Nah, MegaDrive would cause more confusion- it was the European/Asian name for the Sega Genesis.
Still, it might be worth a go. I'd love to see the look on a Mac owner's face when they switched on their machine and Sonic the Hedgehog popped up. However, features that advanced won't appear until OS-XI.
I know; I was responding to the parent which was blaming DVD for VCD not taking off.
I don't know for a fact that your reason is correct, but it's the same one I guessed myself.
If the technology is coming into an established market, it's got to beat the existing product by a mile, or do something reasonably different. The only advantage I could see was random access. Not even recordable- why would I buy one over a VCR?
I've no idea why it took off in Asia; even in a virgin market, wasn't the VCR a better bet?
Frequently, an extensive gay orgy will be taking place between rows of iPods and G4's. Check it out sometime !!!
Yeah, I noticed that even Windows users get curious about different OSes sometimes. Most Windows-owning teenagers go through a phase of interest in Macs, sometimes to the point of experimenting with a Mac, or taking part in "user meetings" such as you describe.
Some go on to buy a Mac, most decide a Mac isn't for them. Others get so paranoid about their liking for Macs that they post anti-Mac flames and masturbate over pictures of Bill Gates.
So, if Mac users are meant to be gay, does this mean that Windows users are straight?
And what about Linux users? They invent their own sexual devices and write kernel drivers for them because they're geeks and can't get laid? (Not even when `experimenting' with OS-X Macs between rows of iPods, G4s and extensive gay orgies)
BDSM^h^h^h^hBSD users probably enjoy weird practises that few other people are into.
As for BeOS fans... I just figured out where all those goatse.cx links came from.
Because the price of DVD discs are still reasonable, the incentive to pirate movies is still very low. DVD's very sharp picture quality is one reason why VCD's have never really taken off in the USA
analogue artifacts like dot crawl don't bother me much at all - they look natural now. Blocky digital artifacts bother me a lot, they jump out and scream, 'hello I am a compression artifact' at me, (not really, but you see what I mean).
Was the player set up correctly? I heard that one reason for people's negative reaction to DVD was that there is meant to be a *bit* of softening of the image.
That's the theory- I got a new PC with a DVD drive, and wanted a movie to test it out. I picked up a copy of 2001 for UKP 7.00 (US$10.50) and played it. My reaction?
Not impressed... jaggies and conspicuous compression all over the place. Tried another movie, was much more impressed, then went back to 2001. Seems the `softness' setting must have got checked somehow; for a small reduction in sharpness, the picture was vastly improved. Sure, you can still find artifacting if you look for it, but it's not noticable in the vast majority of cases- unless you're looking for it.
DVD isn't perfect, but it beats the heck out of VHS (well, PAL VHS anyway).
OTOH, I agree with you about movies sucking; most of them do. And you didn't mention the higher cost of the disks vs VHS, nor how fragile they seem to be.
Your figures are interesting; IE is always going to make up the vast majority of hits, but isn't it possible that the users of other browsers/OSes got hacked off and stopped using your site? Just an observation. I don't know the economics of the situation, so I can't say how much testing is worth your while.
BTW, one *obvious* solution is to buy computers running those OSes, and test it on them. Sensible solution requires a bit more thought, I'm afraid.
Just as Ford defines what a Taurus or a Focus is and does, so does MS as to what IE is and does. The internet is a celebration of individuality. Everyone has their own 'way' of doing things.
Particularly Microsoft. I applaud their attempts to encourage individuality by setting their own standards. This proves that Bill Gates loves us all (I think).
The Internet didn't become what it was today through standardization- thank God that pesky TCP/IP plan never took off.
They wouldn't risk making that game nowadays; some kid would pretend to be Pac-Man, swallow a couple of the marbles, and before you know it... instant multimillion-$$$ law-suit for Namco and/or the toymakers. Even if the kid had thrown up the marbles 30 seconds later ($20m for distress, obviously)....
You need to read Knuth if you want to be anything above mediocre.
I read the first volume of Knuth, understood a good proportion of it, did most of the exercises, and I'm still so mediocre it hurts. Of course, you never actually said reading Knuth would make you above mediocre, only that you couldn't get there without reading it.:-)
Actually, good book IMHO, but it wasn't what I should have been reading at the time.
Ok smart-ass, try this test: place a magnet on or near your VHS. Now place one on or near your DVD. Jump to the start of the DVD movie and watch it 100 times. Do the same with VHS.
Yeah, but for all practical purposes, which do you consider the bigger problem? I had PowerDVD on my PC complain the very first time I tried playing a movie- one tiny smudge. I've never had a problem with VHS, and I'm not overly careful about magnetism.
VHS tapes aren't international either... try playing a US video on a UK VHS player, and see how far you get. (Hint: it doesn't work)
It doesn't? That sucks; seems my 5 year old (UK PAL) VCR, along with the majority of recent models are being missold with the claim they can play back NTSC tapes.
To be fair, I've never tried this out- the quality might suck for all I know.
It's not, technically, a tax. Money the government makes you pay to them is a tax. Money the government makes you pay to somebody else is not a tax.
Maybe I should check my facts more thoroughly, but the position as I understand it is this- the license fee is for right to own/use the equipment, not to receive BBC TV. The British government give the BBC some money. (Not) coincidentally, this is about equal to the license money collected- but legally, the government could allocate it to resurfacing the Houses of Parliament with Nutella instead. Or whatever.
Of course, this is just the legalistic point of view- no-one except the most pedantic cretin would deny that the license fee funds the BBC- but I'll bet it's convenient for the government (got satellite TV, but can't receive the BBC? Tough! No refund).
The majority (75% I guess) of new VCRs sold in the UK can (supposedly) play back NTSC videos- even the 65.00UKP bottom-of-the-range models.
Your mileage may vary though- I've never used this feature in my VCR. Also, it requires a suitable TV (I guess that means it must handle 60Hz-400 line modified-PAL; my 10 year old Sony portable can do that...)
What annoys me about this story is the way it's being presented here. This isn't a technical story at all; given Robert Mugabe's past record of 'using' valid issues as an excuse to terrorise his own people (black or white), I'd bet my life that this is a political move- Mugabe being responsible for the destruction of Zimbabwe's agricultural system in the first place.
If this had happened in another "poor, starving, bankrupt" African country, the GM-based concerns may have been more relevant- and here's the problem. It seems the poster mentally grepped the original article for tech-friendly fodder- "Yeah! Here's something interesting about GM foods- good excuse to criticize^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h have a valid discussion about them"(*)- and ignored any other issues. In this case, taking part of the story out of context has totally altered what it was really about.
So much (valid) mistrust of Bill Gates in geekland- so why the naive (or lazy) willingness to take everything else at face value?
(*) I don't like them either; primarily because of the reasons they're being pushed- but that's not the point here.
You're right. I checked this out, and came across something called Compact Disc Video (CD-V; not Video-CD, V-CD or VCD); essentially, this is just Laserdisc and Laserdisc/CD hybrids under a different name. This page gives a 1987 date for CD-V, and this page dates the official adoption of Video CD (i.e. MPEG-1) to 1993. There's more here and here about CD-V.
The CD-audio 5" disks are actually hybrid CD-DA/Laserdiscs (digital and analog) which is what threw me. (I was wrong earlier- it's the 8" discs that hold 20 minutes of video; the 5" discs hold a whole 6 minutes worth! Wow.)
I don't remember the phrase `Laserdisc' being used to describe any of these discs (5", 8" or 12"); but then, Laserdisc had pretty much bombed in the UK, so it wouldn't surprise me if they marketed all 3 sizes as CD-V.
This still leaves the issue of when VCD (MPEG-1) was launched. The 1987 date given in the URL above seems very early- I think the author of the webpage meant CD-V/Laserdisc (which I saw marketed in '89), or confused it with VCD... I could be wrong though.
VCD is fifteen years old. It was created in 1987. Now, was that so difficult?
Well, this is kind of strange.
I don't know about the US or South-East Asian markets, but I do remember seeing something called `Video CD' in the UK during (I think) early 1989. There were 3 sizes of disc- ordinary CD size, LP size (12") and another somewhere inbetween. I had a leaflet advertising this format, and saw some discs (5" and 12") on sale. IIRC they were gold coloured. I'm pretty sure that this wasn't the same Video CD format as the one that was introduced with the Philips CDi, because the standard-sized CDs could only hold 20 minutes or so of video (good for music singles, I guess)- hence the reason for the existence of the larger discs. I don't think the store got any more discs in that format after the initial supply, which says it all.
More importantly, when the `modern' VCDs were being marketed in the early 90s, I got the impression that this was a different format to the late-80s 'Video CD's.
Wasn't Mulan an adaption of a traditional Chinese story that Disney made in order to gain favor with the Chinese government- and hence get access to their markets?
Assuming that Disney have a substantial proportion of their merchandise made in China (I haven't researched this at all, but it seems likely), would they be trying to sell it back to the people that made it- and would they buy it? I'd like to find out...
Although the `Atari' seemingly responsible for `Gauntlet Legends' is Atari Games, which was totally separate from Atari Corp (now owned by Infogrames) from '84 on..... Atari Games also did the original Gauntlet ('85? '86?).
Not that this really matters- `Atari' in any guise has been nothing more than a branding exercise since any real sense of continuity was lost in the mid-90s anyway...
Which begs the question; why is the only Atari asset that means anything to the man in the street (ie the logo) always being tampered with?
I don't know which was worse- that stupid box Hasbro put round it (Atari corp) or the bad-early-90s-demo lettering for Atari Games.:-6
A good reason to hate the Atari t-shirt craze:- Wear one of these (as a genuine Atari fan), and you're going to be taken for a freshman wearing the latest flavor-of-the-month corporate branding exercise (superficial tech nostalgia); or some ageing I'm-still-with-it-I-bought-Moby's-latest-album type if you're obviously too old to be a freshman:-/
It'll be worse in (say) two years time; you'll look like one of the above types with a fashion sense that's two years out of date.
Perhaps you'll get away with it in 10 years time. If you're lucky. But watch out; the t-shirt craze nostalgia itself kicks in around 2017.
Of course, you could wear a t-shirt with one of the original Atari logos (i.e. the S/A logo, or the Go board). Unfortunately, both those suck.
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Nah, MegaDrive would cause more confusion- it was the European/Asian name for the Sega Genesis.
Still, it might be worth a go. I'd love to see the look on a Mac owner's face when they switched on their machine and Sonic the Hedgehog popped up. However, features that advanced won't appear until OS-XI.
But VCD's never really took off in the US market
I know; I was responding to the parent which was blaming DVD for VCD not taking off.
I don't know for a fact that your reason is correct, but it's the same one I guessed myself.
If the technology is coming into an established market, it's got to beat the existing product by a mile, or do something reasonably different. The only advantage I could see was random access. Not even recordable- why would I buy one over a VCR?
I've no idea why it took off in Asia; even in a virgin market, wasn't the VCR a better bet?
Frequently, an extensive gay orgy will be taking place between rows of iPods and G4's. Check it out sometime !!!
Yeah, I noticed that even Windows users get curious about different OSes sometimes. Most Windows-owning teenagers go through a phase of interest in Macs, sometimes to the point of experimenting with a Mac, or taking part in "user meetings" such as you describe.
Some go on to buy a Mac, most decide a Mac isn't for them. Others get so paranoid about their liking for Macs that they post anti-Mac flames and masturbate over pictures of Bill Gates.
So, if Mac users are meant to be gay, does this mean that Windows users are straight?
And what about Linux users? They invent their own sexual devices and write kernel drivers for them because they're geeks and can't get laid? (Not even when `experimenting' with OS-X Macs between rows of iPods, G4s and extensive gay orgies)
BDSM^h^h^h^hBSD users probably enjoy weird practises that few other people are into.
As for BeOS fans... I just figured out where all those goatse.cx links came from.
Because the price of DVD discs are still reasonable, the incentive to pirate movies is still very low. DVD's very sharp picture quality is one reason why VCD's have never really taken off in the USA
VCD came out years before DVD.
analogue artifacts like dot crawl don't bother me much at all - they look natural now. Blocky digital artifacts bother me a lot, they jump out and scream, 'hello I am a compression artifact' at me, (not really, but you see what I mean).
Was the player set up correctly? I heard that one reason for people's negative reaction to DVD was that there is meant to be a *bit* of softening of the image.
That's the theory- I got a new PC with a DVD drive, and wanted a movie to test it out. I picked up a copy of 2001 for UKP 7.00 (US$10.50) and played it. My reaction?
Not impressed... jaggies and conspicuous compression all over the place. Tried another movie, was much more impressed, then went back to 2001. Seems the `softness' setting must have got checked somehow; for a small reduction in sharpness, the picture was vastly improved. Sure, you can still find artifacting if you look for it, but it's not noticable in the vast majority of cases- unless you're looking for it.
DVD isn't perfect, but it beats the heck out of VHS (well, PAL VHS anyway).
OTOH, I agree with you about movies sucking; most of them do. And you didn't mention the higher cost of the disks vs VHS, nor how fragile they seem to be.
Your figures are interesting; IE is always going to make up the vast majority of hits, but isn't it possible that the users of other browsers/OSes got hacked off and stopped using your site?
Just an observation. I don't know the economics of the situation, so I can't say how much testing is worth your while.
BTW, one *obvious* solution is to buy computers running those OSes, and test it on them. Sensible solution requires a bit more thought, I'm afraid.
Just as Ford defines what a Taurus or a Focus is and does, so does MS as to what IE is and does. The internet is a celebration of individuality. Everyone has their own 'way' of doing things.
Particularly Microsoft. I applaud their attempts to encourage individuality by setting their own standards. This proves that Bill Gates loves us all (I think).
The Internet didn't become what it was today through standardization- thank God that pesky TCP/IP plan never took off.
They wouldn't risk making that game nowadays; some kid would pretend to be Pac-Man, swallow a couple of the marbles, and before you know it... instant multimillion-$$$ law-suit for Namco and/or the toymakers. Even if the kid had thrown up the marbles 30 seconds later ($20m for distress, obviously)....
You need to read Knuth if you want to be anything above mediocre.
:-)
I read the first volume of Knuth, understood a good proportion of it, did most of the exercises, and I'm still so mediocre it hurts.
Of course, you never actually said reading Knuth would make you above mediocre, only that you couldn't get there without reading it.
Actually, good book IMHO, but it wasn't what I should have been reading at the time.
Ok smart-ass, try this test: place a magnet on or near your VHS. Now place one on or near your DVD. Jump to the start of the DVD movie and watch it 100 times. Do the same with VHS.
Yeah, but for all practical purposes, which do you consider the bigger problem? I had PowerDVD on my PC complain the very first time I tried playing a movie- one tiny smudge. I've never had a problem with VHS, and I'm not overly careful about magnetism.
VHS tapes aren't international either... try playing a US video on a UK VHS player, and see how far you get. (Hint: it doesn't work)
It doesn't? That sucks; seems my 5 year old (UK PAL) VCR, along with the majority of recent models are being missold with the claim they can play back NTSC tapes.
To be fair, I've never tried this out- the quality might suck for all I know.
It's not, technically, a tax. Money the government makes you pay to them is a tax. Money the government makes you pay to somebody else is not a tax.
Maybe I should check my facts more thoroughly, but the position as I understand it is this- the license fee is for right to own/use the equipment, not to receive BBC TV.
The British government give the BBC some money. (Not) coincidentally, this is about equal to the license money collected- but legally, the government could allocate it to resurfacing the Houses of Parliament with Nutella instead. Or whatever.
Of course, this is just the legalistic point of view- no-one except the most pedantic cretin would deny that the license fee funds the BBC- but I'll bet it's convenient for the government (got satellite TV, but can't receive the BBC? Tough! No refund).
The majority (75% I guess) of new VCRs sold in the UK can (supposedly) play back NTSC videos- even the 65.00UKP bottom-of-the-range models.
Your mileage may vary though- I've never used this feature in my VCR. Also, it requires a suitable TV (I guess that means it must handle 60Hz-400 line modified-PAL; my 10 year old Sony portable can do that...)
What annoys me about this story is the way it's being presented here. This isn't a technical story at all; given Robert Mugabe's past record of 'using' valid issues as an excuse to terrorise his own people (black or white), I'd bet my life that this is a political move- Mugabe being responsible for the destruction of Zimbabwe's agricultural system in the first place.
If this had happened in another "poor, starving, bankrupt" African country, the GM-based concerns may have been more relevant- and here's the problem. It seems the poster mentally grepped the original article for tech-friendly fodder- "Yeah! Here's something interesting about GM foods- good excuse to criticize^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h have a valid discussion about them"(*)- and ignored any other issues. In this case, taking part of the story out of context has totally altered what it was really about.
So much (valid) mistrust of Bill Gates in geekland- so why the naive (or lazy) willingness to take everything else at face value?
(*) I don't like them either; primarily because of the reasons they're being pushed- but that's not the point here.
laserdisc, quite sure of it...
You're right. I checked this out, and came across something called Compact Disc Video (CD-V; not Video-CD, V-CD or VCD); essentially, this is just Laserdisc and Laserdisc/CD hybrids under a different name.
This page gives a 1987 date for CD-V, and this page dates the official adoption of Video CD (i.e. MPEG-1) to 1993. There's more here and here about CD-V.
The CD-audio 5" disks are actually hybrid CD-DA/Laserdiscs (digital and analog) which is what threw me. (I was wrong earlier- it's the 8" discs that hold 20 minutes of video; the 5" discs hold a whole 6 minutes worth! Wow.)
I don't remember the phrase `Laserdisc' being used to describe any of these discs (5", 8" or 12"); but then, Laserdisc had pretty much bombed in the UK, so it wouldn't surprise me if they marketed all 3 sizes as CD-V.
This still leaves the issue of when VCD (MPEG-1) was launched. The 1987 date given in the URL above seems very early- I think the author of the webpage meant CD-V/Laserdisc (which I saw marketed in '89), or confused it with VCD... I could be wrong though.
VCD is fifteen years old. It was created in 1987. Now, was that so difficult?
Well, this is kind of strange. I don't know about the US or South-East Asian markets, but I do remember seeing something called `Video CD' in the UK during (I think) early 1989.
There were 3 sizes of disc- ordinary CD size, LP size (12") and another somewhere inbetween. I had a leaflet advertising this format, and saw some discs (5" and 12") on sale. IIRC they were gold coloured.
I'm pretty sure that this wasn't the same Video CD format as the one that was introduced with the Philips CDi, because the standard-sized CDs could only hold 20 minutes or so of video (good for music singles, I guess)- hence the reason for the existence of the larger discs.
I don't think the store got any more discs in that format after the initial supply, which says it all.
More importantly, when the `modern' VCDs were being marketed in the early 90s, I got the impression that this was a different format to the late-80s 'Video CD's.
So, I'm kind of curious about this now...
Wasn't Mulan an adaption of a traditional Chinese story that Disney made in order to gain favor with the Chinese government- and hence get access to their markets?
Assuming that Disney have a substantial proportion of their merchandise made in China (I haven't researched this at all, but it seems likely), would they be trying to sell it back to the people that made it- and would they buy it? I'd like to find out...
Although the `Atari' seemingly responsible for `Gauntlet Legends' is Atari Games, which was totally separate from Atari Corp (now owned by Infogrames) from '84 on..... Atari Games also did the original Gauntlet ('85? '86?).
:-6
Not that this really matters- `Atari' in any guise has been nothing more than a branding exercise since any real sense of continuity was lost in the mid-90s anyway...
Which begs the question; why is the only Atari asset that means anything to the man in the street (ie the logo) always being tampered with? I don't know which was worse- that stupid box Hasbro put round it (Atari corp) or the bad-early-90s-demo lettering for Atari Games.
A good reason to hate the Atari t-shirt craze:- :-/
Wear one of these (as a genuine Atari fan), and you're going to be taken for a freshman wearing the latest flavor-of-the-month corporate branding exercise (superficial tech nostalgia); or some ageing I'm-still-with-it-I-bought-Moby's-latest-album type if you're obviously too old to be a freshman
It'll be worse in (say) two years time; you'll look like one of the above types with a fashion sense that's two years out of date.
Perhaps you'll get away with it in 10 years time. If you're lucky. But watch out; the t-shirt craze nostalgia itself kicks in around 2017.
Of course, you could wear a t-shirt with one of the original Atari logos (i.e. the S/A logo, or the Go board). Unfortunately, both those suck.