111–120 of 166 posts
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https://www.bestbuy.com/site/wd-easystore-10tb-external-usb-...
The bizarre thing is I can't find bare drives cheaper than that on Amazon - how are they making a profit on these?
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Museums don’t own all of their collections though, and they too make decisions on what to display at any moment. Not all objects are worthy of display, some get rotated out back into some rich person’s attic.
I'd be very interested to hear about any respectable museum that sends off items that are not displayed to be stored into some rich person's attic (or for display at a private residence as I assume you are implying).
If you constantly collect items, and never discard them, then your collection will just keep growing (as will your warehousing bills). There's far more than can be put on display at many locations.
At this point, saving video games seems like saving examples of drinking glasses from you local discount store. Humanity simply can't save a copy of everything from all time. We should let more go. By preserving everything, we're decreasing signal to noise, IMO.
> But in the current, digitized world, trivial information is accumulating every second, preserved in all its triteness. Never fading, always accessible.[...]All this junk data preserved in an unfiltered state, growing at an alarming rate.
> an overabundance of digital information -- the world will drown in the coming flood of information
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I don't think this is a fair comparison as a museum is normally opened with the sole desire of preserving history ( Profit is often desired but not the incentive for opening ) Do you think google bought YouTube originally to preserve history or to create a new line of profit and enhance its brand?
Considering their mission statement about making the worlds information universally accessible and contemporary goals around literary archival it’s not a stretch to believe they had history on their mind.
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Ah! Small note. There are methods of compression and encoding that allow for scalability. There's some fancy signal processing you can do to encode multiple into a single bitstream without necessarily storing redundant data. But, I'm not in industry, and the last time I poked my head in I recall things being way uglier and more complicated than I had imagined. There was a good conference talk that was linked here onc…
Interesting, thanks! I'd love to read more about ways to encode video that allows streaming at a variety of resolutions with a minimum of redundancy, if anyone has any links.
It's a bit out of date (2002), but the core video encoder material was solid. It's a bit heavy in representing concepts using symbolic/equation notation. That, for me, made the jump from 1D signal processing to multidimensional signal processing tougher than it needed to be.
There are probably better resources so definitely don't just take my word for it! :)
(For scabilility, IIRC the terms "enhancement layer" and "base layer" are particularly important, as are the block diagrams that generate them.)
I don't know if they are. Emulating games is not really preserving them in a sense, because it can't reproduce the hardware or experience as it actually was very well. Like you can play Ridge Racer type 4 in emulation, but part of that game's history was the special controller it was bundled with, which let you twist the middle of it to enable analog steering wheel control. Like you can't emulate Boktai without the s…
To a lesser extent, the same goes for cinema, but there's no question that we're preserving cinematic history by continuing to make Citizen Kane available.
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https://www.bestbuy.com/site/wd-easystore-10tb-external-usb-...
The bizarre thing is I can't find bare drives cheaper than that on Amazon - how are they making a profit on these?
Smaller market of more demanding enthusiast users for internal drives. (Larger businesses aren't sourcing drives from Amazon or Newegg, unless the company is called Backblaze.)
Latter costs more to support and as niche users generally pay more. (The more price conscious resort to shucking external drives.)
At least, that's how it's been explained to me. I don't know if that's the entire story though it sounds reasonable enough.
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I'd like someone to do the math on that 200MiB estimate. YouTube stores every video at multiple resolutions, and has replicas in data centers all around the world.
Ah! Small note. There are methods of compression and encoding that allow for scalability. There's some fancy signal processing you can do to encode multiple into a single bitstream without necessarily storing redundant data. But, I'm not in industry, and the last time I poked my head in I recall things being way uglier and more complicated than I had imagined. There was a good conference talk that was linked here onc…
A big note. All of this wasn't used by YT because they've always used a widely used standard codecs and media containers. All the lower qualities of videos they provide use storage nearly the same as the highest one (so 2x total), all bitrates are the same for all videos. As for download part, the players in auto quality would get first a maximum quality they can for current download speed, if there's a room or connection isn't stable - also 480p version, and if the speed was enough to download current and next chunk in lower quality it would download the best and switch to it over on completion (there were a times when player was downloading the whole video in the best quality after it had finished in an optimal).
> the sort of awful, buggy things (formatting/file wise) that people try to upload that break everything.
YT has very narrow list of formats allowed to upload with hard breaks in converting process, especially for the audio.