From H James Harkins Sent Tue, Jun 16th 1998, 15:25
From H James Harkins Sent Tue, Jun 16th 1998, 15:25
I'm a little behind on my digests, but wanted to throw in a couple of pence--
You know, all this talk about "why make CDs skip?" and the behavior of the
Gescom MD reminds me of a post that showed up on IDM awhile ago, sometime
within the last year, probably, announcing a real-audio project that
unfortunately I never checked out, but which sounded pretty cool.
Apparently the people who made it wanted listeners to start the file
streaming, and then initiate any sorts of processes that would eat up
network bandwidth--large file downloads, browsing of graphics-intensive
pages--to make RA screw up and see what the results would be. This is
pretty tantalizing--I do recall on one occasion trying to listen to a 4OTF
track via RA, but the connection was just a little bit too slow, so the
meter was destroyed and the beats lurched forward in a totally
unpredictable way, and all the while there was this tremendous spitting and
crackling from the audio stopping and starting at non-zero points,
sometimes maybe 10-20 times per second. Wow!!
We've spent huge amounts of time trying to counteract data loss with more
and more elaborate error-correction and compression schemes. The methods
are so sophisticated at this point that, even if they can't be regarded as
fully intelligent, they do have to make some decisions on their own. So
naturally, it's going to be at least interesting to push the technology
past its limits, to make it fail, and observe what our own preservation
strategies do to data under worst-case conditions. So, in answer to the
question "why make CDs skip?", I'd say one good reason is to remind us of
the limitations of technology. J
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