When color came along, the vertical sync frequency shifted ever so slightly, to 59.97Hz (and the horizontal shifted from 15.75 kHz to 15.734 kHz). These frequencies prevented interference issues with the newly added color components of the transmitted signal, while still being within the working range of the existing B/W sets, allowing older sets to receive color programs in B/W.
[pedantic] You're wrong.
The frequency was shifted to about 59.940052328623757195185766614338Hz.
Not a nice round number, but analog electronics don't care about numbers, nor their shape.
But they need to do that, because it naturally strays from 60 Hz, and they need to manually tweak it so that it averages 60 Hz over the course of a year (or whatever timeframe they use) in order to prevent clock drift. They would save money and effort if they didn't need to maintain that average.
Ok. So they save money skipping manual corrections.
Meanwhile: How much money do we lose from the clocks being wrong?
My story goes back to my grandfather, who was an engineer for Ohio Power way back when electricity was still both novel and a hard sell.
He said that a consistent frequency was necessary in order to keep the grid sync'd up. If one generating station were operating at, say, 59.5Hz, and another at 60Hz, and they were interconnected...bad shit happens.
He also said that they kept track of the actual, delivered frequency (quite likely using a synchronous motor-driven clock), and that when a discrepancy happened they would periodically issue make-up cycles to keep everyone's clocks accurate.
This latter part sounds more like the results of a clockmaker's plea than your anecdote. I'd guess that it also helped them sell more power, since they could offer accurate timekeeping as a feature.
but the truth is that WWVB is obsolete. Nowadays, the best way to get accurate time is via GPS. You can buy a GPS module to pull the time from for about $25-$35 to build into your clock.
You really think so?
I've got an "analog" WWVB wall clock that I bought at (of all places) Aldi's. It cost $25. It works fine: I hung it on the wall and with no adjustment at all it keeps the time accurate enough for my living room, and I haven't changed the batteries in the two or three years I've had it. It tracks DST just fine, too. (I believe, based on my background in RF, that the tiny little antenna it uses consists of pixie dust.)
I've only toyed extensively with three GPS receivers. One in my Garmin Nuvi, one in my Droid, and huge old archaic Magellan unit that took a fistful of AA batteries in order to operate.
Only the Droid has been able to get a GPS fix indoors at my house, and it gets a bit of help in doing so from its other location-finding features and a data connection.
On the other hand: At work I've got a few different sites and systems that have some manner of GPS timekeeping and/or accurate timing, but those all rely on an external antenna, hardwired with coax...something which is fairly unusual for many WWVB applications, and impractical in many homes. (They are firmly in the category of things that Just Work, though, once installed)
I don't think WWVB is obsolete. I think it just serves a different purpose than GPS.
But I am sad about this line frequency change.. In the United States, one of the most accurate clock signals is the 60hz power. It's accurate to within about a minute a year at present.
Yes, that -- exactly. My favorite clock is a quite old plug-in Seth Thomas wall clock. It is disturbingly accurate unless the power goes out. (I'd plug it into a UPS, but the nearest one is far too fancy and runs everything on a PWM inverter all the time, which would destroy its accuracy.)
The digital alarm clock in my bedroom also uses 60Hz as a timing source, falling back on a crystal-based source only when running on batteries. I bought the clock 5 years ago, it was already set out-of-the-box (just needed to select a time zone), and I haven't re-set it ever. (It's got a physical switch to neatly select DST.)
I guess I'll be setting both of these again, just so someone can have fun with a large-scale experiment. 1 minute of drift per year is awesome, and TFA discusses purposefully increasing that by a factor of twenty. Meh.
Does your ear affect the shape of the waveform emanating from someone else's mouth in any substantial way?
Of course it does, if that person's mouth is really, really close to your ear. And if they get close enough, and speak quietly enough, nobody else will hear.
On the other hand, if someone is speaking ciphertext at you from across the counter, and only you can understand it, it doesn't matter who else can hear because it's just jibberish to them.
Cryptography is hard work for most people to do in their brains, but I understand that we've got these things called computers which can be pretty good at it...;)
The tube idea just seems impractical, as well: So you've got this anechoic tube with a cap over it in which you can place your handset to pay for you stuff. Novel, I guess, but not very convenient.
Besides, it'd be easy to bug the tube so as to record the goings-on inside.
Of course, you could make the tube transparent, but then it would echo. Which might or might not be a problem, depending on how the system actually works.
Either way it'll still fill with food and ear crud and body funk and arm hairs, just like every other public hole that people stick their hands in. Especially if it's furry. (Mmm, lice.)
You can make it washable, but that won't keep you away from the fresh and personalized telephone crud that will flake off of the well-dressed gentleman in line ahead of you, who just got done wiping his nose trophies on the bathroom wall and texting while he took a shit in the bathroom and didn't wash his hands (he never washes his hands, see -- he's stronger than that).
I've said it a bunch of times in this thread, but it's got to be secure, no matter what the transport layer is. Because someone will record it and exploit it, if not.
It'd take a long time before someone noticed anything strange about the scrap of innocent-looking cardboard hiding under the register, for instance.
I'd take a contact-less near-field payment system that uses secure, audible communication that remains secure without trivially-bypassed low-tech acoustic hacks to create the illusion of security.
Or I'll stick to cash and plastic, neither of which I press against my face.
With all the high profile attacks and leaking private info of companies then attacking FBI and other law enforcement agencies I bet his looking for a lifetime sentence. Serves him right.
"Hi, welcome to Dropbox! Please follow the honor system, and do not be nosing about in others' things, or you'll have to sit in the Time-Out Chair."
Seriously?
[On another note: This should never be any worse than losing a thumb drive. If folks are using their own encryption on their important stuff, and blow the dust off their backups from time to time, it's no big deal. Unless you're one of those folks who doesn't do those things, in which case you should also go have a Time-Out.]
Hang on there - 30kHz wouldn't work for anything complicated, I'd probably grant you that - but for this idea to work, all you'd actually need is the ability for a phone to make any kind of noise at 30kHz +- 3kHz. It could simply use an on/off stream with a good warning burst in front of it and send out the programmed number, and broadcast that series of pulses whenever a button was pressed.
No. You can't make a 30kHz signal with a 48kHz DAC. You can't even get 30kHz +- 3kHz. The very best case is that can get nothing at all above 24kHz.
Can't. Nope. Not fucking ideal because it's not fucking possible. And even if you think it's possible, using some software trick, the low-pass antialiasing filter which exists between digital numberland and the tangible widget that you intend to rapidly vibrate will prevent it from happening with its ninja-like abilities to smooth your high frequencies right out of existence.
TFA says that is both inaudible, and works with existing hardware. These are, quite simply, conflicting statements: One of them is a lie.
(That said, there's no reason why such a system cannot work very well indeed if "inaudible" is deleted from the proclaimed featureset. Or "works with existing hardware." I blame marketing.)
If you are going through the trouble of redesigning the phone anyway, is this really going to save money?
No, it won't save money if it requires a new design. And that new design won't save any space.
The only thing this tech has going for it is that it is a purely software solution.
And as a software solution, it is limited by the constraints of the hardware. And that hardware is limited to producing and recording audible sounds, since it is (well, you know) audio hardware.
With directional elements, the wave-front is no longer spherical - assuming a beam (plane-wave front), the exponential attenuation (due to absorption) holds.
With a best-case cylindrical waveform, the rule of thumb slides to 3dB per doubling of distance.
And so what? Phones aren't made with directional elements. They don't emit cylindrical waveforms. There's one or more little electret mics, and an earspeaker that each operate through a small hole. These arrangements are not things that are known for their superb directionality, but rather the opposite.
Often, there's also a small loudspeaker (used for speakerphone, ringer, etc) which is also not designed to be directional (so you can, you know, hear it ring).
And it doesn't matter. I'll repeat it again: TFA is about hardware that exists today. And today's hardware doesn't work in the way that you're going on about.
If we're going to go about changing the hardware to fit, then the concept described in TFA loses its merit over other technologies.
The human ear is able to pick up to 20 kHz, and people over 40 are able to hear at most 16-18 kHz (if ever). This is why 22 kHz is meant to be the absolute upper frequency to digitally encode on an Audio CD and thus 44 kHz the maximum sampling rate required for "absolute audiophile perfection".
Let us not muddy the waters with a discussion of "audiophile perfection." You'll bring out the trolls, many of whom would tell you everything there is that is wrong with recordings at 44.1KHz.
And you're wrong about why 44.1kHz was selected, but that's OK -- lots of folks are wrong about it. 44.1kHz was chosen as a sampling rate both because it was greater than ~20kHz*2, and it fit neatly into the digital recorders of the time (which generally consisted of a U-matic video deck with a PCM adapter, the Sony PCM-1600 being the first of such beasts available).
In other words, 44.1kHz was convenient, and was in keeping with KISS. A Nyquist limit of 22.5kHz merely is a product of the implementation, not a design goal to allow audiophilic nirvana. (Reference with maths).
All the above as an estimation for what frequency a ADC/DAC in a smart phone can be capable of: my guess - an upper limit of 30-36 kHz. Given the amount of information that a NFP requires (hundreds of bytes, including an encryption key), the fact that tone encoding is not sensitive to amplitude/power variations, the fact that directionality of sound is easier to implement than in RF, the band between 20 to 30 kHz may be just enough to implement the NFP with a better protection for eavesdropping than using radio.
No. The band from 20 to 30kHz doesn't work. The maximum sampling rate that can be reasonably expected to be supported by a reasonably modern, existing (remember the context) phone is 48kHz, which means that frequencies above 24kHz cannot be handled at all. Remember, this is supposed to work with existing devices.
Furthermore, I would be absolutely shocked if any of the speakers or microphones (along with the associated filters, amplifiers, and other analog componentry) on a handset were useful at all above 15kHz in any reliable fashion across different devices. Remember, this is supposed to work with existing devices, wherein the primary design consideration is voice audio over the telephone network (which tops out at 4KHz, anyway), with a small side of watching stupid videos on Youtube. KISS, etc.
Now, given the wavelengths involved, it might actually be easier to design a small directional loudspeaker fo
I can see artifacts on 19.2mbps 1080i ATSC feeds if I'm looking for them. And I've got a Blu-Ray or two that are complete shit as well (though almost all of them are rather good).
If you want a noise pattern consisting of something other than digital artifacts, there's always analog.:)
I, for one, was happier with a clean and unmolested NTSC 480i with a proper antenna and a half-decent scaler than I'll ever be with the 480i subchannels typical of ATSC service.
But again, it depends on the material. A dozen or more years ago, I downloaded a bunch of South Park episodes in a RealVideo format with a bitrate that was at least a couple of orders of magnitude less than what we're discussing today. The video was lousy, and even the voice audio left something to be desired, and any music was completely terrible, but it was still fun to watch, and was usable with dialup.
Would I enjoy watching a nature documentary or an action flick like that, though? No, probably not. (Not even back then.)
And anyway, Netflix seems to handle the panning shots pretty well. As I said, with a good feed, it's only distracting on very very dark scenes (which they could obviously fix if they wanted to) and very very complicated/random scenes (like moving water -- Waterworld was painful to watch on a technical level). But just panning the camera around a typical scene doesn't, generally, produce any artifacting worthy of note on a good feed.
Netflix is really pretty good for a lot of things, given decent gear (a modern TV simply not set to Torch Mode, and a PS3 will suffice) and an unladen consumer pipe. You'll really have to try it yourself to see if the bitrate/resolution tradeoff they use is sufficient for your desires.
No. Sound is not so linear as that. You cannot take a chart that says sound is attenuated by 1800dB at 1km and simply divide by 1000 to get the attenuation at 1m.
All that aside: The simplified rule of thumb for sound at audible frequencies, for a spherical waveform (such as that emitted by a phone), is that sound falls off at a rate of 6dB for each doubling of distance.
So, if you're making noise that measures 80dB@10cm, you get the following results at these increasing distances:
74dB@20cm 68dB@40cm 62dB@80cm
etc.
And we only care about frequencies in the audible range, despite the implication in TFS, or it will be completely unable to work with existing phones (which is the main point of the thing to begin with). To wit: Combine Nyquist theory with the shitty analog electronics and 48KHz (at best!) ADC/DAC in a phone, and the resultant system must be either audible to a sufficiently-close non-damaged human ear, or else be completely non-functional.
So, there's no point in even discussing how well the thing might behave at 50 or 100KHz, because that's never going to work with existing phones.
And the whole argument is moot, anyway: The transport layer for this sort of payment system, whether RFID or barcodes or acoustic signalling or Bluetooth or avian carrier, will be recordable by a sufficiently-motivated and clever person. It therefore must have strong security (whether cryptographic or otherwise), or it will fail and be exploited. And if it does have strong security, it doesn't matter if it's recordable or not, since any recovered data will be useless to the eavesdropping party.
Have you actually tried Netflix's streaming service, or are you just spewing hyperbole?
Some of their video is complete garbage, for sure. But some of it is remarkably good.
According to my router, Netflix is often using 5-6Mbps on "HD" content. For the paltry resolution that they provide, this works fine. For a program that is in the "remarkably good" category, I generally only notice artifacting on shots with moving, reflecting water or consisting entirely of very dark shadows. The rest of the time it behaves quite well, and if there are artifacts to be found I'm not distracted by them.
It depends on the nature of the material for sure, but for a lot of films Netflix is just fine. For other films where video quality is more important, there's always Blu-Ray.
I was worried about the cpu consumption of this and it only took between 7 and 13 % of one q6600 core on firefox 7.0a1 nightly
Wow. It only takes between 7 and 13 percent of a 2.4GHz Core 2 core with a couple of megabytes of cache to do what I was doing on a not-so-special 486 (15 years ago)?
If this is the future of computing, then I'm turning Amish.
I was thinking it's a fantastic way for the people with hacked PS3s to rip copies of games using backup managers rather than risk downloading torrents.
Yep. It's just like the old Xbox, PS1, PS2, and Dreamcast days, except riddled with DLC stuff that only works for the original purchaser.
Cool! We'll all become structural engineers and architects, then, and either deflate your salary and put you on the breadline, or kill lots of people with our mistakes!
Except, I think a lot of us would prefer to play with Lego and/or Minecraft to safely satisfy our building fantasies, while (only incidentally, mind you) preserving your paid role in life.
Slashdot Mirror
In your strange world of black and white, are all non-deadly things also non-harmful?
"Danger" to me doesn't mean "has been shown to cause death," but rather "is likely to cause harm."
What, exactly, does it mean to you?
Most simple digital clocks do run from the grid. It's both cheaper and better that way. :)
[pedantic] You're wrong.
The frequency was shifted to about 59.940052328623757195185766614338Hz.
Not a nice round number, but analog electronics don't care about numbers, nor their shape.
Reference.
[/pedantic]
Ok. So they save money skipping manual corrections.
Meanwhile: How much money do we lose from the clocks being wrong?
My story goes back to my grandfather, who was an engineer for Ohio Power way back when electricity was still both novel and a hard sell.
He said that a consistent frequency was necessary in order to keep the grid sync'd up. If one generating station were operating at, say, 59.5Hz, and another at 60Hz, and they were interconnected...bad shit happens.
He also said that they kept track of the actual, delivered frequency (quite likely using a synchronous motor-driven clock), and that when a discrepancy happened they would periodically issue make-up cycles to keep everyone's clocks accurate.
This latter part sounds more like the results of a clockmaker's plea than your anecdote. I'd guess that it also helped them sell more power, since they could offer accurate timekeeping as a feature.
You really think so?
I've got an "analog" WWVB wall clock that I bought at (of all places) Aldi's. It cost $25. It works fine: I hung it on the wall and with no adjustment at all it keeps the time accurate enough for my living room, and I haven't changed the batteries in the two or three years I've had it. It tracks DST just fine, too. (I believe, based on my background in RF, that the tiny little antenna it uses consists of pixie dust.)
I've only toyed extensively with three GPS receivers. One in my Garmin Nuvi, one in my Droid, and huge old archaic Magellan unit that took a fistful of AA batteries in order to operate.
Only the Droid has been able to get a GPS fix indoors at my house, and it gets a bit of help in doing so from its other location-finding features and a data connection.
On the other hand: At work I've got a few different sites and systems that have some manner of GPS timekeeping and/or accurate timing, but those all rely on an external antenna, hardwired with coax...something which is fairly unusual for many WWVB applications, and impractical in many homes. (They are firmly in the category of things that Just Work, though, once installed)
I don't think WWVB is obsolete. I think it just serves a different purpose than GPS.
Yes, that -- exactly. My favorite clock is a quite old plug-in Seth Thomas wall clock. It is disturbingly accurate unless the power goes out. (I'd plug it into a UPS, but the nearest one is far too fancy and runs everything on a PWM inverter all the time, which would destroy its accuracy.)
The digital alarm clock in my bedroom also uses 60Hz as a timing source, falling back on a crystal-based source only when running on batteries. I bought the clock 5 years ago, it was already set out-of-the-box (just needed to select a time zone), and I haven't re-set it ever. (It's got a physical switch to neatly select DST.)
I guess I'll be setting both of these again, just so someone can have fun with a large-scale experiment. 1 minute of drift per year is awesome, and TFA discusses purposefully increasing that by a factor of twenty. Meh.
I'm amazed, too. I never knew my eyes could do that until a few minutes ago.
And now that I do know that they can do this, and have been toying with it for a few minutes, I will henceforth be distracted by it forever.
Thanks, or something.
(Haidinger's brush at Wikipedia, for the lazy.)
I didn't have to dig very hard -- at all -- to find this clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50cpPAVoxJQ
4 Sheridan tanks airdropped by parachute from way, way more than 10 feet up.
Not a very heavy tank by the looks of things, but still . . .
Does your ear affect the shape of the waveform emanating from someone else's mouth in any substantial way?
Of course it does, if that person's mouth is really, really close to your ear. And if they get close enough, and speak quietly enough, nobody else will hear.
On the other hand, if someone is speaking ciphertext at you from across the counter, and only you can understand it, it doesn't matter who else can hear because it's just jibberish to them.
Cryptography is hard work for most people to do in their brains, but I understand that we've got these things called computers which can be pretty good at it... ;)
The tube idea just seems impractical, as well: So you've got this anechoic tube with a cap over it in which you can place your handset to pay for you stuff. Novel, I guess, but not very convenient.
Besides, it'd be easy to bug the tube so as to record the goings-on inside.
Of course, you could make the tube transparent, but then it would echo. Which might or might not be a problem, depending on how the system actually works.
Either way it'll still fill with food and ear crud and body funk and arm hairs, just like every other public hole that people stick their hands in. Especially if it's furry.
(Mmm, lice.)
You can make it washable, but that won't keep you away from the fresh and personalized telephone crud that will flake off of the well-dressed gentleman in line ahead of you, who just got done wiping his nose trophies on the bathroom wall and texting while he took a shit in the bathroom and didn't wash his hands (he never washes his hands, see -- he's stronger than that).
I've said it a bunch of times in this thread, but it's got to be secure, no matter what the transport layer is. Because someone will record it and exploit it, if not.
It'd take a long time before someone noticed anything strange about the scrap of innocent-looking cardboard hiding under the register, for instance.
I'd take a contact-less near-field payment system that uses secure, audible communication that remains secure without trivially-bypassed low-tech acoustic hacks to create the illusion of security.
Or I'll stick to cash and plastic, neither of which I press against my face.
You mean, like Federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison?
(Did anyone else notice that the end of that Youtube URL ends in "FuCK0"? Lulz.)
"Hi, welcome to Dropbox! Please follow the honor system, and do not be nosing about in others' things, or you'll have to sit in the Time-Out Chair."
Seriously?
[On another note: This should never be any worse than losing a thumb drive. If folks are using their own encryption on their important stuff, and blow the dust off their backups from time to time, it's no big deal. Unless you're one of those folks who doesn't do those things, in which case you should also go have a Time-Out.]
No. You can't make a 30kHz signal with a 48kHz DAC. You can't even get 30kHz +- 3kHz. The very best case is that can get nothing at all above 24kHz.
Can't. Nope. Not fucking ideal because it's not fucking possible. And even if you think it's possible, using some software trick, the low-pass antialiasing filter which exists between digital numberland and the tangible widget that you intend to rapidly vibrate will prevent it from happening with its ninja-like abilities to smooth your high frequencies right out of existence.
Sorry.
TFA says that is both inaudible, and works with existing hardware. These are, quite simply, conflicting statements: One of them is a lie.
(That said, there's no reason why such a system cannot work very well indeed if "inaudible" is deleted from the proclaimed featureset. Or "works with existing hardware." I blame marketing.)
No, it won't save money if it requires a new design. And that new design won't save any space.
The only thing this tech has going for it is that it is a purely software solution.
And as a software solution, it is limited by the constraints of the hardware. And that hardware is limited to producing and recording audible sounds, since it is (well, you know) audio hardware.
With a best-case cylindrical waveform, the rule of thumb slides to 3dB per doubling of distance.
And so what? Phones aren't made with directional elements. They don't emit cylindrical waveforms. There's one or more little electret mics, and an earspeaker that each operate through a small hole. These arrangements are not things that are known for their superb directionality, but rather the opposite.
Often, there's also a small loudspeaker (used for speakerphone, ringer, etc) which is also not designed to be directional (so you can, you know, hear it ring).
And it doesn't matter. I'll repeat it again: TFA is about hardware that exists today. And today's hardware doesn't work in the way that you're going on about.
If we're going to go about changing the hardware to fit, then the concept described in TFA loses its merit over other technologies.
Let us not muddy the waters with a discussion of "audiophile perfection." You'll bring out the trolls, many of whom would tell you everything there is that is wrong with recordings at 44.1KHz.
And you're wrong about why 44.1kHz was selected, but that's OK -- lots of folks are wrong about it. 44.1kHz was chosen as a sampling rate both because it was greater than ~20kHz*2, and it fit neatly into the digital recorders of the time (which generally consisted of a U-matic video deck with a PCM adapter, the Sony PCM-1600 being the first of such beasts available).
In other words, 44.1kHz was convenient, and was in keeping with KISS. A Nyquist limit of 22.5kHz merely is a product of the implementation, not a design goal to allow audiophilic nirvana. (Reference with maths).
No. The band from 20 to 30kHz doesn't work. The maximum sampling rate that can be reasonably expected to be supported by a reasonably modern, existing (remember the context) phone is 48kHz, which means that frequencies above 24kHz cannot be handled at all. Remember, this is supposed to work with existing devices.
Furthermore, I would be absolutely shocked if any of the speakers or microphones (along with the associated filters, amplifiers, and other analog componentry) on a handset were useful at all above 15kHz in any reliable fashion across different devices. Remember, this is supposed to work with existing devices, wherein the primary design consideration is voice audio over the telephone network (which tops out at 4KHz, anyway), with a small side of watching stupid videos on Youtube. KISS, etc.
Now, given the wavelengths involved, it might actually be easier to design a small directional loudspeaker fo
I can see artifacts on 19.2mbps 1080i ATSC feeds if I'm looking for them. And I've got a Blu-Ray or two that are complete shit as well (though almost all of them are rather good).
If you want a noise pattern consisting of something other than digital artifacts, there's always analog. :)
I, for one, was happier with a clean and unmolested NTSC 480i with a proper antenna and a half-decent scaler than I'll ever be with the 480i subchannels typical of ATSC service.
But again, it depends on the material. A dozen or more years ago, I downloaded a bunch of South Park episodes in a RealVideo format with a bitrate that was at least a couple of orders of magnitude less than what we're discussing today. The video was lousy, and even the voice audio left something to be desired, and any music was completely terrible, but it was still fun to watch, and was usable with dialup.
Would I enjoy watching a nature documentary or an action flick like that, though? No, probably not. (Not even back then.)
And anyway, Netflix seems to handle the panning shots pretty well. As I said, with a good feed, it's only distracting on very very dark scenes (which they could obviously fix if they wanted to) and very very complicated/random scenes (like moving water -- Waterworld was painful to watch on a technical level). But just panning the camera around a typical scene doesn't, generally, produce any artifacting worthy of note on a good feed.
Netflix is really pretty good for a lot of things, given decent gear (a modern TV simply not set to Torch Mode, and a PS3 will suffice) and an unladen consumer pipe. You'll really have to try it yourself to see if the bitrate/resolution tradeoff they use is sufficient for your desires.
No. Sound is not so linear as that. You cannot take a chart that says sound is attenuated by 1800dB at 1km and simply divide by 1000 to get the attenuation at 1m.
Remember inverse-square law: Check it out. (And more here.)
All that aside: The simplified rule of thumb for sound at audible frequencies, for a spherical waveform (such as that emitted by a phone), is that sound falls off at a rate of 6dB for each doubling of distance.
So, if you're making noise that measures 80dB@10cm, you get the following results at these increasing distances:
74dB@20cm
68dB@40cm
62dB@80cm
etc.
And we only care about frequencies in the audible range, despite the implication in TFS, or it will be completely unable to work with existing phones (which is the main point of the thing to begin with). To wit: Combine Nyquist theory with the shitty analog electronics and 48KHz (at best!) ADC/DAC in a phone, and the resultant system must be either audible to a sufficiently-close non-damaged human ear, or else be completely non-functional.
So, there's no point in even discussing how well the thing might behave at 50 or 100KHz, because that's never going to work with existing phones.
And the whole argument is moot, anyway: The transport layer for this sort of payment system, whether RFID or barcodes or acoustic signalling or Bluetooth or avian carrier, will be recordable by a sufficiently-motivated and clever person. It therefore must have strong security (whether cryptographic or otherwise), or it will fail and be exploited. And if it does have strong security, it doesn't matter if it's recordable or not, since any recovered data will be useless to the eavesdropping party.
Have you actually tried Netflix's streaming service, or are you just spewing hyperbole?
Some of their video is complete garbage, for sure. But some of it is remarkably good.
According to my router, Netflix is often using 5-6Mbps on "HD" content. For the paltry resolution that they provide, this works fine. For a program that is in the "remarkably good" category, I generally only notice artifacting on shots with moving, reflecting water or consisting entirely of very dark shadows. The rest of the time it behaves quite well, and if there are artifacts to be found I'm not distracted by them.
It depends on the nature of the material for sure, but for a lot of films Netflix is just fine. For other films where video quality is more important, there's always Blu-Ray.
Wow. It only takes between 7 and 13 percent of a 2.4GHz Core 2 core with a couple of megabytes of cache to do what I was doing on a not-so-special 486 (15 years ago)?
If this is the future of computing, then I'm turning Amish.
Yep. It's just like the old Xbox, PS1, PS2, and Dreamcast days, except riddled with DLC stuff that only works for the original purchaser.
woosh
It's not a troll -- it's just old news.
The WTO did a presentation on this very subject several years ago.
Hmm.
You're right.
Perhaps the carriers should just stick to making money on hardware sales, connectivity, and (optionally) contracts.
The world would be a better place.
Cool! We'll all become structural engineers and architects, then, and either deflate your salary and put you on the breadline, or kill lots of people with our mistakes!
Except, I think a lot of us would prefer to play with Lego and/or Minecraft to safely satisfy our building fantasies, while (only incidentally, mind you) preserving your paid role in life.
You mean...like this?
(Humor and taste are sometimes mutually exclusive, and sometimes, neither of them works very well.)