Posts by Michael Strorm 2019 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Feb 2008
As far as I'm aware, "laser rot" is normally used as a (slightly misleading) abbreviation for the LaserDisc version of *disc* rot. (Something our friend Wikipedia confirms (again!))
Interesting comment regardless, though.
> "I guess, if you want to limit the problem to one specific type of error."
I do. Because I never claimed that this approach was suitable for all types of damage- just pops, clicks and scratches which are easily spotted, account for many/most of the obvious problems with record wear, are unlikely to occur at exactly the same point on two different samples and where it's likely to be obvious in the vast majority of cases which is the damaged copy and which isn't.
Any cases that are in doubt or on the edge (probably more likely as we drop the threshold to smaller and smaller pops and clicks) can be flagged for human intervention. In fact, the whole thing should be overseen by a human regardless, if only to verify that it's working correctly and spot any obvious anomalies.
I'd be surprised if this technique hasn't been thought of and probably used already. The advantage is that you don't- or shouldn't- have to modify or filter the copy you're trying to restore *except* where it's *actually* been scratched.
But I never claimed it was suitable for all types of damage.
> "But the CED player is much simpler - there's hardly any electronics in there."
That's not surprising- it shouldn't need the mechanical complexities (or electronics to support those) that cassette-based systems required.
As far as I'm aware, the idea that CED- with its vinyl-like approach- could be manufactured cheaply and simply was always kind of the attraction. Although it came out in 1981, they'd apparently started developing it in 1964(!) and at that time the only video recorders were very expensive professional ones.
I suspect they thought they'd get it out much sooner. If they'd done so, before domestic video cassette recorders were established, it likely *would* have been a success. Even if it had come out in the mid-1970s, when VHS and Betamax were just out but still relatively expensive, it likely could have undercut them for a few years and established a niche.
1981 was just too late.
It *should* work with two copies because we're specifically looking for scratches, pops and clicks, not arbitrary differences. These should show up as obvious sharp spikes in the waveform. The one without the spike is the correct one.
As I already said, "since it's unlikely that many large scratches will appear in exactly the same place on both, it should be clear for most prominent examples which is the "good" copy".
(Note; my comment above was meant to have been made as a reply to this comment instead of a top-level post).
In response to your other points
> "the last major market for Betamax and derived systems were professional audio-video people at places like TV stations and the like"
As far as I'm aware, yes, it's definitely true that Betamax was used for professional audio in some areas, particularly CD mastering via PCM encoders/processors like this (although even Sony themselves note it'll work with *any* video recorder including VHS, U-Matic, etc.).
However, regular Betamax *wasn't* commonly used for professional video as far as I'm aware. The pro-oriented Betacam format, which is often confused with Betamax, used the same physical cassettes in its original incarnation, but it ran the tape at a much higher speed and the recording format was different from and incompatible with standard Betamax.
> "A high-end recordable LaserDisc system would have been quite nice for the pros, as apparently the picture quality was superior on LaserDisc. [..] Recordable LaserDIscs would have been... interesting. And probably expensive. I remember how expensive recordable DVDs were when they first came out, this would have been at least as bad."
Interstingly, according to Wikipedia, again(!), there *was* such a thing. In fact, there were three different versions of a recordable LaserDisc, at least one of which was apparently used by the BBC ("Component Recordable Video disc (CRVdisc)"). I'm not sure about the others, but the "Recordable Laser Videodisc (RLV)" released in 1984 was apparently compatible with regular LaserDisc players.
The article doesn't mention prices, but since it states that none of them were marketed towards consumers, I'm going to assume that's because they were eyewateringly expensive...!
> "one reason why VHS won instead of the technically superior Betamax is because VHS had porn and Betamax didn’t"
Is there any concrete evidence that this was as major a contributor as it's made out to be, or is it just speculation that became an urban myth repeated as fact because it's a nice, simple explanation yet interesting and plausible-sounding? (I did a quick search and these people are sceptical too.)
Coincidentally, I posted this literally just a couple of weeks ago:-
Here's a very interesting and analysis on "The Rise and Fall of Betamax" and why it lost to VHS. If you want a *very* in-depth take, it's well worth reading. (*)
Unlike your typical cliche-recycling article written decades later by some random person repeating an accumulation of catchy-sounding urban myths that became established as "fact" over the decades (e.g. "Betamax failed because VHS had more porn!") this was written for the enthusiast-oriented "Videofax" newsletter, back in 1988 in response to the news that Sony had effectively conceded defeat in the format wars by announcing they'd start selling VHS machines.
In other words, from people who were there at the time *and* at the time *and* long before the subject had become a staple of cheap, lazy nostalgia fodder.
I'm not saying it's the be-all-and-end-all on the subject, but I'd certainly trust it over most other "authorities".
And it doesn't mention porn.
(*) tl;dr Spoiler; Beta's failure wasn't solely down to a single mistake- though the short runtime on early versions hurt came close to that and hurt it badly- but a combination of "we know best" arrogance, corporate pride and multiple misjudgedments that led to Beta playing catchup and still making unnecessary mistakes while doing so.
> "A major reason for DVD’s success was because of the flood of porn on the format "
Again, was it? I'm old enough to remember the early-2000s DVD boom, and I don't remember people going on about porn especially, or it being a major factor in the success of the format. I mean, I know it existed and likely took over from VHS porn, but I don't remember it being that significant and- if anything- it seemed like the Internet was a bigger deal from a porn point of view, especially as broadband was taking off around then and large video files were becoming more practical.
Minor nitpick- as far as I can tell from the Wikipedia article I'd (coincidentally) been reading just a few days ago, the video signal is FM modulated, but the original analogue audio signal is AM.
The diagram in the article explains quite well how it works; effectively this means that the frequency of the pits represents the FM modulated video and the duty cycle of the on/off pits and lands represents the current value of the audio signal. I'm not so clear how the later PCM digital soundtracks were retrofitted onto that setup, though.
Funny, I had a similar idea myself. If you only have one copy of a scratched LP, your software has to judge how likely it is that something is a pop or a scratch.
If you have two copies or more, it should be relatively easy nowadays to have it automatically synchronise and superimpose the waveforms of the two digitised recordings.
Since it's unlikely that many large scratches will appear in exactly the same place on both, it should be clear for most prominent examples which is the "good" copy and- if the problem is with the copy you're trying to restore- you can use that to correctly interpolate the scratch. (Assuming that's even necessary).
This would work better still with three or more copies.
You can have someone double-check this manually or go over the more on-the-edge cases.
To be clear, I wasn't suggesting "averaging" here, just that multiple copies can help spot and replace scratches on the copy you're trying to restore. This won't fix any problems inherent in the original source or common to the entire pressing.
I'm not sure how well "averaging" *would* work? It should be fine in theory, but the alignment would have to be done perfectly or you could end up with (e.g.) phase issues and you'd certainly want to be using examples of the same pressing.
> "You can already scan in an LP at sufficient resolution and software will convert it to a "perfect" audio file."
Can it? As far as I'm aware, grooves on vinyl LPs aren't simply a one-dimensional waggling from side-to-side but also include a vertical (depth) component, at least for stereo. Not sure about mono discs, maybe it works for those? (*)
But yeah, as Doctor Syntax said in their reply above, unless there's a compelling reason otherwise, the best way to archive most media is via the method they were originally designed with in mind.
(*) Even those laser-based turntables for vinyl records which *sounded* like they should be a great idea when first I heard about them turn out to have major problems if the disc isn't kept scrupulously clean, since even the tiniest specks of dirt or dust- ones that a physical needle would push out of the way with barely any effect- register as highly distracting noise.
Note for those who (like myself) haven't had time to watch the video yet, since the article itself doesn't mention CED at all... CED ("Capacitive Electronic Disc") was a different format that actually used a disc (inside a cartridge) with a physical groove traced by a needle- in that respect, like a vinyl LP (but much finer), although the details of how the signal is read are slightly different.
But Musk's still on schedule to have a manned mission to Mars by 2022 right? Sorry, he meant cargo missions by 2022 and people going there by 2024, sorry meant, Starships to Mars in 2026 and crewed flights by 2028 because he'd rather go straight to Mars than waste his time with the moon sorry, should have said he meant to go to the moon all along, who said anything about Mars, he didn't.
Also, you can trust him that orbital data centres are a serious proposal and not just a quasi-legal ruse to justify the otherwise implausible merging of xAI and SpaceX for self-serving and thoroughly dubious financial reasons.
(What I should have added above is that the use of "gigawatt" as a crude synonym for computing power is a giveaway of this approach. Much like it would be in the "alternate future" described above, where the power of your local valve/tube-based computer was broadly proportionate to the amount of electricity it gobbled up).
> "At this point I think it's pretty obvious, centralized "Gigawatt"-LLM inference is headed for a brick wall"
I've said this before, but even its critics seem to completely overlook a major elephant in the room regarding the current AI "revolution".
Namely that the exponential increase in AI capacity in recent years has been predominantly driven by simply throwing similarly-increasing amounts of money and hardware at the problem- until we reached the current eyewatering levels- rather than the far more modest improvements in the underlying technology.
This is fundamentally different to what made the *original* computer revolution- from the end of WW2 to the present day- possible. That *was* driven almost entirely by such improvements in the underlying technology- those that Moore's law described. Exponential decreases in costs and scale of manufacture, coupled with the exponential increases in computing power they enabled.
There's no way this would have happened simply by building increasing numbers and bigger versions of those early valve/tube-based computer designs. There might have been a limited computer revolution of sorts (maybe with several computers in primitive "data centre"-like buildings per town), but you can only scale that "brute force" approach- and valve manufacturing- up so far before the cost and practicalities become prohibitive.
And the problem is that primitive "brute force" approach *is* the one that the current AI companies are relying upon.
Which is an issue because we're already clearly near the limits- the current bubble is *already* consuming ludicrous amounts of investment and it's just not likely to go *that* much higher.
In mitigation of my linguistic clunkiness- is "clichedom" even a real word?!- I did throw that one together somewhat quickly during a spare couple of minutes on my phone while I was trying to put into words quite *why* I disliked "rocks"/"rocking" (in that particular sense) so much...!
Let me put it another way- "rocking an [X]"- is the sort of overused, pseudo-casual language that now borders on having a "generative AI" vibe. Not least because I've actually seen one use it in *exactly* the way you'd expect. However, even *that* is probably a function of how it's been overused in actual, human-generated writing in recent years.
It's a PR man's "safe" choice of a slightly-too-calculated yet slightly-too-obvious attempt at sounding casual.
Am I getting to the nub of it yet? I really don't know.
"The company said users can manage their data through device settings and delete recordings at any time."
Ah, yes. The usual Facebook tactic of shifting responsibility for their privacy-invading behaviour to their users under the guise of offering them control.
Such controls being intentionally complex, constantly-shifting and mysteriously always defaulting or reverting to "let us keep all your data", such that they know overwhelmed users will give up trying to keep on top of them.
> "a worker from India [..] said their base salary is $493 per month, with total pay typically reaching about $819 based on 72 hours of work per week."
This person is from India, so it's not clear whether that represents what the Americans are being paid, but...
> " the first American worker, who earns about $20 per hour."
...yeah, by American standards that's incredibly low for someone moving to and living in a foreign country, something most people doing that type of job would, I assume, only be doing for the money in the first place.
> "We are stuck here and treated like we are expendable."
Now you're learning.
The question with Musk is always whether or not he believes it himself, or whether he just expects everyone else will believe it.
As others have suggested, it's likely that the whole pretence that orbiting datacentres are a practical idea is purely an excuse to justify his financially self-serving merger of xAI and SpaceX when there's no obvious reason to do so otherwise.
You have to wonder whether Musk actually believes any of this is plausible, or whether it was always just an excuse to justify the otherwise legally dubious merging of two apparently unrelated companies (i.e. xAI and SpaceX) for self-serving reasons and financial chicanery.
Here's a very interesting and analysis on "The Rise and Fall of Betamax" and why it lost to VHS. If you want a *very* in-depth take, it's well worth reading. (*)
Unlike your typical cliche-recycling article written decades later by some random person repeating an accumulation of catchy-sounding urban myths that became established as "fact" over the decades (e.g. "Betamax failed because VHS had more porn!") this was written for the enthusiast-oriented "Videofax" newsletter, back in 1988 in response to the news that Sony had effectively conceded defeat in the format wars by announcing they'd start selling VHS machines.
In other words, from people who were there at the time *and* at the time *and* long before the subject had become a staple of cheap, lazy nostalgia fodder.
I'm not saying it's the be-all-and-end-all on the subject, but I'd certainly trust it over most other "authorities".
And it doesn't mention porn.
(*) tl;dr Spoiler; Beta's failure wasn't solely down to a single mistake- though the short runtime on early versions hurt came close to that and hurt it badly- but a combination of "we know best" arrogance, corporate pride and multiple misjudgedments that led to Beta playing catchup and still making unnecessary mistakes while doing so.
> [Trump] in a sense is America's greatest president by virtue of the fact that he exemplifies/Codifies all of the countries bad attributes into one vile package. He is America and America is him... the ultimate Ugly American.
It's not just that, laid bare like this, this famous quote makes clear that Trump is lacking in the most basic "positive" attributes you'd expect from a human being. We all knew that.
It's that it makes clear just *quite* how comprehensively and completely *anything* resembling "humanity" is absent from his character or personality. It's that there's not even the faintest hint of any redeeming positivity there.
It's a long list, yet the most damning thing is there's still nothing there any reasonable person could disagree with:-
> A sad, delusional, dangerous man.
> No books,
> No friends,
> No music,
> No curiosity,
> No patience,
> No integrity,
> No compassion,
> No empathy,
> No loyalty,
> No conscience,
> No courage,
> No manners,
> No respect,
> No character,
> No morality,
> No honor.
> Not even a dog.
(From "Unfit: The Documentary Film")
Got it in one- I've said much the same myself.
Trump and the assorted scum around him being in power *is* a problem in itself. But the problem, even if all those people were to drop dead tomorrow and be replaced by others less awful, it doesn't change the fact that the majority of the US electorate at the 2024 presidential election either voted for Trump or were okay or indifferent enough at the prospect of him winning that they didn't bother to vote against him.
There's no excuse the second time round that they didn't know what type of person Trump was or what he was planning to do. (*)
If the US had clearly accepted that it made a mistake after Trump 1 and demonstrated that Trump was unelectable after the January 6 attacks, that would have been one thing. But neither of those were clearly the case- it was clear very quickly that support for Trump hadn't died and that there was a real chance of him getting back into power.
Trump is- perversely for someone who built his career on cosplaying an idiot's stereotype of a dealmaking businessman (**)- not someone you can do business with.
The self-proclaimed "dealmaker" whose "deals" are worthless because he goes back on them after five minutes. Whose constantly changing and capricious tariffs make "doing [actual] business" with the US not worth the hassle, who costs huge amounts of other countries' attention, diplomacy and political capital to deal with, only for the results of that to be rendered irrelevant within no time.
The person who threatened to take Greenland by force.
Only an idiot would risk tying economic future and military security on a person like that and the country that saw fit to put him in power.
Problem is that Europe made a huge, short-termist mistake by letting itself get into that position over the past thirty years. This was already a mistake before Trump got in, it just took someone like him being elected- particularly the second time(!)- to make that mistake and the consequences of it obvious.
Now it has to get out of it.
That's not going to happen overnight, but it has to happen because there is no alternative.
(*) Not that it wasn't already transparently obvious the first time round what sort of person he was or that he was clearly unfit to be president.
(**) Never forget that Trump is a failed businessman who was only ever able to spend his life doing this because he inherited a shitload of money from his slumlord father in the first place... and ended up no better off than he would have been had he put it in a tracker fund and done *nothing* else.
If that was meant remotely seriously, it says more about the person saying it than the truth of the matter, i.e. rabid right hyperbole from some swivel-eyed nutcase foaming at the mouth over his Daily Telegraph.
(Somewhat similar to the Americans today who accuse the likes of Biden of being Marxist.)
I actually agreed with most of what they said and was inclined to upvote it until that last sentence. I doubt for a second that Labour are trying to win over the Guardian or the strawman lefties they represent.
The idea that modern Labour is a "left wing" party has more to do with what they were historically, and what they're meant to be- not what they are today, which is more like the Tories of the past.
Labour under Starmer takes for granted it can hold the vote of those *actually* on the left to ransom- on the basis that the Tories, or more recently Reform, will get in- and pandered to Tory voters and Brexiteers at the last general election.
Starmer is a blank. I don't know what I'm *expected* to think he actually believes in or what his vision for the party is- let alone what those *actually* are. Labour won the last election purely by keeping their mouths shut and not being the Tories. My expectations of them were very low, yet even I'm shocked that after over 18 months in power, they still manage to project virtually nothing in terms of meaningful values.
Yes, everyone was sick of the attention-seeking, self-serving right-wing "personalities" of the last Tory government, but even a competent-but-dull government- which I think many expected from Starmer- has to be able to project what they stand for and believe in.
I'm tired of apologists telling us how much he cares about X, Y or Z privately, when he never shows that or stands up for it in public. Judged by his actions and policies- the only thing he *can* be judged on- Starmer comes across as a suffocatingly beige Tory.
As soon as I read "activist investor" and "Palliser Capital", my assumption was that they were private equity parasites.
That is, asset strippers on steroids, the same types who use financial trickery to buy a company in a leveraged buyout, load it with debt- to themselves- and leach the value out, leaving the debt-ridden husk and unfulfilled responsibilities to be passed on and ultimately left in the hands of some unsuspecting mug.
Which was apparently- and ironically- a conversion of a somewhat cuter Japanese arcade game called Butasan that U.S. Gold needed to be an early example of "Darker and Edgier for Western audiences" when it converted it to UK home formats. Then advertised it with a barely-clad Page 3 girl holding the box, because sex and controversy sells.
Or so they must have hoped.
I wasn't able to check when I posted the above comment from my phone, but looking back at one of my own comments(!) confirms my vague recollection that it was 5x8 and only 51 columns.
As I mentioned in both comments, it might have been fun to play about with if one happened to have a +3, but nothing more, and not suited to serious use. And I'm not sure how big a selling point it would have been to the people still buying the Spectrum at that point.
It's clear in hindsight that by around 1985/86, the more serious enthusiast market- the type who would have cared about CP/M- was already moving away from it and it was becoming something that sold mainly on the basis of its huge base of cheap games software.
As you suggest, Amstrad had no incentive to improve the Spectrum- which they most likely saw as a cash cow by then- because they'd only have been competing with their existing CPC and/or PCW lines.
And, honestly... I don't really blame them for doing that. Too many companies launched products that occupied poorly-thought out and/or nonexistent niches or overlapped and competed with their own models. And as much as Sugar was a dick whose hardheadedness and understanding of the market and what man-on-the-street wanted was too often used cynically to screw them over (see the "mug's eyeful"), his unsentimental pragmatism wasn't *always* necessarily a bad thing and did sometimes deliver.
So, anyway, I'm surprised that Amstrad even bothered to implement CP/M on the +3 when (I assume) they wanted to sell it as a cheap, quick-loading games machine and most people who cared likely wouldn't have gone for it?
Regardless, Sinclair probably wouldn't have improved the Spectrum into that machine either- mainly because they saw the QL as their business-oriented serious-but-cheap computer. And, in some ways, if it hadn't been flawed and it had been a bit better (*), the QL probably *could* have been that machine and a better starting point for that than Spectrum compatibility which I'm sure fans would have liked but, realistically, probably wasn't that big a deal.
(*) Someone made the very good point that Sinclair's obsession with keeping the price down at all costs probably hurt the QL, and that it might have been better if it had been a £499 rather than a £399 machine.
The +3 was released after Amstrad had bought the Spectrum though, and by then the Spectrum was a bit dated and being sold mainly on the basis of its huge game base.
There were other cheap Z80 Amstrad machines probably more suited to CP/M, most obviously the PCW series.
It's surprising they bothered with it at all in the +3 given the 32 column 256 x192 graphics weren't updated and despite squeezing more characters in by reducing their width, it still wasn't 80 column.
Yahoo Japan was always somewhat its own thing, though- legally, operationally and culturally mostly separate from the main US-based Yahoo other than the fact they co-owned it until recently. (*)
And yes, Yahoo Japan was latterly far more successful than its US namesake, which never really recovered its former impetus after the dotcom crash.
(*) It was a joint venture with Softbank from the 90s until the late 2010s when Softbank bought out Yahoo US's share.
That's true nowadays, but Yahoo Japan started out as a joint-venture with Softbank during the 90s and *was* co-owned by the original US parent until that was itself split up a few years back. (*)
That said, Yahoo Japan has pretty much always been noticeably distinct from its namesake- legally, operationally and in terms of success. Particularly after the dotcom crash, when the original Yahoo lost ground to Google and never really recovered, whereas Yahoo Japan seems to have remained the biggest- or one of the biggest- players there.
In fact, if I remember correctly, part of the reason the original Yahoo company was split was that their stakes in Yahoo Japan and Alibaba were worth far more than the "main" US/worldwide Yahoo business itself and being held back by it.
(*) Verizon bought the main US/worldwide Yahoo operation, but its stake in Yahoo Japan was sold off separately. Wikipedia confirms my recollection that it was Softbank themselves who bought out Yahoo's share.
No, virtue signalling would be "look at me, aren't I good/moral?"
Virtue signalling is undeniably a real thing to a certain extent, and always has been throughout history.
But... it's also noticeable that in recent years there's been a huge online upswing in fingerpointing accusations of "virtue signalling" at anyone apparently behaving in a remotely altruistic way. Or simply showing concern for others and being less than a self-centred piece of shit.
And it's odd that this always seems to come from people who come across as self-centered pieces of shit themselves.
People who- one suspects- would never behave that way unless there was something in it for them to appear "good" and project that mentality onto everyone else. Or people who resent others that make them look bad by comparison, and would rather invalidate the whole idea of altruism and make them out to be hypocrites than become better people themselves.
The type of people okay with (e.g.) Donald Trump being a fucking piece of shit because it validates *them* being fucking pieces of shit themselves.
Irony is that this makes these people suckers for grifters and careerists who want to cash in on appearing as "one of them" by simply pandering to such views and behaviour in a performative manner.
You might call that "vice signalling".
XML is a good example, but it came out before 2008.
The thrust of the article was that everything from the early 90s until the 2008 crash was an improvement and from 2008 on, bullshit.
That might or might not have been broadly true, but the likes of XML- or rather, how it was overdone and oversold- make clear that the earlier era was still far from perfect in that respect.
I was going to say much the same. If we're still discussing this in the context of the article- i.e. contrasting the post-2008 era of "bullshit tech" with the supposedly halcyon era preceding it- then it has to be pointed out that this is *exactly* the position IE was in from the late 90s until the mid-2000s.
IE's nonstandard crap and general stagnation held back web standards for *years*.
A few years ago, I read about some self-pitying tossers at MS whining that they had to support the crappy old, dated, nonstandard features and IE versions people were still using, dating back to IE6 and earlier.
You know, the same stuff that *their* employer shoved into IE in the first place, which then became entrenched because IE had a de facto monopoly and because MS sat on their lazy backsides with IE6 for five years until it finally got some competition with Firefox. By which point many people were locked into systems and sites that relied on all that nonstandard and obsolete crap because everyone back then used IE anyway.
Urgh.
Anyway, yeah, fuck IE and any rose-tinted late-90s/early-2000s nostalgia associated with it- I'm glad that shitty, dated POS is dead.
Just not so happy that Chrome has now become its spiritual successor....
TrapC is just the latest in a long line of numerous attempts at solving this problem for C and/or C++. (It's not even the only current attempt (*)).
Their lack of memory safety- and the impetus to solve it- has *already* been an issue for decades. If any of those earlier attempts had resulted in an easy, universally-applicable solution, they'd have become standard long ago and we wouldn't be discussing this or bothering with Rust. But, of course, we are.
And honestly, if the issue was as straightforward as it appears superficially, it *would* already have happened by now. The fact it hasn't likely makes clear that anything resembling a universal solution is going to be very difficult to find if it's possible at all.
Regardless, I certainly wouldn't hold out hope that- even with the magic of LLM AI(!)- TrapC is going to be anything more than just another attempt.
(*) It's not even the only one in recent times; there's also something called "Fil-C".
The point is that if one already considers GMail a SaaS- as the article does when it points to it as the first example aimed at the general public- then there doesn't seem to be any fundamental distinction between it and Hotmail, which had already been around for the better part of a decade by then.
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