Interesting Items...

It was also given away with the Magpi magazine this month. Who'd have thought, a 1GHz computer with half a gig of RAM as a freebie on a magazine.
 
For all you Android enthusiasts:

Electronics Weekly 4/11/2015 said:
Life is better with an iPhone

When 4G came along I chopped in my iPhone 3G for a Samsung Galaxy S4 chosen because of its big screen.

Now I’m back to an iPhone and I’ve missed it.

The S4’s dual home screen bugged me – when you saved a site to home- screen you never knew which home screen it was going to, and the icons for most saved sites were identical. And there were the multiple unwanted irremovable sites Samsung had loaded on the phone.

And the worst thing about the S4 was the time it took to sniff a signal. When you came off a flight it struggled to connect to a cellular signal.

One of the best things about iPhones is the feel of them. The 3G felt good in the hand and the 6 feels better; whereas the S4 never had the feel-good factor.

And above all iOS feels like it’s on your side while Android comes across as whimsical – sometimes doing what you want but sometimes not.

I had forgotten how nice it is when something functions as expected.
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Well bugger me. I must ditch my SGS5 and become a fanboy then. I'll pop across to PC World in a mo and feel how much better an iPhone feels.
 
Well, he's actually comparing an iPhone with a specific manufacturer's version of Android. Which is rather the point of Android - if you don't like Samsung's way of working or the sluggish signal response of that model, you have a huge range of others to try. iPhone ... not much choice.

Personally, having had a couple of HTCs in our early smartphone days, I now stick with the Google offerings (Nexus, Nexi?) which is relatively plain Android. (There are still a bunch of Google apps loaded which you can't remove, but at least for the ones you don't want you can remove them from the screens and largely ignore them.)
 
I would be interested to know what the 'Legal Department' makes of this one, after all they are 'bricking' an item that people have have paid big bucks for
 
Electronics Weekly 11/04/2016 said:
IBM allows web access to quantum computer

IBM has made access to a quantum computer available via the internet for anyone who wants to use it to run algorithms. Called IBM Quantum Experience, the five qubit machine is on a single cryogenic chip at the TJ Watson Research Center in New York.

“This moment represents the birth of quantum cloud computing. By giving hands-on access to IBM’s experimental quantum systems, the IBM Quantum Experience will make it easier for researchers and the scientific community to accelerate innovations in the quantum field, and help discover new applications for this technology,” said IBM research director Arvind Krishna.

Quantum computers have similarities to digital computers, but are different beasts, with enormous capability if ways
can be found to create the necessary delicate quantum states, and sustain them long enough for them to produce a result.

IBM said it expects medium-sized quantum processors of 50-100 qubits to be possible in the next decade. “None of today’s TOP500 supercomputers could successfully emulate a quantumcomputer built of 50 qubits, reflecting the tremendous potential of thistechnology,” it said.

Standard digital algorithms are not applicable to quantum computing, and a large amount of work on suitable algorithms has already been done.

“The community of quantum computer scientists and theorists is working to harness the power,” said IBM. “Applications in optimisation and chemistry will likely be the first to demonestrate quantum speed-up.”

Last year, IBM found a way to detect quantum errors by combining superconducting qubits in a lattice “whose quantum circuit design is the only physical architecture that can scale
to larger dimensions”, claimed the firm.

In superconducting metal on a silicon chip, its team has now combined fivequbits in the lattice architecture, “which demonstrates ‘parity measurement’, the basis of many quantum error correction protocols”, said IBM. “The road towards universal quantum computing hinges upon the achievement of quantum error correction,” it said.

“Access to early quantum computing prototypes will be key in imagining and developing future applications,” said Dario Gil, vice-president of science at IBM Research. “If you want to understand what a true quantum computer will do for you and how it works, this is the place to do it. You won't experience it anywhere else.”
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I've put this under "Interesting Items..." as my vehicle for magazine cuttings, but it is relevant to several discussions under Freeview and elsewhere (reproduced as-is, don't look at me re grammar and punctuation!):
EPE Aug 2016 said:
Why we need a Digital Television Group - Report by Barry Fox

The annual Summit conference held in May by the UK's Digital Television Group was short on hot news but neatly proved the need for a DTG - to create order out of the chaos which would surely exist if there were no independent body which the TV industry trusts to set standards, test products to ensure they meet standards and steer rival TV stations and set-makers into collaboration.

Intermittent muting
In the run up to this year's event, at the Kings Place concert hall in London's Kings Cross, some TV viewers had been plagued with a mysterious audio fault on all the Freeview high definition channels, but not the standard definition equivalents. On some makes of TV (notably Samsung), but not others, and not on set-top boxes (eg, Humax), the sound intermittently and apparently randomly mutes.

The conference provided an opportunity to talk with the DTG's engineers, who admitted that - like all intermittent, random faults - the HD dropout had been very difficult to isolate and make repeatable. But the DTG thinks it is finally nailed.

CODEC issues
The HE-AAC (High-Efficiency Advanced Audio Coding) audio encoders on the HD multiplex are quite separate from the MPEG (Version 1, Layer 2) encoders used for the SD channels, and earlier this year all the HD encoders were upgraded to tweak their AAC compression with a system called perceptual noise substitution (PNS). This saves bits where wanted audio sounds like unwanted noise. So the coding is continually changing, depending on the sound. Although this was tested before the upgrade, it later emerged that the decoder chipsets used in some TVs (notably Samsung) cannot cope with some levels of compression, and respond by muting.

The DTG is now co-ordinating a temporary rollback of the encoder upgrade to fix the problem - until the set makers have all developed, tested and pushed out updates to the decodes chipsets locked into viewer's sets. The rollback started in May, just before the DTG conference, and is progressing across the country.

The DTG is currently holding 'plugfests' to try and pre-empt what could have been even more widespread problems if broadcasters press ahead with plans to use HDR (high dynamic range) picture coding. Both Netflix and Amazon have gone ahead with the launch of HDR programming on their 4K Internet services, without waiting for an industry standard, and each uses slightly different systems. Sascha Prueter, Head of Android TV at Google, confirmed that the BBC is now working with YouTube on another system.

LG has adopted the proprietary Dolby Vision system, while Panasonic is catering for the Netflix and Amazon systems along with HDR10, the Open HDR system used for Blu-ray discs. Disney wants to use HDR, but with conventional 1080p High Definition video, rather than 4K.

The opportunity for chaos is obvious, with HDR video material likely to look worse than non-HDR pictures if displayed on screens that cannot correctly decode the metadata that travels with the picture signal to match the display capability with the source material.

Participants in the DTG's two recent HDR Plugfests, one in Berlin and another in London, told how TV manufacturers at the events were frantically phoning their software labs in India, Korea and Japan to describe problems encountered at the event. Because the events were spread over two days tere was no time to get back revised software down a line and try it on the spot.

Subtitle 'triumph'
The DTG's Summit at Kings Place was notable also for proving that live TV subtitling does not have to be as poor as it usually is. The current technique is for a titler to listen to the TV sound through headphones and re-speak the words into a microphone connected to a PC which is running voice recognition software. This overcomes the problem that computer voice recognition cannot (yet) cope with different dialects or accents or mumbling. But inevitably re-speaking creates a significant delay and the software still injects recognition errors, which can only be corrected when the programme is recorded and repeated or replayed later from a Catchup Service such as iPlayer.

The recognition errors are often so gross and hilarious that watching a muted TV screen in a club, pub or airport waiting zone has become a whole new form of entertainment. The errors are also deeply frustrating for the prime target audience, the deaf and hard of hearing.

At the DTG Summit, some members of the audience gradually realised that the subtitles for the on-stage talk which were continuously displayed live on screens alongside the stage were remarkably accurate and only slightly behind the speech; and this was despite the fact that many of the speakers were talking very fast, and using Tv jargon.

How is this happening so extraordinarily well, we asked; how can re-voicing and software recognition be so rapid and accurate? Up on screen, to spontaneous applause from the hall, came a direct reply from the titler: 'I am a steganographer'.

The DTG later explained that it had hired a 'verbatim' court steganographer with a dedicated keyboard that captures words as shorthand keystroke combinations which computer software then outputs as plain text. The DTG says it is now co-operating with the UK's telecoms regulator Ofcom on a report, which asks why TV subtitling is so bad, and whether it has to be so bad. Hopefully, someone from Ofcom was at the DTG Summit to see first hand evidence that it doesn't have to be so bad. But the cost will increase because it takes literally years of training to learn to capture in real time.
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Interesting that the article notes that Humax set-top boxes don't suffer this audio codec problem. This means that anyone using HDR-FOX to view HiDef with PCM audio (stereo) on the HDMI won't notice it (because the Humax box will have converted the incoming AAC to PCM), but anyone passing through the multi-channel audio to a TV that can't cope with it would have done.
 
Pretty sure all Humax boxes convert aac to ac3 unless you turn off surround sound in the box TV setup. PCM stereo is output with the surround sound option off and for all SD channels (MP2 to PCM). The s/pdif on two Humax HDR FOX T2 units outputs ac3 because they connect to a pair of Sony cordless surround headphones which have a built in ac3 decoder in the base station (which always lights up). Why would any TV not handle stereo PCM it will be by far the most common digital audio output to a TV ? The issue is with AC3 audio.

No broadcaster will transmit PCM (far too high a bitrate). SD normally MP2 (mpeg1 layer2), ac3 for HD satellite and aac for HD Freeview.
 
Re subtitles

I was amused recently when BBC news were talking about "Siemens" the sub title kept saying "see mens"


Sent from here using a computing device.
 
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