So Konqueror can use one tactic to try and better integrate and gain inroads, but if a monopoly makes the same solution to try and protect their position...it's illegal? Better they should allow the little guy in to take over their business?
If and when KDE reaches a position when they are a serious threat to Microsoft's market dominance, then Microsoft, by definition, is no longer a monopoly, so the gloves can come off, so to speak. Until then, yeah, they play with the kiddie gloves. Which, in practice, means that they get the same treatment as everyone else: they aren't legally allowed to leverage dominance into one market to dominate another, and their competition, not having this dominance to begin with, obviously can't do much leveraging either.
Seems to me that's somewhat subjective to determine what "leveraging monopoly power" is. So if I try to use my already exisiting strengths to my advantage including brand name recognition and UI branding, that's a bad thing? Basically, any company that is a monopoly has no shot at getting in to another market b/c people will find a way to claim they are leveraging their power. Unless of course people don't dislike said company. Then it's all well and good for them to give it a go.
I think you'll find the legal argument (and my ethical argument) against Microsoft is a lot more specific than that. That Microsoft introduced a web browser is perfectly within their rights. That they then proceeded to tie said browser so deeply into the operating system that it (by their own admission) could not be removed without destroying the system, is not.
Are you sure about that? Maybe subsitute Mozilla for Netscape:)
Welll... you're probably right there.:-)
But I still maintain that, despite the fact that Internet Explorer 4 was a better product than Netscape Navigator 4, that's not why Microsoft won out in that particular battle. Certainly, the relative speed by which Microsoft outright buried it's competition would have been impossible to obtain had Microsoft not been actively flexing its monopolist muscles.
To me, it seems they're using success in one sphere to try and attain success in another sphere.
Which is the problem. In theory, a product is supposed to succeed based on its relative merits, not because the company pushing it has the dominance to force it down the public's collective throats. Before you say anything, yes, I know this is a basically unattainable ideal, but the most egregious violations of this can and should be prohibited, and this is a textbook example: Internet Explorer might well have beaten Netscape Navigator through its own merits, but the simple fact is that it did not, because there was never a serious attempt to pit the two against each other on merits. You got (and paid for) Internet Explorer when you got Windows.
In regards to the last paragraph, you imply that if you're small, you can hit as many people as hard as you like. But if you're big, you need to be careful to avoid hitting anybody. That's exactly my issue with this whole idea. Yes, I do see the idea of capitalism and free markets and playing nice. I do agree with those. I'm not defending all of Microsoft's moves they've made. I just have issues when people say IE shell integration is anti-competitive. Or that having Media Player in the OS by default is anti-competitive. Restricting vendors from installing other media players, yes. Saying they can't include one of their products in another of their products is ridiculous. As long as they allow for the choice, I see no problems with the actions taken by a "monopoly".
If you've got short arms, you're less likely to smack someone. If you've got longer arms, you're more likely to do so. The action (swinging one's arms) are equal, but the entity performing the action (the arms) are not. Because my arms are longer, I need to be extra careful that I'm not going to hurt
I think this will be an interesting litmus test: FairPlay is, as far as these things goes, a fairly unobtrusive DRM scheme. It works well, and, perhaps more importantly, it works transparently: the one of two times I've delved into copy-protected WMA files (not that this constitutes an exhaustive sampling, I'm aware), I'm always quite aware of the fact that the files are protected, and there's always some sort of hurdle to jump through to make it work properly, at least on the first play through.
So, what I'll find interesting here is to see how much of an effect on things this PlayFair program has. My personal views on the matter is that Apple has hit upon the right balance with iTMS: it's cheap, it's easy, and it's convenient. I can see the potential value of things like PlayFair for purposes of format shifting for personal use, but I kind of think that the "legal" way of obtaining songs through iTMS will remain easier and more convenient, and that the price is low enough that it's not going to be chasing users to their favorite P2P program. But then, I also have some lingering faith in the overall goodness of human nature, so who am I to judge?
Why does a monopoly make what Microsoft did any different from what Konquerer does?
From what perspective? In terms of functionality, yeah, the integration of KDE's file manager and Konqueror and the integration of Microsoft's Explorer and Internet Explorer are the same. But so what? That wasn't what was being discussed. The legal (and probably moral) difference is precisely what I said at the beginning: Microsoft is a monopoly, as defined by the courts. KDE is not a monopoly. Legally, they have to play by different rules.
Microsoft's problem is not that it is a monopoly, per se. That's not illegal. What is illegal, however, is leveraging monopoly power in one market to succeed in another. In other words, using one's monopoly on operating systems designed for personal computers to crowd out competition in, say, the WWW browser market, or the on-demand streaming media market.
It's hardly a complicated idea: if over 90% of computer users are going to be using computers with Microsoft Windows preinstalled, and if Windows is bundled with software designed to replace the functionality of third-party solutions (like Netscape Navigator, or RealPlayer, or QuickTime, or whatever), then Microsoft has an unfair advantage over AOL/Netscape, Real Networks, or Apple. People will use the Microsoft-provided solution because it's already there.
Where's the fairness in this? Internet Explorer, in this scenario, succeeds not because it's an superior product to Netscape Navigator, or because there's more consumer demand for it, but because they're using success in one sphere (the OS) to crowd out the competition in another (the web browser).
And, leaving out the issue of fairness entirely (which you brought up), this sort of thing is emphatically illegal, because it tends to sabotage the free market in a demonstrable way. Capitalism, as a system, works on the premise that if a product comes along which better suits the needs of the largest section of the market, it will dominate said market. Monopolistic practices throw a spanner into the works because it makes it next to impossible for non-monopolistic competitors to break into the market to begin with, effectively torpedoing the checks and balances of the system.
Like it or not, Microsoft is not equal to any of its competitors. If we had the completely "equal playing field" you suggest, then they would be all but unassailable in perpetuity, unless and until they happened upon an even bigger existing monopoly that could out-muscle them. They are in a unique position in the marketplace, and, as a result, they need to play by different rules.
Perhaps it's better to look at this in a different way: anyone is free to swing their arms about as much as they like. But if I happened to have seven foot arms, I would need to be decidedly more circumspect in doing so, lest I punch somebody in the face. Therefore, I cannot swing my arms about as much as a person with two- or three-foot arms. There are differences between me and my hypothetical monkey arms and your average person and their normal-length appendages, just as there are differences between Microsoft, the 800-pound gorilla of the software business, and KDE, who command, at best, a fraction of a fraction of the marketplace.
Y'know, I don't like Microsoft much. I don't trust Gates or Ballmer, and I think, in general, their software tends to be too flaky and idiosyncratic for my tastes, and their business and advertising practices are downright deplorable.
But I don't think there's much more to this particular story than meets the eye. We're not talking about the source code to Windows here, it's a fairly minor program that they probably don't gain much by keeping closed, and lose next to nothing by opening up. It's the same basic principles behind Apple giving back some of the code it added to khtml when it borrowed it for Safari: they have nothing to gain by hiding it, nothing to lose by opening it, and, yeah, it does gain them a small degree of goodwill amongst some of their loudest detractors.
Microsoft, as unpleasant as it may be, is not the devil incarnate. It's merely ruthless (sometimes to the point of illegality or amorality, yes). Sure, this move was probably not motivated out of community spirit or civic mindedness, but not everything emanating from Redmond needs to be part of some greater conspiracy to kill the open source movement, burn their huts, and ravish their women, after all....
What's the difference between IE's integration into the Windows shell and Konquerer's integration into KDE?
Easy: if you don't have a monopoly, you can't very well leverage that monopoly. KDE does not have a monopoly of the PC desktop; it doesn't even have a monopoly on the Linux subsection of the PC desktop.
What people forget is that the problem isn't with Microsoft's bundling practices, it's with the idea that Microsoft has continually abused its practical monopoly in the OS market to drive competitors in other markets out of business. This is what happened to Netscape in a pretty demonstrable manner, and again with Windows Media Player. And, here's the thing, it is illegal for Microsoft to do that because of the position they are in. On the other hand, it is not illegal for KDE (or Apple, or any other non-monopolist corporation out there) to do much the same thing, because they can't throw their weight around to the extent that Microsoft can, and does.
Microsoft, being the big kid on the block, is held to a different set of standards than everyone else. You can wail all you want about how unfair this is, and I'm sure Microsoft cries all the way to the bank, but the fact is that these rules are in place to ensure that the playing field is kept even and fair for everyone.
Ahh... I've never heard of any problem with Final Fantasy Origins and the PS2. Given that the game came out close to three years after the introduction of the PS2, it would seem that only the stupidest play testers wouldn't have caught something that problematic.
Are you sure you're not thinking of the much-publicized problems with the PS2 and Square's earlier Final Fantasy ports (specifically, IIRC, Final Fantasy V). There were some problems there, but I'm not sure if they were universal (i.e., some people couldn't get it to work, while others could), and I think those problems have been ironed out in all but the very earliest PS2 models. Certainly, I've had no problem with any of these games (but, then again, I didn't get a PS2 at launch).
Erm, not to troll, but if you just want a box capable of running an X server, why on earth would you bother getting a box from Apple? I mean, sure, they're of fine craftsmanship, but Macs are designed (and, perhaps more importantly, priced) with the OS very much in mind. People don't generally by a G4 so they can gut it and run *nix, as you can either buy or put together a x86 box that accomplishes the same thing much more cheaply. If you dislike the very design of OS X, then you'll probably not be using it very often, so why bother with a Mac? It's one thing if you want the flexibility to run OS X and an X server, but if you only want the latter...?
Of course the Microsoft people are going to say that: Access costs a good $100 more than Excel, after all....
Seriously, though, my experience with Access is that it's just too large and bloated to use for something as simple as, for instance, storing telephone numbers. Excel loads up quickly, you can jump right into the neccessary file, and add/remove/access what you need right off the bat. Access, while great for storing large quantities of data (say, phone numbers, email and street addresses, and other contact information), has always seemed like overkill for such simple database needs.
Konami benefits from having one of the most respected and successful music/sound teams in the industry. And, indeed, they've cranked out hit after hit: Castlevania, Contra, Suikoden, Gradius, etc. are all recognized for their soundtracks.
Because it's, frankly, bloated, particularly if you're not inherently interested in it's library management features, and less extensible than many other music players.
I have no huge problems with iTunes, but when it comes playing my music, I still prefer Winamp: it's of superior sound quality (using the appropriate input/output plugins), supports a lot more formats, is slicker, and plays more nicely with other system components. The point isn't that iTunes is bad ('cause it isn't, don't get me wrong... it's a lot better, IMO, than Windows Media Player), just that choice is welcome.
Your point stands, but, to nitpick, I think more or less the entirety of the New Testament is in Greek. Aramaic was a provincial langauge, and therefore not only slightly looked down upon, but wholly unsuited to the folks who were writing down these documents in the first and second centuries: Paul, after all, was a Roman citizen and a proselytizer, and successful proselytizing requires speaking in a language most of your audience would be expected to recognize. Greek was one such language, Aramaic was not, really. Most of the other contributors to the NT (such as the gospel writers) were following in his lead.
Of course, I may be wrong here: I'm not 100% sure of the lineage of some of the less famous epistles, but I don't remember hearing much about Aramaic in the Christian scriptures when I studied this a few years back. Correct me if I'm wrong, though.
The Byzantine Romans survived until 1453, technically speaking, but, by the end, they had dwindled to almost total insignificance. For almost two hundred years before that they had been reduced to holding, desperately, onto the city of Constantinople a few miles surrounding it, surrounded on all sides by an increasingly hostile Ottoman Empire that had long since wrested control of the breadbaskets of the empire. The only reason they lasted that long was likely because the Turks didn't see a whole lot of point in spilling blood over such an insignificant amount of land. The only thing that kept them from being totally ignored was that a half-remembered religious importance going back to Constantine I that was rapidly fading into distant memory in most of the Catholic world and had little weight at all in the Turkish Muslim regions. The Byzantine Empire's fate was in many ways worse than that of its western counterpart: whereas the West fell rapidly, over around a century or two, the East took almost six hundred years.
And, actually, politics did play a major role in the dissolution of the Western Roman Empire. Probably the biggest, all things considered: a good number of the "hostile" barbarian tribes which took their turns marauding up and down the Italian boot in the fifth century were foderati of Rome, and made up the bulk of the Roman army by the end of the fourth century. Alaric, leader of the Visigoths, whose sack of Rome in 410 is seen by most historians as the beginning of the end of the Western empire, took up arms against the empire not because he had some grudge against it, but because of an extremely dangerous political game being played by the two Emperors. Indeed, it was the dreadful mismanagement of the barbarian situation that caused a good many tribes to turn decisively against Rome, and not some hatred of Roman society (which many actively sought to emulate). Exceptions existed, of course (the Huns, in particular, seemed to be in it for conquest's sake alone), but had Rome managed to play its hand a little more thoughtfully, it likely would have survived, in some capacity, through the fifth century.
The Eastern empire, on the other hand, managed to retain a decently cordial relationship with most of the Germanic tribes, or, at the very least, managed to deflect the bulk of their ire. A failure to come to some sort of similar arrangement one thousand years later between Catholic western Europe and the Islamic south and east doomed them just as it had the western empire. In particular, a long-standing religious dispute with the West (resulting in the mutual excommunication of the leaders of both the Orthodox and Catholic churches by the other, which is still, technically, in effect), and the failure to reach some sort of concilliation between the two prevented any western military aid against the Turks in the final few years.
Basically true, except that the game that became the American SMB2 wasn't in development: it had already been released in Japan for the Famicom Disk System (a floppy drive expansion for the Famicom/NES, for which a number of early games, including the original Japanese SMB2/Lost Levels were released). It was called Doki Doki Panic and it was basically identical: the main characters and a handful of monsters were pixel swapped, and it was transferred to cartridge format for the US, but otherwise you'd be hard pressed to spot any differences.
The original Japanese SMB2 was also released as part of the Game Boy Color port of the original SMB a few years ago (Super Mario Bros Deluxe or something like that...). Appropriately, I suppose, the SMB2 levels pick up at the end of the original SMB levels....
Which because worthless to all but an ever-shrinking number of plutocrats. If the majority of a corporation's paid labor is outsourced, then the only distinctly "American" thing about such corporations is the leadership, and you wind up with an almost Marxist class division where the American middle class is basically squeezed into poverty. They have nothing to gain from increased sales of American products overseas, because they are no longer in a position where they reap any of these benefits. Sales money remains in the hands of the upper class management that were running the show to begin with: Joe Sixpack blue (and white) collar worker is still unemployed and poor. The only way, then, the jobs return to the US is that it descends to such a point where labor is cheaper at home than abroad. And at that point, we're a third-world nation.
This isn't a patriotic concern regarding the success or failure of American business. This is a livelihood concern for the public. You can't mollify someone who can't make their daily ends meet (let alone afford to educate themselves neccessary to fill the higher-level jobs that, for the time being, remain local) by telling them that, well, folks like Bill Gates are going to be doing just fine. Nor can you squeeze everyone into the service sector (there are a limited number of people who can become plumbers, or work at McDonalds, and that number will decrease with the American middle class, when money becomes tighter for more and more people.
Everytime something like this has threatened the US economy before, there has been something to reverse the trend, usually along the lines of government involvement: anti-corporate sentiment led to trust-busting and racketeering laws during Teddy Roosevelt's time a century back, and massive government expenditure for World Wars I and II reemployed and rejuvenated the American middle class at various different points since then. In all likelihood, if things get too bad, there will be some intervention, somewhere along the lines, to improve matters. But closing our eyes, pretending that things aren't really that bad, or, even more ridiculously, that the outsourcing trend is somehow a positive thing for the American public at large, is ludicrous.
Before we go off on a discussion of capitalist dogma, remember that the average American worker isn't going to be ideologically driven towards an ideal of global laissez-faire capitalism, anymore than they're driven towards communism, or feudalism, or whatever. If they feel it's the only way they're going to get employed, they will back a protectionist economic policy. If you can't tell people what they, specifically, have to gain from the status quo, they're not going to support the status quo. So the question then remains: what good are increased US sales abroad to the unemployed? What do they gain? And, even more importantly, how do you sell them on a system that is willing to sacrifice them for the good of economy that they have all but fallen out of?
Re:What happens after the 13 episodes?
on
New Dr Who Actor Named
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· Score: 2, Informative
It is intended to be a regular TV show again. This is the new show: he BBC has previously said that they expect a minimum of five years from the show (Remember, "series" and "season" are basically interchangeable terms when it comes to British TV). Thirteen episodes is actually a more than reasonable number of episodes for a season, given British television, and, at 45 minutes to an hour each, means that the new season will run longer than the last four seasons of the original show (which were 14 episodes at 25 minutes each).
Not surprising, then, as Russell T. Davies, the producer spearheading the new series, has gone on record saying he wanted to focus on the horror aspect of the series.
To many people (and especially Americans) Doctor Who is thought of as a lighthearted series. But, really, throughout most of its run, it was not. The show was frequently chided by British "family advocates" for being too scary for the children's audience it was supposedly targetted at, and dabbled in all sorts of macabre ideas. It was only during the reign of producer Graham Williams in the late 1970s (the period in which Douglas Adams served as script editor) that the show gained its reputation for pure camp: Philip Hinchcliffe, the producer preceding Williams, was especially noted for his penchant for gothic horror, and John Nathan-Turner, who followed from Williams' tenure until the cancellation of the show in 1989, tended towards, at various different points, either action/suspense or psychological horror himself. Heck, even Williams/Adams, beneath the somewhat camp exterior, delved into some dark concepts.
The Doctor, as a character, usually has an eccentric edge, but he's not always (or even predominately) a humorous character: even Tom Baker's performance, particularly towards the beginning and end of his seven year run with the role, had its sharper, and darker, edges.
Lest we forget, iTunes borrowed much of its basic interface features from Windows Media Player 7 and up. WMP was the first widely used player to organize by tag info, and the first widely used player to have a searchable database and playlists. The net integration, too, was done first by WMP, Real, even Winamp.
Apple's solution, certainly, is more elegant, and iTunes does, IMO, have a better design than WMP. But the basic differences are minor: function and design-wise, they're quite similar.
I think a lot of people on/. tend to forget exactly what Apple has done well historically: they're not, strictly speaking, innovators. The original Apple I was a calculated attempt to mimic other hobby computers of the era. The original MacOS borrowed heavily from other early GUI systems, including Apple's own ill-fated Lisa. Mac OS X is built on the codebase of numerous earlier projects.
Which, mind you, shouldn't be considered a mark against them: what Apple is almost uniquely skilled at is bringing together the best of all worlds: iTunes was not the first media player on the scene, but it did a good job at it. In Windows, it's my player of choice. But let's not pretend it's something that it's not.
Erm... like it or hate it, "The Sims" is nothing like any MUD I've ever played in my long history of playing MUDs. "Sims Online" may well be (never played it), but the original game was a very different beast indeed. It does have clear connections to other game genres, but it doesn't really clearly fit into any of them, IMO.
IIRC, "Pom Poko," though released by Studio Ghibli, was not directed by Miyazaki. Disney's deal only covers Miyazaki's work, not anything else produced by Ghibli. It's been a while, though, so I may be wrong here.
I remember back when the original Playstation was new on the market there was a lot of talk about it not having the horsepower to handle "true" 3D a la the Nintendo 64. The first batch of PSX games, correspondingly, were either fully 2D, or a sort of limited 3D/2D hybrid (the Crash Bandicoot games, for example). I seem to recall the fuss over the now basically forgotten Croc, which was the first major Playstation game to pull off the "total 3D" style of Mario 64 reasonably well.
The problem with the Atari 7800 analogy that every single person who's mentioned it so far has conveniently failed to mention is the bad timing of its release. Sony released the PS2 at roughly the height of the PS1's popularity. Faced with a choice between three new systems of more or less equal quality, the PS1 library no doubt convinced a number of people to spring for the PS2 over the Gamecube or Xbox.
The Atari 7800, on the other hand, was more or less a last ditch effort on Atari's part to stay relevant. They had already released an upgrade to the 2800 in the 5200, which tanked badly. Not only did they not get around to releasing the 7800 until Nintendo was well on its way to market dominance, but they also released a system which was noticably technologically inferior to basically all of its competition. If the 7800 had been around, say, three years earlier, and been able to meet the NES on equal ground, then just maybe backwards compatibility with the 2800 might have given Atari a competitive advantage over Nintendo. But, as it was, most hardcore 2600 backers had already given up on Atari and moved along to the NES. They'd already made their investment.
Opera is a fine browser, no question, but a lot of these features have also found their way into other browsers. On *nix, Konqueror has address bar searching (gg: will do a Google search, for instance), and, of course, Firebird has its own search bar. And Firebird, similarly, supports aliases/keywords just as well as Opera.
The reason I tend to prefer Firebird is because of the extensions support. I've grown so fond of things like being able to search for text within a select box, or the very capable Adblock, that it has become quite annoying to switch to browsers without similar support.
Sadly, both browsers have some problems under *nix: Opera tends to be a tad unstable, and Firebird doesn't integrate well with Thunderbird, my mailto handler of choice (though it's improving). Nonetheless, both are very solid pieces of work, and both having many things to recommend them over MSIE....
You're both right and wrong. I was incorrect when I stated that 115 episodes were missing, but the number of lost episodes is still in the triple digits. The recovery of this one brought the number down to 108.
The thing is, many early episodes have been recovered. The bulk (though not all) of the first two seasons were returned in the early 1980s, and throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, numerous episodes were discovered in the possession of private collectors, or other television stations, and so on. But after the recovery of all four episodes of The Tomb of the Cybermen in the early 1990s, the speed at which episodes were being returned slowed to a trickle, as most of the obvious channels had been exhausted. The only significant finds in the past couple of years have been an episode of The Crusade five years ago, and now this episode of Daleks' Master Plan.
The thing is, this was all perfectly normal. Every episode of the show (and, indeed, of most BBC programs at the time) were shot on video cassette. Because of the PAL formatting of the tapes, though, these masters were then transferred to film and handed over to another division of the BBC, BBC Enterprises, so that they could be more easily sold to foreign distributors. This was all well and good, except that BBC TV had a relatively small facility for storing tape masters, and routinely had to cycle out older tapes to make room for newer rooms, a process which accelerated in the early 1970s, when most BBC1 shows started switching from black and white to color broadcasts. When Doctor Who made the switch at the start of the 1970 season, BBC TV figured it would be highly unlikely that they would ever rebroadcast the old B&W episodes, and so basically junked the lot of them. With almost no exception, every single video cassette master of every episode of the show produced from its creation in 1963 through 1969 was erased. It was figured that if anyone wanted a copy of these episodes, they could go bug BBC Enterprises for the film transfers.
This left the film transfers being held for oversea sale. The problem here was that the nature of copyright law made it extremely difficult to sort out the rights issue after a couple of years. After this initial period had expired, it wasn't economically practical for BBC Enterprises to store all of the film, and so they were incinerated. BBC Enterprises, for its part, assumed that if anyone wanted copies of the episodes that badly, they could go bug BBC TV for the tape masters because, after all, they created them. This was, in general, a slower process than the video erasing, and took place throughout the 1970s.
There were a few exceptions here, though. BBC TV held onto a more or less random assortment of episodes as examples of BBC work of the time period, so some of these have survived. And, towards the tail end of BBC Enterprises's pyro-spree a number of individuals within the BBC finally figured out what was going on, as fan groups began to ask around at the BBC for copies of early episodes, and managed to put at stop to the practice. After 1978, a new BBC group, the Film and Videotape Library, was created to provide storage for BBC programs so that this sorry experience (which had affected a lot more than just DW episodes) would not be repeated. From abroad, distributors who had purchased episodes from BBC Enterprises had occassionally stored them, and obligingly returned to them to a very humbled BBC in the 1980s.
But this is all incomplete. Not every episode was sold to every foreign distributor, and not every foreign distributor kept every episode they had purchased. So, aside from the few private acquisitions squirelled away from the BBC by collectors, the only real remains of these lost episodes are the audio recordings made (illegally, no less) by fans back in the 1960s, a few short video snippets made on extremely primitive equipment, and the work of a photojournalist named John Cura who had been hired by BBC TV to snap a photographic record of the prod
All of these 115 lost episodes were from the 1960s, before the advent of VCRs. It's possible someone could have hooked up an old fashioned camera and recorded the broadcasts manuaully, but it's not like this was something very many people bothered to do.
Although, interestingly, a number of people did do the best they could at the time. Specifically, they set up audio equipment to record to soundtrack to these episodes, and these sound-only recordings have survived to the present. The BBC, having obtained these soundtracks from the fans who recorded them, has been releasing them, with linking narration, on CD for several years now. Also, a mini-fan industry (not for profit, of course) has sprung up to "reconstruct" the episodes using these soundtracks and surviving clips and still images to give a (very) rough estimate of the original: a sort of semi-animated storybook format.
Interestingly, these fan-recorded audios tend to be of generally high quality, so much so that the so-called Reconstruction Team (the internal BBC group responsible for remastering and touching up these old DW broadcasts for video release) has occassionally used them to redub official BBC copies of extant episodes.
There are dozens of articles and books written on this sad chapter in the BBC's archival history, none of which shine well on them. Apparently, it was a classic case of miscommunication between branches of the company: the warehouses responsible for the wiping of most of these episodes simply assumed that some other branch of the BBC was archiving them, and never bothered to check and find out that no such branch actually existed. Go figure.
Actually, wasn't the Arial fontset including in Microsoft's old "core fonts" collection. Sure, the official MS downloads have been taken down, but there's nothing to indicate that the licensing terms, which specifically allowed third-party redistribution, have been revoked (even if such a thing were really possible). So they're probably in the clear on that one...
As for everything else, though, I don't disagree....
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So Konqueror can use one tactic to try and better integrate and gain inroads, but if a monopoly makes the same solution to try and protect their position...it's illegal? Better they should allow the little guy in to take over their business?
:)
:-)
If and when KDE reaches a position when they are a serious threat to Microsoft's market dominance, then Microsoft, by definition, is no longer a monopoly, so the gloves can come off, so to speak. Until then, yeah, they play with the kiddie gloves. Which, in practice, means that they get the same treatment as everyone else: they aren't legally allowed to leverage dominance into one market to dominate another, and their competition, not having this dominance to begin with, obviously can't do much leveraging either.
Seems to me that's somewhat subjective to determine what "leveraging monopoly power" is. So if I try to use my already exisiting strengths to my advantage including brand name recognition and UI branding, that's a bad thing? Basically, any company that is a monopoly has no shot at getting in to another market b/c people will find a way to claim they are leveraging their power. Unless of course people don't dislike said company. Then it's all well and good for them to give it a go.
I think you'll find the legal argument (and my ethical argument) against Microsoft is a lot more specific than that. That Microsoft introduced a web browser is perfectly within their rights. That they then proceeded to tie said browser so deeply into the operating system that it (by their own admission) could not be removed without destroying the system, is not.
Are you sure about that? Maybe subsitute Mozilla for Netscape
Welll... you're probably right there.
But I still maintain that, despite the fact that Internet Explorer 4 was a better product than Netscape Navigator 4, that's not why Microsoft won out in that particular battle. Certainly, the relative speed by which Microsoft outright buried it's competition would have been impossible to obtain had Microsoft not been actively flexing its monopolist muscles.
To me, it seems they're using success in one sphere to try and attain success in another sphere.
Which is the problem. In theory, a product is supposed to succeed based on its relative merits, not because the company pushing it has the dominance to force it down the public's collective throats. Before you say anything, yes, I know this is a basically unattainable ideal, but the most egregious violations of this can and should be prohibited, and this is a textbook example: Internet Explorer might well have beaten Netscape Navigator through its own merits, but the simple fact is that it did not, because there was never a serious attempt to pit the two against each other on merits. You got (and paid for) Internet Explorer when you got Windows.
In regards to the last paragraph, you imply that if you're small, you can hit as many people as hard as you like. But if you're big, you need to be careful to avoid hitting anybody. That's exactly my issue with this whole idea. Yes, I do see the idea of capitalism and free markets and playing nice. I do agree with those. I'm not defending all of Microsoft's moves they've made. I just have issues when people say IE shell integration is anti-competitive. Or that having Media Player in the OS by default is anti-competitive. Restricting vendors from installing other media players, yes. Saying they can't include one of their products in another of their products is ridiculous. As long as they allow for the choice, I see no problems with the actions taken by a "monopoly".
If you've got short arms, you're less likely to smack someone. If you've got longer arms, you're more likely to do so. The action (swinging one's arms) are equal, but the entity performing the action (the arms) are not. Because my arms are longer, I need to be extra careful that I'm not going to hurt
I think this will be an interesting litmus test: FairPlay is, as far as these things goes, a fairly unobtrusive DRM scheme. It works well, and, perhaps more importantly, it works transparently: the one of two times I've delved into copy-protected WMA files (not that this constitutes an exhaustive sampling, I'm aware), I'm always quite aware of the fact that the files are protected, and there's always some sort of hurdle to jump through to make it work properly, at least on the first play through.
So, what I'll find interesting here is to see how much of an effect on things this PlayFair program has. My personal views on the matter is that Apple has hit upon the right balance with iTMS: it's cheap, it's easy, and it's convenient. I can see the potential value of things like PlayFair for purposes of format shifting for personal use, but I kind of think that the "legal" way of obtaining songs through iTMS will remain easier and more convenient, and that the price is low enough that it's not going to be chasing users to their favorite P2P program. But then, I also have some lingering faith in the overall goodness of human nature, so who am I to judge?
Why does a monopoly make what Microsoft did any different from what Konquerer does?
From what perspective? In terms of functionality, yeah, the integration of KDE's file manager and Konqueror and the integration of Microsoft's Explorer and Internet Explorer are the same. But so what? That wasn't what was being discussed. The legal (and probably moral) difference is precisely what I said at the beginning: Microsoft is a monopoly, as defined by the courts. KDE is not a monopoly. Legally, they have to play by different rules.
Microsoft's problem is not that it is a monopoly, per se. That's not illegal. What is illegal, however, is leveraging monopoly power in one market to succeed in another. In other words, using one's monopoly on operating systems designed for personal computers to crowd out competition in, say, the WWW browser market, or the on-demand streaming media market.
It's hardly a complicated idea: if over 90% of computer users are going to be using computers with Microsoft Windows preinstalled, and if Windows is bundled with software designed to replace the functionality of third-party solutions (like Netscape Navigator, or RealPlayer, or QuickTime, or whatever), then Microsoft has an unfair advantage over AOL/Netscape, Real Networks, or Apple. People will use the Microsoft-provided solution because it's already there.
Where's the fairness in this? Internet Explorer, in this scenario, succeeds not because it's an superior product to Netscape Navigator, or because there's more consumer demand for it, but because they're using success in one sphere (the OS) to crowd out the competition in another (the web browser).
And, leaving out the issue of fairness entirely (which you brought up), this sort of thing is emphatically illegal, because it tends to sabotage the free market in a demonstrable way. Capitalism, as a system, works on the premise that if a product comes along which better suits the needs of the largest section of the market, it will dominate said market. Monopolistic practices throw a spanner into the works because it makes it next to impossible for non-monopolistic competitors to break into the market to begin with, effectively torpedoing the checks and balances of the system.
Like it or not, Microsoft is not equal to any of its competitors. If we had the completely "equal playing field" you suggest, then they would be all but unassailable in perpetuity, unless and until they happened upon an even bigger existing monopoly that could out-muscle them. They are in a unique position in the marketplace, and, as a result, they need to play by different rules.
Perhaps it's better to look at this in a different way: anyone is free to swing their arms about as much as they like. But if I happened to have seven foot arms, I would need to be decidedly more circumspect in doing so, lest I punch somebody in the face. Therefore, I cannot swing my arms about as much as a person with two- or three-foot arms. There are differences between me and my hypothetical monkey arms and your average person and their normal-length appendages, just as there are differences between Microsoft, the 800-pound gorilla of the software business, and KDE, who command, at best, a fraction of a fraction of the marketplace.
Y'know, I don't like Microsoft much. I don't trust Gates or Ballmer, and I think, in general, their software tends to be too flaky and idiosyncratic for my tastes, and their business and advertising practices are downright deplorable.
But I don't think there's much more to this particular story than meets the eye. We're not talking about the source code to Windows here, it's a fairly minor program that they probably don't gain much by keeping closed, and lose next to nothing by opening up. It's the same basic principles behind Apple giving back some of the code it added to khtml when it borrowed it for Safari: they have nothing to gain by hiding it, nothing to lose by opening it, and, yeah, it does gain them a small degree of goodwill amongst some of their loudest detractors.
Microsoft, as unpleasant as it may be, is not the devil incarnate. It's merely ruthless (sometimes to the point of illegality or amorality, yes). Sure, this move was probably not motivated out of community spirit or civic mindedness, but not everything emanating from Redmond needs to be part of some greater conspiracy to kill the open source movement, burn their huts, and ravish their women, after all....
What's the difference between IE's integration into the Windows shell and Konquerer's integration into KDE?
Easy: if you don't have a monopoly, you can't very well leverage that monopoly. KDE does not have a monopoly of the PC desktop; it doesn't even have a monopoly on the Linux subsection of the PC desktop.
What people forget is that the problem isn't with Microsoft's bundling practices, it's with the idea that Microsoft has continually abused its practical monopoly in the OS market to drive competitors in other markets out of business. This is what happened to Netscape in a pretty demonstrable manner, and again with Windows Media Player. And, here's the thing, it is illegal for Microsoft to do that because of the position they are in. On the other hand, it is not illegal for KDE (or Apple, or any other non-monopolist corporation out there) to do much the same thing, because they can't throw their weight around to the extent that Microsoft can, and does.
Microsoft, being the big kid on the block, is held to a different set of standards than everyone else. You can wail all you want about how unfair this is, and I'm sure Microsoft cries all the way to the bank, but the fact is that these rules are in place to ensure that the playing field is kept even and fair for everyone.
Ahh... I've never heard of any problem with Final Fantasy Origins and the PS2. Given that the game came out close to three years after the introduction of the PS2, it would seem that only the stupidest play testers wouldn't have caught something that problematic.
Are you sure you're not thinking of the much-publicized problems with the PS2 and Square's earlier Final Fantasy ports (specifically, IIRC, Final Fantasy V). There were some problems there, but I'm not sure if they were universal (i.e., some people couldn't get it to work, while others could), and I think those problems have been ironed out in all but the very earliest PS2 models. Certainly, I've had no problem with any of these games (but, then again, I didn't get a PS2 at launch).
Erm, not to troll, but if you just want a box capable of running an X server, why on earth would you bother getting a box from Apple? I mean, sure, they're of fine craftsmanship, but Macs are designed (and, perhaps more importantly, priced) with the OS very much in mind. People don't generally by a G4 so they can gut it and run *nix, as you can either buy or put together a x86 box that accomplishes the same thing much more cheaply. If you dislike the very design of OS X, then you'll probably not be using it very often, so why bother with a Mac? It's one thing if you want the flexibility to run OS X and an X server, but if you only want the latter...?
Of course the Microsoft people are going to say that: Access costs a good $100 more than Excel, after all....
Seriously, though, my experience with Access is that it's just too large and bloated to use for something as simple as, for instance, storing telephone numbers. Excel loads up quickly, you can jump right into the neccessary file, and add/remove/access what you need right off the bat. Access, while great for storing large quantities of data (say, phone numbers, email and street addresses, and other contact information), has always seemed like overkill for such simple database needs.
Konami benefits from having one of the most respected and successful music/sound teams in the industry. And, indeed, they've cranked out hit after hit: Castlevania, Contra, Suikoden, Gradius, etc. are all recognized for their soundtracks.
Because it's, frankly, bloated, particularly if you're not inherently interested in it's library management features, and less extensible than many other music players.
I have no huge problems with iTunes, but when it comes playing my music, I still prefer Winamp: it's of superior sound quality (using the appropriate input/output plugins), supports a lot more formats, is slicker, and plays more nicely with other system components. The point isn't that iTunes is bad ('cause it isn't, don't get me wrong... it's a lot better, IMO, than Windows Media Player), just that choice is welcome.
Your point stands, but, to nitpick, I think more or less the entirety of the New Testament is in Greek. Aramaic was a provincial langauge, and therefore not only slightly looked down upon, but wholly unsuited to the folks who were writing down these documents in the first and second centuries: Paul, after all, was a Roman citizen and a proselytizer, and successful proselytizing requires speaking in a language most of your audience would be expected to recognize. Greek was one such language, Aramaic was not, really. Most of the other contributors to the NT (such as the gospel writers) were following in his lead.
Of course, I may be wrong here: I'm not 100% sure of the lineage of some of the less famous epistles, but I don't remember hearing much about Aramaic in the Christian scriptures when I studied this a few years back. Correct me if I'm wrong, though.
The Byzantine Romans survived until 1453, technically speaking, but, by the end, they had dwindled to almost total insignificance. For almost two hundred years before that they had been reduced to holding, desperately, onto the city of Constantinople a few miles surrounding it, surrounded on all sides by an increasingly hostile Ottoman Empire that had long since wrested control of the breadbaskets of the empire. The only reason they lasted that long was likely because the Turks didn't see a whole lot of point in spilling blood over such an insignificant amount of land. The only thing that kept them from being totally ignored was that a half-remembered religious importance going back to Constantine I that was rapidly fading into distant memory in most of the Catholic world and had little weight at all in the Turkish Muslim regions. The Byzantine Empire's fate was in many ways worse than that of its western counterpart: whereas the West fell rapidly, over around a century or two, the East took almost six hundred years.
And, actually, politics did play a major role in the dissolution of the Western Roman Empire. Probably the biggest, all things considered: a good number of the "hostile" barbarian tribes which took their turns marauding up and down the Italian boot in the fifth century were foderati of Rome, and made up the bulk of the Roman army by the end of the fourth century. Alaric, leader of the Visigoths, whose sack of Rome in 410 is seen by most historians as the beginning of the end of the Western empire, took up arms against the empire not because he had some grudge against it, but because of an extremely dangerous political game being played by the two Emperors. Indeed, it was the dreadful mismanagement of the barbarian situation that caused a good many tribes to turn decisively against Rome, and not some hatred of Roman society (which many actively sought to emulate). Exceptions existed, of course (the Huns, in particular, seemed to be in it for conquest's sake alone), but had Rome managed to play its hand a little more thoughtfully, it likely would have survived, in some capacity, through the fifth century.
The Eastern empire, on the other hand, managed to retain a decently cordial relationship with most of the Germanic tribes, or, at the very least, managed to deflect the bulk of their ire. A failure to come to some sort of similar arrangement one thousand years later between Catholic western Europe and the Islamic south and east doomed them just as it had the western empire. In particular, a long-standing religious dispute with the West (resulting in the mutual excommunication of the leaders of both the Orthodox and Catholic churches by the other, which is still, technically, in effect), and the failure to reach some sort of concilliation between the two prevented any western military aid against the Turks in the final few years.
Basically true, except that the game that became the American SMB2 wasn't in development: it had already been released in Japan for the Famicom Disk System (a floppy drive expansion for the Famicom/NES, for which a number of early games, including the original Japanese SMB2/Lost Levels were released). It was called Doki Doki Panic and it was basically identical: the main characters and a handful of monsters were pixel swapped, and it was transferred to cartridge format for the US, but otherwise you'd be hard pressed to spot any differences.
The original Japanese SMB2 was also released as part of the Game Boy Color port of the original SMB a few years ago (Super Mario Bros Deluxe or something like that...). Appropriately, I suppose, the SMB2 levels pick up at the end of the original SMB levels....
Which because worthless to all but an ever-shrinking number of plutocrats. If the majority of a corporation's paid labor is outsourced, then the only distinctly "American" thing about such corporations is the leadership, and you wind up with an almost Marxist class division where the American middle class is basically squeezed into poverty. They have nothing to gain from increased sales of American products overseas, because they are no longer in a position where they reap any of these benefits. Sales money remains in the hands of the upper class management that were running the show to begin with: Joe Sixpack blue (and white) collar worker is still unemployed and poor. The only way, then, the jobs return to the US is that it descends to such a point where labor is cheaper at home than abroad. And at that point, we're a third-world nation.
This isn't a patriotic concern regarding the success or failure of American business. This is a livelihood concern for the public. You can't mollify someone who can't make their daily ends meet (let alone afford to educate themselves neccessary to fill the higher-level jobs that, for the time being, remain local) by telling them that, well, folks like Bill Gates are going to be doing just fine. Nor can you squeeze everyone into the service sector (there are a limited number of people who can become plumbers, or work at McDonalds, and that number will decrease with the American middle class, when money becomes tighter for more and more people.
Everytime something like this has threatened the US economy before, there has been something to reverse the trend, usually along the lines of government involvement: anti-corporate sentiment led to trust-busting and racketeering laws during Teddy Roosevelt's time a century back, and massive government expenditure for World Wars I and II reemployed and rejuvenated the American middle class at various different points since then. In all likelihood, if things get too bad, there will be some intervention, somewhere along the lines, to improve matters. But closing our eyes, pretending that things aren't really that bad, or, even more ridiculously, that the outsourcing trend is somehow a positive thing for the American public at large, is ludicrous.
Before we go off on a discussion of capitalist dogma, remember that the average American worker isn't going to be ideologically driven towards an ideal of global laissez-faire capitalism, anymore than they're driven towards communism, or feudalism, or whatever. If they feel it's the only way they're going to get employed, they will back a protectionist economic policy. If you can't tell people what they, specifically, have to gain from the status quo, they're not going to support the status quo. So the question then remains: what good are increased US sales abroad to the unemployed? What do they gain? And, even more importantly, how do you sell them on a system that is willing to sacrifice them for the good of economy that they have all but fallen out of?
It is intended to be a regular TV show again. This is the new show: he BBC has previously said that they expect a minimum of five years from the show (Remember, "series" and "season" are basically interchangeable terms when it comes to British TV). Thirteen episodes is actually a more than reasonable number of episodes for a season, given British television, and, at 45 minutes to an hour each, means that the new season will run longer than the last four seasons of the original show (which were 14 episodes at 25 minutes each).
Not surprising, then, as Russell T. Davies, the producer spearheading the new series, has gone on record saying he wanted to focus on the horror aspect of the series.
To many people (and especially Americans) Doctor Who is thought of as a lighthearted series. But, really, throughout most of its run, it was not. The show was frequently chided by British "family advocates" for being too scary for the children's audience it was supposedly targetted at, and dabbled in all sorts of macabre ideas. It was only during the reign of producer Graham Williams in the late 1970s (the period in which Douglas Adams served as script editor) that the show gained its reputation for pure camp: Philip Hinchcliffe, the producer preceding Williams, was especially noted for his penchant for gothic horror, and John Nathan-Turner, who followed from Williams' tenure until the cancellation of the show in 1989, tended towards, at various different points, either action/suspense or psychological horror himself. Heck, even Williams/Adams, beneath the somewhat camp exterior, delved into some dark concepts.
The Doctor, as a character, usually has an eccentric edge, but he's not always (or even predominately) a humorous character: even Tom Baker's performance, particularly towards the beginning and end of his seven year run with the role, had its sharper, and darker, edges.
Lest we forget, iTunes borrowed much of its basic interface features from Windows Media Player 7 and up. WMP was the first widely used player to organize by tag info, and the first widely used player to have a searchable database and playlists. The net integration, too, was done first by WMP, Real, even Winamp.
/. tend to forget exactly what Apple has done well historically: they're not, strictly speaking, innovators. The original Apple I was a calculated attempt to mimic other hobby computers of the era. The original MacOS borrowed heavily from other early GUI systems, including Apple's own ill-fated Lisa. Mac OS X is built on the codebase of numerous earlier projects.
Apple's solution, certainly, is more elegant, and iTunes does, IMO, have a better design than WMP. But the basic differences are minor: function and design-wise, they're quite similar.
I think a lot of people on
Which, mind you, shouldn't be considered a mark against them: what Apple is almost uniquely skilled at is bringing together the best of all worlds: iTunes was not the first media player on the scene, but it did a good job at it. In Windows, it's my player of choice. But let's not pretend it's something that it's not.
Erm... like it or hate it, "The Sims" is nothing like any MUD I've ever played in my long history of playing MUDs. "Sims Online" may well be (never played it), but the original game was a very different beast indeed. It does have clear connections to other game genres, but it doesn't really clearly fit into any of them, IMO.
IIRC, "Pom Poko," though released by Studio Ghibli, was not directed by Miyazaki. Disney's deal only covers Miyazaki's work, not anything else produced by Ghibli. It's been a while, though, so I may be wrong here.
I remember back when the original Playstation was new on the market there was a lot of talk about it not having the horsepower to handle "true" 3D a la the Nintendo 64. The first batch of PSX games, correspondingly, were either fully 2D, or a sort of limited 3D/2D hybrid (the Crash Bandicoot games, for example). I seem to recall the fuss over the now basically forgotten Croc, which was the first major Playstation game to pull off the "total 3D" style of Mario 64 reasonably well.
Still, how soon people forget, I suppose.
The problem with the Atari 7800 analogy that every single person who's mentioned it so far has conveniently failed to mention is the bad timing of its release. Sony released the PS2 at roughly the height of the PS1's popularity. Faced with a choice between three new systems of more or less equal quality, the PS1 library no doubt convinced a number of people to spring for the PS2 over the Gamecube or Xbox.
The Atari 7800, on the other hand, was more or less a last ditch effort on Atari's part to stay relevant. They had already released an upgrade to the 2800 in the 5200, which tanked badly. Not only did they not get around to releasing the 7800 until Nintendo was well on its way to market dominance, but they also released a system which was noticably technologically inferior to basically all of its competition. If the 7800 had been around, say, three years earlier, and been able to meet the NES on equal ground, then just maybe backwards compatibility with the 2800 might have given Atari a competitive advantage over Nintendo. But, as it was, most hardcore 2600 backers had already given up on Atari and moved along to the NES. They'd already made their investment.
Opera is a fine browser, no question, but a lot of these features have also found their way into other browsers. On *nix, Konqueror has address bar searching (gg: will do a Google search, for instance), and, of course, Firebird has its own search bar. And Firebird, similarly, supports aliases/keywords just as well as Opera.
The reason I tend to prefer Firebird is because of the extensions support. I've grown so fond of things like being able to search for text within a select box, or the very capable Adblock, that it has become quite annoying to switch to browsers without similar support.
Sadly, both browsers have some problems under *nix: Opera tends to be a tad unstable, and Firebird doesn't integrate well with Thunderbird, my mailto handler of choice (though it's improving). Nonetheless, both are very solid pieces of work, and both having many things to recommend them over MSIE....
You're both right and wrong. I was incorrect when I stated that 115 episodes were missing, but the number of lost episodes is still in the triple digits. The recovery of this one brought the number down to 108.
The thing is, many early episodes have been recovered. The bulk (though not all) of the first two seasons were returned in the early 1980s, and throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, numerous episodes were discovered in the possession of private collectors, or other television stations, and so on. But after the recovery of all four episodes of The Tomb of the Cybermen in the early 1990s, the speed at which episodes were being returned slowed to a trickle, as most of the obvious channels had been exhausted. The only significant finds in the past couple of years have been an episode of The Crusade five years ago, and now this episode of Daleks' Master Plan.
The thing is, this was all perfectly normal. Every episode of the show (and, indeed, of most BBC programs at the time) were shot on video cassette. Because of the PAL formatting of the tapes, though, these masters were then transferred to film and handed over to another division of the BBC, BBC Enterprises, so that they could be more easily sold to foreign distributors. This was all well and good, except that BBC TV had a relatively small facility for storing tape masters, and routinely had to cycle out older tapes to make room for newer rooms, a process which accelerated in the early 1970s, when most BBC1 shows started switching from black and white to color broadcasts. When Doctor Who made the switch at the start of the 1970 season, BBC TV figured it would be highly unlikely that they would ever rebroadcast the old B&W episodes, and so basically junked the lot of them. With almost no exception, every single video cassette master of every episode of the show produced from its creation in 1963 through 1969 was erased. It was figured that if anyone wanted a copy of these episodes, they could go bug BBC Enterprises for the film transfers.
This left the film transfers being held for oversea sale. The problem here was that the nature of copyright law made it extremely difficult to sort out the rights issue after a couple of years. After this initial period had expired, it wasn't economically practical for BBC Enterprises to store all of the film, and so they were incinerated. BBC Enterprises, for its part, assumed that if anyone wanted copies of the episodes that badly, they could go bug BBC TV for the tape masters because, after all, they created them. This was, in general, a slower process than the video erasing, and took place throughout the 1970s.
There were a few exceptions here, though. BBC TV held onto a more or less random assortment of episodes as examples of BBC work of the time period, so some of these have survived. And, towards the tail end of BBC Enterprises's pyro-spree a number of individuals within the BBC finally figured out what was going on, as fan groups began to ask around at the BBC for copies of early episodes, and managed to put at stop to the practice. After 1978, a new BBC group, the Film and Videotape Library, was created to provide storage for BBC programs so that this sorry experience (which had affected a lot more than just DW episodes) would not be repeated. From abroad, distributors who had purchased episodes from BBC Enterprises had occassionally stored them, and obligingly returned to them to a very humbled BBC in the 1980s.
But this is all incomplete. Not every episode was sold to every foreign distributor, and not every foreign distributor kept every episode they had purchased. So, aside from the few private acquisitions squirelled away from the BBC by collectors, the only real remains of these lost episodes are the audio recordings made (illegally, no less) by fans back in the 1960s, a few short video snippets made on extremely primitive equipment, and the work of a photojournalist named John Cura who had been hired by BBC TV to snap a photographic record of the prod
All of these 115 lost episodes were from the 1960s, before the advent of VCRs. It's possible someone could have hooked up an old fashioned camera and recorded the broadcasts manuaully, but it's not like this was something very many people bothered to do.
Although, interestingly, a number of people did do the best they could at the time. Specifically, they set up audio equipment to record to soundtrack to these episodes, and these sound-only recordings have survived to the present. The BBC, having obtained these soundtracks from the fans who recorded them, has been releasing them, with linking narration, on CD for several years now. Also, a mini-fan industry (not for profit, of course) has sprung up to "reconstruct" the episodes using these soundtracks and surviving clips and still images to give a (very) rough estimate of the original: a sort of semi-animated storybook format.
Interestingly, these fan-recorded audios tend to be of generally high quality, so much so that the so-called Reconstruction Team (the internal BBC group responsible for remastering and touching up these old DW broadcasts for video release) has occassionally used them to redub official BBC copies of extant episodes.
There are dozens of articles and books written on this sad chapter in the BBC's archival history, none of which shine well on them. Apparently, it was a classic case of miscommunication between branches of the company: the warehouses responsible for the wiping of most of these episodes simply assumed that some other branch of the BBC was archiving them, and never bothered to check and find out that no such branch actually existed. Go figure.
Actually, wasn't the Arial fontset including in Microsoft's old "core fonts" collection. Sure, the official MS downloads have been taken down, but there's nothing to indicate that the licensing terms, which specifically allowed third-party redistribution, have been revoked (even if such a thing were really possible). So they're probably in the clear on that one...
As for everything else, though, I don't disagree....