I wonder what the longevity of DVD-RAMs is. I suspect it is much better than other forms of DVD as it has much better error correction, a diffecent kind of surface (oxygen I think) and you can put them in a caddy if you want, so that you keep them safe. It is also meant to be rewritten 100000 times.
However, if you are worried about longevity then you need a magneto-optical disk, which basically needs both a magnetic field AND a laser (heat) to modify data. The chances of that happening unintentionally are really low.
When CD's came out (early 80s) there was word that they would last max 15 years (alluminium oxydation). The ones I have from that time still work perfectly.
... maybe I should add that it was after slowing light down to a few m/s.
People tend to forget that you cannot exceed the speed of light IN A VACUUM. If light travels in a medium, its speed is less than c. If make some neat atomic phisics tricks it is not too difficult to have a cell with a very high refractive index and where consequently light travels very slowly. Then it is trivial tu run faster than it.
You do have a point here: for most games all you need is a decent graphics card; I mean, in some cases you don't even need that: fable on the XBox look very good and is fun to play. However I must say that my IBM T42p (dothan) laptop just feels much more responsive than my P4 2.6 desktop, especially for scientific applications having a 2MB cache makes all the difference!
you do need to patent chemical processes, machines etc, because they are not covered by copyright. Software, on the other hand is already protected by copyright, and copyright is a much fairer way of protecting creativity as you have it automatically, whereas you must spend a lot of money and time to get (and defend) a patent.
I am not sure whether I get it or not, but it seems to me that what is revolutionary here is not just the speed, but the convenience of the architecture: what if you had just standard slots in your computer in which you could plug extra processors, graphics cards, memory, optical drive hard drive... anything, using the same exact bus. That would make it so convenient to upgrade and to scale, that it would take over the market. Especially if you could plug in a i386 module too.
Well, it is much more difficult to make a quantum computer than it is to make a quantum cryptography system: the only difficult thing of a quantum cryptographic system is having a single photon source: if I remember right the heisemberg uncertianty principle for phase and number states that if you know exactly how many photons you emit, you will never know when you actually emit them; and viceversa, if you know when you emit them, you really don't know how many you emitted. Also, as emitted photons will follow a poissonian distribution, the most likely time for another photon to be emitted is right after the other one; so you can eavesdrop by catching one photon and not the other.
But I very much doubt that a quantum computer will be made before 10-20 years: there is a process called decoherence that basically "damages" your quantum states as you try to scale them up to macroscopic objects. That is the reason you do not see a really big "shrodinger's cat": the time for which the cat is dead or alife would be so short that it has absolutely no meaning. We manage to scale up the quantum states only to a "few" atoms.
I seem to remember that black and white printers somehow encoded the serial number and other information that they had available to them by shifting the individual characters slightly up or down relative to the baseline, and this could be detected with a special scanner. I also heard that the system was used to prove that certain politicians only went to work once in a while and printed post-dated letters to make it look like they worked every day. They were found out and resigned. This must have been a long time ago...
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I wonder what the longevity of DVD-RAMs is. I suspect it is much better than other forms of DVD as it has much better error correction, a diffecent kind of surface (oxygen I think) and you can put them in a caddy if you want, so that you keep them safe. It is also meant to be rewritten 100000 times. However, if you are worried about longevity then you need a magneto-optical disk, which basically needs both a magnetic field AND a laser (heat) to modify data. The chances of that happening unintentionally are really low. When CD's came out (early 80s) there was word that they would last max 15 years (alluminium oxydation). The ones I have from that time still work perfectly.
... maybe I should add that it was after slowing light down to a few m/s. People tend to forget that you cannot exceed the speed of light IN A VACUUM. If light travels in a medium, its speed is less than c. If make some neat atomic phisics tricks it is not too difficult to have a cell with a very high refractive index and where consequently light travels very slowly. Then it is trivial tu run faster than it.
You do have a point here: for most games all you need is a decent graphics card; I mean, in some cases you don't even need that: fable on the XBox look very good and is fun to play. However I must say that my IBM T42p (dothan) laptop just feels much more responsive than my P4 2.6 desktop, especially for scientific applications having a 2MB cache makes all the difference!
you do need to patent chemical processes, machines etc, because they are not covered by copyright. Software, on the other hand is already protected by copyright, and copyright is a much fairer way of protecting creativity as you have it automatically, whereas you must spend a lot of money and time to get (and defend) a patent.
I am not sure whether I get it or not, but it seems to me that what is revolutionary here is not just the speed, but the convenience of the architecture: what if you had just standard slots in your computer in which you could plug extra processors, graphics cards, memory, optical drive hard drive ... anything, using the same exact bus. That would make it so convenient to upgrade and to scale, that it would take over the market. Especially if you could plug in a i386 module too.
Well, it is much more difficult to make a quantum computer than it is to make a quantum cryptography system: the only difficult thing of a quantum cryptographic system is having a single photon source: if I remember right the heisemberg uncertianty principle for phase and number states that if you know exactly how many photons you emit, you will never know when you actually emit them; and viceversa, if you know when you emit them, you really don't know how many you emitted. Also, as emitted photons will follow a poissonian distribution, the most likely time for another photon to be emitted is right after the other one; so you can eavesdrop by catching one photon and not the other. But I very much doubt that a quantum computer will be made before 10-20 years: there is a process called decoherence that basically "damages" your quantum states as you try to scale them up to macroscopic objects. That is the reason you do not see a really big "shrodinger's cat": the time for which the cat is dead or alife would be so short that it has absolutely no meaning. We manage to scale up the quantum states only to a "few" atoms.
I seem to remember that black and white printers somehow encoded the serial number and other information that they had available to them by shifting the individual characters slightly up or down relative to the baseline, and this could be detected with a special scanner. I also heard that the system was used to prove that certain politicians only went to work once in a while and printed post-dated letters to make it look like they worked every day. They were found out and resigned. This must have been a long time ago ...