thus, a recently designed device that costs $50 is likely to sound as good as a ten-year-old device that costs $100. High quality gear gets cheaper to design and build over time. So the high end stuff today might or might not be a great improvement over the midrange stuff today, but either one is going to be a lot better than the midrange stuff from ten years ago, yet both may still be comparable to the high-end gear from ten years ago.
Not if you want any quality at all. Have you heard the noise levels on those pres? At least the line level inputs are usable (albeit not great) with an external preamplifier, but the mic inputs? They're basically for cheap $5 headsets so that people can use them for A/V chatting....
Mod parent up. That's the real reason why the inputs are disappearing from laptops. If you're trying to record something of any quality, the audio hardware built into computers doesn't even begin to cut it. The latency alone will make you want to throw your machine across the room. So:
People trying to do any real recording are going to buy a decent outboard interface with decent preamps.
People who don't care about quality will likely use the built-in mic on the laptop's bezel.
People who want better isolation for things like video chat but aren't very serious about quality can pick up a cheap USB mic or headset.
Either way, the audio input jack sits there unused.
No one is arguing about whether you'll get distortion if you feed a line level signal into a mic level input, fail to check your levels, and don't enable AGC. The same is likely true for a mic input cranked all the way open.
That said, given that some microphones can exceed line level output by themselves without a preamp (the maximum output of a CAD M9, for example, is +8dBV), it should be possible if you set things up correctly to feed a line level signal into any decent mic input. In some pro gear, they don't even bother to take the preamp out of the signal path for line level inputs; the preamps have to be able to handle that level of input anyway.
That said, I'm talking about relatively high end gear set up by somebody who is paying attention. When you deal with low end gear that has no padding or trim on the input side of the preamp, no gain adjust on the preamp, and limited headroom in the preamp, you almost certainly have to turn down the output of the device providing the line level signal. Even then, it can be done, though. You just have to do it right.
So yes, the line level input is gradually going away, and for precisely the reason stated.
Odd, I get crisper pictures with smaller apertures, all else being equal, and I'm pretty sure everybody else in the world does, too. You've got it completely backwards there.
This is about the laws of physics. I'm sure somebody will correct me if I'm not explaining this very well, but...
There's a limit to how precisely a lens can focus light. Now, in theory, as the aperture gets smaller, the diffusion decreases, so you might think that the small lenses would be result in a more precise image than larger ones. However, with those smaller lenses come smaller image sensors, which means that even if the lens can focus light to a smaller point, the pixels are also smaller, thus canceling out much of this improvement.
The bigger problem is that the smaller the lens, the greater the impact of even tiny lens aberrations on the resolving power of the lens. A speck of dust on a 1.5mm lens makes a huge difference, whereas it can be largely ignored on a lens with a 72mm diameter.
Also, as resolution increases, light gathering decreases. That's pretty fundamental to the laws of physics. Think about the bucket analogy. You have four square buckets measuring 1 foot by 1 foot. You place them side by side during a thunderstorm. You get another bucket that is two feet on each side. You place it beside the others. The same amount of rain (approximately) falls onto the four small buckets as the single large bucket, thus the large bucket has four times the amount of water in it that any one of the smaller buckets does.
The same principle applies to pixels. All else being equal, resolution and light gathering are inversely proportional. Small cameras are already hampered pretty badly by light gathering because of their small lenses. Increasing the resolution just makes this worse. I can tell the difference in noise between my old 6MP DSLR and my 10MP DSLR. I can't imagine what 20MP in a camera phone would look like.:-D
I think the real question should not be whether we can make smaller cameras, but rather whether we can make existing small cameras better by improving the light gathering. This technology might do that---whether it will work better than some of the newer CMOS sensor designs that already move the light-gathering material to the front remains to be seen---but at some point, making things smaller just means that they're easier to lose. I think we're at that point, if not past it....
With silicon, having to pass through narrow gaps should reduce the amount of light coming at the sensor from an unexpected angle as would occur due to lens flare, imperfections in the lens, etc. Without that, I'd expect the clarity of the image to be impacted. Am I missing something, or is this just trading one problem for another?
Also, how does this improve over already commercially available newer CMOS designs that push the photo-sensitive material to the front surface?
Slashdot Mirror
I think you meant the loser?
I think part of the confusion here is that you're confusing the word "backup" with the word "archive". They're not the same thing, though a lot of IT people try to use backups as archives, which is why folks cling to archaic technology like tape.
Hard-drives aren't intended for long-term storage, but that's okay because backups don't have to last long-term. Backups are short-term, by definition. They just have to last long enough to guarantee that you have two or three complete backups of the data, preferably with a couple of those backups off-site and offline at any given time.
Archives, by contrast, provide the ability to fetch an ancient version of some file. Although those can be implemented using tape, they can also be implemented through a version control system. Doing so has the advantage of more rapid availability of the old data, lower overhead (you don't have to call somebody from IT to go digging through a tape vault for an ancient backup tape), and eliminating the need for long-term storage entirely because now even the old versions of the files are being backed up regularly---backups that really only need to last until the drives have their next turn in the backup rotation....
The thing is, SSDs are expensive primarily because of economies of scale. If a lot of major manufacturers started making these drives available for $100 bucks as a feature, you'd see much wider adoption, and it would be more profitable to build additional fabrication plants that would bring the costs down immensely. Even now, 32 GB USB flash sticks cost on the order of $70. SSDs cost twice as much solely because the controllers are made in such limited quantities.
I have drives that are still running after 12 years in continuous use. I also have drives that were replaced after as little as 9 months because they failed suddenly (spin up and right back down, make grinding noises, or won't spin up at all). I've experienced both extremes from most of the major hard drive vendors (every vendor I've bought drives from). There's a wide degree of variation between drive models when it comes to how long they last, and sometimes even wide discrepancies between batches of a given drive model. Some drives are even predictable as far as how long they will last (within +/- tens of hours). Those are the scary ones.
The only safe hard drive is one containing the fifth copy of your data, buried in a lead-lined concrete vault in the middle of a Utah salt flat with armed guards, guard dogs, razor wire, and no electrical connection to the outside world.
Particularly when the silicon runs on a fraction of that voltage, so you have all that conversion loss at the far end.
In fact, IIRC, it's the exact opposite. Most electronics like CPUs and RAM run cooler on lower voltage (at least up until the point where they start to misbehave at the desired clock speed).
The worst part about this law? Personal electronics in the cockpits of small planes make then safer when used for flight-related purposes, and using personal electronics for purposes unrelated to flying is already against the rules, so this law can't possibly do anything but cause harm. I can't tell you how many stories I've heard about:
Might as well provide a link to professional pilot discussion on the subject. To sum up the thread, they mostly think our Congress are a bunch of morons. Usually if the people you are regulating think you are utterly incompetent, that's a clear sign that you should take a step back, pull your head out of your backside, and rethink your position.
Sadly, Congress in their infinite ineptitude, will almost certainly blaze ahead and pass this law, thus dooming some flight a few years from now that could have been saved with personal electronics in the cockpit. And, of course, they'll never know that the flight could have been saved because they aren't smart enough to recognize the hundreds of times this has already happened.
I think we need a constitutional "cooling off period" amendment that says that with the exception of laws to provide financial relief, no law may be passed in response to any accident, catastrophe, or other incident, whether of natural or human cause, for a minimum of one year (or even two) after the incident in question. Such a law would have prevented so many of Congress's worst screw-ups. Hmm. I think I've said this before.
One plane harmlessly overshot its target because somebody was paying attention to a laptop, and now all personal electronics are a threat to our safety and national security. The stewards/stewardesses noticed that they were later than expected, asked the pilots what was up, and they realized their mistake and corrected it. No one was ever in any real danger because we already have safety rules to ensure that there are enough people on the plane to limit the danger posed by these sorts of mistakes. The system worked. But Congress just isn't capable of understanding that. They need someone to blame because the incident got media attention.
Unfortunately, Congress really is that simple-minded. Whenever something bad happens, their primary goal is to find someone or something to blame, then try to come up with a change to the law that will at least appear to thwart whatever scapegoat they chose, all while failing to address any of the real problems, simply because they aren't sufficiently aware of what those problems are to be making these sorts of policy decisions.
The FAA should be making these rules, not Congress. That's why we have federal regulatory agencies. If they aren't making the right rules, Congress should ask the President to replace the head of the agency with someone else. As soon as Congress gets into the regulatory business, we all get screwed. The only role Congress should be playing in this is approving the budget for the new equipment if it was requested by the FAA. If it wasn't requested by the FAA, then the whole bill is crap. Either way, the rest of it is crap.
The point was that it is possible for a mic input with the gain boost disabled to serve as a line in, as lots of hardware does this already. Whether the cheap, crappy sound hardware built into a laptop will actually bother is another question, but clearly it's possible. :-)
I'm not talking about the bandgap. I'm talking about the fact that the surfaces of most CMOS chips have a series of narrow slots through which the light must pass. Call it gaps, call it slots, call it circuit traces, call it whatever. These parts don't have such structures, and that significantly changes the angles of light that these sorts of parts can detect.
And I reiterate the question: do the benefits of absorbing all light (including light from near-parallel angles) outweigh the problems that this causes?
Fair enough, but we're talking about modern digital gear here. Also, I would argue that specifying the input levels as power into a given load is really just specifying sensitivity by a different name; at 600 ohms of input impedance, 1 dBm = 1 dBu, IIRC.
Err... diffraction, not diffusion.
Also, my second paragraph was backwards in that the diffraction increases as the aperture gets smaller. The smaller sensor thus compounds the problem further.
Just to clarify, I wasn't referring to the lens diameter. I'm well aware that you get a more focused image with larger optics. I was referring to the diameter of the iris, and was confusing the depth of field with the focus.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking of. You're right. My brain was spacing out. Mea culpa.
An output has a power measurement. An input has a sensitivity measurement. The term "power" has no meaning in the context of an input unless you're talking about the DC phantom power voltage that some mic inputs provide.
Either way, it's still less sick than the ones who want to see Lady Gaga starve and...
I've never seen a wire-wound resistor above 500 ohms, so you'd have to be nuts to try that. :-)
The word you're looking for is "gain", not "power". Some microphones also require power (either of the low-voltage "plug-in power" variety or full 48V phantom power), but if you plug those devices into a line input, you'll get no sound at all.
As for the differences in grades of gear, yes, to some degree, that's true, with the caveat that some $10/channel hardware will outperform the $100/channel hardware and other $10/channel hardware will be utter excrement. In the audio space, there's often more correlation between price and marketing costs than between price and product quality, IMHO....
More to the point, the older the gear, the more expensive it has to be before you are likely to get good sound. There are exceptions, but in general, as the costs of the underlying components decrease, it becomes more practical to build higher quality gear for less money. Thus, a recently designed device that costs $50 is likely to sound as good as a ten-year-old device that costs $100. High quality gear gets cheaper to design and build over time. So the high end stuff today might or might not be a great improvement over the midrange stuff today, but either one is going to be a lot better than the midrange stuff from ten years ago, yet both may still be comparable to the high-end gear from ten years ago.
Not if you want any quality at all. Have you heard the noise levels on those pres? At least the line level inputs are usable (albeit not great) with an external preamplifier, but the mic inputs? They're basically for cheap $5 headsets so that people can use them for A/V chatting....
Mod parent up. That's the real reason why the inputs are disappearing from laptops. If you're trying to record something of any quality, the audio hardware built into computers doesn't even begin to cut it. The latency alone will make you want to throw your machine across the room. So:
Either way, the audio input jack sits there unused.
No one is arguing about whether you'll get distortion if you feed a line level signal into a mic level input, fail to check your levels, and don't enable AGC. The same is likely true for a mic input cranked all the way open.
That said, given that some microphones can exceed line level output by themselves without a preamp (the maximum output of a CAD M9, for example, is +8dBV), it should be possible if you set things up correctly to feed a line level signal into any decent mic input. In some pro gear, they don't even bother to take the preamp out of the signal path for line level inputs; the preamps have to be able to handle that level of input anyway.
That said, I'm talking about relatively high end gear set up by somebody who is paying attention. When you deal with low end gear that has no padding or trim on the input side of the preamp, no gain adjust on the preamp, and limited headroom in the preamp, you almost certainly have to turn down the output of the device providing the line level signal. Even then, it can be done, though. You just have to do it right.
So yes, the line level input is gradually going away, and for precisely the reason stated.
appose
Odd, I get crisper pictures with smaller apertures, all else being equal, and I'm pretty sure everybody else in the world does, too. You've got it completely backwards there.
This is about the laws of physics. I'm sure somebody will correct me if I'm not explaining this very well, but...
There's a limit to how precisely a lens can focus light. Now, in theory, as the aperture gets smaller, the diffusion decreases, so you might think that the small lenses would be result in a more precise image than larger ones. However, with those smaller lenses come smaller image sensors, which means that even if the lens can focus light to a smaller point, the pixels are also smaller, thus canceling out much of this improvement.
The bigger problem is that the smaller the lens, the greater the impact of even tiny lens aberrations on the resolving power of the lens. A speck of dust on a 1.5mm lens makes a huge difference, whereas it can be largely ignored on a lens with a 72mm diameter.
Also, as resolution increases, light gathering decreases. That's pretty fundamental to the laws of physics. Think about the bucket analogy. You have four square buckets measuring 1 foot by 1 foot. You place them side by side during a thunderstorm. You get another bucket that is two feet on each side. You place it beside the others. The same amount of rain (approximately) falls onto the four small buckets as the single large bucket, thus the large bucket has four times the amount of water in it that any one of the smaller buckets does.
The same principle applies to pixels. All else being equal, resolution and light gathering are inversely proportional. Small cameras are already hampered pretty badly by light gathering because of their small lenses. Increasing the resolution just makes this worse. I can tell the difference in noise between my old 6MP DSLR and my 10MP DSLR. I can't imagine what 20MP in a camera phone would look like. :-D
I think the real question should not be whether we can make smaller cameras, but rather whether we can make existing small cameras better by improving the light gathering. This technology might do that---whether it will work better than some of the newer CMOS sensor designs that already move the light-gathering material to the front remains to be seen---but at some point, making things smaller just means that they're easier to lose. I think we're at that point, if not past it....
With silicon, having to pass through narrow gaps should reduce the amount of light coming at the sensor from an unexpected angle as would occur due to lens flare, imperfections in the lens, etc. Without that, I'd expect the clarity of the image to be impacted. Am I missing something, or is this just trading one problem for another?
Also, how does this improve over already commercially available newer CMOS designs that push the photo-sensitive material to the front surface?
What do they place nuclear power beside?