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Fun Fact: I own porn I can't watch

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Re: Fun Fact: I own porn I can't watch

#141

Post by Gigachad »

brookst wrote: post #118
horsawlarway wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Morally - I don't see much difference, and think the push towards "rent everything, own nothing" is a bad, bad idea for social cohesion, economic equality, and general health and happiness. 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 prici…

I always find it funny when people try to use "rent-seeking" as a pejorative. 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."…

Wasn't rent seeking meant to be referring to a party which wedges itself between a buyer and seller and skims a fee off the transaction despite not really adding much value but in some way has made themselves difficult to bypass.

Someone making content and renting it out wouldn't count, while say the App Store fee would.

Re: Fun Fact: I own porn I can't watch

#143

Post by Gigachad »

LudwigNagasena wrote: post #94
ghaff wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how true that is as a general statement. Definitely yes for digital content that used to be shipped on physical media: music, movies, software, books to some degree. Uber and Zipcar (and competitors)--along with incremental public transit and cycling infrastructure along with e-bikes--have probably made it marginally easier to get off without owning a car in some locations. But other than that I can't th…

The number of homeowners in the US has plateaued after the Great Recession while the number of people who rent housing has been increasing since then. Yes, your clothes and kitchen appliances are safe for now, but who knows for how long?: https://www.forbes.com/sites/worldeconomicforum/2016/11/10/s...

It might not be the worst idea to make renting houses normal and just as convenient as owning. If rental laws were fixed to provide extreme stability and decent rights, you'd only own for investment purposes. And you wouldn't have extreme upwards pressure from renters trying to buy at any cost to avoid shitty renting conditions.

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.

Re: Fun Fact: I own porn I can't watch

#144

Post by WorldMaker »

pjc50 wrote: post #119
WorldMaker wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the terms was interlaced, the nearly forgotten "i" next to something like 480i (versus 480p). Individual magnetic lines of a VHS tape would only describe half a frame and the two halves would be interlaced back together.

Well, that's just how the underlying PAL/NTSC signal worked.

Right, and the fact that there were two different signal standards and VHS was a leaky abstraction that mostly just encoded the signal as-is all adds to the complication of any "generic magnetic tape reader" and hoping to get useful digital data back from that.

Re: Fun Fact: I own porn I can't watch

#145

Post by yencabulator »

delecti wrote: post #70
danbruc wrote: post #56

I have always wondered if it would be possible to build a generic reader for magnetic tapes that essentially just scans whatever tape you throw at it and then it is up to some software to decode the content. I know close to nothing about the details of magnetic recording on tape, so maybe this is just not possible with reasonable effort, i.e. you could but you would need SQUIDs to make it work or something like that.

You might be surprised at how the signals are actually recorded on tapes. For VHS tapes for example, it's actually a series of stacked "diagonal" lines of signal. Imagine a sequence of symbols like \\\\\\\\\\\, except at any given horizontal point along the tape there are about 5 stacked traces of signal. They're also diagonal on audio cassettes, but much less "slanted" relative to the tape's length. I don't remember…

If you "scan the magnetism" for the whole width of the tape -- which such a generic reader for magnetic tapes would have to do anyway -- you can parse out such things after the fact.

    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.

Re: Fun Fact: I own porn I can't watch

#146

Post by pessimizer »

downvoteme1 wrote: post #7

[flagged]

It's a $6 legal download: https://www.somethingweird.com/product_info.php?products_id=...

edit: also I thought you were referring to buying a bootleg on ebay rather than to the pirate bay, which I'm 99.9% sure it won't be on. It is definitely available in the pirate community, though, because I checked.

Re: Fun Fact: I own porn I can't watch

#147

Post by zokier »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #120
danbruc wrote: post #56

I have always wondered if it would be possible to build a generic reader for magnetic tapes that essentially just scans whatever tape you throw at it and then it is up to some software to decode the content. I know close to nothing about the details of magnetic recording on tape, so maybe this is just not possible with reasonable effort, i.e. you could but you would need SQUIDs to make it work or something like that.

This seems quite possible in principle, despite the different helical scanning, tape widths, speeds and whatnot. A device at the British Library archival research did similar for wax cylinders and old disc records, scanning the physical surface with a small wavelength laser interferometer. AFAIK it generated an obscene amount of point cloud data. My thought is that, if you could develop a sensor capable of sampling m…

> 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.

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?

Re: Fun Fact: I own porn I can't watch

#148

Post by mywittyname »

Pxtl wrote: post #128
patapong wrote: post #73

Fascinating. 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.

Somebody recently said the best phrase on the modern internet is "iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts" because podcasts are probably the most recent media-consumption technology where open standards won out and it's just a bunch of standardized data and metadata you can use as you like.

There's a symbiotic relationship that exists with podcasting that doesn't necessary exist for other media. Podcasters want to reach the largest possible audience because they are paid relative to viewership. Hosting their own content has an expense and doesn't provide them with very effective discoverability. Podcast platforms make their money from having a large collection of podcasts and, for spotify/itunes, podcasts don't generally have royalty fees associated with playback.

This isn't really possible with things like movies.

Re: Fun Fact: I own porn I can't watch

#149

Post by Dylan16807 »

nemo44x wrote: post #105

Formats like this sort of reenforce Steve Albini's claim that he only records to tape because he's more certain people will be able to play it back hundreds of years from now than any other (digital) format. The tech is super simple and requires no proprietary anything. He believes that even the most open digital formats will become obscure and forgotten eventually and no one will really be able to playback lots of m…

> He believes that even the most open digital formats will become obscure and forgotten eventually and no one will really be able to playback lots of music that was only recorded that way.

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.

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