> You jumped the gun on the date, AG! This was intended to be posted
> on April 1, no?
It was April 1st in half the world when I wrote it. I didn't want our
New Zealand friends to be disappointed.
> If you're serious, I am reserving disbelief.
The basis of my report is in fact. In the particular industry that
pays my insurance, I'm involved in R&D. One thing we encountered was
equipment that uses CF cards. This isn't any old equipment, but that
stuff of which we absolutely depend on and costs millions of dollars.
Well, the manufacturer specifically recommended a particular
brand/model of CF card because of internal shielding, and long-term
reliability. Shielding? Yes. It turns out that some cards are more
susceptable to radiation and RF interference than others.
One thing I am required to do in my job is to "never assume
anything". If a mission-critical piece of equipment were to fail at
an inopportune time, people can die. Thanks to laws inacted since
9-11, we are now held to a much higher standard than ever before and
must have contingency plans for every possibility.
This was a question I was asked by high-level management on how
reliable these cards are. This is for equipment which will most
likely be in place for up to 25 years.
It turns out that there ARE differences in the design and manufacture
of the various CF cards. It turns out that good-old magnetic media
as found in the Microdrive is the most reliable in a high-RF
environment. Also, the driver chipsets in cameras and these
dedicated devices ARE optimized to certain performance specs.
We assume that because it's "digital" that it's always going to be
100% correct. How do we really know that? Experience? Just because
we've never seen it YET, doesn't mean that the problem doesn't exist.
I was very specific in my "report". I identified three different
cards and identified just ONE camera as a potential source of
incompatibility. Do incompatibilities exist in other digital
components? Of course they do. Why wouldn't cameras be any
different? As an example, RAW files from E-system cameras will tend
to have artifacts in orange/yellow highlights when processed with
some raw converters, but not others.
Back in a previous employment, my company used high-performance
hard-drives. We had, by far, the most demanding requirements of any
application on hard-drives. We always had to stress-test every new
make and model and even manufacturing run of the drives because of
incremental firmware changes which would alter timing, response or
other issues. Thermal-Recalc anyone? If the hard-drive failed to
communicate a "not-ready" state to the device on the other end of the
ribbon-cable, we would actually get data dumping out onto the floor.
(so to speak). It is highly plausable that these kinds of errors or
design-faults exist in our cameras and storage media. Usually the CRC
wouldn't catch it because the failure occured ahead of that point.
I am reminded that when the EOS-1Ds Mark II came out that it had
imcompatibilities with several types of storage cards. Sometimes it
would result in lockups, othertimes it resulted in corrupted data.
These types of failures are OBVIOUS. But what about the subtle
bit-bending that can occur within a file that we may not always be
aware of?
AG
____________________________________________________________________________________
Get your own web address.
Have a HUGE year through Yahoo! Small Business.
http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/domains/?p=BESTDEAL
==============================================
List usage info: http://www.zuikoholic.com
List nannies: olympusadmin@xxxxxxxxxx
==============================================
|