71–80 of 260 posts
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It reminded me of DIVX[1] from 1999. Amazing how many times this horrible greedy idea was tried. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIVX
It isn't clear to me why it's unreasonable to have different pricing for rental vs. owning. In any case, the general trend seems to be towards not owning digital media in general.
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The problem isn't the different pricing. The disgusting greedy thing is purposely designing something to destroy itself to enforce that false dichotomy.
Neither the red tapes nor DIVX destroyed themselves. Red tapes were rewound by a store, and any DIVX disc could be converted to unlimited watching if you paid for 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…
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.
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.
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It seems possible indeed to obtain the film there and view it.
You know. For science.
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It isn't clear to me why it's unreasonable to have different pricing for rental vs. owning. In any case, the general trend seems to be towards not owning digital media in general.
The general trend seems to be towards not owning anything in general.
But other than that I can't think of a lot of examples.
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Promoting a belief that people are born with gendered brains causes (and has caused throughout history) far more harm (in the utilitarian sense of: negative discrimination x females affected) than ‘transphobia’ (which I’m taking to mean simple principled disbelief in innate gender identity and rejection of socially constructed gender of as a primary basis for personal identity).
I really wasn't intending to start a general discussion, I genuinely just wanted to understand what one might hope to accomplish by making off-topic comments, vs the prescribed course of action (flagging the article, contacting HN moderation via email, etc.) If HN staff doesn't want to prohibit links even at the author's request, I don't see what can be done here. It's a link to a publicly available resource. But I f…
Some topics seem to cause some people psychological distress if they can’t explicitly repudiate the opposing worldview when encountered.
[Honest disclosure] My bad, too - couldn’t not counterpoint my own gender critical beliefs in response to your OP’s implied position.
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…
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:
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem isn't the different pricing. The disgusting greedy thing is purposely designing something to destroy itself to enforce that false dichotomy.
Neither the red tapes nor DIVX destroyed themselves. Red tapes were rewound by a store, and any DIVX disc could be converted to unlimited watching if you paid for 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…
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…