Archive for the 'technology' Category

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If Kate Moss and Inspector Morse had a baby

Published on September 4, 2007 in Society and technology. Closed

Donald Trump's nightmare

Ok, she’s not Kate Moss, and he’s not Inspector Morse, but you get the general idea. If you father a child once you’re past 70 years old, the kid’s gonna have bags under the eyes.

made with www.faceresearch.org/demos/baby – via infosthetics.com

On a totally unrelated note: thanks for all the nice emails, SMSes, IM’s and other Facebook pokes I received for my 38th birthday. If I didn’t reply immediately: I had a wonderful weekend with the woman I love. I can only hope the rest of the year will continue on the same elan.

Printing an MP3 on A4′s

Published on March 19, 2007 in technology. Closed

Empire State - QueenRoly
Look wat ‘experts’ are still telling in the courtroom:

The HP Pavilion computer obtained from McGuire’s attorney’s office had a 60 gigabyte hard drive, and not all of it was searched by Seymour.
She told the jury that it is known in the computer industry that if information stored on a 12 gigabyte computer was put on paper it would create a stack of paper higher than the Empire State Building.
from dailyrecord.com

There was a time once when PCs were just overevolved typewriters and it made sense to express everything in “number of pages”. That time has long gone. Let’s convert that 12 GB into today’s storage currencies:

  • 12 GB is the equivalent of 17 CD-ROMs of data (700MB)
  • not yet 3 full DVDs (4.7GB)
  • Not even one HD-DVD (15/30GB) or Blu-Ray (25/50GB) disc
  • 4000 3MB (+-8 megapixel) pictures in JPG format
  • 12 days of MP3 recordings (at 96Kbps)
  • 16 episodes (not even one full season) of Lost, Prison Break or Heroes

Moreover, a conversion to typed-out A4s only makes sense if you specify font-size, spacing, margins and usage of duplex printing, in which case it remains an impractical antiquated unit.

A jury full of technophobes/non-experts shouldn’t be baffled with exaggerations like a “tower the size of the Empire State”. If you do not take into account the operating system, programs, images, music and movies, what remains on a hard disk of searchable data created by the owner? Maybe 2-5 gigabytes, thanks to MS Office’s bloated file formats. And the most important stuff for computer forensics is maybe 5MB: browser history, cookies, IM transcripts, emails and Office documents converted to text.

HD – 720p, 1080i and 1080p

Published on September 27, 2006 in bandwidth and technology. 2 Comments

After a conversation with Ine on HD formats (1080i vs. 1080p), I researched the topic a bit further. Let me resume some of the things I have learned up till now:
HD quality: 720p and 1080i

Real HD and HD-ready

HD or ‘high definition’ as defined for screens, projectors and TV, defines 2 resolutions. The smaller one has 720 lines of each 1280 pixels, the bigger one 1080 lines of each 1920 pixels. They can be used with different frame rates: refreshed at 24 fps (a common movie standard) up to 50/60fps (often used for TV). To limit the necessary bandwidth in some cases ‘interlaced scanning’ is used: 1 frame contains all the odd lines, the next only the even lines. This effectively halves the throughput, at the cost of image quality (rapid moving lines appear jagged).
The two most common formats are:

  • 720p60: 1280×720, 60 fps progressive scanning, used e.g. in USA-based HDTV broadcasts
  • 1080i50 or 1080i60: 1920×1080, 50 or 60 fps interlaced scanning. The higher resolution makes it better for larger screens and movies, but the interlacing has a bad influence on fast moving images (like e.g. sports).

What kind of resolution do we have now? Regular digital TV (SD or ‘Standard Definition’) consists of 480 lines of 720 pixels each. DVD, for instance, allows for 480i and 480p. So, HD delivers at least 3x that resolution.

“HD Ready“, a label that a lot of TVs/screens carry now, just indicates that:

  • The minimum native resolution of the display (e.g. LCD, PDP) or display engine (e.g. DLP) is 720 physical lines in wide aspect ratio.
  • The display device accepts HD input via Analogue YPbPr1, DVI or HDMI
  • HD capable inputs accept the following HD video formats: 1280×720 @ 50 and 60Hz progressive (“720p”), and 1920×1080 @ 50 and 60Hz interlaced (“1080i”)
  • The DVI or HDMI input supports content protection (HDCP)

from eicta.org (PDF)

Even if the display can only show 720p, and so must ‘downsample’ an incoming 1080i signal to that lower resolution, it can be called “HD Ready”.
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IBC Amsterdam: bigger, better, faster

Published on September 14, 2006 in technology. Closed

I spent Saturday with Clo at IBC 2006 (Amsterdam), an exhibition about content creation, management and delivery. As boring as that may sound, we did see some neat stuff.

HARDWARE
IBC: AccentureFirst of all, IBC is a paradise for hardware freaks. I’ve never seen so many 30″ plus flat screen displays on such a limited surface. One vendor combined 6 of those into one impressive control room. Accenture was showing off a huge touchscreen display for geo-applications, which reminded of Minory Report. Apple had dropped off several truckloads of equipment, including a full XServe RAID rack which probably packed more than 30 Terabytes. A nice rack to look at.

There are camera support cranes and extensible poles up to 15m high. We saw a lot of steadycam demos, and one guy did a steadycam demo that was some mix between martial arts and ballet.

All vendors of blue screen/green screen solutions for broadcast purposes showed of their equipment with one or more blond girls. Must be the best hair colour for blue screen effects.
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