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Variety Declares VHS Dead
An anonymous reader writes "Variety has written an obituary for the VHS format only 3 years after it was surpassed in popularity by the DVD." While VHS is hardly the format of choice these days, there are still many, many home movies and other favorite recordings and commercial releases floating around in VHS. How long until VHS players themselves go the way of the 8-track player?
Don't you think that you should wait more than 20 minutes before stealing other people's posts (not mine, but one I replied to) for Karma?
8 78422 @ 6:25pm
Reference : http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=207016&cid=16
And shame on you.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
I take it you're a penguinista. Yes, you can listen to .wma files in xmms, just need the xmms-wma plugin for it, readily available for Debian, Fedora, & Ubuntu, some assembly required for Gentoo, of course...
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Sometimes it can resync, sometimes it can't.
We have had programs showing up lasting -96 hours (or similar unrealistic figures) which were completely unusable.
Mind you, this seems no different to the experience I have had with dvd-rw's.
YMMV
liqbase
For some more anecdotes: I record shows on my comp using SageTV, and toss the DVDs in a pile, sometimes on the floor. Then step on them. Every single one of 150+ still plays without even skipping. Some take longer to read after popping them in, but no biggie.
This could be fixed with Internet over Power. Then broadband will be exactly as ubiquitous and reliable as electricity. It actually doesn't really take as much to implement; the infrastructure is already there.
Zing!
Mostly because it's so gratuitous. Where normal people would use "comedy," they write "laffer," which in addition to not being an actual word, isn't even any shorter! They use the word "actioner," which my brain always interprets as "auctioneer" at first glance. But at least that saves some characters compared to "action movie," so I can sort of vaguely comprehend why someone might mistake it for a good idea.
A lot of it has to do with the specific type of voting machine used. I've heard stories of some really bad designs from people who voted in different areas last week, but it can be done...not necessarily right, but at least better.
The machines that my district has used for the last ~2 years are pain to use (basically a click wheel, and the display is slow enough you can watch it drawing rectangles), but at least have some measures against fraud. For instance, activating the machine requires a single-use passcode that's generated by the control unit and handed to you by the official running that station, so you can't sneak into an unused booth when you're done and vote again. (Not that this would have been possible where I was. They were watching the booths like hawks waiting for one to free up so they could get people through the line as fast as possible. It was the most crowded midterm election I've seen since I started voting in 1994, unless you count the 2003 California governor recall.)
Most importantly, each voting machine has a roll of paper inside like the store copy in a cash register. When you finish your ballot, it first gives you a chance to review your choices on-screen, then it prints them out on the paper roll, which is visible through a plastic window. You have one more chance to confirm that the paper copy matches what you actually chose, then it accepts your vote and rolls the paper out of view.
With that type of machine, even if the memory gets wiped by a power outage, there's still a paper record that can be examined.