Saturday, May 30, 2020

Only New York, Rhode Island Exceed North Dakota In Covid-19 Testing -- May 30, 2020

Link here:


At #18, Michigan must have missed the memo on testing. I guess they were focused on Ford Motor Co. making masks and ventilators, and whether President Trump would wear a mask when touring Ford Motor Company. He did. 

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Enquiring Minds Want To Know: 
Why Are CDs 120 MM In Size?

CDs: compact discs, not certificates of deposit.

Link here
The story that Sony Vice-President Norio Ohga insisted on the new medium being able to accommodate Wilhelm Furtwängler’s reading of Beethoven’s Ninth — at the time, the longest recorded performance of the piece — has passed not only into legend, but into many official histories.
However, according to former Philips researcher Kees Immink, the 120mm diameter and 74-minute running time of the CD were actually the result of undignified horse-trading between Sony and Philips, whose relationship as co-developers of the format was sometimes rocky.
Until quite late in the development process, the disc was to have been 115mm in diameter, but this would have given Philips a competitive advantage, as their subsidiary Polygram already had a plant set up to produce 115mm discs. To level the playing field, Ohga insisted on a late change in the size of the disc.
FWIW: a standard 120 mm CD-ROM holds about 650 megabytes, which is 0.64 gigabytes or 0.68 billion bytes.

Sophia: what's a CD? 

2 comments:

  1. I guess we shouldn’t even bring up 5.25” floppy disks with her; they didn’t even last long enough to transfer real early stuff to CD. Reel tape worked pretty good though, still used.

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    Replies
    1. ... and we haven't even gotten to vinyl.... but, apparently LPs are coming back....wow, you've stuck with the blog for a long, long time. Thank you.

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