>>>the result of JVC ripping off Sony's plans for Betamax
Uh. No. Sony's Betamax used U-loading whereas JVC followed a different route called M-loading. The M loading also proved better for camcorders, which is why JVC was able to shrink it to palmsize (VHS-C). Sony could not make recordable Betamax units, so they had to make a separate standard called Video8 which was incompatible with home VCRs.
Also JVC was smart enough to make their tapes 2 hours standard, so they could record a whole movie, instead of just half (like the 1 hour Beta tapes). That time choice is why VHS was more attractive to consumers, and VHS had essentially "won" the war as early as 1980.
>>>While i'm an Atari guy, i admit we lost and they won.
Only just barely. Apple in 1996 was deep, deep in debt. It was headed to the same black hole as Atari and Commodore fell into (bankruptcy). As Steve Jobs himself said, "We were only 60 days away...... I called Bill and told him to deal directly with me from now on." -- That's when Bill Gates gave Apple some cash, which allowed them to pay their bills, rather than defaulting.
The first time I touched an Apple was in reading class, which would have been 1985. It was a nice machine but I couldn't understand why it was a boring monochrome screen, and simply went "beep" instead of playing music. (I didn't realize the Apple II was already ~8 year old technology.)
I never touched another Apple until the Mac SE when I reached college. And once again I wondered why it was monochrome, had almost no musical ability, and wouldn't let me run more than 1 program at a time. (Still better than an IBM PC though, which I avoided like the plague.)
I have to assume the summary was being sarcastic: "...the most successful storage mediums of all time â" MiniDisc and Zip disks." Minidisc is a bit like the Betamax of our generation, and Zip was prone to data loss.
1.5 TB divided by 30 discs == 50 gig each. Why? Another company has already developed a Bluray disc that can hold 1 terabyte all by itself (100 GB per layer times 10 layers). Strange that Sony would rather sell 30 discs in a cartridge instead of just 1. Not very efficient.
>>>killed the sale of used teacher edition books on ebay
Wow. I don't see how that's legal within the U.S. border, since if you buy something, you have every right to covert it back to cash through the used market. (Next I guess they'll want to outlaw the sale of used CDs, DVDs, or videogames.)
Good question. About a decade ago I bought several 12-hour S-VHS tapes from england. For whatever reason JVC refused to sell any tape longer than 9 hours on U.S. shores, perhaps to force customers to buy more of them.
Wow you're really quite the shill. You work for these people? A few years ago the Textbook as.... I mean, Publishers tried to make selling used books to students illegal. I'm curious to see how far backwards you can bend to justify that as being "fine and dandy" marketing.
Here's a thought: Maybe the textbook publishers should offer TWO copies of their books, just like fiction publishers do: One that is hardcover. And one that is paperbook, with lower-quality paper/binding, but costs 1/3rd to 1/4th as much. (Then we'd not need to import that paperback from India because it would be on U.S. shelves.)
I don't give a shit about a megacorps' protective barriers to free trade among other human beings. Next thing it will want to erect barriers between every state, so I can't even sell my textbook across the line. BS on that.
I don't give a shit if the Megacorp doesn't like that I purchased a cheap paperback Indian copy instead of the overpriced, glossybacked American copy. Sucks to be them. It's not my responsibility to bendover and kiss its ass..... it is not my girlfriend. I have every right as a free citizen (not a megacorp slave) to buy the cheapest copy I can find. It's called free trade.
You would have to sue one county (or city) at a time, in order to challenge the validity of the exclusive contract they gave to Comcast in your juris diction.
I have Verizon. So far they've not applied any caps.
>>>What kind of a twisted mind would put mandatory insurance purchase in the same bin as PIPA, PATRIOT, etc.?!
These laws all have the same thing in common. They all violate the Bill of Rights.
PIPA/ACTA/SOPA violates portions of Amendment 1. The Patriot act violates the 4th (home searches w/o warrants). NDAA violates the 6th. And forced purchase of a product violates the 9th (we have the right to not buy something we don't want) and the 10th (the power to mandate a purchase does not belong to the Congress; it is reserved to the People and their Legislature exclusively). It makes sense to group these laws together when they are all guilty of violating one of our most sacred documents (the Bill of rights).
(1) Not by choice. Dialup is the only thing most hotels got, so that's why I continue to subscribe in order to have internet when traveling. (And those hotels that have wifi rarely work because the Wifi is overloaded. Or else they charge an outrageous price like $90 a month.)
France and Russia are proto-fascist? Right now I would argue their citizens have more freedoms than American ones.
They need not worry about sexual assault/groping by TSA or VIPR teams at random spots throughout the country. They need not worry about being labeled a "terrorist" simply for owning a gun or carrying a pocket constitution or paying with cash (and then being jailed indefinitely without a right to trial ia the NDAA). They need not worry about warrantless searches of their person, car, or home under the auspices of the Patriot Act. We have lost a lot of freedoms over the last decade.
The politicians knew what they were doing. Making decisions behind closed doors so the public could not object..... similar to how Congress passed the NDAA during the holidays when the public was distracted, and the president signed it on New Year's Eve.
My 50 megahertz 68060 Amiga can play MP3s. (The 68060 is Motorola's equivalent to a Pentium.) Mainly because the Amiga isn't overburdered with a bloated OS, so the MP3 decoder gets 99% of the CPU's cycles.
>>>Facebook takes 10X longer to load from 5 years ago
Yes. Facebook is just about unusable on my Kindle G3. It wasn't like that before they switched to the Timeline setting that loads a ton of junk & makes the poor 500 MHz processor go into la-la land. I wish there was a simpler version of facebook.
>>>2.People who say, "if it ain't broke don't fix it!"
Time is finite and I don't want to waste it on things that don't matter (like the color of my desktop, or installing a new OS and trying to fix the broken parts that failed to work). I've used the same Windows XP desktop for 10 years now, and it's done everything I asked it to do. And I saved a LOT of days in my life but not having to relearn a new OS or new arrangement (think Office ribbon). Also cash.
President Obama did hatch a plan to get high-speed internet. Unfortunately his plan was to turn-off free TV (all channels 25 and up) and turn it over to wireless companies. That's not a solution... at least not as good as Fiber to every home.
>>>Which shows it isn't the OS or the hardware, its the networks
No it's the programmers. How else do you explain being able to run WordPerfect on a 1/2 megabyte machine (referring to my 68000 Commodore Amiga, Atari ST, Apple Mac), or Word on my 8 megabyte laptop (386SX), but today it takes 500 megabytes. Yeah they added some new features since the 80s/early 90s but that shouldn't require 1000x more RAM.
Web pages have grown in bloat too. We used to be able to view the web on 14 k modems. Now even 56k can't handle it. (I usually turn-off the too-bloated images.) I can understand people want High-def video and that requires bandwidth, but why should a plain-text site like/. require bandwidth? It should zip right across the phone line.
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>>>the result of JVC ripping off Sony's plans for Betamax
Uh. No. Sony's Betamax used U-loading whereas JVC followed a different route called M-loading. The M loading also proved better for camcorders, which is why JVC was able to shrink it to palmsize (VHS-C). Sony could not make recordable Betamax units, so they had to make a separate standard called Video8 which was incompatible with home VCRs.
Also JVC was smart enough to make their tapes 2 hours standard, so they could record a whole movie, instead of just half (like the 1 hour Beta tapes). That time choice is why VHS was more attractive to consumers, and VHS had essentially "won" the war as early as 1980.
M.U.L.E.
Enough said. "Archon" was also a cool game. And Spindizzy. And Silent Service. And Red Storm Rising. And Pirates. And.....
$1200??? Wow. My first computer was only $400 (the C64). For a CRT, we just plugged the thing into the TV.
>>>While i'm an Atari guy, i admit we lost and they won.
Only just barely. Apple in 1996 was deep, deep in debt. It was headed to the same black hole as Atari and Commodore fell into (bankruptcy). As Steve Jobs himself said, "We were only 60 days away...... I called Bill and told him to deal directly with me from now on." -- That's when Bill Gates gave Apple some cash, which allowed them to pay their bills, rather than defaulting.
>>>sixteen colors
You poor souls. My PC had 4096 colors, near-CD-quality sound, and true multitasking (preemptive). In 1985. My PC was a Commodore. ;-)
The first time I touched an Apple was in reading class, which would have been 1985. It was a nice machine but I couldn't understand why it was a boring monochrome screen, and simply went "beep" instead of playing music. (I didn't realize the Apple II was already ~8 year old technology.)
I never touched another Apple until the Mac SE when I reached college. And once again I wondered why it was monochrome, had almost no musical ability, and wouldn't let me run more than 1 program at a time. (Still better than an IBM PC though, which I avoided like the plague.)
- Commodore PET (same CPU as Apple II)
- TRS-80 with Zilog-80 processor (best selling computer of 1978, 79, and 80).
Source: http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2005/12/total-share.ars/3
VCR? Nope. It's JVC technology.
Laserdisc player? Nope. Philips.
Cassette player? Nope. Philips again.
DVR? Nope.
CD? Yep.
DVD? Nope.
I have to assume the summary was being sarcastic: "...the most successful storage mediums of all time â" MiniDisc and Zip disks." Minidisc is a bit like the Betamax of our generation, and Zip was prone to data loss.
1.5 TB divided by 30 discs == 50 gig each. Why? Another company has already developed a Bluray disc that can hold 1 terabyte all by itself (100 GB per layer times 10 layers). Strange that Sony would rather sell 30 discs in a cartridge instead of just 1. Not very efficient.
>>>killed the sale of used teacher edition books on ebay
Wow. I don't see how that's legal within the U.S. border, since if you buy something, you have every right to covert it back to cash through the used market. (Next I guess they'll want to outlaw the sale of used CDs, DVDs, or videogames.)
>>>Whatever happened to the global market?
Good question. About a decade ago I bought several 12-hour S-VHS tapes from england. For whatever reason JVC refused to sell any tape longer than 9 hours on U.S. shores, perhaps to force customers to buy more of them.
Wow you're really quite the shill. You work for these people? A few years ago the Textbook as.... I mean, Publishers tried to make selling used books to students illegal. I'm curious to see how far backwards you can bend to justify that as being "fine and dandy" marketing.
Here's a thought: Maybe the textbook publishers should offer TWO copies of their books, just like fiction publishers do: One that is hardcover. And one that is paperbook, with lower-quality paper/binding, but costs 1/3rd to 1/4th as much. (Then we'd not need to import that paperback from India because it would be on U.S. shelves.)
I don't give a shit about a megacorps' protective barriers to free trade among other human beings. Next thing it will want to erect barriers between every state, so I can't even sell my textbook across the line. BS on that.
I don't give a shit if the Megacorp doesn't like that I purchased a cheap paperback Indian copy instead of the overpriced, glossybacked American copy. Sucks to be them. It's not my responsibility to bendover and kiss its ass..... it is not my girlfriend. I have every right as a free citizen (not a megacorp slave) to buy the cheapest copy I can find. It's called free trade.
You would have to sue one county (or city) at a time, in order to challenge the validity of the exclusive contract they gave to Comcast in your juris diction.
I have Verizon. So far they've not applied any caps.
>>>What kind of a twisted mind would put mandatory insurance purchase in the same bin as PIPA, PATRIOT, etc.?!
These laws all have the same thing in common.
They all violate the Bill of Rights.
PIPA/ACTA/SOPA violates portions of Amendment 1. The Patriot act violates the 4th (home searches w/o warrants). NDAA violates the 6th. And forced purchase of a product violates the 9th (we have the right to not buy something we don't want) and the 10th (the power to mandate a purchase does not belong to the Congress; it is reserved to the People and their Legislature exclusively). It makes sense to group these laws together when they are all guilty of violating one of our most sacred documents (the Bill of rights).
It violates antitrust laws. Netflix, Amazon, and other streaming video services should just sue Comcast and get it over with it.
(1) Not by choice. Dialup is the only thing most hotels got, so that's why I continue to subscribe in order to have internet when traveling. (And those hotels that have wifi rarely work because the Wifi is overloaded. Or else they charge an outrageous price like $90 a month.)
(2) At home I have broadband not dialup.
France and Russia are proto-fascist? Right now I would argue their citizens have more freedoms than American ones.
They need not worry about sexual assault/groping by TSA or VIPR teams at random spots throughout the country. They need not worry about being labeled a "terrorist" simply for owning a gun or carrying a pocket constitution or paying with cash (and then being jailed indefinitely without a right to trial ia the NDAA). They need not worry about warrantless searches of their person, car, or home under the auspices of the Patriot Act. We have lost a lot of freedoms over the last decade.
The politicians knew what they were doing. Making decisions behind closed doors so the public could not object..... similar to how Congress passed the NDAA during the holidays when the public was distracted, and the president signed it on New Year's Eve.
My 50 megahertz 68060 Amiga can play MP3s. (The 68060 is Motorola's equivalent to a Pentium.) Mainly because the Amiga isn't overburdered with a bloated OS, so the MP3 decoder gets 99% of the CPU's cycles.
>>> if I want to transfer 500 gigs of data, I'd have to pay my provider over five digits for that month.
You must have a darn fast connection to get 500 GB per month. Or you could buy the Sprint(?) plan that costs ~$90 and gives unlimited cellular data.
P2P is metered on your ISP? Wow. Verizon DSL has not done that to me.
>>>Facebook takes 10X longer to load from 5 years ago
Yes. Facebook is just about unusable on my Kindle G3. It wasn't like that before they switched to the Timeline setting that loads a ton of junk & makes the poor 500 MHz processor go into la-la land. I wish there was a simpler version of facebook.
>>>2.People who say, "if it ain't broke don't fix it!"
Time is finite and I don't want to waste it on things that don't matter (like the color of my desktop, or installing a new OS and trying to fix the broken parts that failed to work). I've used the same Windows XP desktop for 10 years now, and it's done everything I asked it to do. And I saved a LOT of days in my life but not having to relearn a new OS or new arrangement (think Office ribbon). Also cash.
Buffer problem?
President Obama did hatch a plan to get high-speed internet. Unfortunately his plan was to turn-off free TV (all channels 25 and up) and turn it over to wireless companies. That's not a solution... at least not as good as Fiber to every home.
>>>Which shows it isn't the OS or the hardware, its the networks
No it's the programmers. How else do you explain being able to run WordPerfect on a 1/2 megabyte machine (referring to my 68000 Commodore Amiga, Atari ST, Apple Mac), or Word on my 8 megabyte laptop (386SX), but today it takes 500 megabytes. Yeah they added some new features since the 80s/early 90s but that shouldn't require 1000x more RAM.
Web pages have grown in bloat too. We used to be able to view the web on 14 k modems. Now even 56k can't handle it. (I usually turn-off the too-bloated images.) I can understand people want High-def video and that requires bandwidth, but why should a plain-text site like /. require bandwidth? It should zip right across the phone line.