As usual, you'll do parts of this assignment with a partner, preferably someone you haven't worked with on a prevoius assignment. Please do what it takes to get partnered up early in the week: This is part of each assignment; not doing it will lower your score. Be sure to use the Partner App so your partnership is recorded.
[This is repeated from the previous assignment.] Read Chapters 1 and 3 of Blown to Bits, which talk about the consequences of representing information digitally. We'll be touching on this material in class.
For this assignment, you will measure information: how much space some object requires, how much it might cost to store it, how long it might take to transmit it. Feel free to use a calculator, spreadsheet, or other tool (such as the "word count" feature of Microsoft Word), and to consult the web references we mention.
How much space is required by the web page you created for Assignment 2? For now, let's just consider the text and not the images. There are two different ways of measuring it:
(b.1) Figure out each of these quantities.
(b.2) How big (all together) are the images on your page?
Write these answers into a document (Word, text, PDF), naming it in the usual form: (w5b-jane12-joelee.pdf), and submit it via Checkmate. Just one partner should submit one copy, and the same partner should submit this part as the next part.
Part (c)
Fill in the table below; there's a copy available on-line. Save a copy of the document, fill it out, then use "Downoad as" PDF from the Google Docs File menu, naming it in the usual form: hw5c-jane12-joelee.pdf. Submit this document via Checkmate. Just one partner should submit one copy; the file name and your Email message will let us give both partners credit.
| Information packages | Size in bytes (or KB, MB, GB, ...) [5] | How many copies of the information package can you fit on one of the storage media listed below? (Or, how many of the storage media would it take to store one information package?) | How much would it cost to store this information on 16 GB flash drives? [6] |
How long would it take to download this information
package using: |
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| USB flash drives ("thumb drives"), 16 GB | DVD-R disks, 4.7 GB | 500 GB hard drive | The 3G cellular network in a car (384 Kb/sec) [7] |
A 30Mb cable modem |
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| The first paragraph under Part (b) above | 320 bytes |
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| The course syllabus [1] |
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| The text of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina [2] (in plain text form) |
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| A bitmap of a black & white drawing, 640 x 480 pixels |
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| An on-screen color picture, 1920 x 1080 pixels, 16 bits per pixel |
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| A high-quality 18 megapixel digital photo, 5184 x 3456 , 32 bits per pixel |
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| A 30-second web ad at 30 frames per second, each frame 352 x 240 pixels, 24 bits per pixel [3] |
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| An 85-minute movie at 60 frames per second, each frame 1920 x 1080, 32 bits per pixel, plus stereo sound [4] |
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Notes:
[1] The syllabus is available on line at
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~kay/courses/10/
[2] Check Project Gutenberg at www.gutenberg.org
[3] Assume there's no sound involved
[4] CD-quality stereo sound involves two channels (left and right). Each channel takes 44,100 samples per second at 16 bits per sample.
[5] Use 1 KB = 1024 bytes, 1 MB = 1000 KB, 1 GB = 1000 MB, and so on.
[6] Look up the price on line
[7] Note that data transmission rates are typically given in bits (or kilobits or megabits) per second