We often refer to the industrial age as the age of atoms and the information age as the age of bits. Why do we say that? As everyone knows, atoms make up molecules, and molecules make up matter, so we also refer to the industrial age as the age of matter. Then, why do we call the information age the age of bits? Here, it is necessary to first explain what a bit is: a bit is the smallest counting unit in a computer; when we input any letter in English into the computer, that letter occupies a byte, and a byte is composed of bits. Chinese characters are more complex; when we input a Chinese character into the computer, that character occupies two bytes. Therefore, we not only call the information age the age of bits but also sometimes refer to it as the age of digital survival.

　　To understand the value and impact of ‘digital survival,’ the best way is to think about the difference between ‘bits’ and ‘atoms’.

　　Although we undoubtedly live in the information age, most information is disseminated in the form of atoms, such as newspapers, magazines, and books (like this book).

　　Our economy may be shifting towards an information economy, but when measuring the scale of trade and recording fiscal revenues and expenditures, atoms still come to mind.

　　The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) is entirely centered around atoms.

　　Recently, I visited the headquarters of a company, one of the largest integrated circuit manufacturers in the United States.

　　When checking in at the front desk, the receptionist asked me if I was carrying a laptop.

　　Of course, I brought one.

　　Then, she asked me about the model, serial number, and value of this computer.

　　’It’s worth about one to two million US dollars!’

　　I said.

　　She replied, ‘No, sir, that is not possible.

　　What are you talking about? Let me have a look.

　　I showed her my old ‘Power-Book’ computer, and she estimated its value to be around 2,000 US dollars.

　　She wrote down the number and then let me in.

　　The key issue is that atoms are not worth that much money, while bits are almost priceless.

　　Not long ago, I attended a management training session for senior managers of PolyGram in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

　　The purpose of this conference is to promote communication among senior managers and to give everyone an overall concept of the company’s plans for the next year, so many upcoming music works, movies, video games, and rock music videocassettes were displayed.

　　They entrusted FedEx to deliver this batch of sealed CDs, videocassettes, and read-only CDs with weight and volume to the venue.

　　Unfortunately, some packages were stopped at customs.

　　The meaning of the information superhighway is the transmission of weightless bits at the speed of light globally.

　　When each industry asks itself ‘What is my future in the digital world?’ in fact, their future is one hundred percent dependent on whether their products or services can be converted into a digital form.

　　If you are making cashmere wool sweaters or Chinese food, there is still a long way to go to convert the product into bits.

　　To become a beam of light and disappear like the characters in ‘Star Trek’ is appealing, but it is probably not possible within the next few hundred years.

　　Therefore, you still have to rely on FedEx, bicycles, or walking to transport atoms from one place to another.

　　This does not mean that in industries based on atoms, digital technology will have no role to play in design, manufacturing, marketing, and management.

　　I merely say that the core characteristics of these industries will not change, and the atoms in their products will not be converted into bits.

　　In the information and entertainment industries, bits and atoms are often confused with each other.

　　Whether book publishers belong to the information transmission industry (transmitting bits) or the manufacturing industry (manufacturing atoms) is a question. The past answer was both, but as information devices become more common and easy to use, all this will change quickly.

　　Now, information devices are still difficult (though not impossible) to compete with the quality of a book.

　　Books are not only printed clearly but also light, easy to flip through, and not too expensive.

　　However, to get the books into your hands, they must go through various links such as transportation and storage.

　　For textbooks, 45% of the cost is the cost of inventory, transportation, and returns.

　　Worse still, printed books may go out of print (out of print).

　　Digital electronic books will never be like this; they always exist.

　　The risks and opportunities faced by other media are even closer at hand.

　　The first entertainment atoms to be replaced by bits will be the video tapes in video rental stores.

　　One inconvenience of renting video tapes is that consumers must return these atoms, and if they are carelessly forgotten and not returned, they will have to pay fines (it is said that 30 billion US dollars of the 120 billion US dollars in the business revenue of the American video rental industry come from fines).

　　Due to the combined effects of the convenience of digital products themselves, economic compulsions, and the relaxation of regulations, other media will also move towards digitization, and at a rapid pace.

　　What is a bit? A bit has no color, size, or weight and can propagate at the speed of light.
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　　It is like the DNA in the human body, the smallest unit of information.

　　A bit is a state of being: on or off, true or false, up or down, in or out, black or white.

　　For practical purposes, we think of bits as ‘1’ or ‘0’.

　　The meanings of 1 and 0 should be discussed separately.

　　In the early days of computing, a string of bits usually represented numeric information (numeric information).

　　If you count while skipping all numbers that do not contain 1 and 0, the result will be: 1, 10, 11, 100, 101, 110, 111, and so on.

　　These numbers represent 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and other numbers in binary.

　　Bits have always been the basic particles in digital computation, but in the past 25 years, we have greatly expanded the vocabulary of binary, making it include a lot of things beyond numbers.

　　More and more information, such as sound and images, are being digitized, simplified into the same 1 and 0.

　　Digitizing a signal means sampling the signal.

　　If we arrange these samples closely together, we can almost completely reproduce the original.

　　For example, in a music CD, the sound is sampled 44100 times per second, and the waveform (waveform, the degree of sound pressure, which can be measured like voltage) is recorded as discontinuous numbers (these numbers are converted to bits).

　　When bit strings are replayed at a speed of 44100 times per second, they can play the original music in continuous tones.

　　Since the intervals between these sampled continuous tones are extremely short, we cannot hear the segmented tones in our ears, and it is all a continuous melody.

　　The situation with black and white photographs is the same.

　　You just need to imagine the principle of the electronic camera as drawing a precise grid (grid) on an image and then recording the grayscale of each grid.

　　Assuming we set the value of pure black as 1 and the value of pure white as 255, then any shade of gray will be between these two.

　　An 8-bit binary group (known as a byte) exactly has 256 ways to arrange ‘1’ and ‘0’, that is, from 00000000 to 11111111.

　　With this tight lattice and detailed brightness and darkness levels, you can perfectly replicate images that are hard for the naked eye to distinguish between real and fake.

　　However, if the lattice you use is rough, or the brightness and darkness levels are not refined enough, you will see the traces of digitalization, that is, the faint outline lines and patchy particles that can be seen.

　　The process of generating continuous images from individual pixels is very similar to the phenomena in the material world we are familiar with, but the process is more refined.

　　Matter is composed of atoms, but if you observe the smooth metal surface at the subatomic level, you will see many craters.

　　The reason why the metal we see is smooth and solid is just because its components are very small.

　　Digital products are the same.

　　However, the world we experience in our daily lives is actually very ‘analog’.

　　From a macro perspective, this world is not at all digitalized; instead, it has the characteristic of continuity, and it does not abruptly switch from black to white, or directly jump from one state to another without transition.

　　From a microscopic perspective, this may not be the case, because the objects we interact with (the flowing electrons in the wires or the photons in our eyes) are all separate units.

　　However, due to their vast number, they seem to be continuous.sports betting platform and The latest method

　　This book contains about 1 atom (books are an extremely analog medium).

　　There are many benefits to digitization.

　　The most obvious benefits are the functions of data compression (data compression) and error correction, which are more important when transmitting information over very expensive or noisy channels (channels).

　　For example, with such a function, the broadcasting industry can save a lot of money, and viewers can receive high-quality images and sound.

　　However, we gradually find that the impact of digitization is far more important than these.

　　When we use bits to describe sound and images, just like the principle of saving energy, the fewer bits used, the better.

　　However, the number of bits used per second or per square inch will directly affect the fidelity of music or images.

　　Generally, we hope to use high-resolution digital technology in some applications, while for other applications, just low-resolution sound and images are enough.sports betting secrets and The latest entrance

　　For example, we hope to print color images with very high resolution using digital technology, but computer-aided page layout does not require very high resolution.

　　As can be seen, part of the economic system of bits is limited by the medium used for storing and transmitting bits.

　　The number of bits transmitted per second over a specific channel (such as copper wire, radio spectrum, or fiber optic) is the bandwidth (band-width) of that channel.

　　This can be used to measure the number of bits that each pipeline can accommodate.

　　This number, or capacity, must be carefully matched with the number of bits required to present a specific data (sound, music, image): For transmitting high-quality sound, 64,000 bits per second is already a considerable amount; transmitting 1.2 million bits per second is more than enough for high-fidelity music; but if you want to transmit images, the bandwidth must reach 45 million bits per second to produce excellent results.

　　However, over the past 15 years, we have mastered the digital technology for compressing original sound and images by examining bits separately or simultaneously from the perspectives of time and space, and removing their inherent redundant parts.

　　In fact, all media have been rapidly digitized, one of the reasons being that we developed high-level compression technology much earlier than most people predicted.

　　Until 1993, some Europeans claimed that the dream of digital imagery could only be realized in the next century.
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　　Five years ago, most people did not believe that we could compress digital image information of 45 million bits per second to 1.2 million bits per second.

　　But by 1995, we could compress, decompress, encode, and decode such vast digital image information at this ratio, with low costs and high quality.

　　This is like suddenly mastering the secret to making Italian espresso coffee powder, which is so delicious that with just hot water, you can enjoy the same rich flavor as freshly brewed coffee in an Italian café.

　　The digital transformation of the media world allows you to add error correction information (telephone noise, radio interference, or TV snow) when transmitting signals.

　　By simply adding a few extra bits to the digital signal and using increasingly mature error correction techniques that can respond to noise and different media, these interferences can be eliminated.

　　On CD discs, one-third of the bits are used for error correction.

　　The same technology can also be applied to current televisions, making it possible for every household to receive images with studio quality, much clearer than now, to the extent that you might mistake this television for the so-called ‘high-definition television’ (high-definition TV).

　　Correcting errors and compressing data are the two most obvious reasons for the development of digital television (digitaltelevision).

　　With the same bandwidth, what could only accommodate one noisy analog TV signal in the past can now fit four high-quality digital TV signals.

　　Not only is the quality of the image transmitted better, but with the same channel, you may also have four times the number of viewers and four times the advertising revenue.

　　Most media managers, when thinking and discussing the significance of digitization, always keep in mind that existing things can be disseminated in a better and more efficient manner.

　　But like a Trojan horse, the consequences of this gift may be unexpected.

　　Because of digitization, there will be a large emergence of new program content, new competitors, and new economic models, and it is possible to spawn family industries that provide information and entertainment.

　　After all media have been digitized, due to the fact that bits are still bits, we will observe two fundamental yet immediately visible results.

　　Firstly, bits can mix with each other effortlessly and can be reused simultaneously or separately.

　　The mixture of sound, image, and data is called ‘multimedia’ (mu1timedia), a term that sounds complex, but in reality, it merely refers to mixed bits (commingled bits).

　　Secondly, a new form of bit has emerged: the ‘枣’ bit, which will tell you about other bits.

　　It is usually a ‘information header’ (header) that can explain the content and characteristics of the information that follows), which is familiar to newspaper reporters who often have to write ‘summary headers’ to indicate the content of news reports.

　　Authors of academic papers are also familiar with these titles, because academic journals often require them to summarize the key points of their papers.

　　On your CD, you can also find simple titles that allow you to jump directly from one song to another, and sometimes you can also get more information about the music.

　　These bits are invisible and inaudible, but they can tell you, your computer, or special entertainment devices something related to the signal.

　　These two phenomena, mixed bits and bits about bits, have completely changed the media world.

　　In comparison, applications like video on demand and using cable TV channels to transmit video games seem trivial—they are just a tiny part of a vast iceberg.

　　Imagine if TV programs were transformed into data, including self-descriptions of the programs that computers can also read. This would mean that you could record the content you want without being limited by time or channel.

　　Further, if this digital description can allow you to choose the form of the program at the receiving end—whether it is sound, image, or text—what would that be like? If we can move bits so easily, then what advantage do the major media companies have for us? These are all situations that digitalization may cause.

　　It opens up infinite possibilities, and unprecedented programs will emerge from a new combination of resources.

　　Where is the wisdom? A typical feature of television broadcasting is that all the wisdom is concentrated at the starting point of information transmission.

　　It represents a type of medium.

　　The information disseminator decides everything, and the receiver can only receive what is received.

　　In fact, in terms of the utility of each cubic inch, the television may be the most笨 of all the electrical appliances in your home (I haven’t included the TV programs yet).

　　Your microwave oven might even have more microprocessors than your television.

　　It is more worthwhile to consider the transformation of wisdom distribution in the future television, or, to put it more accurately, transferring some of the wisdom from the transmitter to the receiver side.

　　As for newspapers, the transmitter also has all the wisdom.

　　However, major newspapers have largely avoided the problem of information singularity, because people at different times can read the newspaper in different ways.

　　We leaf through the newspapers page by page, guided by different titles and photos, and although the newspaper sends the same bits to thousands of readers, each person’s reading experience is vastly different.

　　To explore the great future of digitalization, one way is to see if the essence of media can be interconverted.

　　Can the experience of watching TV be closer to that of reading newspapers? Many people think that newspaper news is more in-depth than TV reports.

　　Is it inevitable? Similarly, people believe that watching TV can provide a richer sensory experience than reading newspapers.

　　Is it inevitable? The answer depends on whether we can develop the ability to filter, sort, arrange, and manage multimedia computers, which will enable people to read newspapers, watch TV, and even act as editors when requested.

　　This kind of wisdom can exist on both the transmitting and receiving ends.

　　When wisdom is on the transmitting end, it’s as if you have hired a professional writer – just like the ‘New York Times’ customizing newspapers for you based on your interests.

　　In this case, the information transmitter will select a group of bits for you, filter and process them, and then send them to you. You may print them at home, or choose to watch them in a more interactive way on the electronic screen.

　　In another case, a news editing system is set up at the receiving end, ‘The New York Times’ first sends out a large number of bits, possibly including 5000 different articles, and your electronic device then selects the part you want based on your interests, habits, or daily schedule.

　　In this case, wisdom exists on the receiving end, while the transmitter treats everyone equally, sending all the bits to everyone.

　　In the future, it will not be a choice between the two, but both will coexist.

　　The Babel City in the bit world

　　Bit reductionism is particularly fond of such an inspiring scene: the flow of bits has no borders, it can bypass the seas

　　They can reach any place in the world. Many people understand this as the transmission of information can transcend traditional territorial and cultural boundaries.

　　It can be shared by everyone. Our world has become a real global village because of bits.

　　The concept of a global village reminds me of the world mentioned in Chapter 66 of Laozi: neighboring countries can see each other, and the sounds of chickens and dogs can be heard.

　　They have heard that people have not communicated with each other since ancient times. It seems that we are living in such a world now: residents of different countries communicate through the network.

　　By connecting to electronic screens, they can see other countries and hear the voices coming from there. Of course, people do not have to walk,

　　So they can die without ever communicating with each other.

　　However, such a global village has not yet become a reality. Of course, we cannot distinguish the sounds of chickens and dogs from all over the world.

　　Yes, there are also different dialects, but it is known that people from different countries or ethnic groups have completely different natural languages.

　　They rely on the various texts and images displayed on the screen to send or receive information, rather than bit strings.

　　the author or reader obviously belongs to different countries. If you feel like it, you can go to the White House in the United States or walk around the Louvre in Paris.

　　This is a topic that many online readers are excited about. The problem is that if you don’t speak English (let alone French),

　　If you know that the White House is Whitehouse and the Louvre is Louvre, how do you go there?

　　Of course, you can find out their network addresses: (White House)

　　(Louvre) However, even if you get there, you will find that this

　　does not have Chinese service. So you can only sigh in admiration like Liu Nai’er entering the Great Garden, looking at the screen full of foreign codes.

　　it is difficult to say that these foreign languages do not carry information, but for those who do not recognize them, they indeed have no information content! The Bible · Genesis

　　Chapter 11 of the Bible has a well-known legend that we are very familiar with:

　　At first, all the people in the world spoke the same language. They said: Let us build a towering tower in the city. Unexpectedly, this

　　alarmed God, he said: Look, these people all speak the same language. If they build this tower, what else can they achieve?

　　Why can’t they do things? So he quietly disrupted the language of these people, so that they could not cooperate to build the tower. From then on, this city was called

　　Babel. The meaning of Babel is the confusion of languages, that is, the inability to communicate information. Our real world is a huge

　　great Babylon, and the Internet today is still like that!

　　I have a friend named Guo, who is a master at playing computers. When a college student asked him for the secret, he smiled calmly

　　said: first learn 5 years of English, then learn 10 years of philosophy. This suggestion is虚实之间，but not all in jest: learn 10 years of philosophy,

　　is to make people understand, and learning 5 years of English is to make people have the minimum qualifications to use computers and go online. In any country,

　　foreign languages all reflect to some extent the level of education a person has received. When foreign languages become the necessary condition for us to use computers and go online,

　　At that time, the customers of computers and the network market could only be those who have received a certain amount of education, in other words, the current network world

　　are two different concepts.

　　From this, we can test the statements about the prospects of the network market. A famous best-selling book about the Internet writes: Now

　　At the rate of almost one person joining the interactive network every 10 minutes, at this pace, by 2003, the entire world

　　population will become Internet users.

　　…Even if half of the world’s population (3 billion) participates in the interactive network at that time, it will still be a terrifying number. In

　　During the period of less than 10 years, 3 billion people will go online! This is truly incredible. Not to mention the two-thirds of the world’s suffering people, even

　　In China, the number of illiterates accounts for more than 1/5 of the population, and fewer than 4% of people have received higher education. The proportion of people who are familiar with foreign languages is

　　lower, almost 100% of people cannot understand two or more foreign languages. How can one expect these

　　people will become Internet users within 10 years? Interestingly, not long ago, I saw a report claiming that on average,

　　One person gets lung cancer every 10 seconds. I am greatly puzzled: How is this possible? If one person goes online every 10 minutes, to

　　In 2003, the number of Internet users will reach 6 billion. If one person gets lung cancer every 10 seconds, won’t everyone on the planet die in a few years?

　　So, I made a calculation myself and found that the above assertion about the number of Internet users was caused by a terrifying calculation error.

　　(Or the author may not have calculated at all!): One person goes online every 10 minutes, and the maximum number of internet users by 2003 will be at most

　　5 million people! It is less than 1/1000 of the current global population! Let us refer to a more professional estimate: currently

　　Internet has 50,000 websites and tens of millions of users. It is estimated that by 2000 there will be 1 million websites, 500 million users.

　　Users. I believe that this number also has a considerable degree of idealization, and these users may be concentrated mostly in developed countries

　　English-speaking world.

　　The British philosopher Wittgenstein said: The limits of language are the limits of the world. The German philosopher Heidegger also expressed a similar idea:

　　The meaning is similar: language is the home of existence. These statements even from common sense also contain a lot of truth. The English

　　French, German, Chinese interface is the national boundaries of different countries, and people live in their own language worlds. We

　　Internet users can only get information from their familiar language world. Therefore, although bits can flow freely in places with networks

　　But different national languages have divided this global village into different worlds. This is the current situation of the network world! When

　　However, technological problems can only be solved by technology. Now domestic software companies are vigorously developing Chinese language software and information products.

　　Even the American Microsoft Corporation on the other side of the Pacific Ocean has developed a very complete Chinese language software in order to enter and monopolize the Chinese market

　　Software.

　　Therefore, people are looking forward to the network as an information communication carrier entering every family in the near future, and then replacing television

　　And newspapers.

　　However, we should not forget that there is a big difference between computer internet and existing broadcasting, television, and newspaper media:

　　The way of communication of television is you speak, I see, newspapers are you write, I read, there is no communication problem here. But the internet is a two-way

　　Medium for communication, in the current situation, its mode of communication is both writing and reading, which is still a problem for many people with writing disabilities

　　Is not an easy task. Breaking through the barriers between national languages, breaking the situation where one can only write but not speak, this is the modern information

　　Ideal of technical experts. Machine translation, voice synthesis, increasing the speed of image transmission, strengthening the electronic screen’s impact on human organs

　　The sensitivity and resolution of the information they receive, all these technologies are to make computers and the people on the other end of the network your counterparts

　　Make computers talk in a language you can understand and understand or listen to your instructions. Only then, computers and the internet

　　Only when the network truly enters every family can the global village become a reality.

　　Reference:

　　Duan Yongzhao: The Tooling, Sanctification, and Fragile Bit World (Part 1):

　　Duan Yongzhao: The Tooling, Sanctification, and Fragile Bit World (Part 2):

　　Binary unit. Bit (bit, also known as ‘bit’): The abbreviation of bit is b, which is the smallest data unit in computers, the abbreviation of binary digit (binary digit), indicating a single digit in binary, which represents ‘0’ or ‘1’.

　　Byte (Byte): 1 Byte = 8 bit, each 8 bits compose a byte (Byte).

　　Word (word): 1 word = 2 Byte, Chinese character.

　　Character (Character): A general term for the total of letters and symbols, which can be the characters of various countries, punctuation marks, graphic symbols, numbers, etc. An English character occupies one byte, and a Chinese character occupies two bytes.

　　Introduction to bit:

　　A bit is the unit of information. Bit (bit) is an abbreviation for binary unit (binary unit) or binary digit (binary digit), representing the amount of information provided by selecting a single digit (0 or 1) from a binary set (if the probability of this binary is equal). In practical situations, each binary digit is often called a bit, regardless of whether the probability of these two symbols is equal.

　　A bit is the amount of information contained in a binary digit of a binary number or the amount of information required to specify one of two options. It is the smallest unit of information, with only two states: 0 and 1.

　　These values can also be interpreted as logical values (true/false, yes/no), algebraic symbols (+/-), activation status (on/off), or any other binary attribute. One byte (byte) consists of 8 bits, an English letter usually occupies one byte, and a Chinese character usually occupies two bytes.

　　The above content is referenced from:百度百科-Bit(bit)

　　The bit rate of a video refers to the amount of data transmitted or processed by the video file per unit of time, usually measured in bits (bit) or bits per second (bps). It is an important parameter in video compression technology that determines the size and quality of the video file.sports betting victory and The latest method

　　The higher the bit rate, the more information the video file contains, and the better the video quality. This is because a higher bit rate allows the video encoder to retain more details and color information, resulting in a clearer and more vivid image. However, a higher bit rate also means that the video file will be larger, occupying more storage space and network bandwidth.

　　Conversely, the lower the bit rate, the less information the video file contains, and the corresponding video quality will also decrease. This is because a lower bit rate causes the video encoder to lose more details and color information during the compression process, resulting in a blurred and distorted image. However, video files with lower bit rates occupy less storage space and network bandwidth, making them more suitable for use in situations with limited bandwidth or storage space.

　　For example, the bit rate of a high-definition movie may reach several Mbps (megabits per second) or even higher to ensure the clarity and smoothness of the picture. On the other hand, a low-resolution, low-quality online video may have a bit rate of only a few hundred kbps or lower to save bandwidth and storage space.

　　In summary, the bit rate of a video is an important parameter that determines the balance between the size and quality of the video file. When choosing the video bit rate, it is necessary to weigh the trade-off between file size and quality based on actual needs and scenarios.