Real Faraday cages are an unmitigated pain to deal with. The ones used for RF testing typically have a heavy door, like a walk-in refrigerator, with conductive fingers all around the doorframe that seal against the door. It's not enough to have metal; all the metal has to be connected. And slots will pass a wavelength up to the length of the slot.
The ones used for high-security classified work are even worse. They're made of welded metal panels. They're a few feet off the ground, so the underside can be checked. Any I/O is fibre optic. Power goes in through huge low-pass filters. Air goes through metal mesh filters. Double doors work like an airlock, and there's a compressed-air system to force the RF-tight door seals. Periodic testing (transmitter inside, receiver outside) insures the tank is really RF-tight.
Not a fun work environment.
Painting the walls with conductive paint is a joke.
There's nothing mysterious about any of this. RF propagation is well understood, and the test gear is easy to obtain. Ask any ham.
OK, we have a contest for people who contribute to open source software, and the prize is a license for proprietary closed-source software. What's wrong with this picture?
Ballmer used to call this "strategic complexity". As Ballmer once put it, when asked why Microsoft kept adding functions to Windows,
"If we stopped adding functions to Windows, it would become a commodity, like a BIOS. And Microsoft is not in the BIOS business".
There's no technical reason why an operating system has to be as bloated as Windows or Linux. Integrating Internet Explorer into the operating system was a business decision, not a technical one. And all that really meant was that IE's code was split up into various DLLs.
Technically, the "big OS" problem results from operating systems with poorly designed interprocess communication. When it's much easier and faster to call the kernel than another program, there's too much of a temptation to put stuff in the kernel. Both pre-NT Windows and UNIX had terrible interprocess communication systems, which is how we got to the mess we're in now.
On top of that classical problem, we now have the "DRM must be in the kernel" problem. DRM is really messing up operating system architecture. "Video streaming" crap is in the kernel, which means codecs with too many privileges and inevitably, codecs as attack vectors. Games want to have "drivers" to enforce their DRM. Even the iPod service wants privileged code in Linux. That has to stop.
That you need a PC to get your iPod connected to the iTunes store always seemed like a temporary measure. All it should really need is some kind of network connection. Like, er, Zune. Or a docking station that both recharged it and connected it to the mothership. Or a cellular network connection.
When the iPod came out, home routers were expensive and rare. But now everybody into home entertainment gear has one. And WiFi is everywhere. So it's no longer necessary for
entertainment boxes to involve a PC.
This is exactly what you need:
DVD Storage Box - Corrugated Cardboard
Holds 108 DVDs. 17x11-3/4x15-1/2. "Comes with 2 sets of 6 cell partitions and an interlocking lift-out tray. This allows for easy access to DVDs stored on bottom.
Made from 275# test brown corrugated. Comes with a 3" deep cover and die-cut handle holes for easy transport." $11 each.
Then get some standard steel shelving designed for records boxes, and you'll be able to store about 1200 disks per 4 lineal feet of shelf space and still get at the disks. Since they're standard sized records boxes, any records-retention warehouse, like Iron Mountain, can store them for you.
The last time I saw production code that reversed a linked list, it was because someone wanted the last element of the list. So they reversed the list and extracted the head. After reading the code for a while, I realized that I was looking at C code written by a LISP programmer. I finally rewrote the thing to use C++ collection classes. A list wasn't even the right structure; a C++ vector was, because the collection was built once and then used millions of times.
Be suspicious of code that does elaborate munging on pointers. Stuff like that should be encapsulated in general-purpose routines. If you see it in application-specific code, somebody is probably doing something wrong. And it's very likely that such code will be broken during maintenance.
Programmers should know how to reverse a list, but shouldn't actually do it.
If you're really consulting, not becoming a psuedo-employee, you definitely don't want to sign that. That's an employee kind of thing, where the assumption is that you have no other customers. If you do have multiple clients, you don't want to limit the areas in which you can work. Such NDAs must be very narrowly drawn. You can work this out. Ask them what NDAs they ask from, say, McKinsey people.
I once turned down consulting at Xerox PARC for that reason. They wanted an overreaching agreement for a part time deal.
A few years ago, I got a student's misdirected message that said "I am going to kill you tonight". I received this because I own a domain in ".com" that's the same as a boarding school in ".co.uk", and some of the teenagers there haven't figured out the domain name system yet. This was shortly after Columbine, so it seemed important to do something. So I called up the school, after some difficulty got someone there after hours, and read them the message. They weren't too worried, explaining to me that it was a 13 year old sending the message.
Just because there's a contractual constraint on selling something doesn't mean it isn't income. In fact, one of the common tax miseries is receiving something you can't sell, like restricted stock, and having to pay taxes on it before you can sell it.
This could be construed as "income from a barter exchange" by the IRS. EvE should send him a 1099-B form at the end of the year, showing that as income. In the words of the IRS:
The Internet has provided a medium for new growth in the bartering exchange industry. This growth prompts the following reminder: Barter exchanges are required to file Form 1099-B for all transactions unless certain exceptions are met. Refer to Barter Exchanges for additional information on this subject.
IRS tax topic "Bartering income
This is a very real issue, because there are active markets for converting ISK to dollars and back. There are buyers, sellers, quotes, and services that track price trends. That's not an "informal exchange of services on a noncommercial basis", which the IRS doesn't tax. That's a non-dollar credit, which the IRS converts to US dollars at prevailing rates and does tax. The numbers here are big enough to attract IRS interest.
Probably should have been called "Apollo 2.0", but that would have been embarassing.
The names for the boosters, "Aries I" and "Aries V", aren't that great either. There's already been an "Aries I" booster, used for a missile defense test in 1992.
I saw that done years ago at a major Hollywood animation studio. The internal network, used for feature animation, was completely isolated from the outside. The external machines were set up as kiosks, and unconnected from anything else. But this was in 1998.
By 2002, they weren't doing that any more. They'd switched from SGI to Windows, and Windows needs to talk to the mothership in Redmond.
Encrypting something twice is effectively creating a new cypher system. Always remember Friedman's remark, "No new cypher
is worth looking at unless it comes from someone who has already broken a very
difficult one."
(If you don't know who William Friedman was, you probably shouldn't be designing cyphers.)
The "e-Ink" guys need to shut up until they make their technology work. What they have is an expensive overlay film for existing displays that makes them reflective. What they've been talking about for years are cheap high resolution flexible displays, which they don't have. Eventually, someone may do that, but it probably won't be e-Ink.
There's a huge amount of automated trading going on, and there has been for years. The effects on the market are well known. For one thing, arbitrage margins are now tiny. If there are some things known to be related, like the stocks underlying a mutual fund vs the fund price, or crude oil vs. gasoline, or futures prices vs. current prices, program traders are tracking that relationship constantly and will trade if a spread develops. As a result, there are no big spreads in those areas. Once enough traders are doing it, it stops working.
Elaborate attempts are made to find more complex relationships like that to exploit, which is what derivatives are really all about. That, too, has been done to death.
As a result, efforts are made to exploit very tiny arbitrage margins by making huge opposing trades. This works until there's some common failure mode for both side of the trade. (See "Long Term Capital Management" and "portfolio insurance").
Then there's automated velocity trading; if it's going up, buy it quickly. Now that produces market instability. This was popular during the dot-com era. It's less popular now.
None of this is new; it dates back to at least the 1970s.
Their patent application number is 20060066428, which you can look up at the USPTO site. The title is "Low energy magnetic actuator"
"A low energy magnet actuator allows magnetic fields to be turned on and off using a small amount of energy. The magnetic actuator according to the invention generally includes a base suitable for the support of a plurality of magnets. An actuatable shield is positioned in relation to the plurality of magnets so that it effectively blocks the magnetic field when it is positioned over at least one of the magnets. The magnetic fields of the plurality of magnets interact in a manner that allows low energy actuation of the shield."
It's just a thing for shielding a magnet with another piece of metal. The patent application does not claim an energy gain.
I was really hoping they'd claimed an energy gain, which might trigger the USPTO's answer to perpetual motion machines. The USPTO has the right to ask for a working model, but they very seldom exercise it. Except for perpetual motion machines and antigravity machines.
The application has been assigned to an examiner, and is in routine processing.
If you had five new users each spend half a day working through simple tasks for OpenOffice Writer, Draw, Impress, and Calc, you'd collect enough info to make the thing much more usable. That's not a massive effort. It might even be possible to get some company that uses OpenOffice to fund such a modest effort. And it would increase developer consciousness of usability, which is badly needed.
The technology has a coefficient of performance greater than 100%.
The operation of the technology (i.e. the creation of energy) is not derived from the degradation of its component parts.
There is no identifiable environmental source of the energy (as might be witnessed by a cooling of ambient air temperature).
The coefficient of performance is not efficiency. It's the reciprocal of efficiency.
Most refrigerators and heat pumps have a coefficient of performance greater than 100%. 200-350% is typical. The coefficient of performance of an ideal heat pump, and the efficiency of an ideal heat engine, both working between the same temperature difference, will have a product of 1.
So Steom can meet its claims with any off-the-shelf heat pump.
Since they talk about "magnetics" so much, they're probably fooling around with something exotic like a magneto-caloric heat pump. This is a cute idea that's been around for a while, requires very strong magnetic fields, is sometimes used for cyrogenic cooling, and has been considered for auto air conditioners. There are buzzword friendly papers like "Preparation of
Superferromagnetic Lanthanide Nanoparticulate Magnetic Refrigerants" on the subject. If they've made that work, they may have something with product potential. Maybe. But it's not "free energy".
The era of "record companies" may be drawing to a close. Because they really don't do very much. Once, they found the artists, financed them, operated the recording studios, had the recordings made, manufactured the records, shipped them to distributors, collected the money, and handled the publicity. Now, they find the artists, finance them, collect the money, and handle the publicity. The actual making and distribution of the music is outsourced to other companies who will deal with anybody. Anybody can get CDs made; the going rate is about $1000 for 1000 retail-ready disks. Anybody can book studio time. Anybody can get music onto a download site. Basically, any band with a few thousand dollars can get product out the door. Doesn't make them rich and famous. But the mechanics of making the product are no problem.
So record companies today are really in the venture capital business - they provide front money and publicity. But they take a much bigger cut than other organizations that provide money and publicity in other industries. That's a vulnerability.
We're seeing this vulnerability exploited. There are now "Myspace bands" and "Walmart bands". So far, the "Web 2.0"/social networking boom hasn't produced a mechanism for making a band a national name, but that may come.
That's the real threat to the RIAA. Not piracy. Disintermediation.
It's a real issue. Historically, water shortages have brought down several civilizations, usually those with failed irrigation cultures.
It could have been worse. A few years ago, there was much talk of "privatizing" the world's water supply. Enron entered the water-trading business. (Their web site for water trading was Water2Water.com.) Fortunately, this didn't catch on, except in Australia, which does have water trading.
OpenOffice has made real progress. As a long-time user, I've watched it go from "totally sucks" to "almost works" to "works, but is irritating at times". Right now, it works mechanically, but has more sharp edges than Office. Compare, say, OpenOffice word completion with Microsoft Word.
OpenOffice will try to do the same dumb thing twice. Microsoft Word will stop fighting you after the first time.
And, let's face it, OpenOffice help information needs help. If you ask for help on something, you often either can't find it, get info about the wrong thing, or get info which doesn't tell you exactly where to find something in the menu system. It's little stuff like that which affects user likability.
All these things are fixable, but they're not the kind of problems that get fixed via Bugzilla complaints. The open source process isn't good at fixing usability issues. It takes things like videotaping users struggling with a program to get these kinds of problems fixed.
Usability testing is simple enough. You make up some tasks, like "Write a letter on company letterhead, then print it and its envelope". You videotape a few people doing this, with a system that records both the screen and the user's face and voice. You watch the videos (this is the time-consuming part) and note all the places where the user got stuck, had to undo something, or lost time. Those are your usability bugs. The goal is a seamless user experience, or "flow".
It would be useful to have video like that on SourceForge or YouTube. It's boring, but it would give more developers a sense of what usability is really about.
Not quite, but the coding scheme that makes CDs and DVDs resistant to dust and scratches works much like that. Big blocks have an error correcting code appended, and then the bits of the data plus error correcting code are rearranged and spread widely across the block. So when you lose a contiguous set of bits, you can replace it by using data distributed across the block.
It's a good error correction scheme, but it's not exactly new. Every CD player in the world has this. CDs aren't encrypted (there's no key, just an well-known algorithm), but you could mix encryption in if you wanted. This wouldn't help the error recovery.
Actually, this is more like Trinitron vs. shadow mask technology for CRTs. For many years, Sony Trinitrons were the best CRT technology, producing a better image than the older shadow mask CRTs, But as electron beam aiming improved, shadow mask caught up and passed Trinitrons, which were more expensive to make.
Slashdot Mirror
Real Faraday cages are an unmitigated pain to deal with. The ones used for RF testing typically have a heavy door, like a walk-in refrigerator, with conductive fingers all around the doorframe that seal against the door. It's not enough to have metal; all the metal has to be connected. And slots will pass a wavelength up to the length of the slot.
The ones used for high-security classified work are even worse. They're made of welded metal panels. They're a few feet off the ground, so the underside can be checked. Any I/O is fibre optic. Power goes in through huge low-pass filters. Air goes through metal mesh filters. Double doors work like an airlock, and there's a compressed-air system to force the RF-tight door seals. Periodic testing (transmitter inside, receiver outside) insures the tank is really RF-tight.
Not a fun work environment.
Painting the walls with conductive paint is a joke.
There's nothing mysterious about any of this. RF propagation is well understood, and the test gear is easy to obtain. Ask any ham.
OK, we have a contest for people who contribute to open source software, and the prize is a license for proprietary closed-source software. What's wrong with this picture?
Ballmer used to call this "strategic complexity". As Ballmer once put it, when asked why Microsoft kept adding functions to Windows, "If we stopped adding functions to Windows, it would become a commodity, like a BIOS. And Microsoft is not in the BIOS business".
There's no technical reason why an operating system has to be as bloated as Windows or Linux. Integrating Internet Explorer into the operating system was a business decision, not a technical one. And all that really meant was that IE's code was split up into various DLLs.
Technically, the "big OS" problem results from operating systems with poorly designed interprocess communication. When it's much easier and faster to call the kernel than another program, there's too much of a temptation to put stuff in the kernel. Both pre-NT Windows and UNIX had terrible interprocess communication systems, which is how we got to the mess we're in now.
On top of that classical problem, we now have the "DRM must be in the kernel" problem. DRM is really messing up operating system architecture. "Video streaming" crap is in the kernel, which means codecs with too many privileges and inevitably, codecs as attack vectors. Games want to have "drivers" to enforce their DRM. Even the iPod service wants privileged code in Linux. That has to stop.
Schwarzenegger signs game-restriction bill. The concept of the guy who played the Terminator, Conan, etc. coming out against violent images is hysterical.
That you need a PC to get your iPod connected to the iTunes store always seemed like a temporary measure. All it should really need is some kind of network connection. Like, er, Zune. Or a docking station that both recharged it and connected it to the mothership. Or a cellular network connection.
When the iPod came out, home routers were expensive and rare. But now everybody into home entertainment gear has one. And WiFi is everywhere. So it's no longer necessary for entertainment boxes to involve a PC.
This reduces the case for Linux iPod support.
Eric Raymond? This is the guy who ran VA Linux into the ground, right? This is like getting economic advice from Enron management.
Oh, right, Bush did that.
This is exactly what you need:
DVD Storage Box - Corrugated Cardboard Holds 108 DVDs. 17x11-3/4x15-1/2. "Comes with 2 sets of 6 cell partitions and an interlocking lift-out tray. This allows for easy access to DVDs stored on bottom. Made from 275# test brown corrugated. Comes with a 3" deep cover and die-cut handle holes for easy transport." $11 each.
Then get some standard steel shelving designed for records boxes, and you'll be able to store about 1200 disks per 4 lineal feet of shelf space and still get at the disks. Since they're standard sized records boxes, any records-retention warehouse, like Iron Mountain, can store them for you.
The last time I saw production code that reversed a linked list, it was because someone wanted the last element of the list. So they reversed the list and extracted the head. After reading the code for a while, I realized that I was looking at C code written by a LISP programmer. I finally rewrote the thing to use C++ collection classes. A list wasn't even the right structure; a C++ vector was, because the collection was built once and then used millions of times.
Be suspicious of code that does elaborate munging on pointers. Stuff like that should be encapsulated in general-purpose routines. If you see it in application-specific code, somebody is probably doing something wrong. And it's very likely that such code will be broken during maintenance.
Programmers should know how to reverse a list, but shouldn't actually do it.
If you're really consulting, not becoming a psuedo-employee, you definitely don't want to sign that. That's an employee kind of thing, where the assumption is that you have no other customers. If you do have multiple clients, you don't want to limit the areas in which you can work. Such NDAs must be very narrowly drawn. You can work this out. Ask them what NDAs they ask from, say, McKinsey people.
I once turned down consulting at Xerox PARC for that reason. They wanted an overreaching agreement for a part time deal.
A few years ago, I got a student's misdirected message that said "I am going to kill you tonight". I received this because I own a domain in ".com" that's the same as a boarding school in ".co.uk", and some of the teenagers there haven't figured out the domain name system yet. This was shortly after Columbine, so it seemed important to do something. So I called up the school, after some difficulty got someone there after hours, and read them the message. They weren't too worried, explaining to me that it was a 13 year old sending the message.
In the US, a SWAT team would have been sent.
Just because there's a contractual constraint on selling something doesn't mean it isn't income. In fact, one of the common tax miseries is receiving something you can't sell, like restricted stock, and having to pay taxes on it before you can sell it.
This could be construed as "income from a barter exchange" by the IRS. EvE should send him a 1099-B form at the end of the year, showing that as income. In the words of the IRS:
The Internet has provided a medium for new growth in the bartering exchange industry. This growth prompts the following reminder: Barter exchanges are required to file Form 1099-B for all transactions unless certain exceptions are met. Refer to Barter Exchanges for additional information on this subject. IRS tax topic "Bartering income
This is a very real issue, because there are active markets for converting ISK to dollars and back. There are buyers, sellers, quotes, and services that track price trends. That's not an "informal exchange of services on a noncommercial basis", which the IRS doesn't tax. That's a non-dollar credit, which the IRS converts to US dollars at prevailing rates and does tax. The numbers here are big enough to attract IRS interest.
Probably should have been called "Apollo 2.0", but that would have been embarassing.
The names for the boosters, "Aries I" and "Aries V", aren't that great either. There's already been an "Aries I" booster, used for a missile defense test in 1992.
Here's the General Accounting Office analysis of the program. GAO says it's already in trouble, and it hasn't even really been started yet. That's so NASA.
I saw that done years ago at a major Hollywood animation studio. The internal network, used for feature animation, was completely isolated from the outside. The external machines were set up as kiosks, and unconnected from anything else. But this was in 1998.
By 2002, they weren't doing that any more. They'd switched from SGI to Windows, and Windows needs to talk to the mothership in Redmond.
Encrypting something twice is effectively creating a new cypher system. Always remember Friedman's remark, "No new cypher is worth looking at unless it comes from someone who has already broken a very difficult one."
(If you don't know who William Friedman was, you probably shouldn't be designing cyphers.)
The "e-Ink" guys need to shut up until they make their technology work. What they have is an expensive overlay film for existing displays that makes them reflective. What they've been talking about for years are cheap high resolution flexible displays, which they don't have. Eventually, someone may do that, but it probably won't be e-Ink.
There's a huge amount of automated trading going on, and there has been for years. The effects on the market are well known. For one thing, arbitrage margins are now tiny. If there are some things known to be related, like the stocks underlying a mutual fund vs the fund price, or crude oil vs. gasoline, or futures prices vs. current prices, program traders are tracking that relationship constantly and will trade if a spread develops. As a result, there are no big spreads in those areas. Once enough traders are doing it, it stops working.
Elaborate attempts are made to find more complex relationships like that to exploit, which is what derivatives are really all about. That, too, has been done to death.
As a result, efforts are made to exploit very tiny arbitrage margins by making huge opposing trades. This works until there's some common failure mode for both side of the trade. (See "Long Term Capital Management" and "portfolio insurance").
Then there's automated velocity trading; if it's going up, buy it quickly. Now that produces market instability. This was popular during the dot-com era. It's less popular now.
None of this is new; it dates back to at least the 1970s.
"A low energy magnet actuator allows magnetic fields to be turned on and off using a small amount of energy. The magnetic actuator according to the invention generally includes a base suitable for the support of a plurality of magnets. An actuatable shield is positioned in relation to the plurality of magnets so that it effectively blocks the magnetic field when it is positioned over at least one of the magnets. The magnetic fields of the plurality of magnets interact in a manner that allows low energy actuation of the shield."
It's just a thing for shielding a magnet with another piece of metal. The patent application does not claim an energy gain.
I was really hoping they'd claimed an energy gain, which might trigger the USPTO's answer to perpetual motion machines. The USPTO has the right to ask for a working model, but they very seldom exercise it. Except for perpetual motion machines and antigravity machines.
The application has been assigned to an examiner, and is in routine processing.
If you had five new users each spend half a day working through simple tasks for OpenOffice Writer, Draw, Impress, and Calc, you'd collect enough info to make the thing much more usable. That's not a massive effort. It might even be possible to get some company that uses OpenOffice to fund such a modest effort. And it would increase developer consciousness of usability, which is badly needed.
What Steom is actually claiming is quite possible, but uninteresting. Steorn is making three claims for its technology:
The coefficient of performance is not efficiency. It's the reciprocal of efficiency. Most refrigerators and heat pumps have a coefficient of performance greater than 100%. 200-350% is typical. The coefficient of performance of an ideal heat pump, and the efficiency of an ideal heat engine, both working between the same temperature difference, will have a product of 1.
So Steom can meet its claims with any off-the-shelf heat pump.
Since they talk about "magnetics" so much, they're probably fooling around with something exotic like a magneto-caloric heat pump. This is a cute idea that's been around for a while, requires very strong magnetic fields, is sometimes used for cyrogenic cooling, and has been considered for auto air conditioners. There are buzzword friendly papers like "Preparation of Superferromagnetic Lanthanide Nanoparticulate Magnetic Refrigerants" on the subject. If they've made that work, they may have something with product potential. Maybe. But it's not "free energy".
The era of "record companies" may be drawing to a close. Because they really don't do very much. Once, they found the artists, financed them, operated the recording studios, had the recordings made, manufactured the records, shipped them to distributors, collected the money, and handled the publicity. Now, they find the artists, finance them, collect the money, and handle the publicity. The actual making and distribution of the music is outsourced to other companies who will deal with anybody. Anybody can get CDs made; the going rate is about $1000 for 1000 retail-ready disks. Anybody can book studio time. Anybody can get music onto a download site. Basically, any band with a few thousand dollars can get product out the door. Doesn't make them rich and famous. But the mechanics of making the product are no problem.
So record companies today are really in the venture capital business - they provide front money and publicity. But they take a much bigger cut than other organizations that provide money and publicity in other industries. That's a vulnerability.
We're seeing this vulnerability exploited. There are now "Myspace bands" and "Walmart bands". So far, the "Web 2.0"/social networking boom hasn't produced a mechanism for making a band a national name, but that may come.
That's the real threat to the RIAA. Not piracy. Disintermediation.
It's a real issue. Historically, water shortages have brought down several civilizations, usually those with failed irrigation cultures.
It could have been worse. A few years ago, there was much talk of "privatizing" the world's water supply. Enron entered the water-trading business. (Their web site for water trading was Water2Water.com.) Fortunately, this didn't catch on, except in Australia, which does have water trading.
OpenOffice has made real progress. As a long-time user, I've watched it go from "totally sucks" to "almost works" to "works, but is irritating at times". Right now, it works mechanically, but has more sharp edges than Office. Compare, say, OpenOffice word completion with Microsoft Word. OpenOffice will try to do the same dumb thing twice. Microsoft Word will stop fighting you after the first time.
And, let's face it, OpenOffice help information needs help. If you ask for help on something, you often either can't find it, get info about the wrong thing, or get info which doesn't tell you exactly where to find something in the menu system. It's little stuff like that which affects user likability.
All these things are fixable, but they're not the kind of problems that get fixed via Bugzilla complaints. The open source process isn't good at fixing usability issues. It takes things like videotaping users struggling with a program to get these kinds of problems fixed.
Usability testing is simple enough. You make up some tasks, like "Write a letter on company letterhead, then print it and its envelope". You videotape a few people doing this, with a system that records both the screen and the user's face and voice. You watch the videos (this is the time-consuming part) and note all the places where the user got stuck, had to undo something, or lost time. Those are your usability bugs. The goal is a seamless user experience, or "flow".
It would be useful to have video like that on SourceForge or YouTube. It's boring, but it would give more developers a sense of what usability is really about.
Not quite, but the coding scheme that makes CDs and DVDs resistant to dust and scratches works much like that. Big blocks have an error correcting code appended, and then the bits of the data plus error correcting code are rearranged and spread widely across the block. So when you lose a contiguous set of bits, you can replace it by using data distributed across the block.
It's a good error correction scheme, but it's not exactly new. Every CD player in the world has this. CDs aren't encrypted (there's no key, just an well-known algorithm), but you could mix encryption in if you wanted. This wouldn't help the error recovery.
Actually, this is more like Trinitron vs. shadow mask technology for CRTs. For many years, Sony Trinitrons were the best CRT technology, producing a better image than the older shadow mask CRTs, But as electron beam aiming improved, shadow mask caught up and passed Trinitrons, which were more expensive to make.