Re: rnd pckts

Mark Grant (mark@unicorn.com)
Sat, 12 Apr 1997 21:39:27 +0000


On Sat, 12 Apr 1997, Eugene Leitl wrote:

> Hitachi's new videocamera (about 5 kDM) can do realtime 1:100 MPEG.

Ick. Unless it's a damn sight better than the MPEG CD-is I've seen I'll
be sticking with Hi8.

> Gateway2000 might acquire Amiga tech & rights from ESCOM AG
> which went bankrupt July 1996. Oh my.

Serves ESCOM right. When I bought my laptop from them I had to wait six
weeks for them to get one which worked, then take it back for a
replacement because they left off the CPU heatsink and it continually
overheated, and they told me they'd have some more RAM for me a couple of
weeks after I bought it. Nine months later I finally found a RAM card for
it in Taipei...

> Vobis, a popular teutonic computer chain, will offer a 64 MByte
> RAM, 1 MB 2nd cache, 4 GByte IDE HD, 4 MByte gfx board and 8x
> CD ROM Alpa for 6 kDM. Muckischrott NT 4.0 and FX!32 (a smart
> run-time Intl-Alpha code compiler) is bundled. Won't sell, of
> course.

Why not? Sounds like a good price to me; just delete NT and install Linux
instead.

> net.jet, a Java application for Nettscrape >2.0 will suck
> this-document referenced pages into local cache, thinking
> ahead of user's mouse. Access latency? Which access latency?
> http://www.peak-media.com

Bad, bad, bad. I don't want my browser downloading pages which I didn't
choose to look at, because I don't want to end up in access logs unless I
have to. I get more than enough junk mail as it is. And just think of the
problems if someone links from a popular page to a legal Dutch porn site
with images which would count as 'child porn' in America, or to an
American crypto ftp site. People looking at those pages would be breaking
the law purely by accident as their browsers go off and download the
illegal data for them.

> from skies seems a better choice, though. Speaking of that,
> when (compressed) video-bandwidth cellular links?

>From what I was reading last week British Rail have been testing video by
GSM. AFAIR it uses four GSM channels and only gives two or three frames
per second, but that's good enough for the security cameras they want to
install on trains. Presumably if you could afford to use 40 GSM channels
at once you could send 25fps.

> Digital photography has taken wing, silver stock will definitely not
> be a good future investment.

Do color films use silver? Anyway, we have a long way to go before film
becomes obsolete; my $700 35mm camera gives about five times the linear
resolution (twenty-five times as many 'pixels') of any similar priced
digital camera. So digital is great for snapshots and advertising photos
with a short turnaround time (e.g. real estate agents, used car ads), but
at the moment it's lousy for real photography.

Mark

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