Fun Fact: I own porn I can't watch(foone.tumblr.com) |
Fun Fact: I own porn I can't watch(foone.tumblr.com) |
* They post something. Someone links to the post here. Someone makes a comment here to the effect of "I think this about what he said". Someone else replies with "actually, it's 'they'". Shitstorm. Therefore, HN is populated primarily by transphobes.
* They post something on Twitter. Someone links to the tweet here. Someone comments on how they wish it was a blog rather than a series of tweets. Apparently the author feels personally attacked by such comments.
* They post something. Someone links to the post here. A Twitter bot tweets the article from here and @s them, therefore they have to keep blocking those bot accounts, and this is apparently HN's fault.
What I find fascinating is that, other than the bots thing, which is now irrelevant because apparently they don't use Twitter anymore, whether someone links to a post of theirs here or not has no effect on them unless they decide to come here and read what people say about it. It's an unusual case of extreme fragility and seemingly wishing to be punished. "Ow! The fire burns me! I should be able to stick my hand in the fire without being burned!"
EDIT: Relevant Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1440375176604966924?s=20
Your comment will likely be nuked because HN posters and admins hide behind a thin veneer of faux-civility and a cognitive dissonance where both information wants to be free and also you're not allowed to point out that the vast majority of posters are bigoted morons. (because "politeness")
They tend to be like the libertarians who are only libertarian because they think it excuses their bigotry and shields it from criticism (or even examination) who then shed their ideals like a molting snake whenever it suits them.
So yeah, pretty much. JK Rowling is an individual who got very lucky by being at the right place at the right time who now thinks they are smarter than everyone else.
Other bad ideas of that era: Polaroid once developed a VHS cartridge with a mechanical counter of how many times it had been played. After some number of plays, the tape jammed.
One of the VHS archiving communities I'm in found one in a sealed envelope at an estate sale, played it, and then started a thread describing the content and asking if anyone knew why they couldn't get it to play a second time.
I don't remember the precise terms for the various concepts, but hopefully that shows how specific to a given format the reader needs to be.
Some other bits of jank in the VHS spec:
- Because the tape is moving while it's being written, it stretches the signal out on the tape. This is perfectly fine for normal playback. But when the tape is not moving, the signal's now too wide for the playback head, and you can only read about half the picture. That's why your VCR had bars of static whenever you paused (unless you sprung for the four-head model)
- Audio is still recorded linearly, and you can't exactly chuck a linear head in an angled, spinning drum. So you have to put the audio head further away from the tape. And that distance is fixed; changing it means your machine is now playing audio out of sync with the video.
Also, there is an extension to VHS that lets you record audio along the video in the helical area, it's called VHS Hi-Fi and it improves the audio dramatically with the trade-off that any minor video glitches will add pops to the audio. Humans are way more sensitive to gaps in audio than video, after all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfuARMCyTvg
I'd recommend pretty much all of his video series to anyone in the HN crowd that's at all interested in analog media formats:
adg.
.beh
..cf
Even if your input is "a..db.gec.hf", that should be able to postprocess out later, for any possible angle, given enough resolution.It's a lot like decoding music from vinyl grooves based on a 2D image scan of the vinyl.
Individual magnetic lines of a VHS tape would only describe half a frame and the two halves would be interlaced back together.
However, there is hardware and software called GreaseWeazle that actually reads the magnetic flux transitions on the disks to extract the data within.
Not that long ago, motherboards still had a floppy controller. These computers do mostly still work.
So do the ones from the 80s, for that matter.
>USB 3.5" floppy drives
To anybody considering: Don't bother. They can only read/write the most standard IBM PC format. No flux streams.
Instead, get any old floppy drive and a greaseweazle at about the same cost. You'll be able to read and write all sorts of formats, and recover data from damaged and otherwise unreadable floppies.
My thought is that, if you could develop a sensor capable of sampling magnetic alignment at sub-micrometer resolution it would also generate unbelievable amounts of data that would first need compressing or decoding into AV signals.
https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2012/03/unlocking-sounds-of-the-pa...
I remember one of the curators mentioning that they had a ton of WWII records for things like daily newscasts which due to wartime supply issues were made from less durable materials, and since they weren’t commercially valuable the owners hadn’t spent time transferring many of them to newer media.
Hard disk drive read head sweeping across the tape? Hard disk track widths are well below 1 micron so presumably the potential for high resolution is there?
EDIT: According to Wikipedia they did have a built-in record feature and the Wiki page even shows an image of a blank tape.
Reminded me of FlexPlay from 2003, "self destructing" DVDs for short-term rentals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexplay
The first post recommended by tumblr at the bottom of this article was about FlexPlay (and DIVX): https://foone.tumblr.com/post/705631633513005056/so-regardin...
https://www.somethingweird.com/product_info.php?products_id=...
https://www.iafd.com/title.rme/title=adultery+for+fun+and+pr...
These red tapes feel like a ridiculous and cumbersome idea. Thinking about it, their concept won in the end though, in terms of media consumption and ownership...
Our current streaming services feel much more akin to these tapes, where you rely on a centralized entity to decide what you can watch and how, rather than infinitely repayable and transferable video tapes.
This isn't really possible with things like movies.
So it doesn't disagree very well.
[0]https://lunchmeatvhs.com/blogs/blog/rescue-your-awesome-anal...
Wonder what changed…
https://twitter.com/JayBauman1/status/1613910812632186881
Basically, old magnetic video tape is such a bad format that the only sane approach of "preservation" is to destroy it and digitize it.
What?
In order to view the content, check this archive link:
And yay! They are on tumblr! So much easier to read and I can subscribe to their posts.
https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1817219
An informative review (8/10 rating)
* The Happy Home Wrecker
10 February 2008
Sherpix, the company that produced and distributed works by filmmakers as diverse as Paul Morrissey and Alex De Renzy in the late '60s and early '70s, inadvertently helped jump-start the short-lived "Porno Chic" trend with ADULTERY FOR FUN AND PROFIT. Grand prize winner at the second (and last) Wet Dream Film Festival in Amsterdam, sponsored by Suck Magazine which had none other than Germaine Greer amongst its editorial staff, it was the first narrative feature by Richard Robinson and a considerable step up from his "white coater" THE ABC'S OF MARRIAGE. Apparently, Robinson (a/k/a "Rick Jr.") had a thing about wedlock as his 1974 masterpiece MARRIAGE AND OTHER FOUR LETTER WORDS is anything to go by. With a happy go lucky script by E.E. Patchen, who would delve into far darker territory for Chris Warfield's sexploitation classic LITTLE MISS INNOCENCE, he seems more intent however on blowing this cornerstone of society to smithereens on this occasion.
Chunky California Casanova Richard (alleged one shot Frank Harris), with adorably chubby cheeks and great Bay City Rollers hair, has a lucrative sideline going, seducing married women on the brink of separation so their husbands won't have to put up alimony. His employer, a devious divorce lawyer (like there's any other kind !), is played by character actor John Dunn who supplemented his "respectable" work in movies like ANDY WARHOL'S BAD with non-sex appearances in skin flicks like LITTLE GIRLS (now wittily changed to WOMEN by Something Weird to avoid legal hassles !) GETTING AHEAD. This premise provides opportunities for successive sexual encounters with some of the genre's earliest and unjustly forgotten starlets. The classy platinum blonde with the great gams in scene 2 is Susan Westcott, also in Walt Davis' astonishing SEX PSYCHO and BLONDE IN BLACK LACE, an early Johnny Wadd entry by Bob Chinn. Richard charms her with the best pick up line ever, convincing her he makes "the most persuasive Martinis in town", adding "two olives for a pretty lady" pausing a beat "three for you !" How could she resist ? Lynn Holmes is the giggly blonde who was paired with namesake John in both SUPERSTUD and FOUR WOMEN IN TROUBLE and Casey Lorraine recycles her British bitch routine from Joe "Adele Robbins" Robertson's riotous romp LORD FARTHINGAY'S HOLIDAY as the story's catalyst, the dissatisfied wife who blackmails Rick into making it with her gay husband ! As envelope-pushing as early erotica may have been, this scene is suggested rather than shown.
Absolute best of show is an extended sequence that has Richard and a recent divorcée and former client (George Peters, who was in COMING WEST with "nudie cutie" royalty Maria Arnold and Sandy Carey) laying pipe with busty brunette Starlyn Simone from Dominic Bolla's memorably warped ANGEL ABOVE, THE DEVIL BELOW and delectable, fair-haired Rainbow Robbins, star of Robinson's subsequent MARRIAGE AND OTHER FOUR LETTER WORDS as well as Gerard Damiano's extremely obscure EVIL WAYS OF LOVE. They move from fireplace to shower and bedroom, exhibiting sustained erotic enthusiasm throughout, accompanied by several awesome tracks that sound suspiciously like library music even though a composer, Mario Litwin, is credited. This is also the most interesting scene visually as it allows the cinematographers, Sven Conrad and Robinson himself (as "David Worth"), to throw in a couple of clever compositions like both men back to back as they receive oral pleasure from their girlfriends in a nifty mirror image effect. Conrad remained to hone his skills within the industry, graduating to directing with some of the most eye-popping adult movies of the '80s (PINK CHAMPAGNE, BODY MAGIC, DOING IT !) and Robinson went on to helm POOR PRETTY EDDIE, one of the most notorious and hard to shake "blaxploitation" efforts ever. *
I'm just speechless.
I thought I did not have a reason to employ a name or even think of productions like this as a format.
But, as you point out, the right name is unclear, and just calling it "a video" begs for a "what format?" discussion.
I like "video essay" quite a lot myself. Documentary can work too, but seems a bit off and I am struggling to express why.
Maybe one of us can ask the Technology Connections guy what name he would use. We might get a whole video on the subject!
I am going to ask. Join me. Very curious what he would say, and he would be among the top people qualified to talk about these things too.
Seems more than a documentary. Can totally be a video essay.
This article seems like a pretty strong argument in the opposite direction: about a tape format which is effectively unreadable without significant heroics (to the extent that a documentary was made about trying to play one of these tapes.)
The format admittedly wasn't exactly successful, and I imagine more common formats would have better luck finding usable hardware. But even then, the tape still degrades.
If I really needed something to last a Very Long Time, I'd print it in highly redundant QR codes on lots of paper, and then also print the specs for QR codes and whatever other encodings were necessary.
Oh please. Just use raw PCM audio. No one will ever lose track of how to play that.
A 10.5 inch reel of 2 inch tape can be digitized just fine to 16 bit samples, 44/48kHz, 24 channels, most of an hour. That's about 7 gigabytes. So you could back up a huge number of digitized tapes to a dozen different locations quite easily. You could put a thousand of them on a pocket SSD.
It is not listed as 'Outstanding Sports Documentary' winner or even as nominee. Same for the 2014 Sports Emmy Awards.
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2883206/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/34th_Sports_Emmy_Awards
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20131118154841/http://www.emmyon...
Indeed, that documentary won in the "Sports: Documentary" category in the 2014 New York Emmys ceremony.
See this list of the winners (note: PDF): https://www.nyemmys.org/media/files/files/7c2ad17b/57th_NY_E...
I say probably because out of the 14 episodes made the only one left today is episode 3, Little Lost Robot [2], the first adaptation of Isaac Asimov's I, Robot. The reason we don't have the other episodes? Apparently ABC had this practice of wiping the tapes after the episodes aired. What could they have been possibly thinking.
So many treasure troves, art and otherwise, have been lost to carelessness; perhaps with the new found generatively hallucinatory powers of statistical learning we could see some restorative trend, a retro-magination, based on extant leftovers. Perhaps Aristotle did write a treatise on Comedy after all [3].
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0163475/?ref_=fn_al_tt_4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_of_This_World_(British_TV_...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-RX1GT4GT0
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Name_of_the_Rose#:~:text=T....
> In the early 70's the DuMont network was being bought by another company and the lawyers were in heavy negotiation as to who ould be responsible for the library of DuMont shows currently being stored in the facility - who would bear the expense of storing them in a temperature controlled facility, take care of copyright renewal, etc..
> One of the lawyers said he would "take care of it in a fair manner..." He took care of it all right...
> At 2am the next morning he had 3 huge semis back up to the loding dock at ABC, filled them with all the stored kinescopes and 2" videotape, drove them to a waiting barge in n New Jersey, took them out on the water, made a right at the Statue of Liberty and dumped them in Upper New York Bay. Very neat... no problem!
- Edie Adams, comedian, entertainer, and wife of Ernie Kovacs.
https://web.archive.org/web/20081208112200/http://www.loc.go...
Edie Adams’ son explains why her late husband Ernie Kovacs is seemingly forgotten in Hollywood
https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/edie-adams-ernie-kovac...
Maintaining archives of material is actually a pretty complex and expensive process, especially when we're talking about physical analog media (that is sometimes literally a ticking time bomb, as is the case with old cellulose film stock). Also, such media is expensive to acquire, so reusing them wherever possible is useful to keep costs down.
Combine this with the fact that the value of such preservation is often not apparent. Reruns of old material don't provide a lot of value--especially in an era where there are very few available channels--and there's no practical means for making copies of them to even interested buyers, at least in any sort of economical way (see above about cost of media). It's not until around 1980 or so that the home video market is a viable way to make money on old productions, and it's around that time that the wiping of old broadcasts was stopped as a regular practice.
Basically every video he does scratches that itch of learning a new thing about the world. The analog video series is indeed especially fantastic (laserdisc, VHS, B&W vs color TV, blu-ray, etc).
Certainly this is how the "applesauce" reader works: https://applesaucefdc.com/
Yes, those gaps are annoying as all get out. Tracking has to be dialed right in to recover the sound properly.
But, once you do that?
It's really great! Frequency response goes almost to zero, and up to 22Khz, and it's flat for most of that range.
One of the albums I recorded had a warp in it. When the actual vinyl was played on a good stereo system it was possible to see the speaker cones actually move in time with the warp. It's essentially a very low frequency signal.
Cassette does not reproduce that. I bet a good reel-to-reel system would.
Hi-Fi VHS reproduced it pretty much bang on perfect!
The best part was being able to add index marks! While recording, one could press a button and get one of those written to the tape. I had several tapes made with music I really like and could access pretty much anything on it quickly.
Fun stuff!!
Edit: also, the helical scan on a VHS tape can't really be said to be "vertical". A helical scan already implies a direction along the length of the helix, and "vertical helix" doesn't really make sense in the context of scanning down the length of a magnetic tape. Adding "vertical" to the actual term "helical scan" can really only be an attempt to back-fit an acronym to "VHS".
The beta machines would phase shift the signal 180˚ every other frame when writing, and they use that for noise cancellation. VHS did four frames at 90˚ each, because of patents.
The read heads were on a spinning drum. Beta machines had an L loading system that would grab the tape and wrap it almost all the way around the drum with the read heads, exposing more tape at once to the reading mechanism. VHS had an M loading system that grabbed the tape on either side and pulled it up, covering maybe half of the drum, because of patents.
And supposedly VHS won out because Sony was begging a lot of money for patent licensing. But tape capacity was probably a factor, too.
If we're worried about being unable to access the bits at all, we should consider etching them into metal or printing them on archival paper. Tape won't reliably last hundreds of years. But for now we can keep bits alive pretty easily, with low but nonzero sustained effort.
If you have a lot of tapes, a dozen digital copies will survive a lot more incidents than the originals, and be a lot cheaper than analog backups along with no generation loss.
Sure, but the tapes had Boris Karloff himself as host, you can't just wipe a tape with Karloff in the 60s [1] and think "eh, probably no one will ever want to watch this again".
It's just a point how awfully relative everything is. What if Max Brod actually listened to Franz Kafka and burned all his texts. How much we miss because Nikolai Gogol did actually burn the second volume to his Dead Souls.
[1] "Boris Karloff was awarded two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on 8 February 1960", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Karloff
Or in a saner format (when it loads): https://nitter.net/foone/status/1440375176604966924
That's because it connects to an existing 5.25" drive
> is there any hardware you know of that replicates the drive itself?
Why would you build a device to emulate a device that already exists, when all you need to do is communicate with it?
I don't want to have to buy used gear off eBay, and wouldn't need to for 3.5" disks or drives - you can actually find people producing new stock.
Why doesn't 5.25" hardware get the same treatment?
Of course sadly so much content is produced at 1080p24 nowadays for that “film” effect it’s rather meaningless for display purposes.
Online of course it tends to be p50 or more commonly p60 (even in 50hz countries). YouTubeers tend to be able to afford more lights and clearer microphones than big budget productions too.
* 30000/1001
The licensing of the music on certain movies didn't anticipate the internet. And the studios never came to an agreement. As a result you can buy DVDs of movies like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Fair_Lady and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullets_Over_Broadway, but you can't rent them off of any streaming service. Given that most of us no longer have DVD players, they seem destined to only survive in pirated copies. If that.
But the second tier ones don't. There isn't so much money to be made from fixing them, nor is there the public pressure. So they languish..indefinitely.
https://www.amazon.com/My-Fair-Lady-Audrey-Hepburn/dp/B08NDY...
https://www.amazon.com/Bullets-Over-Broadway-John-Cusack/dp/...
A couple of years ago it wasn't true. I know because I tried to watch both and not a single streaming service, including Amazon, had it.
Plus it's not like CD's/DVD's are incredibly resource-intensive. Remember AOL CD's you got sent for free? A quick Google says one billion of those were sent out. There's about as much plastic by weight in an average Chinese takeout, or a single plastic clamshell of fresh greens at the grocery store.
Awesome for the environment? Of course not. But "disgustingly greedy"? Nope, just a tiny drop in the bucket of plastics usage.
I loved the story of DIVX. As a format, it never actually got hacked to unlock unlimited viewing of the far-cheaper-than-DVD discs.
It never got hacked not because its security was great (after all - a static disk which received unlock codes over dialup, had to have some significant attack surface), but because it sucked and wasn't worth hacking.
Video quality was lower than that of DVD's and soon enough after release, the pricing of used DVD's was close enough that buying DIVX made no sense at all. To say nothing of paying a premium price for all of that in the players.
Having now read about Red tapes, it seems like pure folly that DIVX should have been attempted.
It didnt make it out of the test marketing stage, thankfully.
Does that mean I own every book I've checked out of a library? Every hotel room I've stayed in?
Realistically - there is a considerable difference in the resources required to create a digital copy of a good vs a physical copy. The digital good has the slight upside that when companies abuse consumers through predatory pricing practices (literal rent-seeking...), they are destroying slightly less of the environment in the process.
Most consumers aren’t going to rent a movie they can only watch a few for a 10% discount off the price of unlimited views.
For example, Apple typically prices movie “purchases” around 4x of a 24 hr rental (75% off), and that has essentially zero marginal cost of production. With physical media there would be no profit.
But other than that I can't think of a lot of examples.
Producers rent seek. More at 11
We really should allow renters to stay indefinitely at rentals and also pass on the general maintenance responsibilities on to them as well.
Renting things like appliances doesn't make sense since you require exclusive access to them and generally use them for their entire lifespan. While houses mostly exist before and after your need for them.
If they (all these companies) ever fully sort out audio rights, start providing great-quality copies of movies without screwing with them (the 4k77 and related projects are far and away the highest-quality copies of the original, unmolested Star Wars trilogy available, period, for any price, and they're entirely a very-expensive-to-produce volunteer fan-made effort, available for free! WTF?), stop cutting episodes, and stop revoking access to things, I can finally scrap that stupid server. It's 1000% not worth the cost and effort just to avoid paying for the things I watch. Buuuuut if I'm maintaining it anyway, for other reasons, well, that's another matter.
I actually see piracy as a moral imperative. Without it, we would not be able to properly preserve culture.
Like, yes, someone invested a lot of capital up front and hopes to make a profit by selling time-limited access to what they bought, thereby making the goods accessible to people who don't have the up-front capital.
I can see preferring to own, but as a moral position, "rent-seeking" is synonymous with "risk-taking" and "access-providing."
For my part I am very happy to be able to rent a digital movie for $4 rather than buying a DVD for $20. The risk to me is lower and I'm more likely to try movies I wouldn't take a $20 chance on.
In this scenario, the predatory pricing is a key aspect of how it becomes rent seeking, and a well-functioning market would not have predatory pricing. And the root issue is tied in to how current US copyright law has major flaws.
Someone making content and renting it out wouldn't count, while say the App Store fee would.
As a developer, I made a couple of hundred thousand dollars from the Apple App Store. You know how much value the App Store provided me? Way, way more than the 30% I paid (this was years ago).
Without a portal that could direct millions of people to find my app, I probably would have made tens of dollars.
So we can debate fair pricing, but the idea that aggregators don’t provide any value isn’t an indictment of aggregators, it’s a confession of not understanding the business.
Good point. Another often unappreciated point is that it's way easier to convince people to give their credit card to Apple than it is to convince them to give it to some random web site. Especially if they've already given their credit card to Apple, as many of them have.