On a related note, does anyone have suggestions for good compositing software (on any OS)? I've been "archiving" my vintage one-sheet (usually 27" by 41") film poster collection by scanning at 600dpi in 16 overlapping segments, but I haven't done any of the compositing yet. One issue I had is that my old scanner did an automatic color adjustment which left some segments with a slightly different coloring than others, and I'm hoping there's a good compositing application that can compensate for this well enough without me having to manually adjust the color in each segment first.
So, what software would you recommend for compositing groups of 16 overlapping images? Hopefully there are a few good alternatives to try out.
> I wish people would read: http://www.lectlaw.com/files/cur78.htm (or > one of another billions sources or the actual case files) before > always mentioning "the coffee case."
And I wish senseless money-grubbing lawyers would stop treating an incorrect "lottery litigation" outcome as if it were good, when it isn't:
That case encapsulates all that is wrong about the current state of torts and the despicable lawyers who take advantage of their vagaries. Anyone who supports the decision in that case lacks common sense (almost all coffee even today is served at an equal or higher temperature) and is likely to be tort-abusing ambulance-chasing swine not worthy of the practice of law.
> Nuclear power (especially on its own) isn't going to do much to reduce oil dependency. > It's not like much electricity comes from burning oil or derivatives.
First, we in the U.S. burn large amounts of fossil fuels (coal, oil derivatives etc) for electricity--precisely because unlike Europe we haven't built new nuclear power plants in decades.
Second, the ubiquity of cheap nuclear-generated electricity would easily have a ripple effect on other areas of infrastructure, phasing in electric capacitance charging stations to slowly displace gas pumps as electric cars replace petrol guzzlers.
All-electric retrofits of existing gas/electric hybrids are so impressive that cars designed from the start as all-electric would be phenomenal; today's battery tech makes this feasible, unlike the early days with the EV1. Add large capacitors like the ones mentioned in a recent/. article in to the equation, and performance, range, and recharge time can be improved.
An abundance of cheap nuclear-generated electricity would change everything. Cutting back on fossil fuel use and resultant greenhouse gasses would merely be the tip of the iceberg--imagine if energy eventually became an order of magnitude cheaper due to a real effort to create a nuclear infrastructure, the ripples that could have. In IT alone the effects would be huge--one of the largest ongoing costs to companies like Google, for example, is the big energy bill its countless servers and cooling solutions generate. A nuclear infrastructure generating more and cheaper energy could boost the whole economy in the long term.
> saying that "the family should be burned" is a threat directed > to specific individuals.
No, it absolutely is NOT, and that's why I'm disappointed that so many European nations don't draw the important distinction drawn in the U.S. "The family should be burned" is not a specific threat of or incitement to action, but a general expression of a thought or wish or fantasy. In the U.S., it would be protected free speech except if uttered under a threatening physical circumstance or said in the context of more specific threat-like statements. Basically, in the U.S. we make a legal distinction regarding the specific intent implied by these statements, while much of the EU doesn't:
"The family should be burned." (generic and protected) "The family should be burned--let's burn them." (specific threat or incitement, not protected) "I wish the family would be killed, too." (generic and protected, except in certain contexts) "I want you to kill the family, too." (specific threat or incitement, not protected) "I want them to die." (generic and protected) "I want to kill them." (specific threat or incitement, not protected)
Any child can tell you the differences between each pair of statements. It makes sense then that in the U.S., our legal system differentiates between each. It is offputting and wrong that some EU systems don't.
But we're talking specifically about assuring the quality of the sampling and encoding, not some hypothetical missing content. Checking a few seconds of video during a transition between dark and light would weed out about 95% of poor video quality.
2 videos per hour?! Are you mad, sir? To weed out ~95% of problems you only need to view a few seconds of video from a transition point between bright and dark. 2 videos every 30 seconds is more like it (excepting whatever time it takes to flag a video as bad and write a problem description).
Don't forget that many states still don't have "sliding scale" age of consent loopholes to exempt relationships between peers. In mine, an 18-year-old high school senior can be punished by up to 10 years in prison and/or a $10,000 fine for consensual sex with a 17-year-old classmate. Just because it isn't usually prosecuted doesn't mean it isn't a problem if overprotective parents insist--I personally know of an 18-year-old senior prosecuted for consensual sex with a 16-year-old junior. Luckily the trial was held over for a year and eventually dismissed contingent on good behavior; but, it could've added another victim to our barbaric sex offender registry system.
The sex offender registry is a Puritan scarlet letter system all over again, but worse because it renders people unemployable and sometimes unhousable. Just because an offense sounds bad the way it's listed on the registry doesn't make it so; e.g., how does "production and distribution of child pornography" sound? Bad, unless you know the registrant took a few nude pictures of *herself* on her cameraphone when she was 16 and sent them to her boyfriend. Stupid, sure, but not an offense which should taint the rest of her life--and several such cases of teenage girls or boys photographing *themselves* have been prosecuted and led to sex offender status. How about "rape of a minor"? That sounds bad too, until you realize it might be one of the many *kids* statutorily convicted of rape because their otherwise-consenting partner was months or even weeks younger. I recall reading of a 14-year-old boy subject to sex offender status for consenting acts with a classmate. We are a barbaric, immature nation when it comes to sex, including our proclivity to classify too much consensual sex as a crime--so don't assume a sex offender registry is telling you anything useful.
Indeed, there are dozens of people living within a few miles of my house who are on the sex offender registry. Knowing it changes nothing regarding how the kids in the family are taught to act when outside or around strangers or neighbors, or how closely we adults supervise the kids. I actually worry more about the sex offender registry's potential to drive registrants into unemployment, housing problems or harassment, and therefore a feeling that they have nothing left to lose and might just as well lash out and act out. A much better way to deal with the issue is not to have a registry which could push people towards reoffending by removing support systems and giving them a public scarlet letter, but rather to apply better law enforcement tracking technology.
By mandating GPS monitoring of released sex offenders instead of putting them on a public hit list, you'd let them develop the positive community ties and support systems which are crucial to minimizing recidivism rates, while also making it extremely hard to reoffend without immediate detection and arrest. Knowing that the GPS tracker would lead to instant arrest if it shows you were at a crime scene or approached a restricted zone like a school, or tried to remove or tamper with it, would be a far better deterrent than a public registry. Offenders always try to rationalize that their chances of being caught are minimal; remove any doubt, make it known that GPS data *will* instantly link them to any crime, and recidivism will plummet. As technology progresses regarding GPS accuracy and law enforcement databases we could even go so far as to make it enforceably illegal for a convicted sex offender to enter the yard of a house where children reside, with the GPS tracker alerting police instantly. The answer to protecting kids from convicted sex offenders is better technology and tracking in the hands of police and parole depts., not public lists which probably do more ham than good.
I stopped reading [H]ardOCP soon after they switched from "real" benchmarks (equal settings for both machines) to their oh-so-flawed allegedly-but-not-"real-world" tests (different settings for each platform, to get a similar framerate). It's bullshit and tells me *nothing* except what I'd get if I copied their settings directly--if I prefer to play at different resolutions, and/or different levels of AA/AF/etc., their reviews become worthless compared to traditional ones which give head-to-head benchmarks with more datapoints for me to extrapolate from.
[H]ardOCP in my mind is for stupid or lazy gamers--they can their benchmarks and corresponding reviews for audiences who can't or won't draw good conclusions from traditional datapoint-intensive head-to-head benchmarks and reviews. Not to mention, the great possibility for abuse to twist the results, which is what happened here--when the playing field is unlevel at the discretion of [H]ardOCP, whoever wins is up to them rather than the relative merits of the products.
The fact is, Intel has a lineup of real winners here but [H]ardOCP made the playing field unlevel to avoid acknowledging it. Sad fanboyism.
> Then he has to give up his clue card. Prior to HTML hundreds of people used "the web".
People widely used "the internet" before HTML was adopted, yes. But they didn't widely use "the web" before HTML was adopted. There is a difference. The web is just a service used over the internet. Hint: the "http" and "www" in web addresses really do stand for something. Hyper Text Transfer Protocol and Hyper Text Markup Language made the World Wide Web the popular success it is, supplanting most other earlier forms and formats of internet use through their open standardization and wide adoption. There are reasons we don't type "gopher://" much anymore, and those reasons are the success of HTTP and HTML as the open standard of the World Wide Web. Competing formats/services like Gopher were proprietary and had licensing fees and lost in part because of it--which is what Microsoft fears will happen to its document formats and apps if open document format initiatives gain steam.
If an XML based open document format (like, say, OpenDocument) were to be widely adopted, it could help spur a similar process of popularization and simplification for document exchange, including better online document search and browser-integrated display. An open XML based document format, if widely accepted, would not only ensure easy document exchange without the potential hassle and cost of proprietary formats and software, it would also blur the line between webpages and documents since XML would be the basis for both (HTML has evolved into XHTML, with rules of XML as a basis).
Personally, I think the implications would be huge as the line between webpage and document formats blurs and disappears. The lines between word processing and webpage authoring, and between document viewing and web browsing, would also disappear. Right now there are still big gaps, with different apps and formats and viewing and authoring methods and tools used which seperate documents and webpages. But if the formats become essentially similar so will their respective authoring and viewing apps, merging, which could really alter the way we use and interact with the underlying information.
> Let's take 24 for instance, that show started in 2001 (old enough for you?).
*24* is your example of an "old" show? If you're a 10-year-old, sure that's an "old" show--but it's so "new" from an objective standpoint that it's still a TV current event and not TV history.
What was special about TV Tome is that it covered the shows of two decades ago as thoroughly as those of two seasons ago. You could ask yourself "Hmm, what was that early 90's show about a college campus, where the first episode had snow everywhere and one of the professors sleeping with a student?" And then you could find the answer [1993's one-season-wonder *Class of '96*] on TV Tome, with synopses of the episodes you remember and a forum where you might even run across someone with tapes to share.
It was a huge resource composed by TV lovers for TV lovers, and its loss is painful.
> Betamax is the consumer format, Betacam is the pro format.
Incorrect. As I said, Betacam was Sony's name for their Betamax video recorders, including personal models--it started as a marketing brand like "Handycam." Only later, in 1986, was Betacam SP invented--prior to that, Betacam was the same as Betamax.
Fortunately the copyright on a video belongs to the videographer unless waived by contract, and a 20-year-old Mac launch can't be considered a trade secret.
Though, I wouldn't put it past Apple Legal to try... "Your honor, the defendant's video tape reveals the trade secrets of our proprietary Reality Distortion Field...";-)
> Not really, A VHS would not have survived as long. Beta was a significantly more > robust format.
This is a common misconception, but no. The magnetic tape used is almost identical and will last roughly as long. VHS and Beta, using magnetic tape and analog formats, are very long-lasting and decay gracefully.
You might see extra noise and dropouts on a 25-year-old VHS or Beta, but it will play perfectly fine as long as it wasn't stored in a hot or wet place. Hot and wet is great when you're with a lady, but not when you're storing media.;-)
Uh, no. E-mails from fans are irrelevent to raising commercial timeslot rates, without which there will be no money for making new episodes. Ratings matter. Like it or not, they're all-important for an expensive show like BSG.
There was one great thing about *Galactica 1980* though--the episode "The Return of Starbuck." It's an impressively good episode, on par with anything in the "main series."
> The Cylons don't want to become our overlords. They want to be our exterminators.
Ah, but they don't necessarily. Given the tack of the series so far, maybe they want to be our Gods--or even better, maybe they want *us* to be *their* Gods. Maybe they want us to love them.
Then again, they might just be looking for a good ham sandwich. It's all quite vague.;-)
I got to see the SkyOne airings and I must say this is currently the best drama on TV. It's certainly funny when appropriate, it's very sexy, and it's definitely good science fiction, but the levels of dramatic tension are astounding. Each episode of the first 11 I've seen has impressed me with new surprises layered atop steady, logical plot advancement--evading cylons, finding supplies, rooting out spies, rebuilding fleet organization, casting off old releationships due to new circumstances. But always there's tension, drama, a sense of the importance of survival. It draws you in and makes the viewer feel this frenetic struggle to survive.
And understanding the Cylon motivation has proven to be a philosophical, religious tangle. They're not one-dimensional machines--they seem to be acutely self-aware and trying to discover more about the nature of their souls, so to speak. The whole series is a major accomplishment and a departure from formulaic, one-dimensional sci-fi.
Unstable? Pfft. Writable CDs and DVDs are far more prone to bit-rot than hard drives. Even good, expensive Japanese optical media can go bad, but the cheap Taiwanese stuff has a very high rate of long-term bitrot.
Half my reason for transferring old CD-R and DVD-R to hard disk is that even my best Taiyo Yuden media gets a percentage of corrupt files after a few years--hard drives are *more* stable, especially when sitting offline. They aren't susceptible to chemical instabilities which plague writable optical discs.
1:1 hard drive backups, just for the important stuff. A few weeks ago one of my 300GB Maxtor drives started getting bad sectors, so I bought a replacement, swapped the backup drive for the bad one, made a backup to the new replacement, and RMA'd the bad drive to Maxtor.
It beats the heck out of the spindles full of CDs and DVDs I was generating before. When the RMA'd replacement comes back from Maxtor I'll have to transfer a bunch of the old CD and DVD recordings I have lying around to the drive.
When you grab them on sale, hard drives are only about 20-30 cents per GB more expensive than quality blank DVDs are. Worlds better if you have the infrastructure (like a hot-swap bay or more) to use them. And they're space-efficient and unobtrusive--I lined old plastic VHS cases with antistatic bags and use those to store unconnected drives.
> I have about 200 GB of shows on disc. I'd need at least $200 worth of > drives to hold that
250GB hard drives routinely go on sale for $110-$135 at major retailers like Best Buy and CompUSA. I gave up on CDs and DVDs and just use HD now. Much more convenient.:-)
Actually, several newer discs I have have disabled fast-forward/seeking on either the main feature or significant extras, as some sort of "artistic intent" mandate from directors/producers.:-(
The TV show DVD *Greg the Bunny* for example has a great, in-depth feature about the genesis of the show as shorts on IFC through its network incarnation, reworking, and demise. No fast-forward, even though you can fast-forward the episodes themselves.
I just got my *Degrassi: The Next Generation* box set and thought I'd briefly skip to the parts that were censored in the U.S. airings before viewing it all--but no, not allowed.
I even bought a *porn DVD* that has this "feature"--a classic 70's adult film featuring the most beautiful gal in porn history, Annette Haven. Imagine my surprise when a notice on the Scene Access menu says, "The producers intend for this classic feature to be viewed in its entirety. However, for those who've already seen the film, a scene index has been provided." You can choose one of five places to skip to, but once there *no fast-forwarding*. Aargh.
Thank god for DVD Decrypter's option to strip PUOPs (Prohibited User OPerations) from IFOs and VOBs...
Slashdot Mirror
On a related note, does anyone have suggestions for good compositing software (on any OS)? I've been "archiving" my vintage one-sheet (usually 27" by 41") film poster collection by scanning at 600dpi in 16 overlapping segments, but I haven't done any of the compositing yet. One issue I had is that my old scanner did an automatic color adjustment which left some segments with a slightly different coloring than others, and I'm hoping there's a good compositing application that can compensate for this well enough without me having to manually adjust the color in each segment first.
So, what software would you recommend for compositing groups of 16 overlapping images? Hopefully there are a few good alternatives to try out.
[Obligatory *Dazed & Confused* reference.]
"That's what I love about these high school girls, man...I get older...they stay the same age! Yes they do."
> I wish people would read: http://www.lectlaw.com/files/cur78.htm (or
_ and_stella_liebe.html
> one of another billions sources or the actual case files) before
> always mentioning "the coffee case."
And I wish senseless money-grubbing lawyers would stop treating an incorrect "lottery litigation" outcome as if it were good, when it isn't:
http://www.overlawyered.com/2005/10/urban_legends
That case encapsulates all that is wrong about the current state of torts and the despicable lawyers who take advantage of their vagaries. Anyone who supports the decision in that case lacks common sense (almost all coffee even today is served at an equal or higher temperature) and is likely to be tort-abusing ambulance-chasing swine not worthy of the practice of law.
> Nuclear power (especially on its own) isn't going to do much to reduce oil dependency.
/. article in to the equation, and performance, range, and recharge time can be improved.
> It's not like much electricity comes from burning oil or derivatives.
First, we in the U.S. burn large amounts of fossil fuels (coal, oil derivatives etc) for electricity--precisely because unlike Europe we haven't built new nuclear power plants in decades.
Second, the ubiquity of cheap nuclear-generated electricity would easily have a ripple effect on other areas of infrastructure, phasing in electric capacitance charging stations to slowly displace gas pumps as electric cars replace petrol guzzlers.
All-electric retrofits of existing gas/electric hybrids are so impressive that cars designed from the start as all-electric would be phenomenal; today's battery tech makes this feasible, unlike the early days with the EV1. Add large capacitors like the ones mentioned in a recent
An abundance of cheap nuclear-generated electricity would change everything. Cutting back on fossil fuel use and resultant greenhouse gasses would merely be the tip of the iceberg--imagine if energy eventually became an order of magnitude cheaper due to a real effort to create a nuclear infrastructure, the ripples that could have. In IT alone the effects would be huge--one of the largest ongoing costs to companies like Google, for example, is the big energy bill its countless servers and cooling solutions generate. A nuclear infrastructure generating more and cheaper energy could boost the whole economy in the long term.
> saying that "the family should be burned" is a threat directed
> to specific individuals.
No, it absolutely is NOT, and that's why I'm disappointed that so many European nations don't draw the important distinction drawn in the U.S. "The family should be burned" is not a specific threat of or incitement to action, but a general expression of a thought or wish or fantasy. In the U.S., it would be protected free speech except if uttered under a threatening physical circumstance or said in the context of more specific threat-like statements. Basically, in the U.S. we make a legal distinction regarding the specific intent implied by these statements, while much of the EU doesn't:
"The family should be burned." (generic and protected)
"The family should be burned--let's burn them." (specific threat or incitement, not protected)
"I wish the family would be killed, too." (generic and protected, except in certain contexts)
"I want you to kill the family, too." (specific threat or incitement, not protected)
"I want them to die." (generic and protected)
"I want to kill them." (specific threat or incitement, not protected)
Any child can tell you the differences between each pair of statements. It makes sense then that in the U.S., our legal system differentiates between each. It is offputting and wrong that some EU systems don't.
But we're talking specifically about assuring the quality of the sampling and encoding, not some hypothetical missing content. Checking a few seconds of video during a transition between dark and light would weed out about 95% of poor video quality.
2 videos per hour?! Are you mad, sir? To weed out ~95% of problems you only need to view a few seconds of video from a transition point between bright and dark. 2 videos every 30 seconds is more like it (excepting whatever time it takes to flag a video as bad and write a problem description).
Don't forget that many states still don't have "sliding scale" age of consent loopholes to exempt relationships between peers. In mine, an 18-year-old high school senior can be punished by up to 10 years in prison and/or a $10,000 fine for consensual sex with a 17-year-old classmate. Just because it isn't usually prosecuted doesn't mean it isn't a problem if overprotective parents insist--I personally know of an 18-year-old senior prosecuted for consensual sex with a 16-year-old junior. Luckily the trial was held over for a year and eventually dismissed contingent on good behavior; but, it could've added another victim to our barbaric sex offender registry system.
The sex offender registry is a Puritan scarlet letter system all over again, but worse because it renders people unemployable and sometimes unhousable. Just because an offense sounds bad the way it's listed on the registry doesn't make it so; e.g., how does "production and distribution of child pornography" sound? Bad, unless you know the registrant took a few nude pictures of *herself* on her cameraphone when she was 16 and sent them to her boyfriend. Stupid, sure, but not an offense which should taint the rest of her life--and several such cases of teenage girls or boys photographing *themselves* have been prosecuted and led to sex offender status. How about "rape of a minor"? That sounds bad too, until you realize it might be one of the many *kids* statutorily convicted of rape because their otherwise-consenting partner was months or even weeks younger. I recall reading of a 14-year-old boy subject to sex offender status for consenting acts with a classmate. We are a barbaric, immature nation when it comes to sex, including our proclivity to classify too much consensual sex as a crime--so don't assume a sex offender registry is telling you anything useful.
Indeed, there are dozens of people living within a few miles of my house who are on the sex offender registry. Knowing it changes nothing regarding how the kids in the family are taught to act when outside or around strangers or neighbors, or how closely we adults supervise the kids. I actually worry more about the sex offender registry's potential to drive registrants into unemployment, housing problems or harassment, and therefore a feeling that they have nothing left to lose and might just as well lash out and act out. A much better way to deal with the issue is not to have a registry which could push people towards reoffending by removing support systems and giving them a public scarlet letter, but rather to apply better law enforcement tracking technology.
By mandating GPS monitoring of released sex offenders instead of putting them on a public hit list, you'd let them develop the positive community ties and support systems which are crucial to minimizing recidivism rates, while also making it extremely hard to reoffend without immediate detection and arrest. Knowing that the GPS tracker would lead to instant arrest if it shows you were at a crime scene or approached a restricted zone like a school, or tried to remove or tamper with it, would be a far better deterrent than a public registry. Offenders always try to rationalize that their chances of being caught are minimal; remove any doubt, make it known that GPS data *will* instantly link them to any crime, and recidivism will plummet. As technology progresses regarding GPS accuracy and law enforcement databases we could even go so far as to make it enforceably illegal for a convicted sex offender to enter the yard of a house where children reside, with the GPS tracker alerting police instantly. The answer to protecting kids from convicted sex offenders is better technology and tracking in the hands of police and parole depts., not public lists which probably do more ham than good.
I stopped reading [H]ardOCP soon after they switched from "real" benchmarks (equal settings for both machines) to their oh-so-flawed allegedly-but-not-"real-world" tests (different settings for each platform, to get a similar framerate). It's bullshit and tells me *nothing* except what I'd get if I copied their settings directly--if I prefer to play at different resolutions, and/or different levels of AA/AF/etc., their reviews become worthless compared to traditional ones which give head-to-head benchmarks with more datapoints for me to extrapolate from.
[H]ardOCP in my mind is for stupid or lazy gamers--they can their benchmarks and corresponding reviews for audiences who can't or won't draw good conclusions from traditional datapoint-intensive head-to-head benchmarks and reviews. Not to mention, the great possibility for abuse to twist the results, which is what happened here--when the playing field is unlevel at the discretion of [H]ardOCP, whoever wins is up to them rather than the relative merits of the products.
The fact is, Intel has a lineup of real winners here but [H]ardOCP made the playing field unlevel to avoid acknowledging it. Sad fanboyism.
> Then he has to give up his clue card. Prior to HTML hundreds of people used "the web".
People widely used "the internet" before HTML was adopted, yes. But they didn't widely use "the web" before HTML was adopted. There is a difference. The web is just a service used over the internet. Hint: the "http" and "www" in web addresses really do stand for something. Hyper Text Transfer Protocol and Hyper Text Markup Language made the World Wide Web the popular success it is, supplanting most other earlier forms and formats of internet use through their open standardization and wide adoption. There are reasons we don't type "gopher://" much anymore, and those reasons are the success of HTTP and HTML as the open standard of the World Wide Web. Competing formats/services like Gopher were proprietary and had licensing fees and lost in part because of it--which is what Microsoft fears will happen to its document formats and apps if open document format initiatives gain steam.
If an XML based open document format (like, say, OpenDocument) were to be widely adopted, it could help spur a similar process of popularization and simplification for document exchange, including better online document search and browser-integrated display. An open XML based document format, if widely accepted, would not only ensure easy document exchange without the potential hassle and cost of proprietary formats and software, it would also blur the line between webpages and documents since XML would be the basis for both (HTML has evolved into XHTML, with rules of XML as a basis).
Personally, I think the implications would be huge as the line between webpage and document formats blurs and disappears. The lines between word processing and webpage authoring, and between document viewing and web browsing, would also disappear. Right now there are still big gaps, with different apps and formats and viewing and authoring methods and tools used which seperate documents and webpages. But if the formats become essentially similar so will their respective authoring and viewing apps, merging, which could really alter the way we use and interact with the underlying information.
> Let's take 24 for instance, that show started in 2001 (old enough for you?).
*24* is your example of an "old" show? If you're a 10-year-old, sure that's an "old" show--but it's so "new" from an objective standpoint that it's still a TV current event and not TV history.
What was special about TV Tome is that it covered the shows of two decades ago as thoroughly as those of two seasons ago. You could ask yourself "Hmm, what was that early 90's show about a college campus, where the first episode had snow everywhere and one of the professors sleeping with a student?" And then you could find the answer [1993's one-season-wonder *Class of '96*] on TV Tome, with synopses of the episodes you remember and a forum where you might even run across someone with tapes to share.
It was a huge resource composed by TV lovers for TV lovers, and its loss is painful.
> Betamax is the consumer format, Betacam is the pro format.
Incorrect. As I said, Betacam was Sony's name for their Betamax video recorders, including personal models--it started as a marketing brand like "Handycam." Only later, in 1986, was Betacam SP invented--prior to that, Betacam was the same as Betamax.
Fortunately the copyright on a video belongs to the videographer unless waived by contract, and a 20-year-old Mac launch can't be considered a trade secret.
;-)
Though, I wouldn't put it past Apple Legal to try... "Your honor, the defendant's video tape reveals the trade secrets of our proprietary Reality Distortion Field..."
Betacam was just Sony's name for their Betamax video recorders. Betacam SP is their professional format, but it didn't exist until years later.
> Not really, A VHS would not have survived as long. Beta was a significantly more
;-)
> robust format.
This is a common misconception, but no. The magnetic tape used is almost identical and will last roughly as long. VHS and Beta, using magnetic tape and analog formats, are very long-lasting and decay gracefully.
You might see extra noise and dropouts on a 25-year-old VHS or Beta, but it will play perfectly fine as long as it wasn't stored in a hot or wet place. Hot and wet is great when you're with a lady, but not when you're storing media.
Uh, no. E-mails from fans are irrelevent to raising commercial timeslot rates, without which there will be no money for making new episodes. Ratings matter. Like it or not, they're all-important for an expensive show like BSG.
Funniest part of the series? When Starbuck walks in on Baltar with his pants around his ankles, "exercising." Wow...
There was one great thing about *Galactica 1980* though--the episode "The Return of Starbuck." It's an impressively good episode, on par with anything in the "main series."
> The Cylons don't want to become our overlords. They want to be our exterminators.
;-)
Ah, but they don't necessarily. Given the tack of the series so far, maybe they want to be our Gods--or even better, maybe they want *us* to be *their* Gods. Maybe they want us to love them.
Then again, they might just be looking for a good ham sandwich. It's all quite vague.
I got to see the SkyOne airings and I must say this is currently the best drama on TV. It's certainly funny when appropriate, it's very sexy, and it's definitely good science fiction, but the levels of dramatic tension are astounding. Each episode of the first 11 I've seen has impressed me with new surprises layered atop steady, logical plot advancement--evading cylons, finding supplies, rooting out spies, rebuilding fleet organization, casting off old releationships due to new circumstances. But always there's tension, drama, a sense of the importance of survival. It draws you in and makes the viewer feel this frenetic struggle to survive.
And understanding the Cylon motivation has proven to be a philosophical, religious tangle. They're not one-dimensional machines--they seem to be acutely self-aware and trying to discover more about the nature of their souls, so to speak. The whole series is a major accomplishment and a departure from formulaic, one-dimensional sci-fi.
Um, they've already done so on various nights for two weeks now on both Sci-Fi and even on NBC. This is why I skim the week's listings beforehand. ;-)
Unstable? Pfft. Writable CDs and DVDs are far more prone to bit-rot than hard drives. Even good, expensive Japanese optical media can go bad, but the cheap Taiwanese stuff has a very high rate of long-term bitrot.
Half my reason for transferring old CD-R and DVD-R to hard disk is that even my best Taiyo Yuden media gets a percentage of corrupt files after a few years--hard drives are *more* stable, especially when sitting offline. They aren't susceptible to chemical instabilities which plague writable optical discs.
1:1 hard drive backups, just for the important stuff. A few weeks ago one of my 300GB Maxtor drives started getting bad sectors, so I bought a replacement, swapped the backup drive for the bad one, made a backup to the new replacement, and RMA'd the bad drive to Maxtor.
It beats the heck out of the spindles full of CDs and DVDs I was generating before. When the RMA'd replacement comes back from Maxtor I'll have to transfer a bunch of the old CD and DVD recordings I have lying around to the drive.
When you grab them on sale, hard drives are only about 20-30 cents per GB more expensive than quality blank DVDs are. Worlds better if you have the infrastructure (like a hot-swap bay or more) to use them. And they're space-efficient and unobtrusive--I lined old plastic VHS cases with antistatic bags and use those to store unconnected drives.
> I have about 200 GB of shows on disc. I'd need at least $200 worth of
:-)
> drives to hold that
250GB hard drives routinely go on sale for $110-$135 at major retailers like Best Buy and CompUSA. I gave up on CDs and DVDs and just use HD now. Much more convenient.
Actually, several newer discs I have have disabled fast-forward/seeking on either the main feature or significant extras, as some sort of "artistic intent" mandate from directors/producers. :-(
The TV show DVD *Greg the Bunny* for example has a great, in-depth feature about the genesis of the show as shorts on IFC through its network incarnation, reworking, and demise. No fast-forward, even though you can fast-forward the episodes themselves.
I just got my *Degrassi: The Next Generation* box set and thought I'd briefly skip to the parts that were censored in the U.S. airings before viewing it all--but no, not allowed.
I even bought a *porn DVD* that has this "feature"--a classic 70's adult film featuring the most beautiful gal in porn history, Annette Haven. Imagine my surprise when a notice on the Scene Access menu says, "The producers intend for this classic feature to be viewed in its entirety. However, for those who've already seen the film, a scene index has been provided." You can choose one of five places to skip to, but once there *no fast-forwarding*. Aargh.
Thank god for DVD Decrypter's option to strip PUOPs (Prohibited User OPerations) from IFOs and VOBs...