If going digital, go with the ONE BOX solution...
on
TiVo Buries the VCR
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· Score: 1
Once analog switches off, you'll either have do some tricky messing around with your Freeview set-top box and your VCR (and possibly buy a second STB) or buy a Freeview PVR.
Believe me, I've considered this before. And after a while, you'll realise that the ideal solution is to have a box that combines:-
- Digital tuner (Freeview/DVB or your preferred source, depending on what you want and where you live)
- Hard Drive
- DVD Recorder
- Analogue signal input
You may ask why, since traditionally all-in-one units lack flexibility and reduce your choice in comparison with separate units (e.g. TV/VCR combos rarely save you money, and they often only have one tuner).
Well, simple answer:-
It's going to be a PITA to
(a) Get all the above to work together
(b) Operate them together, and
(c) Not lose quality or 'information' when transferring between them.
Examples:-
(i) You want to transfer a digitally-stored programme from the HDD to a separate DVD recorder. Can you transfer the digital information without loss? What if the DVD recorder only has analogue (at best RGB) inputs. This means loss of quality, and you'll have to transfer in real-time. What if you have some form of digital interface between the two? Are they compatible? Better check. What if there are issues between two different manufacturer's units? Do you *really* want the hassle of this? Are you sure that even if the interfaces connect that the DVD recorder will be able to handle the digital output of the PVR?
Can you even get video off the PVR in its stored form (I suppose you could take the HDD out and connect it to your computer; assuming you can read the drive's format)?
(ii) You don't really need an analogue *tuner* if you have a digital (e.g. Freeview) tuner (if the worst comes to the worst, you can use the one in your old VCR). However, if you want to digitise old video material, you'll still need some form of analogue-compatible input (and a converter).
I could come up with lots of examples, but that's my case; it'll be better to buy a single unit with all four of these functions integrated.
The problem with stuff at present is that it isn't this integrated; e.g. I can buy a digital-only PVR for a decent price, and a DVD-recorder with built-in analogue tuner and analogue-inputs at a decent price. But what if I want to burn stuff from the PVR to DVD? Loss of quality.
Integrated recorders are good; but do they include analogue input? If not, you probably can't use them to digitise all your old VHS.
A PC gives you the flexibility to do all this, probably. But this is *way* more hassle than it's worth if you have a large collection. You really want to just push a few buttons for each transfer.
I could live without the analogue input myself (don't have enough VHS left to worry about it), but my Dad, for example, has a lot of tapes that he'd probably like to transfer; and he's not the type of guy who enjoys faffing around with HiFi and "Home Theatre" setups.
I doubt those figures of 97 million homes still with VCRs. Everybody I know
Ah, yes. The reliable statistical technique of a *not remotely random sample*.
has at least a DVD player in their home, most actually having a DVD recorder
Then "everybody you know" isn't remotely representative. "Most people" don't have a DVD recorder in their home, if by "DVD recorder" you mean a standalone device, and not just a recordable DVD drive in their PC.
of some form and most having a home theater PC.
And "most people" still don't have a "home theater PC".
VHS died years ago.
Oh, this is even more clueless. It's not that VHS is *now* dead.... it's that VHS died *years ago*.
Yes, everyone stopped using VHS in 2001 because standalone DVD recorders were so widely available and cheap back then.
I'm not American, nor am I familiar with the intricacies of the American market. Bearing this in mind, I can still confidently say that your assertion that "VHS died years ago" is complete garbage.
Amongst your very niche-y, cliquey, enclosed group of early-adopting, tech-obsessed friends, perhaps. But Tivo, despite its fanatical following, was (and still is) dwarfed by VHS usage.
Of course, VHS users are likely to be less serious tech-fans/TV-viewers, and thus aren't as "prominent" or "fashionable"; but I can quite confidently tell you that despite all the fuss over PVRs and recordable DVD in the past few years, both those technologies were still relatively niche products. Only *now* are they getting to the point where they will replace VHS.
Don't even think about pointing out the obvious; that DVD players are ubiquitous, and have almost killed off the pre-recorded VHS market (possible exception being childrens' stuff). Of course they are, and of course it has.
You were discussing the *death* of VHS, and until recently there has been no competition for *recording* material.
I think we're at the point now where VHS really *will* be eaten alive by a combination of DVD recorders (the most obvious replacement for VHS recording), and PVRs (the most *suitable* replacement for what VHS is still used for- time-shifting; most people don't want to keep the stuff they watch, so removing the hassle of changing media and keeping it all in one place is what they *really* want- trust me).
For example, my local supermarket now sells a basic PVR with integrated "Freeview" (terrestrial digital) tuner for UK £99 (about US $170). If I hadn't already had a Freeview tuner, or if I'd been into time-shifting enough to make it worthwhile, I'd have snapped it up.
I predicted in early 2004 that Christmas 2005 would be the "tipping point" when PVRs (not DVD recorders so much) would put the final nail in the coffin of VHS by taking over its remaining use. PVRs, I guessed, would be the runaway success this Christmas that DVD players were 3 or so years ago.
Well, I'm not 100% sure if I was right about Christmas, but if the tipping point isn't right now, I'm still confident it'll be in the next 4-6 months.
I unserstand in the real world we are supposed to act all civilized and polite, but I say FUCK THEM, it's too late for MS to play nice. Welcome to the future, enjoy Linux and OSS, and FUCK YOU.
It's not too late for them to play nice, but they won't.
Here's what will happen; MS will *never* genuinely "play nice" unless it benefits them (although they may briefly try to give that appearance to screw over some naive customers etc.)
MS's mentality is such that even if it were to their benefit to "play nice" starting right now, it would take them years to realise it, and quite a bit longer for the entrenched attitudes in the company to be changed.
And since MS have proven themselves not to be trustworthy, it would require several years of them actually playing nice for everyone else to believe it, and MS to start reaping the benefits.
So don't expect a love-in between MS and anyone else within the next 10 years. If things are going to change, they'll have changed by then.
Anyway, for what it's worth, this guy is a tool of MS whether he realises it or not; if he doesn't, he's merely a "useful idiot". This comment sums it up nicely IMHO.
Feh... no point in my making any serious points this late in the discussion, so in response to this:-
Design...the part of the internet most of the world (non nerds) use is the www...which was 'designed' at CERN, in Europe, by a european.
I'll just say that any Americans uncomfortable with using a cheese-eating, surrender-monkeying socialist-designed system like the web should go back to using Gopher instead. I'd love to see the looks on their faces:-)
Political correctness is the ultimate strawman representation of liberal (*) left-wing politics used by its opponents.
Whenever someone says something aong the lines of "I'm going to be un-PC", or "it might not be politically correct but", they're not just trying to sugar the pill of what they say, they're positively trying to gain favour with those who agree that "political correctness" is stupid.
And since PC is a strawman designed to make those on the left look bad, of course it's stupid.
Not saying I agree with all those that the 'anti-political correctness' argument is used against, but it's a convenient and easy bogey-man for those on the opposing side.
(*) In the literal sense, not the 'synonymous with left-wing' meaning that it has in the US.
This is why there are so many gay men. [...] Then they won't have to bother if colours match
Yep. All those gay men on shows like "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" going around matching fluorescent red with yellow and green tartan in the bathroom.
You can't trust 'em to colour-coordinate at all; they just don't give a monkeys about that sort of thing.
Disclaimer: Yes, the message underlying this sarcasm is somewhat stereotypical, and doesn't apply to all gay men. But let's be honest, your "analysis" was pretty crap too, and relied on the straight-man stereotype. And anyway, the problem with two straight men getting together for sex is.... DUH.
That's really a matter of opinion. So far as I can tell, the only difference between the dial-in and telnet-in BBSs was... the dialling in vs. the telnetting in. They certainly didn't exploit the more flexible nature of the Internet and TCP/IP more than that, they were merely terminals, just like a dial-in service.
And they referred to themselves as BBSs; would anyone at that time have argued that they weren't BBSs simply because they weren't dial-in?
Assuming- of course- that it wasn't possible to dial in. There's no reason they couldn't have had both Internet and dial-up access, and at that time there may well have been motivation to do so- in the UK (at least), you paid for your monthly Internet access *plus* non-local call access.
No kidding, if you were still using BBS's in 1994 then you would have had to been extremely hard-core since the rest of us had already moved to the Internet.
Smartass; actually, there were plenty of BBSs *on the Internet* in 1994. I know because I used them (*) when I first got in the net in late 1993 (before I'd heard of the WWW, and was still trying to figure out gopher) and they were still there in mid-1995.
Obviously they died out in the face of the web and such like, but they did exist and let you do 'BBS-ish' things, such as uploading files, leaving messages, chatting, and so on. If you think about it, it's pretty natural this should happen; phone-based BBSs used your computer as a glorified terminal, and the telnet protocol/program does pretty much the same thing. Like it or not, cultures don't change overnight, and the culture in the early-1990s was still BBS-based.
OTOH, telnet itself doesn't get as much use these days either...
(*) Actually, I've *only* used Internet-based BBSs; never dial-up ones.
You missed my point. I didn't say that in practice digital wasn't worth a slight reduction in resolution or increase in cost; I was arguing your point that digital was higher resolution. For the kinds of uses 35mm film gets used for, it's not. You can buy pretty impressive digital cameras for about twice the price of an entry-level film SLR, but they're still not as high resolution as film.
As I said, it's a trade off, and of course, if you stick that film in a crappy camera, the results are still going to suck. But the same would apply if you stuck a massively expensive sensor behind a dirt-cheap lens.
Anyway digital *will* probably surpass film in the next few years...
Back then cameras didn't have auto-white balance; you had to shoot a picture of a white card and press the "white balance" button...
I knew I'd missed something out...
No, the sky *specifically* was pink, but everything else was relatively normal (at least that's how I- vaguely- remember it; if everything else had been pink, I'd probably have remembered it differently, although I wouldn't go so far as to bet my life on it). I can only ascribe this to the sky overloading the sensor (pickup tube, if you are correct) somehow.
Auto-white balance isn't a pancea either, though; I have a matchbox-sized camera which does this, and whenever you point it at a scene with lots of red in it, it gives everything a turquoise cast, which has a particularly disagreeable effect on skin colour.
These days I consider the reliability and quality of their products to be worse than many of the noname OEM Chinese manufacturers.
I noted 3 or 4 years ago that "Sony" CD burners were simply rebranded "Lite On" models (Chinese manufacturer, not quite a "noname" OEM, but one of the cheapest brands). I might expect this from Philips, but Sony?! Why pay for Sony? Little badge, and a change of name in firmware?
I'm really glad I bought my Sony TV (circa 1993); the picture *has not degraded noticeably* since the day I bought it (and it was excellent in the first place), and it's never needed repaired. But I wouldn't use this as a reason to buy modern Sony stuff.
A lot of that software caused major problems when going from the A500 to the A500 Plus/A600 (same "generation", but slightly upgraded custom chips). Many games failed to work. Then, more problems from the A500-generation to the A1200 (major upgrades to the custom chips).
However, that was required, because going through the OS slowed things down too much. If the Mac had had similar hardware to the Amiga, it would probably also have required doing the same thing to get acceptable performance.
Apart from the fact that film [...] offers far lower resolution than current top-of-the-line digicams
Care to provide a citation for this? In general, film still provides a far higher resolution than digital at a given price-point (actually, this is meaningless; I can buy film and stick it in a $5 35mm-compact, and the film itself still has the same high resolution, although the camera will let it down).
I'm sure that prohibitively expensive specialist digital equipment will beat 35mm film, but then, you can always buy larger-format (and possibly better) film.
And I don't think that's what you meant by "top-of-the-line digicams"; for *anything* like the purposes we're discussing here, the fact is that film will offer higher resolution for a comparable price point than digital. Digital has come down a lot in price, and when you factor in the processing cost and convenience, is now starting to threaten 35mm film for serious SLR work. But in like-for-like, price-for-price, raw resolution, it's not there yet.
Highly exposed areas (like highlights on metallic objects) of the pictures had highly distorted colors (fluorescent green or pink).
I remember at school when the local Police were showing us a safety video that they'd shot themselves (the titles had clearly been done on a BBC Microcomputer). The sky was pink!! It wasn't a colour cast; I'd put it down to the quality of CCDs in early camcorders (this was in the mid-80s; yes, I'm going to pick up my pension after this...). Strange that a fault should do the same thing, though.
Moreover, if you would point the camera to a bright light source (for example a tube light), the cameras LCD would start displaying all kinds of weirdly distorted colors.
The first widely-used (commercial) colour television cameras in the UK (and possibly the US) did this; if you watch 1970s (and some 1980s) British TV shows including video-sourced material, you'll notice this effect around the highlights.
Of course, such cameras also required bright lighting, thus increasing the incidence of such "hotspots" and their weird side-effects; but only around the hot spot (e.g. green blobs).
Perhaps you were talking about a different effect?
If the business on the far end had bothered to set up their PayPal correctly, they would be able to accept credit card payments without the person on the far end needing to sign up for a full PayPal account (although the option is there).
I've seen that on eBay. I went through the process, and if PayPal weren't actually saying that I *needed* to set up an account, they were certainly trying to give that impression.
Either that or they were trying to coerce or mislead me into setting one up (by which I mean that they'd have set up the route through the payment screens such that if you weren't paying it your full attention you'd end up unwittingly following the "Yes, I'd like to set up a full PayPal account after all" route at some stage, and inadvertantly "set up" an account).
I might be wrong about this, but that was the impression I remember from back then.
Since I've heard enough about PayPal not to ever consider setting up an account with them, I decided to avoid using that payment method altogether. Now I will not have *anything* to do with PayPal. Any business that *requires* me to use PayPal (even "without" an account) will lose my custom, period.
I'll happily use Nochex for the same purpose, though. Their process was clear and straightforward.
Oh man. Thanks for mentioning the Pentium Mobile. Personally, I'm seriously considering basing my next PC on one; low-power, no fan noise, pretty good performance.
I've been hearing more and more about the Pentium Mobile vs. the Pentium 4 in the past few months; lots of people were saying that the Pentium Mobile was a good choice for a desktop machine, that the design (ironically based on the Pentium III) was the way forward rather than the dead-end (following the 'Prescott' iteration) that the Pentium 4 is currently stuck in.
In fact, there's a rumour that the Pentium Mobile, not the Pentium 4/Prescott is now Intel's "reference" design; which wouldn't be surprising, since everyone else has been saying they should do that for months now.
Anyhow, back to the fans. I'm one of those people who'll sacrifice a small amount of cutting-edge performance and pay a bit more to get a relatively silent machine; the fact I'm happily using my 3-year old 1.8 P4 suggests I'm not really pushing it anyway- and I'll bet in the general public there are a *far* higher proportion of people like me than there are in the Slashdot crowd.
You're aware that a large amount of Amiga software (primarily games and graphics-oriented software) bypassed the OS, and "hit the hardware" directly?
I'm not sure that the Mac/Lisa would have been focussed on those types of apps (let's face it, 2-colour monochrome isn't going to compete with 4096-colour HAM), so perhaps the comparison isn't entirely valid.
I've heard that story elsewhere. Of course, *they* could have got their information from the Sony source, so that doesn't necessarily prove anything (a common mistake some people make)
Pretty informative, I think I'll bookmark this, thanks.
FWIW, I used Swing in 2002 on my (then current machine) Pentium-233.
It reminded me of my 8MHz Amiga 500 on a bad day... I tend to subscribe to the theory that Intel provided Sun with the "performance increase" of Swing; after all, it's just about usable on my current 1.8MHz P4:-/
Slashdot Mirror
Once analog switches off, you'll either have do some tricky messing around with your Freeview set-top box and your VCR (and possibly buy a second STB) or buy a Freeview PVR.
Believe me, I've considered this before. And after a while, you'll realise that the ideal solution is to have a box that combines:-
- Digital tuner (Freeview/DVB or your preferred source, depending on what you want and where you live)
- Hard Drive
- DVD Recorder
- Analogue signal input
You may ask why, since traditionally all-in-one units lack flexibility and reduce your choice in comparison with separate units (e.g. TV/VCR combos rarely save you money, and they often only have one tuner).
Well, simple answer:-
It's going to be a PITA to
(a) Get all the above to work together
(b) Operate them together, and
(c) Not lose quality or 'information' when transferring between them.
Examples:-
(i) You want to transfer a digitally-stored programme from the HDD to a separate DVD recorder. Can you transfer the digital information without loss? What if the DVD recorder only has analogue (at best RGB) inputs. This means loss of quality, and you'll have to transfer in real-time. What if you have some form of digital interface between the two? Are they compatible? Better check. What if there are issues between two different manufacturer's units? Do you *really* want the hassle of this? Are you sure that even if the interfaces connect that the DVD recorder will be able to handle the digital output of the PVR?
Can you even get video off the PVR in its stored form (I suppose you could take the HDD out and connect it to your computer; assuming you can read the drive's format)?
(ii) You don't really need an analogue *tuner* if you have a digital (e.g. Freeview) tuner (if the worst comes to the worst, you can use the one in your old VCR). However, if you want to digitise old video material, you'll still need some form of analogue-compatible input (and a converter).
I could come up with lots of examples, but that's my case; it'll be better to buy a single unit with all four of these functions integrated.
The problem with stuff at present is that it isn't this integrated; e.g. I can buy a digital-only PVR for a decent price, and a DVD-recorder with built-in analogue tuner and analogue-inputs at a decent price. But what if I want to burn stuff from the PVR to DVD? Loss of quality.
Integrated recorders are good; but do they include analogue input? If not, you probably can't use them to digitise all your old VHS.
A PC gives you the flexibility to do all this, probably. But this is *way* more hassle than it's worth if you have a large collection. You really want to just push a few buttons for each transfer.
I could live without the analogue input myself (don't have enough VHS left to worry about it), but my Dad, for example, has a lot of tapes that he'd probably like to transfer; and he's not the type of guy who enjoys faffing around with HiFi and "Home Theatre" setups.
I doubt those figures of 97 million homes still with VCRs. Everybody I know
Ah, yes. The reliable statistical technique of a *not remotely random sample*.
has at least a DVD player in their home, most actually having a DVD recorder
Then "everybody you know" isn't remotely representative. "Most people" don't have a DVD recorder in their home, if by "DVD recorder" you mean a standalone device, and not just a recordable DVD drive in their PC.
of some form and most having a home theater PC.
And "most people" still don't have a "home theater PC".
VHS died years ago.
Oh, this is even more clueless. It's not that VHS is *now* dead.... it's that VHS died *years ago*.
Yes, everyone stopped using VHS in 2001 because standalone DVD recorders were so widely available and cheap back then.
I'm not American, nor am I familiar with the intricacies of the American market. Bearing this in mind, I can still confidently say that your assertion that "VHS died years ago" is complete garbage.
Amongst your very niche-y, cliquey, enclosed group of early-adopting, tech-obsessed friends, perhaps. But Tivo, despite its fanatical following, was (and still is) dwarfed by VHS usage.
Of course, VHS users are likely to be less serious tech-fans/TV-viewers, and thus aren't as "prominent" or "fashionable"; but I can quite confidently tell you that despite all the fuss over PVRs and recordable DVD in the past few years, both those technologies were still relatively niche products. Only *now* are they getting to the point where they will replace VHS.
Don't even think about pointing out the obvious; that DVD players are ubiquitous, and have almost killed off the pre-recorded VHS market (possible exception being childrens' stuff). Of course they are, and of course it has.
You were discussing the *death* of VHS, and until recently there has been no competition for *recording* material.
I think we're at the point now where VHS really *will* be eaten alive by a combination of DVD recorders (the most obvious replacement for VHS recording), and PVRs (the most *suitable* replacement for what VHS is still used for- time-shifting; most people don't want to keep the stuff they watch, so removing the hassle of changing media and keeping it all in one place is what they *really* want- trust me).
For example, my local supermarket now sells a basic PVR with integrated "Freeview" (terrestrial digital) tuner for UK £99 (about US $170). If I hadn't already had a Freeview tuner, or if I'd been into time-shifting enough to make it worthwhile, I'd have snapped it up.
I predicted in early 2004 that Christmas 2005 would be the "tipping point" when PVRs (not DVD recorders so much) would put the final nail in the coffin of VHS by taking over its remaining use. PVRs, I guessed, would be the runaway success this Christmas that DVD players were 3 or so years ago.
Well, I'm not 100% sure if I was right about Christmas, but if the tipping point isn't right now, I'm still confident it'll be in the next 4-6 months.
I unserstand in the real world we are supposed to act all civilized and polite, but I say FUCK THEM, it's too late for MS to play nice. Welcome to the future, enjoy Linux and OSS, and FUCK YOU.
It's not too late for them to play nice, but they won't.
Here's what will happen; MS will *never* genuinely "play nice" unless it benefits them (although they may briefly try to give that appearance to screw over some naive customers etc.)
MS's mentality is such that even if it were to their benefit to "play nice" starting right now, it would take them years to realise it, and quite a bit longer for the entrenched attitudes in the company to be changed.
And since MS have proven themselves not to be trustworthy, it would require several years of them actually playing nice for everyone else to believe it, and MS to start reaping the benefits.
So don't expect a love-in between MS and anyone else within the next 10 years. If things are going to change, they'll have changed by then.
Anyway, for what it's worth, this guy is a tool of MS whether he realises it or not; if he doesn't, he's merely a "useful idiot". This comment sums it up nicely IMHO.
To be fair, IIRC, TBL's browser included support for images, it just didn't include them in the main text.
I don't think it was *quite* as basic as Lynx either, though come to think of it, I really know jack about it.
Anyhow, I'd use Lynx more often if it most websites weren't designed around so exclusively around the graphical features of most browsers.
Feh... no point in my making any serious points this late in the discussion, so in response to this:-
:-)
Design...the part of the internet most of the world (non nerds) use is the www...which was 'designed' at CERN, in Europe, by a european.
I'll just say that any Americans uncomfortable with using a cheese-eating, surrender-monkeying socialist-designed system like the web should go back to using Gopher instead. I'd love to see the looks on their faces
How about:
Which income tax form did you file last year?
(d) Cowboy Neal
Even better poll combining the best (or worst) aspects of the two above:-
How do you plead to the charge of having intercourse with a minor?
(a) Guilty
(b) Not Guilty
(c) I swear that Cowboy Neal told me he was over 18
Anti-Societal behavior is curbed with "The Police" a group which will use an escelating level of violence to get you to conform to their wishes.
They split up years ago, but Sting still regularly employs punishment beatings against those who don't buy his albums.
I'm gonna be a little un-PC here.
Political correctness is the ultimate strawman representation of liberal (*) left-wing politics used by its opponents.
Whenever someone says something aong the lines of "I'm going to be un-PC", or "it might not be politically correct but", they're not just trying to sugar the pill of what they say, they're positively trying to gain favour with those who agree that "political correctness" is stupid.
And since PC is a strawman designed to make those on the left look bad, of course it's stupid.
Not saying I agree with all those that the 'anti-political correctness' argument is used against, but it's a convenient and easy bogey-man for those on the opposing side.
(*) In the literal sense, not the 'synonymous with left-wing' meaning that it has in the US.
This is why there are so many gay men. [...] Then they won't have to bother if colours match
Yep. All those gay men on shows like "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" going around matching fluorescent red with yellow and green tartan in the bathroom.
You can't trust 'em to colour-coordinate at all; they just don't give a monkeys about that sort of thing.
Disclaimer: Yes, the message underlying this sarcasm is somewhat stereotypical, and doesn't apply to all gay men. But let's be honest, your "analysis" was pretty crap too, and relied on the straight-man stereotype. And anyway, the problem with two straight men getting together for sex is.... DUH.
To be fair, I used to get tons of spam via Hotmail, and now I get very little. It's one area they've definitely improved in in the past 4 or so years.
OTOH, my Hotmail address isn't identical to any of my usernames anywhere.
I currently run MCE05 after years of Tivo and love it. It never fails, the interface is usable by the lady
That's no way to talk about your Mother.
Then it's not really a BBS, is it.
That's really a matter of opinion. So far as I can tell, the only difference between the dial-in and telnet-in BBSs was... the dialling in vs. the telnetting in. They certainly didn't exploit the more flexible nature of the Internet and TCP/IP more than that, they were merely terminals, just like a dial-in service.
And they referred to themselves as BBSs; would anyone at that time have argued that they weren't BBSs simply because they weren't dial-in?
Assuming- of course- that it wasn't possible to dial in. There's no reason they couldn't have had both Internet and dial-up access, and at that time there may well have been motivation to do so- in the UK (at least), you paid for your monthly Internet access *plus* non-local call access.
No kidding, if you were still using BBS's in 1994 then you would have had to been extremely hard-core since the rest of us had already moved to the Internet.
Smartass; actually, there were plenty of BBSs *on the Internet* in 1994. I know because I used them (*) when I first got in the net in late 1993 (before I'd heard of the WWW, and was still trying to figure out gopher) and they were still there in mid-1995.
Obviously they died out in the face of the web and such like, but they did exist and let you do 'BBS-ish' things, such as uploading files, leaving messages, chatting, and so on. If you think about it, it's pretty natural this should happen; phone-based BBSs used your computer as a glorified terminal, and the telnet protocol/program does pretty much the same thing. Like it or not, cultures don't change overnight, and the culture in the early-1990s was still BBS-based.
OTOH, telnet itself doesn't get as much use these days either...
(*) Actually, I've *only* used Internet-based BBSs; never dial-up ones.
You missed my point. I didn't say that in practice digital wasn't worth a slight reduction in resolution or increase in cost; I was arguing your point that digital was higher resolution. For the kinds of uses 35mm film gets used for, it's not. You can buy pretty impressive digital cameras for about twice the price of an entry-level film SLR, but they're still not as high resolution as film.
As I said, it's a trade off, and of course, if you stick that film in a crappy camera, the results are still going to suck. But the same would apply if you stuck a massively expensive sensor behind a dirt-cheap lens.
Anyway digital *will* probably surpass film in the next few years...
Back then cameras didn't have auto-white balance; you had to shoot a picture of a white card and press the "white balance" button...
I knew I'd missed something out...
No, the sky *specifically* was pink, but everything else was relatively normal (at least that's how I- vaguely- remember it; if everything else had been pink, I'd probably have remembered it differently, although I wouldn't go so far as to bet my life on it). I can only ascribe this to the sky overloading the sensor (pickup tube, if you are correct) somehow.
Auto-white balance isn't a pancea either, though; I have a matchbox-sized camera which does this, and whenever you point it at a scene with lots of red in it, it gives everything a turquoise cast, which has a particularly disagreeable effect on skin colour.
These days I consider the reliability and quality of their products to be worse than many of the noname OEM Chinese manufacturers.
I noted 3 or 4 years ago that "Sony" CD burners were simply rebranded "Lite On" models (Chinese manufacturer, not quite a "noname" OEM, but one of the cheapest brands). I might expect this from Philips, but Sony?! Why pay for Sony? Little badge, and a change of name in firmware?
I'm really glad I bought my Sony TV (circa 1993); the picture *has not degraded noticeably* since the day I bought it (and it was excellent in the first place), and it's never needed repaired. But I wouldn't use this as a reason to buy modern Sony stuff.
I live in Japan, another hot and humid place, but since I've been relatively aware of this problem for a while now
Yeah, but it's unreasonable to expect a company like Sony to know anything about conditions in an obscure country like Japan.
Oh, hang on...
Bad design? Absolutely!
A lot of that software caused major problems when going from the A500 to the A500 Plus/A600 (same "generation", but slightly upgraded custom chips). Many games failed to work. Then, more problems from the A500-generation to the A1200 (major upgrades to the custom chips).
However, that was required, because going through the OS slowed things down too much. If the Mac had had similar hardware to the Amiga, it would probably also have required doing the same thing to get acceptable performance.
Apart from the fact that film [...] offers far lower resolution than current top-of-the-line digicams
Care to provide a citation for this? In general, film still provides a far higher resolution than digital at a given price-point (actually, this is meaningless; I can buy film and stick it in a $5 35mm-compact, and the film itself still has the same high resolution, although the camera will let it down).
I'm sure that prohibitively expensive specialist digital equipment will beat 35mm film, but then, you can always buy larger-format (and possibly better) film.
And I don't think that's what you meant by "top-of-the-line digicams"; for *anything* like the purposes we're discussing here, the fact is that film will offer higher resolution for a comparable price point than digital. Digital has come down a lot in price, and when you factor in the processing cost and convenience, is now starting to threaten 35mm film for serious SLR work. But in like-for-like, price-for-price, raw resolution, it's not there yet.
Highly exposed areas (like highlights on metallic objects) of the pictures had highly distorted colors (fluorescent green or pink).
I remember at school when the local Police were showing us a safety video that they'd shot themselves (the titles had clearly been done on a BBC Microcomputer). The sky was pink!! It wasn't a colour cast; I'd put it down to the quality of CCDs in early camcorders (this was in the mid-80s; yes, I'm going to pick up my pension after this...). Strange that a fault should do the same thing, though.
Moreover, if you would point the camera to a bright light source (for example a tube light), the cameras LCD would start displaying all kinds of weirdly distorted colors.
The first widely-used (commercial) colour television cameras in the UK (and possibly the US) did this; if you watch 1970s (and some 1980s) British TV shows including video-sourced material, you'll notice this effect around the highlights.
Of course, such cameras also required bright lighting, thus increasing the incidence of such "hotspots" and their weird side-effects; but only around the hot spot (e.g. green blobs).
Perhaps you were talking about a different effect?
If the business on the far end had bothered to set up their PayPal correctly, they would be able to accept credit card payments without the person on the far end needing to sign up for a full PayPal account (although the option is there).
I've seen that on eBay. I went through the process, and if PayPal weren't actually saying that I *needed* to set up an account, they were certainly trying to give that impression. Either that or they were trying to coerce or mislead me into setting one up (by which I mean that they'd have set up the route through the payment screens such that if you weren't paying it your full attention you'd end up unwittingly following the "Yes, I'd like to set up a full PayPal account after all" route at some stage, and inadvertantly "set up" an account).
I might be wrong about this, but that was the impression I remember from back then.
Since I've heard enough about PayPal not to ever consider setting up an account with them, I decided to avoid using that payment method altogether. Now I will not have *anything* to do with PayPal. Any business that *requires* me to use PayPal (even "without" an account) will lose my custom, period.
I'll happily use Nochex for the same purpose, though. Their process was clear and straightforward.
Oh man. Thanks for mentioning the Pentium Mobile. Personally, I'm seriously considering basing my next PC on one; low-power, no fan noise, pretty good performance.
I've been hearing more and more about the Pentium Mobile vs. the Pentium 4 in the past few months; lots of people were saying that the Pentium Mobile was a good choice for a desktop machine, that the design (ironically based on the Pentium III) was the way forward rather than the dead-end (following the 'Prescott' iteration) that the Pentium 4 is currently stuck in.
In fact, there's a rumour that the Pentium Mobile, not the Pentium 4/Prescott is now Intel's "reference" design; which wouldn't be surprising, since everyone else has been saying they should do that for months now.
Anyhow, back to the fans. I'm one of those people who'll sacrifice a small amount of cutting-edge performance and pay a bit more to get a relatively silent machine; the fact I'm happily using my 3-year old 1.8 P4 suggests I'm not really pushing it anyway- and I'll bet in the general public there are a *far* higher proportion of people like me than there are in the Slashdot crowd.
You're aware that a large amount of Amiga software (primarily games and graphics-oriented software) bypassed the OS, and "hit the hardware" directly?
I'm not sure that the Mac/Lisa would have been focussed on those types of apps (let's face it, 2-colour monochrome isn't going to compete with 4096-colour HAM), so perhaps the comparison isn't entirely valid.
I've heard that story elsewhere. Of course, *they* could have got their information from the Sony source, so that doesn't necessarily prove anything (a common mistake some people make)
Pretty informative, I think I'll bookmark this, thanks.
:-/
FWIW, I used Swing in 2002 on my (then current machine) Pentium-233.
It reminded me of my 8MHz Amiga 500 on a bad day... I tend to subscribe to the theory that Intel provided Sun with the "performance increase" of Swing; after all, it's just about usable on my current 1.8MHz P4