The actual simple reason is that Beta recorders were tightly controlled by Sony and were therefore very expensive. In direct contrast, the VHS recorder market had lower prices and a greater available range of recording equipment, so the cost of entry to VHS publishing, if you weren't overly concerned about picture quality, was compellingly lower.
The first order effect of that was that the porn video industry sprang up using VHS, not Beta; and the second order effect was that consumers overwhlemingly bought VHS, not Beta. And that's all she wrote. Well, taped.
If you're getting charged for using a credit card, then you're using the wrong card. Hell, my main card actually gives money BACK to me out of what they charge businesses for my using it:
I generally cycle $2-3K a month of retail purchases through it, which has been good for a $300-$500 Christmas bonus on the card pretty consistently the last few years.
No, DRM is great if it keeps the content providers complacent enough to keep providing their content, whilst still allowing the consumer to remove its restrictions legally and without undue effort.
Since you can burn your purchased tracks with Apple's DRM to CD, legally, it meets the above definition of "great". And as long as copyright laws exist, and therefore record companies exist, you're not going to get professional music legally under any better definition of "great". Deal.
You're talking just slightly past my point. What you're discussing is independence of action. You're probably in the right ballpark with estimating that 50% can't even handle that.
However, what I was talking about is people who can do without even having a framework to work independently within. That is *much* rarer by an order of magnitude at least in the general population, down to 5% or so, and that's being quite generous. Geeks like complexity, choices, and control, so they are way out of line with the general population on this, and alpha geeks might as well be a separate species completely.
The best thing to read to get your head around how much normals actively resist choices and responsibility and just how different they are from geeks that way is the book "The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse" which explains quite interestingly just why choices and prosperity lead directly to unhappiness for many, perhaps most, people.
The vast majority of people actually do want a structured environment that removes responsibility for decisions from them. Or at least puts their decision-making power firmly subordinate to a value framework that validates any decision that may come their way.
Cf. "religion". Also "political party". Et cetera.
The trick is to provide the framework of assumptions within which people will make decisions voluntarily that serve your ends. And, of course, to get that provision labelled positively as esprit de corps instead of negatively as cultish.
There's a variety of ways to get around the NAT/firewall issues, but to completely eliminate them under all possible circumstances you pretty much need to have a server at a dedicated public IP. It just so happens that there is one out there called X-Tunnels, and it's open source too, which Xten of X-Lite/X-Pro/eyeBeam SIP softphone fame has made available here:
http://www.xtunnels.org/
which you could always look into if you're trying to set up a genuinely universally accessible from absolutely anywhere at all SIP network.
Disclaimer: I wrote it. So I might be a bit biased here.
It's not just IQ. Any measure of variability you can come up with, physical mental or psychological, males are far more widely distributed than females. Which means that the highest levels of achievement in any given field, if everyone is equally enabled to reach their full potential, will predictably be filled mostly by males, even in areas where the average woman has an edge on the average man.
For some reason, the flip side that the *lowest* levels of achievement will also be almost exclusively male never seems to hold much weight with the hardcore feminist types...
Some of us have more epicurean sensibilities than you, friend.... of course, if you want to come along and play wingman next time we go clubbing, that is PRECISELY the attitude I would encourage you to have...
As you will see, this is the first majority OF THE POPULAR VOTE since 1988, and a larger majority OF THE POPULAR VOTE than any Democrat has received since 1964, just as I said.
Rubbish. You are confusing "nuclear winter" with the pollution predictions.
Ah, no. See, for instance, this Newsweek article; which I very unconfusedly remember reading when it was on newsstands, kiddo.
A survey completed last year by Dr. Murray Mitchell of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reveals a drop of half a degree in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968. According to George Kukla of Columbia University, satellite photos indicated a sudden, large increase in Northern Hemisphere snow cover in the winter of 1971-72. And a study released last month by two NOAA scientists notes that the amount of sunshine reaching the ground in the continental U.S. diminished by 1.3% between 1964 and 1972.
So, um, where is the confusion here, son?
And today, we have Kyoto and all; but back then, we had:
Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects. They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers, might create problems far greater than those they solve...
And sorry, son, but telling us "oh, of course they were completely wrong back then... but they're COMPLETELY RIGHT NOW!! I JUST KNOW IT!!" well that don't cut it.
I have always had a hard time understanding how anyone can dismess global warming, considering that 95% of the climate scientists agree that global warming is real.
Well, for starters, we happen to be in an unusually cold period right now by geological standards; for over 70% of the lifespan of the planet, geology tells us, there have been no icecaps at either pole, and there's a wide consensus that we are actually in an interglacial period right now, which could go back to a full on Ice Age, or back to the more accustomed steambath. So, given that; if things are getting warmer, it's a lot more plausible to figure that climate is just reverting to geological norms than that there's anything significant humans are doing or can do to affect it. The sunspot activity data over recorded history sure seems a hell of a lot more compelling proof that our climate depends directly on the Sun's activity than it does on anything that humans do or don't do. But it's a lot harder to indulge your anti-capitalist prejudices if the problem is sunspots, so the fear-mongering types do their ignore any astronomical contributions to the global warming debate, and actively supress funding for that line of inquiry if they can. However, if the sunspot theorists are right, there should be a slight cooling over the next couple of years and a marked cooling by 2012 or so, so if that happens and their models are the only ones that explain it, well it won't matter at that point what anyone's politics are, I imagine.
On a more philosophical level; you little kiddies may be easy to work up about the sky falling, but us grizzled oldies remember the 70s when that same 95% of climate scientists, using the same data, assured us that a new Ice Age was just about to engulf us all and we had to panic to deal with *that* threat. So when we hear that everything's flipped 180 and now there's a 95% consensus around the exact opposite position, although the data hasn't changed; well, fool me once, and all that...
Your barn cats are getting fed, from someone else.
Heh. The next nearest neighbour was four miles, the one after that twelve. I *assure* you, neither of them were feeding our barn cats. Or their own. Now, you can think that the cats were making a fifty mile round trip every day to and from the nearest subdivision where somebody might actually feed them, but you would be pretty much a complete idiot if you did, most people would say.
And you do realize they don't enjoy being killed by local dogs, coyotes, cars, etc right?
Well, there was only one local dog and only four local cars, where 'local' is a fifteen mile radius... and not too many coyotes either. None of the above killed any significant number of cats that I ever noticed. Try again.
Heh. Apparently you've never lived on a farm. Aside from the detail that they prefer sleeping inside out of the rain and cold, sensibly enough of them, barn cats are just as feral a predator as anything else close to their size and do just fine without any humans pandering to them in the slightest.
You got some kind of documentation for that? I'm under the impression that DU and its ilk specifically buy lands that are *not* otherwise protected, which certainly seems to make more sense than saying that they're wasting their money like you are, so it seems some kind of proof of your assertion is warranted here.
Hmmmm, I'm pretty much as libertarian as they come, and my fans outnumber my freaks by better than 5 to 1. Now how exactly does that get explained by your theories? Shouldn't it be the other way around, if you're not just blowing smoke out your butt here?
'Course, I might just blow it by not being a judgemental type of fellow so I don't classify anyone else as either friends or foes, just deal with whatever posts I see on their individual merits, so there's an easy out for you if you'd like.
Errrrm, sorry to disturb your prejudicies with reality, but yes, they do, actually.
Compare and contrast the results of the completely private, voluntary, and market-based wetlands preservation effort of Ducks Unlimited, which buy up wetlands so that ducks have comfy places to hang out and get shot at, with all the public, involuntary, rule-based efforts of the feddle gummint to preserve those same wetlands.
Now, how is it that what you think is a "laugh" is a precise and exact description of reality in this instance, and in every other instance of market-based preservation in actual reality, as well?
The first assumption I make is that it has to be water-based organic life. It has to be water...
Not necessarily. On a somewhat cooler world than ours with 4-5% flourine in the atmosphere, water would be immediately broken down into oxygen and hydroflouric acid, which is liquid in the -83 to 19.4 C range.
This works because "plants" could function by photosynthesis with HF in place of water and carbon tetraflouride in place of carbon dioxide to produce H-C-F chain compounds and liberate free flourine, with nickel as the catalyst in place of the magnesium in chlorophyll. We'd have to postulate higher UV energy levels as well to provide enough decomposition energy, but that goes along with a thinner atmosphere and lower temperatures without much of a stretch.
"Animal" soft tissues in this scenario would be about the same as the plants, but hard tissues would be produced by the reaction
{ H-C-F } + F2 -> { F-C-F } + HF
resulting in a teflon boned and shelled organism, probably one muther-tough sonofabitch. His main energy reaction would be
{ H-C-F } + F2 -> CF4 + HF
with a blood catalyst metal of titanium, which would result in colorless arterial blood and violet veinous, as the titanium flips back and forth between tri- and tetra-valent states. So he'd probably be a good deal more energetic than us 02-running organisms as well.
Given what we know about vulcanism on the outer moons and so forth, I wouldn't be surprised to find that a scenario along these lines is rather more probable around the universe than the local one we're familiar with.
Their technology would be rather different than ours too, since no terrestial style organic matter is possible, and there wouldn't be much around except flourides; no oxides, sulfides, silicates, or chlorides. All metallurgy would have to be electrical. Oh, and they probably wouldn't be good mountain climbers either, since flourides are structurally weak; nothing tough like granite to make mountains out of. So technological progress seems a trifle unlikely. But *shrug* they'd probably think that about Earth, too...
Hmmmm... there's that Microsoft Smartcard Z-80 CP/M running Apple ][ card, which took over the host's display and keyboard. That would qualify under many definitions of "computer", I'd say.
Slashdot Mirror
True, but it's a second order effect.
The actual simple reason is that Beta recorders were tightly controlled by Sony and were therefore very expensive. In direct contrast, the VHS recorder market had lower prices and a greater available range of recording equipment, so the cost of entry to VHS publishing, if you weren't overly concerned about picture quality, was compellingly lower.
The first order effect of that was that the porn video industry sprang up using VHS, not Beta; and the second order effect was that consumers overwhlemingly bought VHS, not Beta. And that's all she wrote. Well, taped.
they charge you for using the credit card
a rd .html
If you're getting charged for using a credit card, then you're using the wrong card. Hell, my main card actually gives money BACK to me out of what they charge businesses for my using it:
http://www.cibc.com/ca/visa/dividend-platinum-c
I generally cycle $2-3K a month of retail purchases through it, which has been good for a $300-$500 Christmas bonus on the card pretty consistently the last few years.
how great DRM is as long as it's from Apple
No, DRM is great if it keeps the content providers complacent enough to keep providing their content, whilst still allowing the consumer to remove its restrictions legally and without undue effort.
Since you can burn your purchased tracks with Apple's DRM to CD, legally, it meets the above definition of "great". And as long as copyright laws exist, and therefore record companies exist, you're not going to get professional music legally under any better definition of "great". Deal.
You're talking just slightly past my point. What you're discussing is independence of action. You're probably in the right ballpark with estimating that 50% can't even handle that.
3 8/ 104-8690463-3611122
However, what I was talking about is people who can do without even having a framework to work independently within. That is *much* rarer by an order of magnitude at least in the general population, down to 5% or so, and that's being quite generous. Geeks like complexity, choices, and control, so they are way out of line with the general population on this, and alpha geeks might as well be a separate species completely.
The best thing to read to get your head around how much normals actively resist choices and responsibility and just how different they are from geeks that way is the book "The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse" which explains quite interestingly just why choices and prosperity lead directly to unhappiness for many, perhaps most, people.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/06794630
Well, that's not right.
The vast majority of people actually do want a structured environment that removes responsibility for decisions from them. Or at least puts their decision-making power firmly subordinate to a value framework that validates any decision that may come their way.
Cf. "religion". Also "political party". Et cetera.
The trick is to provide the framework of assumptions within which people will make decisions voluntarily that serve your ends. And, of course, to get that provision labelled positively as esprit de corps instead of negatively as cultish.
There's a variety of ways to get around the NAT/firewall issues, but to completely eliminate them under all possible circumstances you pretty much need to have a server at a dedicated public IP. It just so happens that there is one out there called X-Tunnels, and it's open source too, which Xten of X-Lite/X-Pro/eyeBeam SIP softphone fame has made available here:
http://www.xtunnels.org/
which you could always look into if you're trying to set up a genuinely universally accessible from absolutely anywhere at all SIP network.
Disclaimer: I wrote it. So I might be a bit biased here.
It's not just IQ. Any measure of variability you can come up with, physical mental or psychological, males are far more widely distributed than females. Which means that the highest levels of achievement in any given field, if everyone is equally enabled to reach their full potential, will predictably be filled mostly by males, even in areas where the average woman has an edge on the average man.
For some reason, the flip side that the *lowest* levels of achievement will also be almost exclusively male never seems to hold much weight with the hardcore feminist types...
The fact that I can't carry a few spare AAA batteries
... Extend the playback time of your iPod shuffle with the Battery Pack, powered by two AAA batteries..."
..." ...Closed systems ... gouge me on a replacement battery ... doesn't play OGGs...
Ahem.
"
Won't work as a plain ole' USB thumb device
Ahem.
"... Store files along with your music
Nobody. In. The. Target. Market. Gives. A. Flying. Fuck.
Should I keep going?
Well, you haven't actually started yet, so please.
That strikes me as a feature best left to Belkin.
e ss ?Merchant_Id=&Section_Id=201526&pcount=&Product_Id =169368
http://catalog.belkin.com/IWCatProductPage.proc
Fido in Canada does that now.
c it y=vancouver
Here in Vancouver, for Cdn $45 you get a larger unlimited calling area than you do with a landline.
http://cityfido.ca/get/getcityfido.jsp?lang=en&
"Prettier" does not mean "superior."
... of course, if you want to come along and play wingman next time we go clubbing, that is PRECISELY the attitude I would encourage you to have ...
Some of us have more epicurean sensibilities than you, friend.
Start here, and follow the years.
l _e lection__1964.html
http://www.fact-index.com/u/u_/u_s__presidentia
As you will see, this is the first majority OF THE POPULAR VOTE since 1988, and a larger majority OF THE POPULAR VOTE than any Democrat has received since 1964, just as I said.
Highest percentage since 1988.
(First majority since 1988, to boot.)
Higher percentage than any Democrat since 1964.
That seems reasonably impressive to me, I'd say.
Rubbish. You are confusing "nuclear winter" with the pollution predictions.
... but they're COMPLETELY RIGHT NOW!! I JUST KNOW IT!!" well that don't cut it.
Ah, no. See, for instance, this Newsweek article; which I very unconfusedly remember reading when it was on newsstands, kiddo.
A survey completed last year by Dr. Murray Mitchell of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reveals a drop of half a degree in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968. According to George Kukla of Columbia University, satellite photos indicated a sudden, large increase in Northern Hemisphere snow cover in the winter of 1971-72. And a study released last month by two NOAA scientists notes that the amount of sunshine reaching the ground in the continental U.S. diminished by 1.3% between 1964 and 1972.
So, um, where is the confusion here, son?
And today, we have Kyoto and all; but back then, we had:
Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects. They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers, might create problems far greater than those they solve...
And sorry, son, but telling us "oh, of course they were completely wrong back then
http://www.globalclimate.org/Newsweek.htm
I have always had a hard time understanding how anyone can dismess global warming, considering that 95% of the climate scientists agree that global warming is real.
Well, for starters, we happen to be in an unusually cold period right now by geological standards; for over 70% of the lifespan of the planet, geology tells us, there have been no icecaps at either pole, and there's a wide consensus that we are actually in an interglacial period right now, which could go back to a full on Ice Age, or back to the more accustomed steambath. So, given that; if things are getting warmer, it's a lot more plausible to figure that climate is just reverting to geological norms than that there's anything significant humans are doing or can do to affect it. The sunspot activity data over recorded history sure seems a hell of a lot more compelling proof that our climate depends directly on the Sun's activity than it does on anything that humans do or don't do. But it's a lot harder to indulge your anti-capitalist prejudices if the problem is sunspots, so the fear-mongering types do their ignore any astronomical contributions to the global warming debate, and actively supress funding for that line of inquiry if they can. However, if the sunspot theorists are right, there should be a slight cooling over the next couple of years and a marked cooling by 2012 or so, so if that happens and their models are the only ones that explain it, well it won't matter at that point what anyone's politics are, I imagine.
On a more philosophical level; you little kiddies may be easy to work up about the sky falling, but us grizzled oldies remember the 70s when that same 95% of climate scientists, using the same data, assured us that a new Ice Age was just about to engulf us all and we had to panic to deal with *that* threat. So when we hear that everything's flipped 180 and now there's a 95% consensus around the exact opposite position, although the data hasn't changed; well, fool me once, and all that...
Your barn cats are getting fed, from someone else.
... and not too many coyotes either. None of the above killed any significant number of cats that I ever noticed. Try again.
Heh. The next nearest neighbour was four miles, the one after that twelve. I *assure* you, neither of them were feeding our barn cats. Or their own. Now, you can think that the cats were making a fifty mile round trip every day to and from the nearest subdivision where somebody might actually feed them, but you would be pretty much a complete idiot if you did, most people would say.
And you do realize they don't enjoy being killed by local dogs, coyotes, cars, etc right?
Well, there was only one local dog and only four local cars, where 'local' is a fifteen mile radius
Heh. Apparently you've never lived on a farm. Aside from the detail that they prefer sleeping inside out of the rain and cold, sensibly enough of them, barn cats are just as feral a predator as anything else close to their size and do just fine without any humans pandering to them in the slightest.
You got some kind of documentation for that? I'm under the impression that DU and its ilk specifically buy lands that are *not* otherwise protected, which certainly seems to make more sense than saying that they're wasting their money like you are, so it seems some kind of proof of your assertion is warranted here.
Hmmmm, I'm pretty much as libertarian as they come, and my fans outnumber my freaks by better than 5 to 1. Now how exactly does that get explained by your theories? Shouldn't it be the other way around, if you're not just blowing smoke out your butt here?
'Course, I might just blow it by not being a judgemental type of fellow so I don't classify anyone else as either friends or foes, just deal with whatever posts I see on their individual merits, so there's an easy out for you if you'd like.
Errrrm, sorry to disturb your prejudicies with reality, but yes, they do, actually.
Compare and contrast the results of the completely private, voluntary, and market-based wetlands preservation effort of Ducks Unlimited, which buy up wetlands so that ducks have comfy places to hang out and get shot at, with all the public, involuntary, rule-based efforts of the feddle gummint to preserve those same wetlands.
Now, how is it that what you think is a "laugh" is a precise and exact description of reality in this instance, and in every other instance of market-based preservation in actual reality, as well?
The first assumption I make is that it has to be water-based organic life. It has to be water...
Not necessarily. On a somewhat cooler world than ours with 4-5% flourine in the atmosphere, water would be immediately broken down into oxygen and hydroflouric acid, which is liquid in the -83 to 19.4 C range.
This works because "plants" could function by photosynthesis with HF in place of water and carbon tetraflouride in place of carbon dioxide to produce H-C-F chain compounds and liberate free flourine, with nickel as the catalyst in place of the magnesium in chlorophyll. We'd have to postulate higher UV energy levels as well to provide enough decomposition energy, but that goes along with a thinner atmosphere and lower temperatures without much of a stretch.
"Animal" soft tissues in this scenario would be about the same as the plants, but hard tissues would be produced by the reaction
{ H-C-F } + F2 -> { F-C-F } + HF
resulting in a teflon boned and shelled organism, probably one muther-tough sonofabitch. His main energy reaction would be
{ H-C-F } + F2 -> CF4 + HF
with a blood catalyst metal of titanium, which would result in colorless arterial blood and violet veinous, as the titanium flips back and forth between tri- and tetra-valent states. So he'd probably be a good deal more energetic than us 02-running organisms as well.
Given what we know about vulcanism on the outer moons and so forth, I wouldn't be surprised to find that a scenario along these lines is rather more probable around the universe than the local one we're familiar with.
Their technology would be rather different than ours too, since no terrestial style organic matter is possible, and there wouldn't be much around except flourides; no oxides, sulfides, silicates, or chlorides. All metallurgy would have to be electrical. Oh, and they probably wouldn't be good mountain climbers either, since flourides are structurally weak; nothing tough like granite to make mountains out of. So technological progress seems a trifle unlikely. But *shrug* they'd probably think that about Earth, too...
That's Wil E. Coyote.
Sheesh. Kids these days...
I heard it was due to budget constraints.
:)
Yep, I know someone in the animation side of things that worked on it.
Basically, they screwed up the budget completely, and eventually had to decide: Suits, or Bugs?
Bugs won
Remember: Microsoft never made computers
... there's that Microsoft Smartcard Z-80 CP/M running Apple ][ card, which took over the host's display and keyboard. That would qualify under many definitions of "computer", I'd say.
Hmmmm
"an instinctive grasp of the spirit of a language, esp. consciousness of what is acceptable usage in the grammar or idiom of a particular language."
Roughly, the German equivalent of savoir faire and savoir vivre combined, when applied to social situations.