Slashdot Mirror
Why VHS Was Better Than Betamax
Vladimir Kornea writes "This article argues that 'when someone buys and uses a product, the technological aspects are a small and often uninteresting part of the decision' and that the when the 'whole product' (a term commonly used among marketing people) is considered, VHS was better than Betamax, and that the Wintel PC is better than the alternatives." Update: 01/29 04:26 GMT by T : Apologies for the dupe.
Didn't this story run like yesterday?
oh wait... dupe
second post!
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/01/26/028207 &mode=thread&tid=126
Two days ago.
Cause you could watch stuff over and over again in nice, compact, tape-form and not have to carry around an entire computer to see the same thing day after day.....
news for amnesiacs, stuff that mattered
Is this my imagination, or is this a duplicate?? btw, FIRST POST
more about me
know what i mean little timothy?
wink, wink, nudge nudge... say no more.
-Malakai
A Dragon Lives in my Garage
what a c0xs0x37 'nuff said most people here in the u.s. drive g.m. autos -- does that make them best?
---
Information wants...you to shut your pie hole.
there's nothing better than reading something one day, and then getting a refresher again the next day... hey, and there's all new posts now too!!!
cowboyneal rocks!!!!!
-isolens
and all /. editors know this:
Better Copies.
Doing a search on this exact title would have shown that this was repeated just 2 days ago. Good old timothy... why bother searching when you can just wait for him to repost it?
I browse Slashdot at +3, Funny
Definately a dupe!
This is unbelievable!! One should figure out the ratio of fresh postings to dupes... http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/01/26/028207 &mode=thread&tid=126
Duplicate posts are designed to drive just enough people mad that slashdot ceases to be stupid.
And by stupid, I don't mean the people *running* it.
sig not found
This time, it's even pointing to the same exact article, not just the same story covered by someone else
A new all-time slashdot low...
VHS was better in the same sense that the Model T Ford was better. It was cheaper, mass-produced, and more easily obtainable by the average Joe. Betamax was a technically superior format, with cleaner chrominance and luminance signal encoding/decoding to/from the tape, but Sony was just too expensive and arrogant with the Betamax's market positioning. They could've mass-produced them more cheaply to compete, but failed to do so in the very beginning, when timing and window of opportunity for establishing the dominant format was critical.
I can take gleeful delight in pointing out Timothy's errors...
oh, wait... dammit all I DID make a mistake once!
dammit all to heck and back.
I am a leaf on the wind
I I think think this this might might be be a a duplicate duplicate
There are 10 kinds of people; those who know ternary, those who don't, and those now hunting for a dictionary.
Hey timothy, you should read slashdot.org sometime. They cover a lot of the same stuff.
...that there's all these duplicate comments complaining about how the story is a duplicate story...
Repton.
They say that only an experienced wizard can do the tengu shuffle.
From Fark, last week, and from Slashdot, day before yesterday.
Almost all "troll" or "flaimbait" moderations will be m2ed as unfair.
This is a duplicate story. Again. Am I supposed to comment on this twice?
At least, that's what they say in the FAQ. I suggest the people that whine about dupes read it. Heck, if it's a dupe story, don't read it. You've already read it. Go to next story. Big whooping deal.
It's not like all the slashdot stories reside in databases on OUR systems. It's their database. If they want to have redundant data in it (a.k.a. dupe stories), let them.
BETA is supperior to VHS, basing quality as proliferation of the general market is asinine.
Is dejá-vu.org taken? :)
And why is the html validator on w3.org blocked?
J.
Do we really need another debate about VHS vs Beta? Beta is dead, VHS won, and will itself be replaced by DVD-R in a few years. Enough already!
When people post the same story over and over it means its a better "whole product" then an new original story.
those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.
OK I realize this is a duped post, but I never got a chance to read it before, I only realized it was duped when I read the comments! o_O Anyway, VHS won because "the whole product" did what people wanted at a price they were willing to pay. And when people use the VHS v Beta analogy, they are not indicating a market failure but their own ignorance. People's ignorance is the most common reason new products don't succeed, yeah, obvious, we know. But who's to say this product didn't suck? Isn't this guy being a little arrogant to say people as a whole are just plain ignorant? Ok so we are. I'm ignorant. YOU reading my post, yeah you, you're ignorant too. We all are. But if we, the ignorant masses accepted all the new and radical ideas introduced to us over the last few decades, why would this be any different? I say, because it wasn't a good product. And I'd venture that's what everyone else who didn't like it thought too. Just my 2 cents (and a paper clip)
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
and yet, here you are.
The rule is quite simple. You need to "trick" a /. editor to repost a recent /. story. The shorter the interval between original and the repost, the higher your score. Also you got bonus points if it is the same editor and/or under the same headline.
And if you have posted in the original story you can try to repost your comments to see if you get the same score or even the same modifier!
Let the game begin.
Codeala - Just another mindless drone
... but it did run on Fark...
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
The horse is dead!
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. --Edmund Burke
Why Slashdot is better than Kuro5hin.
/because/ it is an amzingly popular weblog.
Before you mod me down as a troll, look at the idea-
Kuro5hin has many of the features people consistantly ask for (voting for stories)
Kuro5hin isn't owned by a large, closed source software-company.
Kuro5hin has more intellegant discussion, and fewer duplicated stories
But Slashdot has more users. Slashdot is an amazingly popular weblog,
Think about that. The main reason Slashdot is popular is because of it's base of users. Because of the comments. And higher-installed base makes it more attractive to many people.
That is exactly the argument made in this article.
Just some thoughts.
Colin
Colin Davis
i've been thinking of ways of preventing duplicate stories... and the most effective method that i've thought of would be an algorithm that compared new stories with older stories and searched for identical links. if they were found, it could notify the editor
i can't imagine it would be that difficult to implement, but i'm not actually familiar with slashcode story management.
if searching through all past stories is too intensive, a simple script could be written that would be run every time a story is posted. it would parse out each linked address in the post and add it to a database. searching an indexed database consisting of addresses every time a story is posted would be trivial...
According to the premise of the article, in a percieved sense, VHS was better than Beta. Yeah so what? It doesn't stop Beta being a better format in a very real sense. Neither does it stop a Lintel platform being better in a real sense than Wintel
I have an old, Sanyo top-loader Beta that I bought with money from my first job in 1985 and it's still running. The picture quality on it is better than the five four-head, gee-whiz VHS turds that have died on me within a couple of years of ownership. VHS won the format battle because of one thing...PORN! You could squeeze 7 hours of porn on a VHS tape, but only 4 on a beta. Microsoft proved it...your stuff can be better and still fail commercially.
comments commenting on the duplication of comments?
Your post alone has served to convince me that we not only need a +1 troll rating, but might well need a +1 redundant as well.
KFG
So that's why Circuit City recently stopped stocking VHS.
I'll be looking into my local outlet every few days, I can tell you that much...
Vindication at last!!!
You're the 10,000th person to suggest that!
To claim your prize, set your head on fire and jump out a window!
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
Ok, so the whole product idea makes a little sense, but the writer was completely wrong when he used the windows example. At this point Windows isn't accepted because of the whole product model anymore, but rather because people don't know they have a choice. In terms of cost effectiveness for the price of Windows XP with Office I could buy another computer. Windows isn't beating anyone, they're dupping everyone.
My Blog
Hey guys, calm down, this is the Nvidia release of this story, couple days late, with a 5% faster read time!
01:36AM up 426 days, 2:46, 1 user, load average: 0.14, 0.11, 0.05
The value of a product is not defined by its creators. It is defined by its market. Meaning its users and customers.
Linux is doomed to be a niche player until this fact is more widely accepted. It doesn't matter what geeks think about the product if the end user is not satisfied, overjoyed even.
As it is today, woe to any newbie who wants to jump on the linux bandwagon; all they get is name calling and static when they have real problems. The overall experience can be very unpleasant.
I forgot to reply the first time this article was posted, so here goes...
Schofield seems to think that the incredibly obvious and oft-repeated arguments he presents have some relevance in evaluating the beliefs of people who think Beta was superior to VHS. He doesn't present a survey of the beliefs of these people, so I'll have to go with my own experiences, which in every instance contradict Schofield's view.
Schofield's insight mostly boils down to the obvious fact that the product that won was the one that on the whole was preferable to consumers. No Beta advocate could possibly dispute that. Nonetheless, there is actual substance to the claim that Beta was superior to VHS. People who preferred Beta did so on the basis of particular attributes that were important to them, and that were demonstrably superior in Beta. "Technical superiority" is a fair characterization of these attributes, and is clearly the point people are making when they say or write that Beta was better than VHS.
Schofield's condescending and infantile tone aside, his argument has no demonstrable substance. For whatever reason, he chooses not to understand the trivial and obviously factual point made by people who point out that Beta was (at least in many important respects) technically superior to VHS. Does he really think that Betamax advocates think Beta offered a better "whole product" than VHS? That seems unlikely. My guess is that he wanted to write that pointing out Beta's technical superiority is beside the point. But it makes better headlines to say something is a myth than to say it's beside the point, especially since not everyone cares what Jack Schofield thinks the point is. The fact that he has to create a straw man in order to do so seems not to worry him.
His argument is akin to pointing out that someone who says Shawn Bradley is a very tall center is missing the point. Obviously, commenting on Shawn Bradley's height is not the best way of assessing his talents as a center. But when I say he's tall, I mean he's tall. If I wanted to comment on his value as a center, I'd do that. If Schofield wants to argue that someone has a "failure to understand how technology markets work," then he should find a claim about technology markets. The claim that Beta was technically superior to VHS is not one.
Just to be clear, I was never a Beta advocate. I did have both kinds of machines when I was younger, and on the whole I would have been happier had Beta won, but my comments are not motivated by any history of rabid advocacy. On the whole, I couldn't care less than I do about VCR tape formats. But I do get a little upset now and then when ignorant people abuse their soapboxes to mock folks with more reasonable and well supported views.
When I see dups like this, I often wonder what gets thrown out in favor of repeating the same exact stuff? Instead of meta-moderating comments, is there anyway to get to the raw Slashdot submissions? Maybe even meta-moderate the raw submissions?
r y/0,1 2449,881780,00.html
r y/0,1 2449,881780,00.html
What really has me stumped, is while Slashdot acknowledges the repeation behavior of Spam and the ability to use gzip to filter spam, they can't come up with anything to locate how much Slashdot repeats.
Some of the excuses is that link checking won't work since repeats are due to similar stories at complettely different URLs such as CNET and Wired both reporting on the same new advancement in electronics. Ok, that seems like a worthy excuse to explore:
On Sunday, January 26th, michael posted a linke to:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/comment/sto
On Tuesday, January 28th, timothy posted a link to:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/comment/sto
Hmmm... looks like link checking would have caught this. But lets say the links where different. How about the Slashdot search engine. If we look for the title "Why VHS Was Better Than Betamax" which was posted by Timothy and "order by score" then "Why VHS Was Better" from Jan 26th gets a score of 1.0 and is listed immediately after Timothy's new post. The next score drops down to 0.4.
So, even if link checking would have missed this duplicate, the Slashdot search engine scoring might be of assistance to an "editor."
But I really think this shows that Slashcode should allow the readers to assist in the editorial process. Users that login should be able to get ten random submissions of which they can do the following:
- Recommend to be rejected for containing a broken URL
- Recommend to be reject because wording of scoop does not make sense
- Recommend to be reject because the article is clearly an advertizement
- Recommend to be reject because the article is a duplicate
- Suggest alternative Subject wording
- Suggest alternative Topic or Section area
- Rank level of how interesting the article is
/. posts MAYBE 10 new stories a day, MAYBE
I can remember wether I have seen the story for at least a week.
I do remember when there was a story posted and BARELY 6-8 hours later it was reposted...
What we do need is for the editors to at least check the front page, and the yesterdays edition before they even post. A script will only allow them to get EVEN LAZIER than they are already.
moo.
This is a dupe of a comment from a couple days ago:
Here's an idea I just thinked:
One of the perks of having the highest karma ratings on Slashdot could be that the top 50 users could see a story for the first 5 minutes before comments could be taken on that story. So that we can eliminate these pesky dupes once and for all, those users could be given a "this looks like a dupe" button. If the button is pressed by one of the chosen few, then the story could return to the poster for review and possibly cancellation, saving both time and embarrassment.
I like my idea, however I cannot foresee what the negative astroturfing aspects of this feature might wind up being.
I definitely wrote this before coffee, so all standard disclaimers apply.
Oliver Wendel Jones stated that the test of the truth of an idea is its power to get accepted in the marketplace of ideas. While there is some validity to this notion, it lacks familiarity with a physical or logical discipline. Our society is blighted with a tendancy to ascribe anthropomorphic victory to an idea which has achieved greater acceptance. This blight is in part the reason we fall victim to other basic flaws in logical thinking which lead to such phenomenon as bigotry. If one loses the backwards need to declare victory of some kind, one can see that the popularity of an idea is no measure of its accuracy or validity. After all, if enough people think that individuals of african descent are less intelligent than those of european descent, does this make the idea true? Certainly it does not. But, at one time, it was widely accepted. If an idea becomes popular enough, it becomes deemed 'right' by those who have no intellectual ambition to see for themselves what they want to believe.
The intelligent thing to do is simply to point out that VHS was more popular than betamax. The mistake is to confuse popularity with quality. They are actually two different things.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
The best part of slashdot is that it is possible to get first post in the same story..TWICE
And I just sold my VHS to buy a DVD player! :)
What this article really explains is why we are so wrong about the Prisoner's Dilemna. You know, the police interrogator offers to co-conspirators the chance to confess--if neither confesses they both get 5 years of jail, if one confesses he goes free while his associate gets 20 years, and if both confess they both get 10 years.
The Beta VCR, Linux, and Apple fans say a cooperative strategy of mutually refusing to confess is the best strategy that maximizes the cumulative outcome of everyone. But this article and most consumers evaluate the "whole product" of confession and incarceration, realizing that they are better off confessing no matter what their associate does, and goes out to buy Office XP.
The common wisdom, as I know it, is that Betamax was technologically superior, but VHS was in the right place at the right time, and ended up with the whole market. Considering just the item itself, Beta is better, but the whims of the market (the whole product, although what is important is only obvious in hindsight) are more important than the finer points of technology.
Of course, the wisdom imagines a semi-mythical time when neither technology was developed into a product; people don't wish that 1-hour tapes had won the market, they wish that Beta encoding had won, either by being marketted more effectively, or even simply by being used in VHS recorders. The real question is not why consumers buy technologically inferior but more suitable products, it's why more suitable products are made with inferior technology; the answer is that the wrong company owns the wrong technology.
Well, I must I have replied to something about Ethnocentrism in some long ago forgotten era, and mozilla now thinks all subject lines should be ethnocentrism. From now on I do my web browsing with power point like everyone else.
it's strange seeing VHS referred to in the past-tense. I still have tons of VHS tapes and a working VCR!
A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with. - Tennessee Williams
All you trolls out there, with various free-times and scripts, how about you guys start up some scripts which pick random dupes and submit them? I can see that this problem has gotten out of hand, but the editors obviously dont, so let us join together and troll their fucking asses.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
The quality of betamax is so much better... I remember watching tape after tape of betamax dubs of Japanese shows at my friend's house... good times :D
I've been using a Hi-8 for recording for the past six years now. Works great, and I can store about eight of them in the space of one VHS tape!
As previously reported in many stories (too lazy to find them right now), timothy seems to be the source of the majority of the dupes. What's scary is that he often dupes his own stories. Can you say, "Short-Term Memory"?
Short-Term... LINE!
*SMACK!* [racermd slaps forehead with palm of hand in disgust]
I've got a bad short-term memory, and specifically with people's names, but what do you have to be on if you're forgetting the stories you've *posted* the day prior? I'll forgive the occasional relapse. But this is consistent.
The sensible thing to do is to just completely ignore the dupes. Don't even open the discussion thread. I know, I'm not exactly a gleaming example of my own advice, but I usually stay away from them as a rule. Consider this my one exception. The proper thing to do is to send an e-mail to the editors to let them know a dupe got by them. Griping about it in the discussion thread is off-topic and counter-productive at best.
My sources are unreliable, but their information is fascinating. -- Ashleigh Brilliant
That is not funny. Chris Burke is the editor-in-chief of the NDSS quarterly magazine and does do a better editorial job. Before you go declairing to know who Timothy is, why don't you find out who you are, "Anonymous Coward." Based on how low your comment is, I think it is fairly clear that Chris Burke surpasses any level of expectation that you have for yourself.
Groundhog Day?
Ever think you were in it?
Ever think the slashdot moderators were in it?
cuz id very easy to make do same thing over an ova again.
cuz id very easy to make do same thing over an ova again.
cuz id very easy to make do same thing over an ova again.
--Enter The Sig--
--Idiots, Every single one of YOU, A flaming mass of conglomerated morons, hey wait a second, isnt that how RAID works?
I have to say that the author of this article doesn't understand why people talk about the way things ought to be. As in the case of the standard x86 system. He clames that PCs are better because more people use them therefor there is a greater support and software base... Duh! It doesn't change the fact that there is better technology out there and that the masses don't always make the best descisions. Simply, by his arguements the consumer chooses the better "whole product" and through that choice makes it the better "whole product". So what's the point of the article? I don't think the author could even give you a valid arguement for the existance of the article.
How about the rumor that VHS beat Betamax, because it was willing to let the porn industry use its format, whereas Betamax was resistent?
Here is a crash course tutorial on how not to repeat stories on Slashdot. This tutorial comes FREE(as in beer) of cost !
1. After you have decided on the story, point your URL to http://slashdot.org.
2. Scroll down to the bottom of the page you see.
3. Locate the text box on the left. Make sure that there is a button titled "Search" on to it's right.
4. Choose some keywords from the article, and type them out in the text box. If you need a tutorial on how to select keywords, quit this job.
5. Now click the search button and wait for the results. Among the results, see if any articles have been posted before.
Yes, it's that simple ! Example query listing is here
getSexySig();
Sorry, I seem to be off-topic by posting about the actual article rather than about dupes, but here I go. (I missed the Sunday article due to travel so wouldn't have seen this but for the duplication.)
The Guardian article had this paragraph about DAT:
"Let's take a simple example: digital audio tape (Dat). Get someone to compare Dat with a humble C90 compact cassette and they will find Dat to be technologically superior, especially for recording music. However, if you consider "the whole product", Dat is vastly inferior for most people most of the time. This is why people still buy millions of cassettes, while Dat has virtually disappeared from consumer use."
I don't think Schofield understands the DAT failure at all. He argues that it failed because it was inferior to C90s on a "whole product" basis. That's just bunk. In no way was it inferior to analog tape as a "whole product", except maybe the Serial Copy Management Scheme (if I remember the name). It failed because it was inferior to *Compact Disc* as a "whole product". There was no motivation to start collecting new releases in yet another digital format, and I think the phenomenon of taping one's music for archival purposes really declined after CDs became popular. So the only application was for creating mix tapes, or for recording live performances. And I think that cut way down on the demand for any new tape-based medium.
Now we've got MP3 or Ogg and the random access they provide, which of course is better (from a "whole product" stance) than any tape-based medium can be.
the format war shall never die, its children scarred by the myriad media of data retention and the chaos that unraveled continuously.
nay, the light shall not come Ð a future of agreeance is shrouded like the chunky thighs of an overweight nun.
when, peace, when? when shall both be valid choices and the need for absolue superiority fade away into a tepid pool of lukewarm gellato?
It doesn't matter that this was posted two days ago, and the articles are similar in functionality, this article is better as far as the whole product aspect.
While he argues that in fact VHS was the superior "whole product", I think you could make a parallel, and to me more articulate argument that in fact VHS was technically superior in the category that consumers cared most about: the length of the tape. Now, if the video quality had been really bad (i.e. unwatchable), then it wouldn't have mattered if they were 12 hour tapes. So, VHS was technically adequate in some respects, but actually superior in the most important category. I realize that you could argue that "whole product" covers everything I just said, but it seems to be a vague term.
I don't think you got the point of that post you just replied to there pal.
- sigs are for wimps.
I don't think you got the point of that post you just replied to there pal.
- sigs are for wimps.
First off, Beta did have the better picture quality. VHS was crap. Done.
Second, a person is smart, people are dumb. Done.
Third, there wouldn't be a problem between VHS and Betamax or whatever format we are discussing today if companies didn't want not only a piece of the pie, but the whole thing and then some. It really comes down to what was advertised better. VHS was better marketed and pushed in the United States and people have to see what all of their little friends were using.
While I'm no clearly no genius, I think this author is just restating the obvious. Do you really think that I'm going to go buy a car that makes no pollution needs no maintanence and costs next to nothing to operate if I am not positive that I can keep its fuel supply (gas diesel, hydrogen, plutonium, etc) loaded today tommarow and into the future? The author is just another person who is happy the fell into the "majority" at the right time. He probably skipped Beta and bought VHS. He thinks Windows is IT and will follow the next fad to the end.
Also, quit your damn complaining about dupes. You all probably don't remember every single article that gets posted to Slashdot nor would you really be able to a day, week or month down the road. The poster appologized but its not like they are going to take it down. That would open up the door to things like "I don't like this comment, drop it." Once they have realized their mistake give it up and read on to the next tidbit.
These include the availability of cheap cassettes on every high street, cheap personal stereos, and the ability to use the same format for a wide range of applications (personal stereo, portable radio/cassette players, in the car, in your hi-fi stack).
So for the Linux Unix guys in user laymans terms this is why windows dominates:
These include the availability of cheap personal computers on every street corner, and the ability to use a vast category of applications made available by mulitple vendors that are standardized and built on windows.
no text no text no text no text no text no text no text no text no text
Lameness filter, bite my ass.
This article was to illustrate that VHS was very good for making copies, hence the duplicate news.
today's dupe story submission winner is Vladimir Kornea
today's dupe loser is timothy
thanks for playing, Vladimir, and timothy. good tteamwork!
would you like to know more about dupe posting?
This is classic Urban Myth revisionism: the writer gets his kicks by simply labelling any common, but old and hard to prove if you weren't there, knowledge as "an Urban Myth" and then sells it to gullible editors.
Complete crap from start to end, just like his insane assertion that the PC was better than the alternatives - what a toss-pot.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
troll?
:)
What kind of idiot moderator passes up a chance like I just handed out, to mod as 'redundant'...? Talk about dim witted
----- Original Message -----
From: "Timothy Lord"
Sent: Wednesday, January 29, 2003 12:03 AM
Subject: Re: Why do you post dupes?
> I'm sorry about that duplicate (and any others) -- this Sunday I was
> pretty much out of it: personal things were unhappy, and I missed the
> story. There is a putative "duplicate catcher" which looks for similar
> words and attempts to point out suspiciously similar stories, but in this
> case it wasn't triggered. Still my fault of course; that duplicate
> catcher, though, does a very good job in general of reducing duplicate
> posts (from me or anyone else).
>
> If I could pull time backwards while preserving present knowledge, I'd
> spot that in the bin and scoff at the dupe, then delete it unread,
> wondering about all the submitters who send in dupes. Now, it's chagrin
> city instead.
>
> Apologies.
>
> Tim
Since one year the crisis of
Now there is not much left of the glory of earlier days. Today's occasional trolls can not catch up to the glorious trolls of the past. What remains are honourable memories.
So it is time to mention some of the great heroes of the past to give them the merits they deserve. Of course, i have forgotten many, so please post any names that you consider worth to be named.
Egg Troll
Trollaxor
Klerck
* Spork
Turd Report
Fecal Troll Matter
Weather Troll
Grammar Nazi
WIPO Troll
According to the article, Betamax had at least as many movies to rent, price was comparable to VHS etc... in other words, when they started out, the non-technical aspects were more or less 50-50 between Betamax and VHS...
So if the 'whole product' argument applied, surely Betamax would have won, as it *also* offered technical superiority?
That means that something had to tip the balance in favour of VHS that wasn't mentioned in the article... and once it had enough market share, Betamax was always going to struggle, as regardless of the 'real whole product', the 'perceived whole product' will always be somewhat less...
2) Like repeating the 3rd grade, we already know the material and feel 'smart'.
3) We get to make offtopic posts without taking as big a karma hit.
4) We get to make offtopic posts without taking as big a karma hit. (ooops! sorry for the dupe!)
Send us your Linux Sysadmin articles.!
Geeky modern art T-shirts
Windows is stuffed down your throat by a monopoly.
Freedom to choose hasn't occurred yet.
He is saying the popular device is the better device, Which is better ? A Toyota or a Aston Martin? Well they sure do sell allot more Toyotas.
Get a free ipod.
Ya know what's Really Bloody sad... the number of posts here pointing out that this is a duplicate post... for the Love of God people... GET A LIFE!
Well, Digital Beta lives. Digital Beta tape and drives are still in use at different broadcast centers. These centers get movies from different studios and use these tapes for making house and on air masters for broadcasting. There is no perceptible deterioration between copies and some of the pay per view movies you watch are sometimes broadcast from these tapes or from video servers which were "filled" from these tapes.
Regular Bata tapes and machines were sold in Japan until just a few years ago. IMHO Beta was better at first during the VHS-Beta wars. However, so many manufacturers chose VHS and more money went into upgrading the VHS systems. Over time VHS surpassed Beta in quality.
1. Copy the link location from the article being considered for posting to the front page.
2. Paste that URL into the search field.
3. Post story if and only if no result pops up.
No need for keywords, no extraneous results.
blog
The secondary arguments are risible. The thing about how technology doesn't matter comes quickly (second sentence) to:
Translation: Compact Cassette was here first, and had time to saturate the market next to its competition back then, so it's a better "whole product" because it's got all the infrastructure to support it.
By that way of thinking, gasoline is a better whole product than anything that might try to replace it, isn't it? And hey, examining how the car manufacturors crushed urban rail systems, that's not important -- the "whole product" of cars was better, so we couldn't possibly learn anything about urban planning decisions and how to prevent abuses in future, now, could we?
I'd hate to see this guy doing history. Everything happened because it was for the best... it was all just inevitable, and pay no attention to all those people who had to struggle to get things done.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
will be happy. This is a single case of what happened in consumer technology. Doesn't apply to all markets, all customers, or all products. Enough of this story already!
Onward to the Aether Sphere!
It used to be a joke when /. would dupe a story, but it's gotten out of hand. What's it been, like, five dupes this *week?* C'mon, fucking seriously... put just the least little bit of effort into this? I know it's hard when you see a submission 1000x to remember if it made the cut or not, so when someone re-submits it a day later, you might go ahead and run it. So, either a) hire someone who's job it is is to *not* look at incoming stories and *only* read what gets posted online, so they won't have that cross-memory problem, or b) *write a fscking script!!!!!* (You have people there that can write scripts, right?) Just have it where, below the story submission box is a little box to put keywords into, and when you press 'submit' (or 'preview', right?) it does a quick check of the last 30 days worth of stories to see if it matches. Here's another idea--check the URL! If it's an identical match, there you go. If it's the same *domain*, it throws up a flag, or if whatever follows the last slash (startreklego.html) matches, you get a flag. (Might have to adjust that setting so it looks back one more slash if the final piece is index.*)
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
First he says VHS won because there were more tapes and more players available, rather than on the basis of features. But that's not an explanation at all: It boils down to "VHS won because VHS had won." It'd be like saying "Windows has most of the market share because Windows has most of the market share." Well, sure, but why?
But then he goes on to point out a feature of VHS tapes -- their length -- that was better, and that tipped the scales in VHS's favor. This seems to contradict his "whole product" point from the first half of the article: If there was a basic features of VHS tapes that met consumers' needs better than Beta, then it wasn't all those auxiliary things that made VHS popular after all. So he seems simply to be debunking myths about the VHS-Beta story rather than making the larger point he started out with.
Here's my suggestion, once an editor notes a duplicate story, change its category to "dupe" then allow users to filter out "dupes" from their pages (haven't seen a JonKatz rant in years...)
Here's the conspiracy comment: considering the number of people that comment on a duplicate story (just to bitch about it being a dupe), Slashdot gets the ad-eyballs with very little effort. There is a built-in impetus to post duplicates to stir traffic. It's a delicate balance but my guess is that they elected timothy to be the dupe-poster and to manage the flow of dupe postings.
And, I'll probably repost this with each dupe. At least each timothy dupe.
sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
That MS makes the best software and McD's makes by far the best food on the entire plannet. Britney is the best musician alive, and some huge state school offers an education that far outclasses any Ivy League school. China and India are the best countries in which to live and bud light is the best beer. Ford and GM make the best cars. Excuse me while I finish off my microbrews, escargot, veal, and caviar and find a nice cliff over which to drive my German engineered uberwundercar. If this is the best this planet has to offer, there's no sense in continuing.
Copyright Violation:"theft, piracy"::Anti-Trust Violation:"thermonuclear price terrorism"<-Overly dramatic language.
When you choose compact cassette, you are also buying into a vast infrastructure of capabilities, services and support. These include the availability of cheap cassettes on every high street, cheap personal stereos, and the ability to use the same format for a wide range of applications (personal stereo, portable radio/cassette players, in the car, in your hi-fi stack).
It seems to me there's a chicken-and-egg issue here. Are the products "superior" because more people like them, or do more people like them because they're superior? This guy is arguing that besides technical aspects, there are other factors that enter into a consumer's buying decision (duh!), and that one of those is the existing level of acceptance and support of the product in the market (ie, availability). But he also says that the products aren't superior anyway.
Despite the author's anecdotal "evidence" disputing the technical superiority of the items in question, there are cases where a given product has been proven to be technically superior through rigorous studies (see my sig) but still failed, usually because the inferior product was first to market and became entrenched. And even in cases where the products were introduced around the same time, other factors such as marketing budgets can make or break a product.
So my question is, "Is this a good thing?". It seems to me that if we care about improvement in technology, we should work to reduce the inertia in the system, and eliminate factors that ought not be relevant. This article is meaningless in that context, since it doesn't address this question.
Read my keyboard review.
Ask the average tivo owner what quality level they select for their seinfeld reruns.
Haha, too true. When I first got my Tivo (60Hr Series2), I recorded stuff at all the various quality levels. High quality was too disk-consuming, the level below that (good? I forget) was also too disk-hungry and not noticably different than high quality. Basic quality seemed kind of appalling on the first few programs I recorded -- even my wife, who's about as nontechnical as they come was noticing some artifacts.
So I stuck with medium quality for a while, but I noticed I just wasn't getting the retention I wanted when I had a lot of movies recorded, so I started switching to basic quality on some stuff, and lo and behold I noticed that it wasn't all that bad.
I've been sold on basic since then, but I've noticed its kind of all over the map. Some stuff I find indistinguishable from medium quality, some stuff is pretty appalling. Music videos, for example, have too many jump cuts and quick camera movements -- the quality there sucks. But a lot of other content appears just fine, especially content originally shot on film. Even old Rockford episodes are good, and especially good are recordings of filmed content shown on digital channels; analog noise from analog channels must hinder the compressor.
Anyway, you're right -- basic quality has become more than good enough, at least until a do a disk upgrade and get a DVD recorder to copy stuff too, but even then I may stick with the longest content length...
As long as we are at it. In addition to VHS being better than Betamax and Windows being better than MacOS we must say crack cocaine is better than milk, Democrats are better than Republicans, Hitler was better than FDR, and Oreos were better than Hydrox.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Picking the dominant player on the grounds that competitors are weak, unreliable, and have less "resources" is just flawed logic.
In a sense, it's really a variation the Prisoner's Dilemma - should I choose what's best for ME if it's going to screw the next guy?
Well - if you ALWAYS choose the dominant market player, and if everyone does that, the dominant market player soon becomes the ONLY market player - then everybody gets screwed (except the vendor), because just because a company has the theoretical resources to create a "best of breed" product, does not mean that they'll sink those resources into doing it.
An alternate argument could be - if you're a believer in Capitalism, you must accept that Monopolies are fundamentally opposed to the theory behind why Capitalism is a great system. (because competition is what drives Vendors to produce the best product for the marketplace, not simply having more resources). Therefore, if you're a red-blooded American, or a staunch believer in freedom and Capitalism, ALWAYS choosing the top player (whether by virtue of them just being the top player, or whether they really do offer a superior value at that point in time) is really an UnAmerican, UnPatriotic choice. One should ALWAYS consider supporting the "underdog" from time to time.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
This guy argues that VHS should have been superior because it won. Has Beta won, it would have been the better product.
I can't see why these people get paid to write.
Imagine the thought processes:
"Windows is way better that Linux, otherwise it wouldn't dominate".
"But Linux has so much better ".
"Why, yes, but as a WHOLE product, Windows is berre, otherwise it wouldn't dominate".
Can we check if this is a jonKatz troll in disguise? He's been awfully quiet, and this article has his style all over it... >:)
The thought process here is that since something is more prevelant, and therefore has more facets available to it. By this rationale, economy cars are better than luxury cars. This idea of thinking breeds out innovation, as innovative products always start small and with an even smaller audience. Compliance does not breed right.
The Beta formats used in industrial and broadcast applications were/are not the same as consumer Betamax. The brand is the same, and some of the engineering principles and designs may have been similar between "Beta" formats, but the signal quality is worlds apart. No broadcast engineer worth their salt would let a consumer Betamax-grade signal on the air except in an emergency.
I've often heard the argument that Beta lost the race because they refused to allow pornography distributed on their tapes.
Is there any truth in this?
Awe c'mon laugh!!!, Dupes happen!!!
Regards,
Ryan Pritchard
Fun Extends All Basic Life Expectancies
Awe c'mon laugh!!!, Dupes happen!!!
Regards,
Ryan Pritchard
Fun Extends All Basic Life Expectancies
Of course the Slashdot editors need some ribbing for dupe stories, but why don't we tease the submitter of the story as well? It is so blatant that this was a dupe story since it has only been about a week since the original story, so why did someone submit the story again. There is more than enough Slashdot love to go around.
Oh, those awful Slashdot editors! How dare they make mistakes! I'm demanding my $0 back immediately! I'll report them to the FCC! No, wait Slashdotters hate the FCC, so I'll report then to the EFF for some reason!
Waaaaaaaaa!
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one " -Albert Einstein
Pfft!
The article is nothing more than an interesting headline. Nobody has ever disagreed that VHS had market advantages despite its inferior picture quality... well nobody's disagreed who's ever stepped foot in a video rental in the past decade.
In fact the only reason you ever hear anybody saying that 'betamax was better.." is when they are making *exactly* the same fucking hacknayed point that this joker makes.
His article is nothing more than an excuse to run the eye-catching title. He has absolutely nothing new to say.
VHS did not beat beta because of video quality. It was because of sony pulling the machine of the market because of a copyright lawsuit (sound familiar?). VHS went ahead and put out its inferior machines in spite of the lawsuit and won the toe hold in the American home. In any video studio beta was king and probably still is in some. What is the point of this article? Crappy is good enough for most people? That would explain the popularity of Microsoft ;-)
...because good is dumb!
Even though a large part of Schofield's "whole product" theory seems tailored to match the situation, he does have one thing very right - consumers as a whole usually focus on non-technical aspects of products.
What would have been much more interesting would have been thoughts as to why people acted this way, not just sitting back and saying that they did. Hindsight is 20/20 after all.
"There are people who do not love their fellow human being, and I _hate_ people like that!" - Tom Lehrer
One thing kept hitting me on the head like a ballpeen hammer while reading the article: he was discussing products which had been around for years, in terms of services and qualities which were not realized until some years after the original product was first introduced.
When the IBM PC was first introduced, it didn't have a huge software base, not many people owned one, and repair shops weren't well-trained in repairing one. So in terms of "the whole product", the IBM PC was WORSE than any other computer existing at the time.
Due to gradual changes over time, plus decisions such as allowing other motherboard manufacturers to make "clones" of the IBM PC, the IBM PC developed the additional qualities of "the whole product" that made it so much better than its competition. In other words, any newly introduced product is automatically WORSE than any competing product, if you are considering "the whole product". By definition, all competing products released before the new product have more of the qualities attributed to "the whole product" than the new product.
This leads me to what I think is the logical conclusion of "the whole product": "Our product, though technologically inferior to anything else anyone can come up with, is, by 'the whole product' standards, vastly superior to anything else on the market. Don't waste your time marketing anything other than our product, since anything else doesn't stack up to our product in terms of 'the whole product'."
Sounds like a Micro$oftism to me: anything to discourage competition, as long as it can't be directly traced back to us.
All I can think is that "the whole product" must be a relatively new marketing concept, since if we'd had it back in the days of the horse and buggy, the Model-T would only be available to "obsolete product collectors" on the telegraph version of E-Bay, and delivered by the Pony Express.
Damn Brits, what do they know? :-) Actually, if you are comparing VHS/Beta recorded in Pal standard rather than NTSC, you may not see as big a difference. Pal TV standard has a better overall picture (more lines than NTSC's 550). Since the source is better you are going to get a better recording, even on VHS. People from the states always comment how good the TV picture was when they visit the UK.
I know that Philips is not well known in the U.S., but in this discussion Video2000 was forgotten. It was superior to both Betamax and VHS. The Video2000 system was the first system to stop, because the American studios certainly wouldn't support a Dutch firm! It wasn't until the '80 "The Dutch strike back" with the Compact Disc
In 1985 the public didn't want any of those features, and for good reasons.
Every one of those features is quite expensive, hardware and software-wise, and at the prohibitive cost of a basic workstation running on the single-digit Mhz, any of those ideas was a joke.
Why do they want them now?
Have they been educated, persuaded, or contaminated by relentless marketing? Have they found new uses for the technology? Perhaps only now do we have the expertise or the technical hardware to exploit them?
Even today, it's not that clear that they are "good" features for what were doing in 1985 with computers.
- Do we really need hardware-accelerated GUIs with 3D capabilities to create Excel spreadsheets? Is that Gouraud shading on the bar chart REALLY important?
- Sure, pre-emptive multitasking is a good idea from an operating systems POV. But in 1985 that was the wrong POV to take for personal computers. There were little resources for an OS to manage, and multitasking is a concept that costed too much in a single-user machine and most users don't grasp. The typical user that drives the market still works on a single document/task at a time.
- Multi-channel digital is still an unprofessional annoyance in office workstations, as anyone who drank coffee to the sound of 50 "Windows Start-up Chimes" at 7:00AM knows, or typed a report to the not-so-muted-headphone sound of a neighbor's latest kazaa find. The ability to include annoying MIDI music in a Powerpoint presentation may not compensate that...
The point is that these features are "good" for things that didn't exist in 1985, because they either were not possible, or the ideas that put them to use were in embryonic state:
- Digital sound beyond the warning beeps of the BIOS required special hardware to play and special software to process. This was developed in other markets, for other markets, before it found any use in the mainstream, and then it required a lot of other things to fall into place. It couldn't happen without computer games, but also it couldn't have happened inthe mainstream without the "multimedia" idea, which couldn't have happened without CD-ROMs among the masses AND without hyperlinked documents AND without hardware-accelerated GUIs.
Only then did the product make sense.
- GUIs as we know them couldn't take off, I believe, without the desktop publishing revolution, and the desktop publishing revolution couldn't take off without the primitive GUIs that promised, but didn't quite give what was needed for that. Until desktop publishing changed what "creating a document in the computer" implied, GUIs were not such an amazing product, much less the idea of hardware-accelerating them. In the terms of the article, it took some time to make complex GUIs a "whole product".
- Pre-emptive multitasking was demanded by the market when it became useful. They needed no education for that, although they may have used the less technical term "Calculator shouldn't freeze this crap, and make me lose my work in 7 other apps". Sure, it was delivered late and buggy, but they weren't promising it since the days of OS/2 development because of the nicety of their hearts. They didn't promise it when people didn't care about it, because they could never create a document using 7 applications at the same time before.
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...