How A Failed Video Format Spawned A New Kind of MicroscopeThe video cassette tape was really the first successful home video format; discs just couldn’t compete back in the early days.
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How A Failed Video Format Spawned A New Kind of Microscope
The video cassette tape was really the first successful home video format; discs just couldn’t compete back in the early days. That’s not to say nobody tried, however, with RCA’s VideoDisc a valiant effort that ultimately fell flat on its face. However, the forgotten format did have one benefit, in that it led to the development of an entirely new kind of microscope, as explained by IEEE Spectrum.
The full story is well worth the read; the short version is that it all comes down to capacitance. RCA’s VideoDisc format was unique in that it didn’t use reflective surfaces or magnetic states to represent data. Instead, the data was effectively stored as capacitance changes. As a conductive stylus rode through an undulating groove in a carbon-impregnated PVC disc, the capacitance between the stylus and the disc changed. This capacitance was effectively placed into a resonant circuit, where it would alter the frequency over time, delivering an FM signal that could be decoded into video and audio by the VideoDisc player.
The VideoDisc had a capacitance sensor that could detect such fine changes in capacitance, that it led to the development of the Scanning Capacitance Microscope (SCM). The same techniques used to read and inspect VideoDiscs for quality control could be put to good use in the field of semiconductors. The sensors were able to be used to detect tiny changes in capacitance from dopants in a semiconductor sample, and the SCM soon became an important tool in the industry.
It’s perhaps a more inspiring discovery than when cheeky troublemakers figured out you could use BluRay diodes to pop balloons. Still fun, though. An advertisement for the RCA VideoDisc is your video after the break.
youtube.com/embed/h184c9WJ8uY?…
Gli ultimi otto messaggi ricevuti dalla Federazione
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Giuli spende trenta milioni nostri per un Caravaggio....meloni urla anche stavolta?
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I enjoyed and appreciated reading this post.
"I realized almost immediately that GNU/Linux and FreeBSD were so similar they were completely different."
This right here.
My initial impression with #FreeBSD in 2006 was quite similar. Of course, #Linux back then was a much different beast than what it has evolved (mutated?) into today.
Had I not pursued Linux system administration as a career, I *probably* would have stuck with FreeBSD.
We can make all the technical comparisons between the two OSes all day long but what drove my interest and enthusiasm are (1) the documentation and (2) the community.
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@peacelink ma non sono riuscite ad evitare di sbavare mentre lo dicevano
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@stefano Don’t bother filing a bug report. They will act stupid. Probably they are stupid about it. They think it is a bug. Actually the author probably wrote a program he knew was not a solution to the problem but which he could do on deadline and which was good enough for his job at HP.
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@stefano Here is something new for you to be upset about, though, which affects everyone, Linux, BSD, illumos alike. I have been upset about it for over 20 years.
Read ‘man 5 fonts-conf’ or whatever your equivalent is. Read it carefully under ‘FONT MATCHING’. What it says is that a font is not chosen as you wished, but instead RANDOMLY. You are only LUCKY if you get the font you wished.
And if you experiment long enough you will find this is true.
Fontconfig is unfixable and must be scrapped.
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L'Ucraina ha sviluppato nuovi missili balistici FP-7, analoghi all'ATACMS, ma due volte meno costosi
I test si stanno muovendo verso una nuova fase, i missili saranno testati direttamente in attacchi in Russia
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E in omaggio la concessione decennale per l'uso di un pezzo di bosco demaniale.
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@quinta non solo lo fa, ma se ne vanta pure.
