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For a Missouri Cassette Tape Factory, Obsolesence is Just a 12-Letter Word (arstechnica.com)
The Missouri-based National Audio Company, reports Ars Technica, is sweeping up in a category that our future-looking selves might twenty years ago have imagined would be dead and buried in the year 2015: making and selling audiocassettes. There are fewer and fewer competitors in the tape-making business, but NAC still has a healthy market for cassettes -- in October, the company noted "a 31 percent increase in order volume over the previous year." From the article: [Company president Steve Stepp] said that as his competitors began bailing out of the cassette business once CDs came to prominence, NAC started buying up their machinery. “It would have been incredibly expensive 30 to 35 years ago when [cassette manufacturing machines] were new on the market, but when our competitors bailed out of the business and started making CDs, we went round the country and bought [them] out," he said. Some artists are still releasing music on tape, but about 70 percent of what the company sells is blank cassettes; there are an awful lot of tape decks out there; my father alone still buys a few hundred blanks each year.
"Ob so le se nc e is Just a 12-Letter Word"
Really?
I loved buying Maxell XL-IIS blanks. That being said, I can't see buying and making tapes today. It'd be like buying an old Polaroid camera... oh wait I did that
I've learned that they're worthless, so I don't read AC comments anymore.
Obviously there are exceptions like wax cylinders and stone tablets, but in general if a medium is cheap and/or does a job thats not easily or cheaply replicated elsewhere it'll stick around. As soon as the Next Thing comes along certain people always predict the demise of that which its superceding. Cassette was supposed to kill vinyl. It didn't. Ditto CDs, they didn't. MP3s were supposed to kill CDs and cassettes. They didn't. Streaming - we are told - is the end of downloads. Yeah, right. DVD killed VHS? No it didn't - not until set top box recorders came along to fill in that functionality. Automatic gearboxes were the death knell of manual transmissions. Oh really? Now driverless cars will be the end of human driven cars. No, don't think so.
Anyone who predicts the end of anything without waiting a few decades is an idiot.
Firefox 3.6 was painfully slow. The speed improvements from 4 onwards made it much more enjoyable to use until they started copying Chrome and doing other bone headed things.
That's more than the number of weekdays in the year. What the hell does he do with that many?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Audio magtapes have shit quality
um, no?
Sorry, couldn't hear you over the hissssssssssssssssss
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Am I the only one who's dying to know what the author's father is doing with those hundreds of blank cassettes every year?
You are welcome on my lawn.
I had the tape deck for the Atari, and it was nothing but a trail of tears.
Spend 30 minutes "loading" a program and when it was done...no program.
Spend the same amount of time "saving" a program, and later find out it saved nothing. :(
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
I remember, back at the dawn of the PC age, going into to my local computer software retailer and browsing the rack for games that were sold on cassettes that were packaged in plastic sandwich bags with a one page set of instructions printed with a dot matrix printer. I'd buy a few, take them home, put one into the cassette player whose audio output was connected to my Apple II+, and start the programming sequence. A few seconds later, the computer would beep and display an error message stating that it couldn't read the tape and to try again.
I never did play those fucking games.
Firefox can't update itself successfully. It updated on my machine this morning and afterwards, it wouldn't start because it had deleted it's own executable. Then I went to the Mozilla website and almost vomited from sheer ugly. Their website has little squares of different shapes and sizes everywhere (Like Windows Metro interface), and as such, presents information extremely both inefficiently and in a manner which is offensive to the eye. It was hard to find the download link amongst all of the other squares which did who knows what. I assume they were advertisements, but similar to the ACA, you can't tell what they do unless you click on them.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
That's not Firefox 's roots. Firefox originated as the stand alone browser without all the other crap. In its inception, it was separate from seamonkey or the Netscape stile internet suite.
If he said back to its Netscape roots, you would be accurate. But since the entire concept of Firefox was a standalone browser , the association to seamonkey is a bit off.
You can feel the weight balance to tell how much of the tape is on one reel versus the other. You can rewind and fastforward by gut-feeling, with no display. Every operation of the player is tactile, and there are no hidden options menus, touchscreens, or any of that crap.
We used cassette tapes for other purposes too... http://www.oldcomputers.net/hp... We'd save off a program to cassette for storage, and it usually worked the next time you tried to load the program. Follow the link and check out the three people in the picture, ready to get to work!
The first time I found ample access to a computer (HP 9830A desktop calculator) was at Texas A&M in '76-'77. Its hard to believe that I spent entire nights from dusk to dawn in the math building on campus, learning BASIC, including a Star Trek game. There's no telling how much thermal paper I ran through the printer.
I read TFA last night from ARS itself...
As soon as I read the summary, I realized they got it backwards.
From TFA:
''In a September article, Bloomberg reported that NAC “has deals with major record labels like Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group as well as a number of small contracts with indie bands. About 70 percent of the company's sales are from music cassettes while the rest are blank cassettes.” ''
70% pre-recorded; 30% blanks.
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
Firefox 3.6 was painfully slow. The speed improvements from 4 onwards made it much more enjoyable to use until they started copying Chrome and doing other bone headed things.
Yeah, it was great until about Firefox 29...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Well, at least vinyl still does something that even CDs can't
Make hipsters happy? It has no audio advantage, to be sure.
Big fancy magtape can kick the crap out of a CD,
Make audiophiles happy? Make your cables danceable?
The only limitation of CDs (if you include CD-Rs etc) is that they only contain enough information to match perfect human hearing, so you might want more bits for the mastering process, where some information loss is inevitable. But for consumer use, just playing the music, CDs are right.
The only example that makes sense is a tube amp, which distorts sound in a way many people find pleasing.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
But you also hear things on vinyl that gets left out on digital media because the sampling rate isn't high enough.
This is not only wrong, but provably wrong. That's the nice thing about math: actual proofs. After you've listened to a record a few times, you've degraded the audio quality through wear. Perhaps you like that sound better? Many people like the distortion of tube amps better.
Also, most prominently used digital audio formats are lossy, which means some of the data gets lost as part of the compression process
True enough. Low bitrate MP3s annoy me to no end, but they're still better than cassette tape.
But there is no better listening experience than vinyl with a good turntable and high-end speakers.
You forgot directional cables. Don't hook em up backwards: you need your cables to be danceable.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
No, you don't. Just because it's analog doesn't mean that it has infinite bandwidth, or even that the bandwidth it does have beats the bandwidth of the reconstructed signal that can be created from the sample rate a CD has.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Except Hipsters have a buttload more money than the rednecks... and they pay very well for someone to restore that 1965 motorcycle for them and add a beard holder.
I love hipsters, they actually pay their bills.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
"Big fancy magtape can kick the crap out of a CD, but it doesn't fit in your pocket."
http://www.amazon.com/Sony-PCM...
Fits in my pocket and blows CD's out of the water hard. What are you one of those skinny jeans freaks that cant even put quarters in your pockets?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
SeaMonkey can be built without mail/news and there are Firefox 3.x look alike themes. You get a lean browser with better performance then FF, all the security fixes etc and the familiar FF 3.x UI
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism