To paraphrase Azimov, a ‘significantly advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’
The germans have just created magic. I spend a significant amount of time tooling around usenet grabbing music, software, books and more off of the binary newsgroups. One of the most frustrating aspects of this is the missing parts. You see, when files are posted they’re broken into chunks. An audiobook for example might consist of 50 pieces. Despite subscribing to what is probably the best commercial usenet provider, I run into the problem of missing pieces on an almost daily basis. You can’t actually use the material you’re downloading until you have all the pieces. Roy and I spend a lot of time trading missing pieces back and forth and hunting them down. Now some awesome programmers in Germany have invented a new file format that allows you to recreate from scratch the missing pieces, without ever having the actual pieces themselves. On the surface it seems like magic. Of course in the end it boils down to sophisticated math I guess, but damn is it cool. No more usenet ‘needle in a haystack’ file hunts for me 😉