When I think of the hardiest hardware, the first thing that comes to mind is the venerable Crown DC-300A amplifier. Mounted in an Anvil flight case, this staple of many rock tours was virtually indestructible, both physically and electrically. Each unit could pump out a steady 600 Watts all day long, and would be pristine after a fall from a 40' semi trailer.
Crown manufactured open-reel tape decks before they got into the amplifier business. Those were designed to travel with missionaries who went into the uncharted wilderness, looking for souls to save. But the name Nagra is synonymous with bulletproof tape decks. Go figure.
The HP calculators of the 70s were nearly indestructible, thanks to their ABS plastic cases and first-rate engineering. For example, the buttons had injection molded characters (rather than painting them on), so they would be readable until the entire button wore away.
Fluke was legendary for making field test instruments that took tremendous amounts of abuse. The first Ampex VTRs (the ones that used 2" tape) have a bulletproof reputation as well. In fact, quite a few TV stations still keep a couple around (after 40 years of constant usage) so they can play back archival footage. And of course, Nikon is well-known for making rugged 35mm SLR cameras.
OTOH, the Apollo astronauts used Hasselblad cameras to take those priceless pictures on the moon. They were also issued special wristwatches. I don't remember who made them. Anybody?
When it comes to wristwatches, the Synchronar 2000 (an early digital watch) was probably the winner in that class. The watch itself was embedded in an epoxy block, which was then fitted into a stainless steel case that provided attachment points for the bracelet, and also housed small magnets that activated tiny reed switches inside the epoxy. These were used to operate the watch. The manufacturer claimed that in testing, they put one on a railroad track, and it survived being run over by a train. That's pretty impressive!
I ran across this when dealing with out of control profiles in a large Citrix farm. My predecessor had written a script that used xcopy and deltree from Windows 95, or something like that. It didn't work.
I wasn't about to wear out my mouse hand copying 3000+ profiles across a couple dozen machines, using the only Microsoft gives us, so I tried a different environment: Cygwin.
The zip program in the Cygwin environment copies everything, given the right switches. Although I haven't tried, I bet that tar, cpio etc. would work as well.
One interesting thing that I found out about the profile copier in Windows is that on one hand it does copy the "files that aren't really files", but on the other, it fails to copy any of your Outlook data. Go figure.
Looks like you're correct in the context of applications, but there's more to that. After looking through one of my 1000+ page books, I noticed that while the other users' processes may continue to run, they are unable to run "interactively". Thus a program like vncserver that runs interactively is likely to find itself in limbo when the 1st user loses his/her desktop.
As I understand it, Fast User Switching simply keeps other users' processes alive (but suspended) while a user at the console starts up his/her own processes. If you're running vncserver manually, from the Start Menu or as a "Run" item in the Registry, going back to the Welcome Screen will cause vncserver to be suspended. Therefore, vncserver must be run as a service. Most VNC distros make it very easy to do this.
The big problem is the Welcome Screen, which must be enabled in order to use Fast User Switching. We know that VNC works fine with the Explorer shell, but my guess is that the Welcome Screen does something to thwart non-MS remote utilities. It could be a matter of permissions; that everybody (including the vncserver service) must have the same priveleges or be in the same group as the Welcome Screen process.
Personally, I use RemotelyAnywhere and GoToMyPC to access Windows machines over the Internet. If you're doing this only on a private network, then no worries. But if this goes across any public networks like the Internet, I strongly suggest finding a solution that provides more secure authentication at the very least.
Since XP does offer RDP, I'd tend to use RDP before I tried VNC. Is there any reason why n-sAC must use VNC?
Palm devices, by their nature, move about quite a bit. This means that if you put a directional antenna directly on the device, you're going to have to learn to hold the device quite still. Not very practical. That leaves three choices:
1. Keep the isotropic antenna that's already in the device, and increase gain at the base station.
2. Void your warranty, open it up, and rig an external non-isotropic antenna (as suggested).
3. Use some kind of passive elements and/or reflectors to create gain.
For #1 above, the obvious solution is to point a directional antenna at the park. But if you want to have a signal at other places in the vicinity of your home, you'll either need to add more gain to your omni base antenna (15dB is a lot of gain already!), or adjust the beam tilt so the sweet spot hits the park. The drawback to either method is that you don't get something for nothing. Increased gain in one direction means negative gain (blind spots) in other directions.
For #2, the drawbacks are that you lose your warranty, and will have to keep the external antenna very still. You need to find a way to mount the external antenna in a fixed position, pointing at the base station. For example, you could use a clamp to fix it to a park bench, and rig something up to adjust it. I bought a $10 fan with a clamp and adjustments at Walgreen's that would do nicely.
Choice #3 is the most difficult to set up. You'll probably have to experiment a lot before you get results. Directional antennae use reflectors and directors in addition to the driven element to produce gain. You already have the driven element somewhere in the Palm. Depending on where it is, you can attach your own reflectors and/or directors to the outside of the Palm, and not void the warranty. It's more alchemy than science, but it can be done. I once taped a "T" antenna that comes with most FM radios to the ceiling, and then taped a few directors in the appropriate locations so that I could pull in a low-power college station. It wasn't pretty, but it worked! You're still going to have to contend with the problem of signal fading every time you move the palm, but it's worth a try.
Reflectors are used to get around obstructions. If you have a building between your base antenna and the park, you could put up a sheet of metal that essentially acts like a mirror to the radio signal. This probably isn't practical in your situation, but it's worth mentioning just in case. Moving the base antenna around could possibly align some existing metal structure to reflect in the right direction.
If you're not familiar with the various types of antennae, and the formulas used to construct them, I suggest going to your local library and checking out the latest ARRL Handbook.
UNIX is the sole property of the Open Group. The Open Group, and the Open Group alone decides what is UNIX. Even SCO has to pass the Open Group's tests in order to call their product "UNIX".
"Unix" or any other capitalization and/or hyphenation schemes are a violation of the UNIX trademark.
"UNIX" is not a generic term. The Open Group makes it clear exactly what it means and how it can be used. Other copyrights that have become generic have become so because of widespread public usage. Most people don't even use UNIX. In fact, the vast majority of the world's population have no idea whatsoever of what UNIX means.
All of those "BSD" distributions, including the "underpinnings" of Apple's OSX product share one common ancestor: 4.4BSD-Lite. 4.4BSD-Lite contains absolutely no UNIX code. That was decided conclusively, and in painstaking detail during litigation between USL and the U of C. AFAIK none of the subsequent distributions have ever met the Open Group's definition of UNIX. Therefore, the current "BSD" distributions have neither the UNIX trademark nor the UNIX lineage.
Considering the above, Apple is clearly in the wrong. To put it another way, a street peddler who sells $25 "Rolex" watches could argue that the Rolex name has become generic, but a $25 watch is going to work like a $25 watch no matter what is written on it.
Indeed. Cringely doesn't seem to have any clue that the Open Group is the one and only entity that can call something "UNIX". SCO can't do a damn thing about that! If AIX contains any code licensed from SCO, they can (and may already have) opt to replace it with their own code. So AIX is a non-issue.
As far as Microsoft goes, I find it interesting that the Santa Cruz Operation (a.k.a. SCO) was started to sell Xenix, Microsoft's own UNIX clone, before they ever had a real UNIX product. That irony was lost on Cringely. And why would Microsoft throw away 15 years of kernel development to port Windows APIs to UNIX? Especially since the NT OS is finally getting stable enough for production use! Well, Cringely doesn't have any idea what Connectix does...
KDE Rules the Desktop
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KDE 3.1 Released
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Every time I read about how "Linux is not ready for the desktop", I just laugh. It's KDE that's the real desktop star, and yes it is ready! I've been using KDE at home since KDE2 came out, and find myself using Windows at work less and less.
When Windows XP came out, I gave it a fair shot. I didn't boot Linux/X/KDE for 3 months. Outlook was a giant pain, compared with KMail. IE was a nightmare, and I had to install Phoenix to escape unwanted programs and scripts. Easy CD Creator had me longing for X-CD-Roast. And XP crashed way too often.
Now KDE is getting even better. The SSH stuff is exactly what I need! Life is good.
Who needs all of these complicated schemes? I just filter the sending domains as they come. Filter every sender containing "specials", "optin", "offer", "special", "deal", "email", "reward", "value", "promotion", "special" and "super, and all subject lines starting with "friend", and 85% is taken care of right away. So far my formula has had no false positives.
The VHS standard isn't open any more than Betamax's is - you still have to pay royalties to use it and you can't change it.
You're missing the point. Sony dictated what Betamax was, and other companies were only able to buy licenses. JVC formed a consortium with several other companies to draft the VHS standards. So if you were a contributing member, yes you could change VHS. The smaller companies that just wanted to license the technology could do so for a lot less than they could from Sony.
Sony, rightly or wrongly in the "nice" stakes, kept Betamax to itself, and experimented with all these things and more and evolved Betamax into something much better than it was. They then sold it to the professional community for $5,000+ per VCR
Are you implying that only Sony improved their products? Not so.
Good stuff!! Nice to see some more authoritative information.
I remember watching a Letterman segment taped on-location, and noticing the 1" portable recorder they were using. They must have switched back at CBS. Back then they were still doing "60 Minutes" on film!
As far as backwards compatibility was concerned, I think it needs to be clarified that Betacam decks were NOT backwards-compatible with Betamax. And although the cassette shells looked very similar, every single part inside was different. So it's erroneous to say that Betacam used Betamax tapes.
BTW, Betamax also used color under, not separate tracks. I never saw any 2" helical decks, although the 2" quads are still around here and there. They're so stable they don't even require a TBC!
I still have a U-matic deck around here somewhere. {I'm the AC you replied to, BTW.) My TV career got started about the time U-matic came out, in the early 70s, and most of my work was done on 3/4" tape. When the formats wars were raging, I had U-matic, Betamax and VHS at home, so I could take my pick. I wanted a 1" C VTR too, but couldn't afford one.
Naturally I used my U-matic deck mostly for professional work. I've always found VHS decks better for timeshifting. Panasonic had the best ergonomics for that IMHO. Betamax tried to be all things to all people, and weren't very good for the things I wanted to do at home.
My station didn't use any of the 1/2" formats, so I was a spectator, except for the occasional job the IBEW local threw my way. The engineers that had to work on them full time weren't terribly happy with them IIRC. They needed constant recalibration, and went haywire on-air a lot more than U-matic.
I didn't hear too many complaints about M-II, although to be fair the station that used M-II was a NABET shop, so I didn't have as much contact.
I don't recall an explanation of BetaMax's supposed superiority.
The Betamax specification specifies a maximum luminance bandwidth of (roughly) 3 MHz, producing a horizontal resolution of 240 lines per NTSC testing methods. The first VHS specification had a luma bandwidth that was only.2 MHz less, and so the number of lines was 220 or so. In practice, this difference was negligible to the home viewer, and was only of value to salespeople who bombarded the hapless shopper with a slew of numbers that neither really appreciated the significance of.
So you see, it was nothing more than a pissing contest that proved nothing. You can brag all day that your penis is 2mm longer than your friend's, but if you can't get any girls, what does it matter?
In the mid 80s JVC amended the VHS specifications to allow a hair more luma bandwidth than Betamax, and at that point, all technical superiority that Betamax owners could boast of came to an end. Later on there were extensions to the basic formats, called S-VHS and Super-Betamax. Again Sony went for brinksmanship in numbers, boasting 400 lines of horizontal resolution to S-VHS's 350. The problem was that NTSC video signals only had a resolution of 330 lines to begin with, so the big numbers got you nothing.
In the 1980s, advances in technology got to the point that Sony and Matsushita (Panasonic) started selling compact VCR decks for electronic news-gathering (ENG) use, that could be connected directly to a video camera. Sony's was called Betacam, and used a cassette that was the same basic size and shape as the Betamax cassette, but that's all they had in common. Betacam was a component video recording format, while Betamax and VHS were composite color-under formats. "Color-under" meant the color information was recorded separately from the luminance (think "black and white") signal. Composite recorded the red, green and blue output from the camera without first encoding into NTSC composite. This had a number of technical advantages for video production, but was vastly more expensive.
Betamax recorders were designed to take the tape out of the cassette, and thread it into the machine whenever a tape was inserted. This was done to save time, since the Beta tape path was long and convoluted, taking a long time to load. The problem was that if the deck malfunctioned (and they often did!), your tape was stuck inside the machine, and couldn't be removed without an expensive service call. In contrast, VHS tapes stayed in their shells until you wanted to use them. This made for much faster rewinding, and saved many tapes.
Tape size? VHS also uses 1/2" tape. So what? No, Betacam is in a completely different "family" than Betamax.
It's too bad that you have failed to grasp the point of the article--that Betamax is NOT superior. Maybe your father in-law can explain it to you when he tells you how Betacam records in a totally different way.
It'd sure be nice if folks who write garbage like the article in The Guardian would at least try to research the info first.
How ironic. If you had bothered to do a little research, you would have noticed that Betacam is a different word than Betamax. Betacam SX is 4:2:2 digital, while Betamax is color-under analog. As different as night and day.
OTOH, all I have to do to beat you at your own game is mention that JVC makes a HDTV deck, so therefore all VHS is superior. Take your pick.
By the way, coming up with reasons why you did something - after the fact - is rationalizing. That is what this article is: a rationalization.
Yeah...speak for yourself, foo'. Your "proof" of Betamax's alleged superiority is based on you confusing two similarly-named, but radically different product lines. All you're proving is that you'll accept anything that you think supports your prejudice. That is precisely why the "Betamax is better" myth has persisted.
Another example of strong and ugly vs elegant and beautiful in a marketing fight: Windows 95 vs OS/2 Warp. OS/2 was a far superior operating system to Windows 95 but it lost the marketing fight.
First of all, what you call "elegant and beautiful" is purely subjective, and only your opinion. OS/2 had already failed in the marketplace before Windows 95 ever came out. The fact that Warp 3 didn't even come with a networking stack at a time when the Internet was exploding, and the fact that it couldn't run Win32 programs sealed OS/2's fate.
VHS was lucky to get about 225 lines of resolution.
And Betamax had 240. Then VHS-HQ came along and they were even at 240 lines. It's important to remember that the single technical lead that Betamax had only lasted for a half-dozen years! Even then, 99% of the people who bought the things didn't notice any difference.
S-VHS was a lot better with 350 lines of resolution. However, ED Beta whomped them all with 500 lines of resolution.
That's the kind of specsmanship that parts clueless consumers from their money, but what use was it? After all, NTSC video tops out at 330 lines. The reason why S-VHS tops out at 350 lines is because more lines == more bandwidth, and more bandwidth == more noise. So from an engineering perspective, adding 170 useless lines of resolution is technically inferior.
Finally, what about VHS HQ?... All VHS decks have been HQ for over 5 years, they just dropped the name since every one had it anyway.
More like 15-20 years. So what if not 100% were HQ in the beginning? The important thing is that the best VHS decks have been comparable to the best Betamax decks for far longer than they have not. And VHS has always offered superior tape handling for the home user.
The problem is that what you're saying is similar to "Farmer Brown's oranges taste good, so therefore his apples taste good too." Betamax and Betacam are apples and oranges. They share exactly two things in common: 1) the general shape of the tape shell, and 2) the "Beta" prefix in their names. So sure, the Beta... trademark has succeeded. But Betamax has failed.
Yes, Sony has been successful in the professional marketplace. So has Matsushita (Panasonic) and JVC, both VHS vendors. As a matter of fact, Panasonic's AG-1900 series VHS editing decks continue to be very popular in industrial video applications, long after the demise of Betamax.
Q. And saying you oculd only record an hour?! If that is correct, then how could video stores have two hour movies on tape?
A. They had to rent two tapes for one movie. That negated the size advantage Betamax tapes had, and was a logistical nightmare. Later on, when slower tape speeds allowed longer recording, they could fit a whole movie on one tape, but then the picture quality was clearly inferior to VHS.
Those features are pretty lame. Some of them were in fact released first on VHS! So all in all, they aren't unique to Betamax, so they're no evidence of alleged Betamax superiority.
The only thing that Betamax beat VHS in was horizontal resolution. In the beginning, Betamax had 240 lines to VHSs 220. Big deal. Both were very short of the 330 lines broadcast. By the mid-80s, VHS had made up that difference, and emerged as victor on all technical fronts.
The Betacam format was not evolved from Betamax. Cam uses a radically different method of encoding the signals onto tape. It's worth noting that while Betacam was once popular among broadcasters, that it has been all but replaced by digital tape formats. The reason for that is because Betacam used a lot of analog voodoo to get a broadcast quality signal onto what was then a very small tape. Because Betacam took analog to its limits, it often fell down on the job. It was all too common to see a Betacam playback picture freak out and disappear into blotches of solid colors. That's why to this day, the 1" videotape format still rules in broadcasting.
No, TV stations do NOT use Betamax. It's not broadcast-quality. TV stations do use other Sony products, but not Betamax.
1. VHS picture quality was crap prior to super VHS. A. Same thing Betamax. Their specs were nearly identical.
2. There were MANY, MANY (read in direct contraditction to the author) Beta tapes when my family first bought a VCR at all of the shops in Victoria, Australia. VHS had -none-!!! A. I guess you never read the article. The author's whole point was that Betamax had the lead at first, then lost it because it was inferior all-around.
3. Betamax players cost much more than VHS due to licensing fees (read: cheap cost the author forgot to mention) Again, read the article.
4. The betamax tapes were smaller and could not record as much (agreed) OK
5. VHS quality noticeably improved with super vhs (again, the author forgot to mention). If VHS was "so perfect in the first place", this would be an irrelevant point. I see a straw man. If Betamax was so perfect in the first place, why was SuperBeta introduced? Slewn by his own sword, LOL.
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When I think of the hardiest hardware, the first thing that comes to mind is the venerable Crown DC-300A amplifier. Mounted in an Anvil flight case, this staple of many rock tours was virtually indestructible, both physically and electrically. Each unit could pump out a steady 600 Watts all day long, and would be pristine after a fall from a 40' semi trailer.
Crown manufactured open-reel tape decks before they got into the amplifier business. Those were designed to travel with missionaries who went into the uncharted wilderness, looking for souls to save. But the name Nagra is synonymous with bulletproof tape decks. Go figure.
The HP calculators of the 70s were nearly indestructible, thanks to their ABS plastic cases and first-rate engineering. For example, the buttons had injection molded characters (rather than painting them on), so they would be readable until the entire button wore away.
Fluke was legendary for making field test instruments that took tremendous amounts of abuse. The first Ampex VTRs (the ones that used 2" tape) have a bulletproof reputation as well. In fact, quite a few TV stations still keep a couple around (after 40 years of constant usage) so they can play back archival footage. And of course, Nikon is well-known for making rugged 35mm SLR cameras.
OTOH, the Apollo astronauts used Hasselblad cameras to take those priceless pictures on the moon. They were also issued special wristwatches. I don't remember who made them. Anybody?
When it comes to wristwatches, the Synchronar 2000 (an early digital watch) was probably the winner in that class. The watch itself was embedded in an epoxy block, which was then fitted into a stainless steel case that provided attachment points for the bracelet, and also housed small magnets that activated tiny reed switches inside the epoxy. These were used to operate the watch. The manufacturer claimed that in testing, they put one on a railroad track, and it survived being run over by a train. That's pretty impressive!
I ran across this when dealing with out of control profiles in a large Citrix farm. My predecessor had written a script that used xcopy and deltree from Windows 95, or something like that. It didn't work.
I wasn't about to wear out my mouse hand copying 3000+ profiles across a couple dozen machines, using the only Microsoft gives us, so I tried a different environment: Cygwin.
The zip program in the Cygwin environment copies everything, given the right switches. Although I haven't tried, I bet that tar, cpio etc. would work as well.
One interesting thing that I found out about the profile copier in Windows is that on one hand it does copy the "files that aren't really files", but on the other, it fails to copy any of your Outlook data. Go figure.
Looks like you're correct in the context of applications, but there's more to that. After looking through one of my 1000+ page books, I noticed that while the other users' processes may continue to run, they are unable to run "interactively". Thus a program like vncserver that runs interactively is likely to find itself in limbo when the 1st user loses his/her desktop.
I concur with this.
As I understand it, Fast User Switching simply keeps other users' processes alive (but suspended) while a user at the console starts up his/her own processes. If you're running vncserver manually, from the Start Menu or as a "Run" item in the Registry, going back to the Welcome Screen will cause vncserver to be suspended. Therefore, vncserver must be run as a service. Most VNC distros make it very easy to do this.
The big problem is the Welcome Screen, which must be enabled in order to use Fast User Switching. We know that VNC works fine with the Explorer shell, but my guess is that the Welcome Screen does something to thwart non-MS remote utilities. It could be a matter of permissions; that everybody (including the vncserver service) must have the same priveleges or be in the same group as the Welcome Screen process.
Personally, I use RemotelyAnywhere and GoToMyPC to access Windows machines over the Internet. If you're doing this only on a private network, then no worries. But if this goes across any public networks like the Internet, I strongly suggest finding a solution that provides more secure authentication at the very least.
Since XP does offer RDP, I'd tend to use RDP before I tried VNC. Is there any reason why n-sAC must use VNC?
Palm devices, by their nature, move about quite a bit. This means that if you put a directional antenna directly on the device, you're going to have to learn to hold the device quite still. Not very practical. That leaves three choices:
1. Keep the isotropic antenna that's already in the device, and increase gain at the base station.
2. Void your warranty, open it up, and rig an external non-isotropic antenna (as suggested).
3. Use some kind of passive elements and/or reflectors to create gain.
For #1 above, the obvious solution is to point a directional antenna at the park. But if you want to have a signal at other places in the vicinity of your home, you'll either need to add more gain to your omni base antenna (15dB is a lot of gain already!), or adjust the beam tilt so the sweet spot hits the park. The drawback to either method is that you don't get something for nothing. Increased gain in one direction means negative gain (blind spots) in other directions.
For #2, the drawbacks are that you lose your warranty, and will have to keep the external antenna very still. You need to find a way to mount the external antenna in a fixed position, pointing at the base station. For example, you could use a clamp to fix it to a park bench, and rig something up to adjust it. I bought a $10 fan with a clamp and adjustments at Walgreen's that would do nicely.
Choice #3 is the most difficult to set up. You'll probably have to experiment a lot before you get results. Directional antennae use reflectors and directors in addition to the driven element to produce gain. You already have the driven element somewhere in the Palm. Depending on where it is, you can attach your own reflectors and/or directors to the outside of the Palm, and not void the warranty. It's more alchemy than science, but it can be done. I once taped a "T" antenna that comes with most FM radios to the ceiling, and then taped a few directors in the appropriate locations so that I could pull in a low-power college station. It wasn't pretty, but it worked! You're still going to have to contend with the problem of signal fading every time you move the palm, but it's worth a try.
Reflectors are used to get around obstructions. If you have a building between your base antenna and the park, you could put up a sheet of metal that essentially acts like a mirror to the radio signal. This probably isn't practical in your situation, but it's worth mentioning just in case. Moving the base antenna around could possibly align some existing metal structure to reflect in the right direction.
If you're not familiar with the various types of antennae, and the formulas used to construct them, I suggest going to your local library and checking out the latest ARRL Handbook.
Considering the above, Apple is clearly in the wrong. To put it another way, a street peddler who sells $25 "Rolex" watches could argue that the Rolex name has become generic, but a $25 watch is going to work like a $25 watch no matter what is written on it.
Hopefully the __SCO__ is part of the iBCS module that allows SCO binaries to be run in Linux.
Indeed. Cringely doesn't seem to have any clue that the Open Group is the one and only entity that can call something "UNIX". SCO can't do a damn thing about that! If AIX contains any code licensed from SCO, they can (and may already have) opt to replace it with their own code. So AIX is a non-issue.
As far as Microsoft goes, I find it interesting that the Santa Cruz Operation (a.k.a. SCO) was started to sell Xenix, Microsoft's own UNIX clone, before they ever had a real UNIX product. That irony was lost on Cringely. And why would Microsoft throw away 15 years of kernel development to port Windows APIs to UNIX? Especially since the NT OS is finally getting stable enough for production use! Well, Cringely doesn't have any idea what Connectix does...
Every time I read about how "Linux is not ready for the desktop", I just laugh. It's KDE that's the real desktop star, and yes it is ready! I've been using KDE at home since KDE2 came out, and find myself using Windows at work less and less.
When Windows XP came out, I gave it a fair shot. I didn't boot Linux/X/KDE for 3 months. Outlook was a giant pain, compared with KMail. IE was a nightmare, and I had to install Phoenix to escape unwanted programs and scripts. Easy CD Creator had me longing for X-CD-Roast. And XP crashed way too often.
Now KDE is getting even better. The SSH stuff is exactly what I need! Life is good.
Who needs all of these complicated schemes? I just filter the sending domains as they come. Filter every sender containing "specials", "optin", "offer", "special", "deal", "email", "reward", "value", "promotion", "special" and "super, and all subject lines starting with "friend", and 85% is taken care of right away. So far my formula has had no false positives.
I could ask who modded your flameage up. Learn the meaning of "analogy" and try again, k?
The VHS standard isn't open any more than Betamax's is - you still have to pay royalties to use it and you can't change it.
You're missing the point. Sony dictated what Betamax was, and other companies were only able to buy licenses. JVC formed a consortium with several other companies to draft the VHS standards. So if you were a contributing member, yes you could change VHS. The smaller companies that just wanted to license the technology could do so for a lot less than they could from Sony.
Sony, rightly or wrongly in the "nice" stakes, kept Betamax to itself, and experimented with all these things and more and evolved Betamax into something much better than it was. They then sold it to the professional community for $5,000+ per VCR
Are you implying that only Sony improved their products? Not so.
Good stuff!! Nice to see some more authoritative information.
I remember watching a Letterman segment taped on-location, and noticing the 1" portable recorder they were using. They must have switched back at CBS. Back then they were still doing "60 Minutes" on film!
As far as backwards compatibility was concerned, I think it needs to be clarified that Betacam decks were NOT backwards-compatible with Betamax. And although the cassette shells looked very similar, every single part inside was different. So it's erroneous to say that Betacam used Betamax tapes.
BTW, Betamax also used color under, not separate tracks. I never saw any 2" helical decks, although the 2" quads are still around here and there. They're so stable they don't even require a TBC!
I still have a U-matic deck around here somewhere. {I'm the AC you replied to, BTW.) My TV career got started about the time U-matic came out, in the early 70s, and most of my work was done on 3/4" tape. When the formats wars were raging, I had U-matic, Betamax and VHS at home, so I could take my pick. I wanted a 1" C VTR too, but couldn't afford one.
Naturally I used my U-matic deck mostly for professional work. I've always found VHS decks better for timeshifting. Panasonic had the best ergonomics for that IMHO. Betamax tried to be all things to all people, and weren't very good for the things I wanted to do at home.
My station didn't use any of the 1/2" formats, so I was a spectator, except for the occasional job the IBEW local threw my way. The engineers that had to work on them full time weren't terribly happy with them IIRC. They needed constant recalibration, and went haywire on-air a lot more than U-matic.
I didn't hear too many complaints about M-II, although to be fair the station that used M-II was a NABET shop, so I didn't have as much contact.
I don't recall an explanation of BetaMax's supposed superiority.
.2 MHz less, and so the number of lines was 220 or so. In practice, this difference was negligible to the home viewer, and was only of value to salespeople who bombarded the hapless shopper with a slew of numbers that neither really appreciated the significance of.
The Betamax specification specifies a maximum luminance bandwidth of (roughly) 3 MHz, producing a horizontal resolution of 240 lines per NTSC testing methods. The first VHS specification had a luma bandwidth that was only
So you see, it was nothing more than a pissing contest that proved nothing. You can brag all day that your penis is 2mm longer than your friend's, but if you can't get any girls, what does it matter?
In the mid 80s JVC amended the VHS specifications to allow a hair more luma bandwidth than Betamax, and at that point, all technical superiority that Betamax owners could boast of came to an end. Later on there were extensions to the basic formats, called S-VHS and Super-Betamax. Again Sony went for brinksmanship in numbers, boasting 400 lines of horizontal resolution to S-VHS's 350. The problem was that NTSC video signals only had a resolution of 330 lines to begin with, so the big numbers got you nothing.
In the 1980s, advances in technology got to the point that Sony and Matsushita (Panasonic) started selling compact VCR decks for electronic news-gathering (ENG) use, that could be connected directly to a video camera. Sony's was called Betacam, and used a cassette that was the same basic size and shape as the Betamax cassette, but that's all they had in common. Betacam was a component video recording format, while Betamax and VHS were composite color-under formats. "Color-under" meant the color information was recorded separately from the luminance (think "black and white") signal. Composite recorded the red, green and blue output from the camera without first encoding into NTSC composite. This had a number of technical advantages for video production, but was vastly more expensive.
Betamax recorders were designed to take the tape out of the cassette, and thread it into the machine whenever a tape was inserted. This was done to save time, since the Beta tape path was long and convoluted, taking a long time to load. The problem was that if the deck malfunctioned (and they often did!), your tape was stuck inside the machine, and couldn't be removed without an expensive service call. In contrast, VHS tapes stayed in their shells until you wanted to use them. This made for much faster rewinding, and saved many tapes.
Tape size? VHS also uses 1/2" tape. So what? No, Betacam is in a completely different "family" than Betamax.
It's too bad that you have failed to grasp the point of the article--that Betamax is NOT superior. Maybe your father in-law can explain it to you when he tells you how Betacam records in a totally different way.
It'd sure be nice if folks who write garbage like the article in The Guardian would at least try to research the info first.
How ironic. If you had bothered to do a little research, you would have noticed that Betacam is a different word than Betamax. Betacam SX is 4:2:2 digital, while Betamax is color-under analog. As different as night and day.
OTOH, all I have to do to beat you at your own game is mention that JVC makes a HDTV deck, so therefore all VHS is superior. Take your pick.
Gawd are you dense!
Repeat after me: MAX != CAM, MAX != CAM, MAX != CAM...
Somebody mod this guy down to "Emily Litella". No, even lower; at least Emily said "never mind" after she was corrected!
By the way, coming up with reasons why you did something - after the fact - is rationalizing. That is what this article is: a rationalization.
Yeah...speak for yourself, foo'. Your "proof" of Betamax's alleged superiority is based on you confusing two similarly-named, but radically different product lines. All you're proving is that you'll accept anything that you think supports your prejudice. That is precisely why the "Betamax is better" myth has persisted.
Another example of strong and ugly vs elegant and beautiful in a marketing fight: Windows 95 vs OS/2 Warp. OS/2 was a far superior operating system to Windows 95 but it lost the marketing fight.
First of all, what you call "elegant and beautiful" is purely subjective, and only your opinion. OS/2 had already failed in the marketplace before Windows 95 ever came out. The fact that Warp 3 didn't even come with a networking stack at a time when the Internet was exploding, and the fact that it couldn't run Win32 programs sealed OS/2's fate.
VHS was lucky to get about 225 lines of resolution.
... All VHS decks have been HQ for over 5 years, they just dropped the name since every one had it anyway.
And Betamax had 240. Then VHS-HQ came along and they were even at 240 lines. It's important to remember that the single technical lead that Betamax had only lasted for a half-dozen years! Even then, 99% of the people who bought the things didn't notice any difference.
S-VHS was a lot better with 350 lines of resolution. However, ED Beta whomped them all with 500 lines of resolution.
That's the kind of specsmanship that parts clueless consumers from their money, but what use was it? After all, NTSC video tops out at 330 lines. The reason why S-VHS tops out at 350 lines is because more lines == more bandwidth, and more bandwidth == more noise. So from an engineering perspective, adding 170 useless lines of resolution is technically inferior.
Finally, what about VHS HQ?
More like 15-20 years. So what if not 100% were HQ in the beginning? The important thing is that the best VHS decks have been comparable to the best Betamax decks for far longer than they have not. And VHS has always offered superior tape handling for the home user.
The problem is that what you're saying is similar to "Farmer Brown's oranges taste good, so therefore his apples taste good too." Betamax and Betacam are apples and oranges. They share exactly two things in common: 1) the general shape of the tape shell, and 2) the "Beta" prefix in their names. So sure, the Beta... trademark has succeeded. But Betamax has failed.
Yes, Sony has been successful in the professional marketplace. So has Matsushita (Panasonic) and JVC, both VHS vendors. As a matter of fact, Panasonic's AG-1900 series VHS editing decks continue to be very popular in industrial video applications, long after the demise of Betamax.
Q. And saying you oculd only record an hour?! If that is correct, then how could video stores have two hour movies on tape?
A. They had to rent two tapes for one movie. That negated the size advantage Betamax tapes had, and was a logistical nightmare. Later on, when slower tape speeds allowed longer recording, they could fit a whole movie on one tape, but then the picture quality was clearly inferior to VHS.
Those features are pretty lame. Some of them were in fact released first on VHS! So all in all, they aren't unique to Betamax, so they're no evidence of alleged Betamax superiority. The only thing that Betamax beat VHS in was horizontal resolution. In the beginning, Betamax had 240 lines to VHSs 220. Big deal. Both were very short of the 330 lines broadcast. By the mid-80s, VHS had made up that difference, and emerged as victor on all technical fronts.
The Betacam format was not evolved from Betamax. Cam uses a radically different method of encoding the signals onto tape. It's worth noting that while Betacam was once popular among broadcasters, that it has been all but replaced by digital tape formats. The reason for that is because Betacam used a lot of analog voodoo to get a broadcast quality signal onto what was then a very small tape. Because Betacam took analog to its limits, it often fell down on the job. It was all too common to see a Betacam playback picture freak out and disappear into blotches of solid colors. That's why to this day, the 1" videotape format still rules in broadcasting.
No, TV stations do NOT use Betamax. It's not broadcast-quality. TV stations do use other Sony products, but not Betamax.
1. VHS picture quality was crap prior to super VHS.
A. Same thing Betamax. Their specs were nearly identical.
2. There were MANY, MANY (read in direct contraditction to the author) Beta tapes when my family first bought a VCR at all of the shops in Victoria, Australia. VHS had -none-!!!
A. I guess you never read the article. The author's whole point was that Betamax had the lead at first, then lost it because it was inferior all-around.
3. Betamax players cost much more than VHS due to licensing fees (read: cheap cost the author forgot to mention)
Again, read the article.
4. The betamax tapes were smaller and could not record as much (agreed)
OK
5. VHS quality noticeably improved with super vhs (again, the author forgot to mention). If VHS was "so perfect in the first place", this would be an irrelevant point.
I see a straw man.
If Betamax was so perfect in the first place, why was SuperBeta introduced? Slewn by his own sword, LOL.