Really clever people like Atari used stereo data recorders with their machines. On software like 'Conversational Spanish', one track would load data while the other talked away giving examples of words & pronounciation etc. Some games had the load music on the audio track for extra quality.
1. Invent/discover something cool
2. Tell everyone about it
3. ????
4. NO Profit
It's sad to say that here in the UK we never learn and have a long and distinguished history of brilliant research followed by total fumbling of the ball and making no money out of the discoveries whatsoever.
Back in the 80's, so many people were starting bands and had their own 4-track cassette that record companies started releasing singles in the single sided 4 track cassette format. You could just play it as was or you could remix it to your hearts content.
True but there's not a huge amount to be made in IT book publishing unless the ones you know are just moving in to generic fiction? I know a few (still jobbing) journos who have several books under their belt and they all say it's a vanity thing and that in terms of GBP/hour, it's less than they ever get/got for magazine writing.
In the UK PC magazines have been closing in recent years at a fiendish rate although blogs or forums have just sped up something that was already happening.
Magazines go through cycles. When something new comes out or is changing in popularity, magazines flourish as people try to learn as much as possible about a subject. Then once things get to a point where said item is either so easy to use, you don't need help or becomes so mainstream people just accept the state of the art as is and don't bother investigating further.
The result is sales fall, ad revenue falls and the market consolidates and we're seeing that now in the IT press.
Previous victims include HiFi magazines - huge in the 70's and 80's when you could read all about fine tuning turntables, building concrete speaker stands and all that good stuff. Then CD and reasonably OK stuff for cheap came out and suddenly only real HiFi nuts cared - for most people an all-in-one set up was good enough. In the UK HiFi magazines went from a dozen and a half titles to 2 or 3 thin efforts.
Further back, we were awash with Microwave magazines, freezer magazines and so on. Once people became confortable with the products, they stopped buying them.
Most editors I've worked with since about 2000 reckoned IT mags in print were dead or about to be and it's surpring they've lasted as long as they have. You want reviews? Why wait a month - get it online the day it comes out. Help? Tutorials? it's all here for free on the web. The only real difference is the quality. Some websites go in to far more detail on a product than a magazine would ever bother but equally, general editorial tends to be better in a magazine where an editor has tidied up bad prose or woolly thinking.
>I am guessing you mean 24 as in the Los Angeles CTU fictional series, rather than BBC News 24?
One is made by Fox, one isn't. That ought to be a bit of a pointer.
>Indians are fast, accurate and cheap:
Hmm. All the stuff we've outsourced has been less that good. They come here, we do knowledge transfer, they go home, 6 months later leave the company and we're back to square one. The code is often so buggy it won't even compile. They're great at doing all the CMM stuff so get to tick all the boxes that keep management happy but the reality is the onshore people have to do twice the work to manage the problems.
Thanks. Same amp for both. The LD sounds warmer, more analogue like and with deeper bass whereas the DVDs are very toppy but when the bass is there, it sounds artificial like big chunks of frequencies are missing. That's with 2 LD players and maybe 4-5 DVD players over the years.
Personally I take an instant dislike to shops with names like Hairkutz, KoolFoods and KwikiDrinkz so BluRay switches me right off. Put the damned e back in blue FFS.
I've always found my AC3 laserdiscs sound far better than DD5.1 DVD's when watching the same movies - are there differences in the encoding/sample rates etc? (sorry for picking on you but you seem to know your stuff;-) )
>But the Star Wars score was recorded and mixed in 5.1
Surely it was only Dolby Stereo aka ProLogic back then with the two rear channels being identical? 5.1 came much later.
And barely a trailblazer. Atari had the Atari CDAR-504 out in late 1985 (sort of) for the ST line although there was only something like half a dozen CD-ROM titles available including such stuff as the Boeing 747 parts manual.
Slashdot Mirror
>old tapes to MP3s
For some strange reason, lossy compression is something you *really* don't want with program/data files.
Really clever people like Atari used stereo data recorders with their machines. On software like 'Conversational Spanish', one track would load data while the other talked away giving examples of words & pronounciation etc. Some games had the load music on the audio track for extra quality.
I had some bubble memory but it popped :-(
1. Invent/discover something cool
2. Tell everyone about it
3. ???? 4. NO Profit
It's sad to say that here in the UK we never learn and have a long and distinguished history of brilliant research followed by total fumbling of the ball and making no money out of the discoveries whatsoever.
I was talking PS2 as in IBM late 80's PCs. PS2 consoles are/were OK-ish, given that they are made by Sony.
>I just knew there was something fishy about that bukkake garden!
They'll come to a sticky end, no doubt.
>they were considered munitions
Certainly true that firing a PS2 out of a big gun was about the best thing you could do with them.
Forget my last question. Why didn't I bother to Google first - it's all there. /. had a 'delete my dumb post' button.
Be nice if
I'm glad someone mentioned Minix. Whatever happened to that and why didn't it get the same level of interest as Linux?
>>Thereby setting back the UK IT industry by - oh, let's say 10 years, IMHO.
>It still is.
Look, I'm doing my best here guys...
>The movie U-571 is a dramatization of one of these successes
And wildly inaccurate too.
>Gillian Anderson has got to be pretty old by now.
Well I wouldn't climb over her to get to you.
Back in the 80's, so many people were starting bands and had their own 4-track cassette that record companies started releasing singles in the single sided 4 track cassette format. You could just play it as was or you could remix it to your hearts content.
Ender Wiggin did it so much better though.
I can't believe there's a company called General Atomics - sounds like something out of a bad 1930/40/50's pulp SciFi book.
True but there's not a huge amount to be made in IT book publishing unless the ones you know are just moving in to generic fiction? I know a few (still jobbing) journos who have several books under their belt and they all say it's a vanity thing and that in terms of GBP/hour, it's less than they ever get/got for magazine writing.
In the UK PC magazines have been closing in recent years at a fiendish rate although blogs or forums have just sped up something that was already happening.
Magazines go through cycles. When something new comes out or is changing in popularity, magazines flourish as people try to learn as much as possible about a subject. Then once things get to a point where said item is either so easy to use, you don't need help or becomes so mainstream people just accept the state of the art as is and don't bother investigating further.
The result is sales fall, ad revenue falls and the market consolidates and we're seeing that now in the IT press.
Previous victims include HiFi magazines - huge in the 70's and 80's when you could read all about fine tuning turntables, building concrete speaker stands and all that good stuff. Then CD and reasonably OK stuff for cheap came out and suddenly only real HiFi nuts cared - for most people an all-in-one set up was good enough. In the UK HiFi magazines went from a dozen and a half titles to 2 or 3 thin efforts.
Further back, we were awash with Microwave magazines, freezer magazines and so on. Once people became confortable with the products, they stopped buying them.
Most editors I've worked with since about 2000 reckoned IT mags in print were dead or about to be and it's surpring they've lasted as long as they have. You want reviews? Why wait a month - get it online the day it comes out. Help? Tutorials? it's all here for free on the web. The only real difference is the quality. Some websites go in to far more detail on a product than a magazine would ever bother but equally, general editorial tends to be better in a magazine where an editor has tidied up bad prose or woolly thinking.
>I am guessing you mean 24 as in the Los Angeles CTU fictional series, rather than BBC News 24?
One is made by Fox, one isn't. That ought to be a bit of a pointer.
>Indians are fast, accurate and cheap:
Hmm. All the stuff we've outsourced has been less that good. They come here, we do knowledge transfer, they go home, 6 months later leave the company and we're back to square one. The code is often so buggy it won't even compile. They're great at doing all the CMM stuff so get to tick all the boxes that keep management happy but the reality is the onshore people have to do twice the work to manage the problems.
The LD (Pioneer 2950 modded for AC3) is connected via RF coax and the DVD by optical digital (TOSlink?)connector. The amp is a Yahama DSP-A3090.
Thanks. Same amp for both. The LD sounds warmer, more analogue like and with deeper bass whereas the DVDs are very toppy but when the bass is there, it sounds artificial like big chunks of frequencies are missing. That's with 2 LD players and maybe 4-5 DVD players over the years.
Personally I take an instant dislike to shops with names like Hairkutz, KoolFoods and KwikiDrinkz so BluRay switches me right off. Put the damned e back in blue FFS.
I've always found my AC3 laserdiscs sound far better than DD5.1 DVD's when watching the same movies - are there differences in the encoding/sample rates etc? (sorry for picking on you but you seem to know your stuff ;-) )
>But the Star Wars score was recorded and mixed in 5.1
Surely it was only Dolby Stereo aka ProLogic back then with the two rear channels being identical? 5.1 came much later.
And barely a trailblazer. Atari had the Atari CDAR-504 out in late 1985 (sort of) for the ST line although there was only something like half a dozen CD-ROM titles available including such stuff as the Boeing 747 parts manual.