Socialism in practice is just another flavor of unlimited government power. Once the principle of private ownership of anything is abandoned, the private ownership of everything has lost its intellectual underpinning.
Except that in a socialist bureaucracy, if you piss off the wrong guy or he just decides he wants to screw someone today, you end up bankrupt or in prison. If you piss off somebody at Wallyworld, you can go work for Home Despot instead.
The converter boxes are worthless even in "near fringe" areas; the signals just aren't strong enough for digital to work. Digital TV requires a minimum of -65 dBm to work barely acceptably, about -60 dBm to work reliably. http://copradar.com/dtv/index.html That's 32 uV and 58 uV into 300 ohms, respectively, which is not a small signal.
This might be a question of continuing contracts with terrestrial stations, where the contracts guarantee no competing station (i.e. no XM) in the station's vicinity. Stern's raunchiness keeps him off the family-friendly AM band, so Stern is stuck with the much smaller XM audience.
It takes roughly an 18 dB S/N ratio (for white noise) before any digital signal can deliver enough consecutive bits for digital audio to be useful, regardless of the error correction scheme. With an 18 dB S/N ratio, the FM "quieting" effect is already working, giving about a 28 dB S/N ratio (for mono). Even if the digital scheme is frequency shift encoded, FM retains an advantage near the noise floor. In places where the only radio is noisy FM, a switch to DAB means no radio at all.
At any signal strength that makes AM intelligible, FM is superior.
The difference between common commercial broadcast AM and FM is that the AM band is around 1 MHz ( 300 m ) and FM band around 100 MHz ( 3 m ). The 300 m wavelength means more power diffracts around mountaintops into valleys, compared to 3 m which will be more line-of-sight.
However, total noise (man-made + atmospheric + galactic) is 30 to 40 dB higher at 1 MHz than at 100 MHz. This gives the 100 MHz band a tremendous advantage in open country.
I live about 30 miles from the nearest transmitter, in southern New Hampshire. At any time, I can receive about 50 FM stations with good quality. During the day I can get about 5 AM stations in the intelligible-to-good range, and 10 or 15 at night. This is moderately hilly country with 500 to 1000 foot mountain ranges that it would seem would block FM reception in most directions, yet FM has a distinct advantage. (The exception is the ability at night to receive New York City stations 200 miles away; their signals bounce off the ionosphere.)
Anscochrome came in a bright red box. GAF claimed the film was balanced for 6500K (or 6000K?) light, which implies that images would come out redder than the Kodak film balanced for 5500K. I don't recall any difference in color balance, but I never tied to compare them.
In the 1970s, a company called Dignan printed approximate instructions and provided chemicals that in principle would have allowed a very capable amateur to eventually be able to process Kodachrome at home. I tried it once and although I did get the reversal process to work, the color range was clear-yellow-black with no other color showing up. Based on my limited experience and what I've read, I'd guess it would be possible to make a lab capable of processing Kodachrome (probably not very well) for perhaps $100,000.
From the 1950's to the early 1970's there were a number of fly-by-night film and processing companies that did a poor job of making and processing film. I don't look forward to a re-emergence of those conditions.
Kodachrome keeps well in the dark, but the dyes are not light-fast. Put them in direct sunlight and they'll be seriously degraded in about 2 weeks. A better product for color prints was made by Ciba, but it used very toxic chemicals and in any case is also no longer available.
Digital phones have very small apertures compared to a 35 mm camera. That means that for the same f/-number, the depth of field for the phone-camera is in the range of 4 to 7 times as great. In short, it's difficult for the phone-camera not to be in focus.
Selective focus is the realm of large apertures, which implies large sensors.and wide-open lenses.
Although digital sensors are linear (if designed that way - they can be designed, for instance, to have a log response) the default output of most digital cameras (especially the cheaper ones) is JPEG, and JPEG often uses the sRGB profile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG which has an average gamma of about 0.45. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRGB. (Incidentally, this nonlinear response is a good choice, it provides a much wider dynamic range.)
Although the top part of the "S curve" is characteristic of most film developing, the bottom part ("toe") can be extended or nonexistent depending upon the developer used. My favorite developer was D76, which as it turns out is an inferior developer: it has a long toe caused by borax in the formulation, which eats away at the emulsion before the critical regions that receive the least light are fully developed. The result is muddy dark areas.
Films were being constantly improved over the years, and by 1967 there was Anscochrome 500 and Kodachrome 400, even while the highest speed color negative film I was aware of was Kodacolor 100. In the 1970's film manufacturers realized this was a ridiculous situation and there was a revolution in the speed and resolution of color negative film. All this was happening in films that incorporated dye couplers in the emulsion, i.e. not Kodachrome. Indeed, after perhaps 1975 there were no improvements in Kodachrome 25 or 64, so the dye-coupled products eventually won out. By the time Kodachrome 25 was discontinued it was inferior in both speed and resolving power to Ektachrome 100. Neither of them was anywhere near as good as equivalent speed color negative film, and the color negative film is more resistant to highlight blowout.
The idea that Kodachrome's "resolution was limited by your own optics, rather than by grain." can be easily disproved by anyone with a microscope.
For most applications faster RAM gives very small overall speed improvement. A fast GPU is good for gaming and for those very few applications that do parallel math on the GPU.
Black in the IRE system is 7.5 units. The 0 IRE is a voltage representing nothing that can be displayed. It's a convenience for the sloppy capabilities of 1950's tube technology, so that a poorly adjusted monitor won't show retrace lines.
If the spectrum of the sources exactly matched the cone spectral responses, the result would be inferior. Take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cone_cell and see how much the red and green cone spectral response overlap. Do some thinking about how you would best stimulate red response without stimulating green, and vice versa.
A monochromatic source in the cyan region would excite the green and blue cones with less response by the red cones, than a combination of green and blue sources with the same green and blue cone response would excite the red comes. By causing less red cone response, the cyan source is perceived as purer.
Take a look at https://dot-color.com/category/color-gamut-standards/. Make points along the periphery to represent monochromatic sources. Connect the points with lines. The area within the lines represents all the colors that can be produced with those monochromatic sources. With 3 sources, all the colors that exist in nature (Pointer's gamut) can just barely be shown (assuming normal vision and other reasonable things.) With 4 sources more colors ("unnatural") can be shown, mostly covering additional colors in the green-blue region. 5 sources is even better, etc.. 6 is not a reasonable improvement.
The number 6 comes from color printing, which has different limitations from emissive displays. See hexachrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexachrome for an example.
Close to half the traffic in my local library is movies. It's hard enough to justify spending tax dollars on a library as it is, if the patronage falls dramatically the funding will be at risk.
The Americans with Disabilities Act attempts to prohibit shelves so close together that a wheelchair can't fit between them. It only takes a lawyer and one bitter person in a wheelchair to make your plan very costly.
Slashdot Mirror
Socialism in practice is just another flavor of unlimited government power. Once the principle of private ownership of anything is abandoned, the private ownership of everything has lost its intellectual underpinning.
Except that in a socialist bureaucracy, if you piss off the wrong guy or he just decides he wants to screw someone today, you end up bankrupt or in prison. If you piss off somebody at Wallyworld, you can go work for Home Despot instead.
The converter boxes are worthless even in "near fringe" areas; the signals just aren't strong enough for digital to work. Digital TV requires a minimum of -65 dBm to work barely acceptably, about -60 dBm to work reliably. http://copradar.com/dtv/index.html That's 32 uV and 58 uV into 300 ohms, respectively, which is not a small signal.
This might be a question of continuing contracts with terrestrial stations, where the contracts guarantee no competing station (i.e. no XM) in the station's vicinity. Stern's raunchiness keeps him off the family-friendly AM band, so Stern is stuck with the much smaller XM audience.
No, twice 53 kHz. The sidebands exist on both sides of the nominal center frequency.
It takes roughly an 18 dB S/N ratio (for white noise) before any digital signal can deliver enough consecutive bits for digital audio to be useful, regardless of the error correction scheme. With an 18 dB S/N ratio, the FM "quieting" effect is already working, giving about a 28 dB S/N ratio (for mono). Even if the digital scheme is frequency shift encoded, FM retains an advantage near the noise floor. In places where the only radio is noisy FM, a switch to DAB means no radio at all.
At any signal strength that makes AM intelligible, FM is superior.
The difference between common commercial broadcast AM and FM is that the AM band is around 1 MHz ( 300 m ) and FM band around 100 MHz ( 3 m ). The 300 m wavelength means more power diffracts around mountaintops into valleys, compared to 3 m which will be more line-of-sight.
However, total noise (man-made + atmospheric + galactic) is 30 to 40 dB higher at 1 MHz than at 100 MHz. This gives the 100 MHz band a tremendous advantage in open country.
I live about 30 miles from the nearest transmitter, in southern New Hampshire. At any time, I can receive about 50 FM stations with good quality. During the day I can get about 5 AM stations in the intelligible-to-good range, and 10 or 15 at night. This is moderately hilly country with 500 to 1000 foot mountain ranges that it would seem would block FM reception in most directions, yet FM has a distinct advantage. (The exception is the ability at night to receive New York City stations 200 miles away; their signals bounce off the ionosphere.)
That design is super-regenerative, which means it's always oscillating and spewing interference everywhere. Abysmal quality and irresponsible.
Anscochrome came in a bright red box. GAF claimed the film was balanced for 6500K (or 6000K?) light, which implies that images would come out redder than the Kodak film balanced for 5500K. I don't recall any difference in color balance, but I never tied to compare them.
5 bits was good enough for Émile Baudot.
In the 1970s, a company called Dignan printed approximate instructions and provided chemicals that in principle would have allowed a very capable amateur to eventually be able to process Kodachrome at home. I tried it once and although I did get the reversal process to work, the color range was clear-yellow-black with no other color showing up. Based on my limited experience and what I've read, I'd guess it would be possible to make a lab capable of processing Kodachrome (probably not very well) for perhaps $100,000.
From the 1950's to the early 1970's there were a number of fly-by-night film and processing companies that did a poor job of making and processing film. I don't look forward to a re-emergence of those conditions.
Kodachrome keeps well in the dark, but the dyes are not light-fast. Put them in direct sunlight and they'll be seriously degraded in about 2 weeks. A better product for color prints was made by Ciba, but it used very toxic chemicals and in any case is also no longer available.
Digital phones have very small apertures compared to a 35 mm camera. That means that for the same f/-number, the depth of field for the phone-camera is in the range of 4 to 7 times as great. In short, it's difficult for the phone-camera not to be in focus.
Selective focus is the realm of large apertures, which implies large sensors.and wide-open lenses.
Although digital sensors are linear (if designed that way - they can be designed, for instance, to have a log response) the default output of most digital cameras (especially the cheaper ones) is JPEG, and JPEG often uses the sRGB profile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG which has an average gamma of about 0.45. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRGB. (Incidentally, this nonlinear response is a good choice, it provides a much wider dynamic range.)
Although the top part of the "S curve" is characteristic of most film developing, the bottom part ("toe") can be extended or nonexistent depending upon the developer used. My favorite developer was D76, which as it turns out is an inferior developer: it has a long toe caused by borax in the formulation, which eats away at the emulsion before the critical regions that receive the least light are fully developed. The result is muddy dark areas.
Films were being constantly improved over the years, and by 1967 there was Anscochrome 500 and Kodachrome 400, even while the highest speed color negative film I was aware of was Kodacolor 100. In the 1970's film manufacturers realized this was a ridiculous situation and there was a revolution in the speed and resolution of color negative film. All this was happening in films that incorporated dye couplers in the emulsion, i.e. not Kodachrome. Indeed, after perhaps 1975 there were no improvements in Kodachrome 25 or 64, so the dye-coupled products eventually won out. By the time Kodachrome 25 was discontinued it was inferior in both speed and resolving power to Ektachrome 100. Neither of them was anywhere near as good as equivalent speed color negative film, and the color negative film is more resistant to highlight blowout.
The idea that Kodachrome's "resolution was limited by your own optics, rather than by grain." can be easily disproved by anyone with a microscope.
For most applications faster RAM gives very small overall speed improvement. A fast GPU is good for gaming and for those very few applications that do parallel math on the GPU.
It's all downhill when you get to SLEDs.
Black in the IRE system is 7.5 units. The 0 IRE is a voltage representing nothing that can be displayed. It's a convenience for the sloppy capabilities of 1950's tube technology, so that a poorly adjusted monitor won't show retrace lines.
A nit is the egg of a louse. Thus these TVs are lousy.
If the spectrum of the sources exactly matched the cone spectral responses, the result would be inferior. Take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cone_cell and see how much the red and green cone spectral response overlap. Do some thinking about how you would best stimulate red response without stimulating green, and vice versa.
A monochromatic source in the cyan region would excite the green and blue cones with less response by the red cones, than a combination of green and blue sources with the same green and blue cone response would excite the red comes. By causing less red cone response, the cyan source is perceived as purer.
Take a look at https://dot-color.com/category/color-gamut-standards/. Make points along the periphery to represent monochromatic sources. Connect the points with lines. The area within the lines represents all the colors that can be produced with those monochromatic sources. With 3 sources, all the colors that exist in nature (Pointer's gamut) can just barely be shown (assuming normal vision and other reasonable things.) With 4 sources more colors ("unnatural") can be shown, mostly covering additional colors in the green-blue region. 5 sources is even better, etc.. 6 is not a reasonable improvement.
The number 6 comes from color printing, which has different limitations from emissive displays. See hexachrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexachrome for an example.
Opportunity costs.
Close to half the traffic in my local library is movies. It's hard enough to justify spending tax dollars on a library as it is, if the patronage falls dramatically the funding will be at risk.
The Americans with Disabilities Act attempts to prohibit shelves so close together that a wheelchair can't fit between them. It only takes a lawyer and one bitter person in a wheelchair to make your plan very costly.