A new and faster way to do Fast Fourier Transforms – who cares?
Eventually, everyone. FFT is an algorithm for calculation that is used in lots of what you see online. It’s used to compress the video and audio streams on the internet, as well as to your TV.
One of the problems with ‘broadband’ is that the more we get, the more we need. Now that so many people have a high-speed, always-on connection to the internet, we are now watching more high-bandwidth types of content, like Youtube video, listening to high-fidelity music, and even stuff like HBO Go (your HBO subscription that lets you watch HBO on the computer).
So as we use more, we continue to clog the internet with lots of traffic. Fighting its way through the billions of spam emails flying around, and all the other junk.
So if a new FFT method results in doing a 100-fold improvement in the compression of video and audio, we’ll be able to do more online yet consume less bandwidth. Sounds awesome!
You can read about this new method at Popular Science and other news outlets. I first read about it on my iPad through a great little app called Zite. I love news aggregators that can figure out what you might be interested in, based on what you read. Very cool!
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Author: Chris Gardner
Your Tech Coach at PosiTek.net
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