I missed that about the read/write speed (and 50GByte tape capacity). It does sound like they were just blowing smoke about not compressing the data, etc.
"What purpose does it serve to partially decompress and then store?" Your player doesn't need as much CPU power. Really dumb reason, but we're talking about executives here. 8-)
So the final claim is that it won't be copied over the internet because the files are too damned big. 28.2Mbps is about 13GByte/hour. Another way to look at it, it's 6 X T1. I think it is going to be a few years before many people who have to pay for their own bandwidth will be downloading things like that just for fun. But it will happen, because fiber could carry tens of thousands of streams like that.
Information Technology?
on
What is 'IT'?
·
· Score: 1
Right now the lead article in
http://www.informationweek.com/
is "IT Execs Meet...". It's not talking about this swibble.
The resistance of metals rises with temperature. The resistance of insulators drops. There is a potential problem there, but maybe you'd have to worry about keeping the wires or SiO2 insulation from melting first.
Incidentally, semiconductor resistance usually drops with temperature -- so you on-state works better, but your off-state leaks more. Apparently diamond, if it can be formed into transistors, would stretch the point where it becomes too leaky to work out considerably.
What I would be concerned about is this: what is the forward drop across a diode junction? This determines the minimum voltage where any semiconductor will work. For Germanium it was a fraction of a volt, but Ge was too leaky at room temperature. For Silicon, it's 0.7V, and leakage is reasonable up to about 150C. Diamond is next on the periodic table, with much higher temperature, so I expect the diode drop will be several volts. If there isn't some work-around for that, you can forget about gigahertz diamond circuits. They might be great for the high-voltage, high-powered stuff like controlling CRT's or the AC end of a power supply.
HDTV over the air is broadcast highly compressed. This deck tape deck apparently is storing it uncompressed, or much less drastically compressed. The company officials are assuming you won't run Mpeg-2 (or higher) compression yourself. A year or two ago, that was almost a valid assumption, since compression on a PC without special hardware was much slower than real-time (a day or so to compress a two hour movie). But I'd expect that an Mpeg-2 routine compiled especially for the Pentium-4 1.5GHz would run faster than real time right now, and by the time they get this thing into production at consumer prices...
The other question is, whether Mpeg compression noticeably detracts from the image quality. It's not a lossless compression like zip files, but rather it throws away some fine detail, then compresses what's left. The algorithm's authors claim that what's thrown away couldn't be seen either -- maybe so, but I've heard similar claims made where I could sure tell the difference! And HDTV ought to be considerably more of a challenge because you can see so much more detail.
Anyone who still watches the Greedlympics must be too dumb to figure out how to use an anonymiser.
Not to say that many collectors of Nazi memorabilia are much smarter. But it would only take one to get Yahoo into trouble, while I don't see why the Olympic organizers would be terribly concerned if a few percent of Aussies managed to see the Yank version of the coverage. I have even more trouble imagining why the Aussies would bother.
The thing I don't understand about the Yahoo/Nazi memorabilia case, is why it wasn't sufficient that Yahoo exclude those with a French shipping address? Preferably from everything, those stinking rude frogs don't deserve to keep up with the world. (Just kidding.)
The professors just don't want to have to raise their hand and ask "Boss, I need to look at some pr0n"
Seriously, having to fill out paperwork and wait for it to go through the head office will be a significant impediment to research. How many researchers come under one state agency head anyway? Who at a university would qualify as a "state agency head" -- or does it go to the top at the department of education (probably a politically appointed ignoramus). Does the head of a hospital qualify, or does it go to the state health agency head -- who certainly doesn't have time to look at a few hundred such requests.
Think about this: if you went to a state-sponsored hospital in Virginia with a sexual disorder, would you want your doctor sending a request to the state board of health to be allowed to research it? Not to mention waiting a year or so for the head to get around to it. br>
Finally, the next step will of course be to install filtering software to prevent the law from being violated. Except that anyone that's been paying attention knows that filtering software is just slightly better than flipping a coin...
Guess we don't have to worry about competition from Virginia anymore, eh?
If the half-life was 16 hours, it would be useless for rocket fuel -- sort of like fueling your 4x4 with something that would get you out in the wilderness fast, then evaporate before you could turn around for home. But it turns out that AM-242 has a 16 hour half life, while Am-242m has a half-lfe of 141 years. http://web1.caryacademy.pvt.k12.nc.us/chemistry/ru shin/StudentProjects/ElementWebsites/americium/fac ts.htm
I couldn't get into the article, but it sounds like the idea is to cause thin sheets of Am to fission, and just let the fragments fly out the back of the rocket. Might be a pretty good fuel, but it's going to be horrendously expensive -- you probably would need a few times the final weight of the ship in fuel, and this stuff is synthesized in particle accelerators... Anyone know the exhaust velocity, that's what determines how much you need?
Quite often that lawyerese turns out to be unacceptably vague when someone bothers to actually try to parse it. Like when a judge and a lawyer got together to define "sexual relations" in the case of a certain public figure accused of asking an employee for a blowjob, and wound up with a definition that arguably did not include blowjobs.
Plain English, well-written, is often more precise than tortured legal constructions -- and no one can reasonably argue that they did not understand it. And virtually any written regulation will include some vague areas; just don't go tromping on employee's rights when one of those vague areas is involved, and you'll never wind up in court about vagueness.
Very good points. The trouble is, the MM vendors are all pushing "one size fits all" methodologies. And in the case of ISO-9000, you even have European laws behind the full system. Our manufacturing plant goes under ISO-9002 (just the manufacturing and QA parts of it), and it's way too heavy of a paperwork load for three factories of about 500 employees each. Not that it isn't helpful in preventing many kinds of screwups and ensuring we keep records of how we built something last time so we can do it again, but we've got 50 people in middle-management type jobs who spend more time writing new procedures than executing them!
If that was applied to our tiny engineering section also, we wouldn't ever get anything done.
Slashdot Mirror
"1/10/1901"
Also, it's wet, dark, under great pressure, and barely above freezing. You sure you didn't pick up a drowning weather balloon instead? 8-)
I missed that about the read/write speed (and 50GByte tape capacity). It does sound like they were just blowing smoke about not compressing the data, etc.
"What purpose does it serve to partially decompress and then store?" Your player doesn't need as much CPU power. Really dumb reason, but we're talking about executives here. 8-)
So the final claim is that it won't be copied over the internet because the files are too damned big. 28.2Mbps is about 13GByte/hour. Another way to look at it, it's 6 X T1. I think it is going to be a few years before many people who have to pay for their own bandwidth will be downloading things like that just for fun. But it will happen, because fiber could carry tens of thousands of streams like that.
Right now the lead article in ...". It's not talking about this swibble.
http://www.informationweek.com/
is "IT Execs Meet
The resistance of metals rises with temperature. The resistance of insulators drops. There is a potential problem there, but maybe you'd have to worry about keeping the wires or SiO2 insulation from melting first.
Incidentally, semiconductor resistance usually drops with temperature -- so you on-state works better, but your off-state leaks more. Apparently diamond, if it can be formed into transistors, would stretch the point where it becomes too leaky to work out considerably.
What I would be concerned about is this: what is the forward drop across a diode junction? This determines the minimum voltage where any semiconductor will work. For Germanium it was a fraction of a volt, but Ge was too leaky at room temperature. For Silicon, it's 0.7V, and leakage is reasonable up to about 150C. Diamond is next on the periodic table, with much higher temperature, so I expect the diode drop will be several volts. If there isn't some work-around for that, you can forget about gigahertz diamond circuits. They might be great for the high-voltage, high-powered stuff like controlling CRT's or the AC end of a power supply.
If that's all it is, the overhype is incredible, but considering the participants....
HDTV over the air is broadcast highly compressed. This deck tape deck apparently is storing it uncompressed, or much less drastically compressed. The company officials are assuming you won't run Mpeg-2 (or higher) compression yourself. A year or two ago, that was almost a valid assumption, since compression on a PC without special hardware was much slower than real-time (a day or so to compress a two hour movie). But I'd expect that an Mpeg-2 routine compiled especially for the Pentium-4 1.5GHz would run faster than real time right now, and by the time they get this thing into production at consumer prices...
The other question is, whether Mpeg compression noticeably detracts from the image quality. It's not a lossless compression like zip files, but rather it throws away some fine detail, then compresses what's left. The algorithm's authors claim that what's thrown away couldn't be seen either -- maybe so, but I've heard similar claims made where I could sure tell the difference! And HDTV ought to be considerably more of a challenge because you can see so much more detail.
They have a Simpsons home sex video? Yucch! Sorry, couldn't resist.
Anyone who still watches the Greedlympics must be too dumb to figure out how to use an anonymiser.
Not to say that many collectors of Nazi memorabilia are much smarter. But it would only take one to get Yahoo into trouble, while I don't see why the Olympic organizers would be terribly concerned if a few percent of Aussies managed to see the Yank version of the coverage. I have even more trouble imagining why the Aussies would bother.
The thing I don't understand about the Yahoo/Nazi memorabilia case, is why it wasn't sufficient that Yahoo exclude those with a French shipping address? Preferably from everything, those stinking rude frogs don't deserve to keep up with the world. (Just kidding.)
The professors just don't want to have to raise their hand and ask "Boss, I need to look at some pr0n"
Seriously, having to fill out paperwork and wait for it to go through the head office will be a significant impediment to research. How many researchers come under one state agency head anyway? Who at a university would qualify as a "state agency head" -- or does it go to the top at the department of education (probably a politically appointed ignoramus). Does the head of a hospital qualify, or does it go to the state health agency head -- who certainly doesn't have time to look at a few hundred such requests.
Think about this: if you went to a state-sponsored hospital in Virginia with a sexual disorder, would you want your doctor sending a request to the state board of health to be allowed to research it? Not to mention waiting a year or so for the head to get around to it.
br> Finally, the next step will of course be to install filtering software to prevent the law from being violated. Except that anyone that's been paying attention knows that filtering software is just slightly better than flipping a coin...
Guess we don't have to worry about competition from Virginia anymore, eh?
If the half-life was 16 hours, it would be useless for rocket fuel -- sort of like fueling your 4x4 with something that would get you out in the wilderness fast, then evaporate before you could turn around for home. But it turns out that AM-242 has a 16 hour half life, while Am-242m has a half-lfe of 141 years.u shin/StudentProjects/ElementWebsites/americium/fac ts.htm
http://web1.caryacademy.pvt.k12.nc.us/chemistry/r
I couldn't get into the article, but it sounds like the idea is to cause thin sheets of Am to fission, and just let the fragments fly out the back of the rocket. Might be a pretty good fuel, but it's going to be horrendously expensive -- you probably would need a few times the final weight of the ship in fuel, and this stuff is synthesized in particle accelerators... Anyone know the exhaust velocity, that's what determines how much you need?
Quite often that lawyerese turns out to be unacceptably vague when someone bothers to actually try to parse it. Like when a judge and a lawyer got together to define "sexual relations" in the case of a certain public figure accused of asking an employee for a blowjob, and wound up with a definition that arguably did not include blowjobs.
Plain English, well-written, is often more precise than tortured legal constructions -- and no one can reasonably argue that they did not understand it. And virtually any written regulation will include some vague areas; just don't go tromping on employee's rights when one of those vague areas is involved, and you'll never wind up in court about vagueness.
Very good points. The trouble is, the MM vendors are all pushing "one size fits all" methodologies. And in the case of ISO-9000, you even have European laws behind the full system. Our manufacturing plant goes under ISO-9002 (just the manufacturing and QA parts of it), and it's way too heavy of a paperwork load for three factories of about 500 employees each. Not that it isn't helpful in preventing many kinds of screwups and ensuring we keep records of how we built something last time so we can do it again, but we've got 50 people in middle-management type jobs who spend more time writing new procedures than executing them!
If that was applied to our tiny engineering section also, we wouldn't ever get anything done.