Yah, that's why I still have a lot of laserdiscs lying around. The video quality is pretty good (slightly less than DVD), the sound is incredible (uncompressed PCM, and sometimes even AC3), and they work in every player ever made. And the extra neat bonus is that they don't have any Macrovision, or any other form of copy protection.
I kinda miss the laserdisc days, since they really cared about compatability. When laserdisc started to implement Dolby Digital, they decided that they needed to do it in a way which would make sure that older players weren't obsolete. Instead of just telling everyone that in order to watch a newer movie, you had to buy a new player, they instead created discs that stored mono analog on one track, modulated Dolby Digital on the other track, and then Digital PCM on the digital tracks. Thus, all generations of players (Analog, Digital and AC3) could all play the same discs. Truly impressive.
Thanks for the backup on this one. I was just commenting how back in the 80's and 90's it was really easy to mess up a dos box with a simple batch file. The batch files I was writing were like 4 - 5 lines long, and literally incapable of spreading. They were just used to mess with my buddies a little bit.
The point that I was hoping to make was that a simple 4 - 5 line batch file made by a little kid is still capable of messing up an MS box because of things like changing the hosts file or renaming boot.ini. In a sense, not a lot has changed over the years.
When I was younger, I used to write little batch files that would mess up my friends autoexec.bat file. I would give them a game on a disk, and then tell them to play the game they had to type go (go.bat). The batch file would then backup their autoexec.bat file and replace it with my tampered version. Then when they rebooted their computer, blammo.
I would have it execute gwbasic programs that would continiously loop "your computer is screwed", or that would just bleep out sounds from the PC speaker. I even wrote a program that would pretend to format your floppy drive (a continous loop that constantly tried to load a file from A:>)
People were so clueless they actually thought they had a virus. After people started using 2000 and XP I kinda figured that this sort of simple fake hack was over, but then I forgot about the hosts file. I think I'm goona change my grandma's computer so that google.ca resolves to playboy.com:)
Another simple fake hack is to erase the boot.ini file. It makes your uncle think his hard drive is mangled.
Ah windows, it's the one constant I can always rely on.
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Yah, that's why I still have a lot of laserdiscs lying around. The video quality is pretty good (slightly less than DVD), the sound is incredible (uncompressed PCM, and sometimes even AC3), and they work in every player ever made. And the extra neat bonus is that they don't have any Macrovision, or any other form of copy protection. I kinda miss the laserdisc days, since they really cared about compatability. When laserdisc started to implement Dolby Digital, they decided that they needed to do it in a way which would make sure that older players weren't obsolete. Instead of just telling everyone that in order to watch a newer movie, you had to buy a new player, they instead created discs that stored mono analog on one track, modulated Dolby Digital on the other track, and then Digital PCM on the digital tracks. Thus, all generations of players (Analog, Digital and AC3) could all play the same discs. Truly impressive.
Thanks for the backup on this one. I was just commenting how back in the 80's and 90's it was really easy to mess up a dos box with a simple batch file. The batch files I was writing were like 4 - 5 lines long, and literally incapable of spreading. They were just used to mess with my buddies a little bit.
The point that I was hoping to make was that a simple 4 - 5 line batch file made by a little kid is still capable of messing up an MS box because of things like changing the hosts file or renaming boot.ini. In a sense, not a lot has changed over the years.
When I was younger, I used to write little batch files that would mess up my friends autoexec.bat file. I would give them a game on a disk, and then tell them to play the game they had to type go (go.bat). The batch file would then backup their autoexec.bat file and replace it with my tampered version. Then when they rebooted their computer, blammo.
I would have it execute gwbasic programs that would continiously loop "your computer is screwed", or that would just bleep out sounds from the PC speaker. I even wrote a program that would pretend to format your floppy drive (a continous loop that constantly tried to load a file from A:>)
People were so clueless they actually thought they had a virus. After people started using 2000 and XP I kinda figured that this sort of simple fake hack was over, but then I forgot about the hosts file. I think I'm goona change my grandma's computer so that google.ca resolves to playboy.com :)
Another simple fake hack is to erase the boot.ini file. It makes your uncle think his hard drive is mangled.
Ah windows, it's the one constant I can always rely on.