39 ms·

Fun Fact: I own porn I can't watch

449 points by pzb 4y ago

TheRealPomax 4y ago
Sounds like a job for Technology Connections. Or Cathode Ray Dude.
NotYourLawyer 4y ago
> So DuArt Media Services got to work trying to rescue the tape . . . . DuArt then made a documentary about this, called “Lost and Found: The ’73 Knicks Championship Tape”. It won an Emmy. The punchline? That documentary seems to be lost. I'm just speechless.
- deleted 4y ago
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- funwares 4y ago
  The IMDb page for the film [0] does appear to have an Emmy win as trivia, but I can't find anything about this documentary on the 2013 Sports Emmy Awards Wikipedia page [1] or its source [2]. 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/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2883206/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/34th_Sports_Emmy_Awards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/34th_Sports_Emmy_Awards [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20131118154841/http://www.emmyonline.org/mediacenter/sports_34th_winners.html https://web.archive.org/web/20131118154841/http://www.emmyon...
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - zerocrates 4y ago
    This was aired on MSG Network, a local network for New York sports, so I figured it was probably a local Emmy (like when your local news talks about winning some large number of Emmys). 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_Emmy_Awards_Winners_Press_Release_Nov_4_2016_2_.pdf https://www.nyemmys.org/media/files/files/7c2ad17b/57th_NY_E...
    - yellowapple 4y ago
      Are there local versions of the Grammys, Oscars, and Tonys, too? Maybe an EGOT ain't as out of reach as I once thought.
  - michaelcampbell 4y ago
    Imdb can be quite innaccurate; an ex colleague of mine is listed as some minor production staff in one of the Star Wars movies, but he never was involved whatsoever. He told me but I can't remember how he got listed.
- ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago
  ABC Britain made this probably amazing anthology series in 1962 called Out of This World [1]. 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://www.imdb.com/title/tt0163475/?ref_=fn_al_tt_4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_of_This_World_(British_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_of_This_World_(British_TV_... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-RX1GT4GT0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-RX1GT4GT0 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Name_of_the_Rose#:~:text=The%20solution%20to%20the%20central%20murder%20mystery%20hinges%20on%20the%20contents%20of%20Aristotle%27s%20book%20on%20Comedy%2C%20which%20has%20been%20lost https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Name_of_the_Rose#:~:text=T....
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    The loss of the DuMont archives adds to our extremely distorted idea of the entire celebrity environment of the past. Some of the biggest entertainers have had their entire careers lost, notably Ernie Kovacs: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/dumont-network-gleason-lost-kinescope https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/dumont-network-gleason... > 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.gov/film/pdfs/tvadams.pdf 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-kovacs-comedy https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/edie-adams-ernie-kovac...
- deleted 4y ago
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standardUser 4y ago
This is incredibly fascinating. The one thing I don't get is how the Cartrivision was used to record off of TV. Was it a built-in feature? Did they sell blanks? Or maybe it was some kind of hack? EDIT: According to Wikipedia they did have a built-in record feature and the Wiki page even shows an image of a blank tape. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartrivision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartrivision
- jayd16 4y ago
  You can just record over used magnetic tape, no? You don't necessarily need blanks.
  - Finnucane 4y ago
    But the player has to have the record function. Did it allow for that or did someone mod the hardware?
amelius 4y ago
And I can't watch it on my Oculus Quest, because Zuck is watching over my shoulders ...
- deleted 4y ago
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downvoteme1 4y ago
[flagged]
- RajT88 4y ago
  I won't argue with the downvotes as you're advocating piracy, but this appears to be technically accurate. It seems possible indeed to obtain the film there and view it. You know. For science.
- jrnichols 4y ago
  I agree. After reading this article, that was the first thing I thought of. Copy protection mechanisms like these were downright obnoxious and it's no surprise that customers get sick of them and go with the cracked/pirated versions. Things like DiVX were doomed from the start.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  It's a $6 legal download: https://www.somethingweird.com/product_info.php?products_id=57912 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.
throwawayacc3 4y ago
[flagged]
- sleepychu 4y ago
  foone uses they/them pronouns :-)
  - csours 4y ago
    I'm sure I'm not the first to say this, but I'd prefer to use they/them as the default for people I don't know well (ie, everyone on the internet that I don't have a social or parasocial relationship with)
    - Veen 4y ago
      Who is stopping you from doing that? Use whichever pronouns you want. Unless of course by ”I prefer” you mean “everyone should,” which is a different matter.
- jsnell 4y ago
  I bet that the kvetching doesn't happen now that it's a single Tumblr post rather than a tweet thread. And if it does, the complaints can be flagged instead of the post.
  - fknorangesite 4y ago
    > I bet that the kvetching doesn't happen now that it's a single Tumblr post rather than a tweet thread. Maybe. But also HN doesn't have a great reputation re: gender, and foone is non-binary. So there are multiple reasons.
- sschueller 4y ago
  I don't understand? Why would you post a blog on the public internet and then have an issue over it being shared? It's not like HN is reprinting it and the discussions are interesting. I would not have know about this format if it hadn't been posted here.
sys32768 4y ago
Very fascinating. Reminded me of FlexPlay from 2003, "self destructing" DVDs for short-term rentals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexplay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexplay
- agotterer 4y ago
  Before that it was DIVX, Digital Video Express (not the codec), who in the late 90s tried to create an alternative to video rentals: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIVX https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIVX.
- crunchyfrog 4y ago
  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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIVX
  - ghaff 4y ago
    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.
    - flomo 4y ago
      The real issue with DIVX wasn't the rental/PPV model, it was certain studios who were boycotting DVD, due to poor DRM security. (Which they eventually 'patched' legally.) So it was imperative that DIVX failed to avoid a format war.
    - mrguyorama 4y ago
      The problem isn't the different pricing. The disgusting greedy thing is purposely designing something to destroy itself to enforce that false dichotomy.
      - ghaff 4y ago
        How is that any different from "buying" a digital rental on Amazon that expires after some length of time?
s5300 4y ago
[flagged]
- jedberg 4y ago
  If they didn't want their posts linked from HN, they could block it like jwz.org does.
  - s5300 4y ago
    It was to my knowledge that they had tried in some method, but for whatever reason it was repeatedly worked around & their work kept showing up here, typically leading to them being harassed on Twitter by users coming from here. You can now see, that for various reasons including this, they no longer use Twitter I may be remembering some things incorrectly, but that’s the jist. Just thought I’d pass along the knowledge of their hatred for this site out of respect, as I don’t think most who repeatedly post & upvote their work know. Feels. Grimy as fuck to me, but I’m nobody.
- apocalypstyx 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - FredPret 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - apocalypstyx 4y ago
      [flagged]
      - FredPret 4y ago
        Seems like both sides want that
        apocalypstyx 4y ago
MissTake 4y ago
Not about the format here; but I was interested in the image for “Brother Rat” downplaying Ronald Reagan’s billing, whereas the three posters available on IMDB has him basically on top billing. Wonder what changed…
- greenburger 4y ago
  I don't know, but it must have happened to Jane Wyman too.
- bigmattystyles 4y ago
  Ronald Reagan, the actor!?
  - BizarroLand 4y ago
    And Jack Benny is Secretary of the Treasury!
getoffmyyawn 4y ago
I was surprised to find that there is at least one working Cartrivision system out there[0] and the host of the video says to contact him if you have one you want fixed! 0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcpouZiZ4UE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcpouZiZ4UE
Semaphor 4y ago
Heh, I read it and remembered knowing a lot of it already. Of course, it turns out it was them even then [0] ;) And yay! They are on tumblr! So much easier to read and I can subscribe to their posts. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28302722 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28302722
- Semaphor 4y ago
  Just wondering, am I getting downvoted because I correctly gender them, or because I’m happy to read content in a format that I can read without it being a mental issue for me?
shp0ngle 4y ago
When I googled, it seems the document didn’t actually win an Emmy.
- philwelch 4y ago
  Local Emmy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34631203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34631203
labrador 4y ago
The old "Tantalean punishment" reworked as a sexual fetish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tantalus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tantalus
krupan 4y ago
Too bad about the click bait title (I almost skipped reading because of it, but then I saw it was Foone), this is a great history lesson on technology and copyright stupidity!
- thiht 4y ago
  I clicked because of the title! I expected something like a legal oddity, but wasn’t disappointed, this is way better!
eternalban 4y ago
Adultery for fun and profit, 1971 /g https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1817219 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. *
danbruc 4y ago
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.
- delecti 4y ago
  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 the precise terms for the various concepts, but hopefully that shows how specific to a given format the reader needs to be.
  - Y_Y 4y ago
    hence the name: Vertical Helical Scan
    - delecti 4y ago
      That's a backronym. VHS originally was an abbreviation for "Video Home System". 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".
  - EvanAnderson 4y ago
    I don't know about DAT as an audio format but DAT in its data storage format "Digital Data Storage"[0] is also helical scan. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Data_Storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Data_Storage
LAC-Tech 4y ago
[flagged]
- antisthenes 4y ago
  I'd rather hear about their porn habits than endless virtue signalling that's prevalent in the 21st century USA.
  - RangerScience 4y ago
    real / not real question but like when does lamenting about virtue signaling itself become virtue signaling?
    - dpkirchner 4y ago
      And when will the people crying about virtue signaling admit the concept goes way, way back. Look at how popular necklaces with crosses are, as a prominent example.
      - antisthenes 4y ago
        Just because something goes way back, doesn't mean one shouldn't complain about it. It was crass 1000 years ago and it's still crass now.
        dpkirchner 4y ago
        Oh, sure, I agree. But it's never considered. People just seem focused on modern virtue signaling like sharing their belief that some people are transgender (or that that's even a thing). It's a weird right-wing cry fest, which is ironic because the right is associated with the aforementioned cross-based virtue signaling.
      - RangerScience 4y ago
        Haha, excellent point. And fitting - I can't shake the thought that the OP article is also "unlicensed bread goes back to 1973" ref: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-...
temptemptemp111 4y ago
[dead]
trononono 4y ago
[flagged]
trononono 4y ago
[flagged]
patapong 4y ago
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.
- sneak 4y ago
  My NAS running Jellyfin would like a word.
  - patapong 4y ago
    You are the person opening the red tapes to be able to watch them again!
  - SergeAx 4y ago
    Right after my torrent client, please.
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    Either you broke the law many times to fill that NAS, or you have massive gaps in content because those items have never been broadcast or released on disc. So it doesn't disagree very well.
- Pxtl 4y ago
  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.
  - mywittyname 4y ago
    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.
Animats 4y ago
I came across a Cartrivision rewinder in a surplus store once. It was a simple device, with a motor, some limit switches, a key switch, and a counter. The counter tracked how many cartridges had been rewound, for billing purposes. 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.
- betamaxthetape 4y ago
  Do you have any more information on this? It sounds really interesting, and I'd love to learn more!
  - Animats 4y ago
    The play counter? Lots of patents in the 1980s. 3M, IBM, CBS, Polaroid. Dead end commercially. [1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US4586101A/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US4586101A/en
    - betamaxthetape 4y ago
      Interesting. But was it ever developed commercially? I can't find any consumer products actually using the counter (either for rental or for lock/jam-after-certain-plays). But that could just be because I'm using the wrong search term - I imagine that there is a brand-specific term and searching "VHS tape play counter" isn't helpful since all the results are for either repairing VCRs, or for accessing the tape counter functionality in the VCR.
- Wistar 4y ago
  In the early 80's, I modified a VHS cassette by placing a cylindrical high-strength magnet adjacent to the tape path on the takeup side. There was a nearly perfect pre-existing pocket in the case webbing to put the magnet with a dot of glue. The idea was to make a play-once, self-erasing cassette. Although not perfect, it was effective enough to really screw up the second playback. Probably screwed up the tape deck, too, but I don't recall any real evidence of that.
nemo44x 4y ago
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 music that was only recorded that way.
- soneil 4y ago
  Seems somewhat ironic that this is tape?
- jesboat 4y ago
  > 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 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.
  - nemo44x 4y ago
    He uses magnetic tape that has been in use for nearly 100 years and continues to be.
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  > 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.
pessimizer 4y ago
Aside from the great technical trivia, it looks like the late Mike Vraney at SWV found this movie and saved it: https://www.somethingweird.com/product_info.php?products_id=57912 https://www.somethingweird.com/product_info.php?products_id=... https://www.iafd.com/title.rme/title=adultery+for+fun+and+profit/year=1971/adultery-for-fun-and-profit.htm https://www.iafd.com/title.rme/title=adultery+for+fun+and+pr... http://distribpix.com/blog/adultery-fun-and-profit-1971 http://distribpix.com/blog/adultery-fun-and-profit-1971
spiritplumber 4y ago
foone should be followed on the birdsite as well, it's worth the time.
- jml7c5 4y ago
  Foone stopped posting on Twitter shortly after Musk bought it. They're over on Mastodon now: https://digipres.club/@foone https://digipres.club/@foone
Pxtl 4y ago
This reminds me of Jay Bauman's rant about how VHS is a shit format when his Youtube team (RedLetterMedia) obliterated every VHS copy of Nukie they could find in a wood-chipper. https://twitter.com/JayBauman1/status/1613910812632186881 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.
tezza 4y ago
lol. i am sure to that there are some porn magazines which no longer open
foone 4y ago
[flagged]
- camdenlock 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - dang 4y ago
    Please stop breaking the site guidelines. You've done it repeatedly and we've asked you more than once before. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - pooooopeee 4y ago
      [flagged]
- colonwqbang 4y ago
  Why don't you want people to link to your site?
  - McGlockenshire 4y ago
    Every time foone gets posted here, there is, in rough order: 1) Misgendering, usually out of ignorance. foone is aggressively agender and goes by they/them. 2) Someone correcting the misgendering. 3) The same circular discussion of why foone doesn't like being posted to HN. 4) The same circular discussion of pronouns and the culture war. 5) Culture warriors come out and do their thing and often get their comments flagged and sometimes, though not nearly often enough, get banned. 6) Many of these posts get nuked. Both yours and mine are likely candidates. It's a guaranteed pattern and foone got sick of it long ago and has asked that submissions of their stuff be banned here. That hasn't happened and thus the cycle will continue endlessly as long as foone does cool shit.
    - TheHappyOddish 4y ago
graton 4y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20230202165438/https://foone.tumblr.com/post/705446706461949953/fun-fact-i-own-porn-i-cant-watch https://web.archive.org/web/20230202165438/https://foone.tum...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
capableweb 4y ago
Here is an archive of the original content before it was replaced: https://archive.is/I00Gh https://archive.is/I00Gh
ashurov 4y ago
it seems that they didn't migrate the video. https://players.brightcove.net/5387496921001/default_default/index.html?videoId=5453961780001 https://players.brightcove.net/5387496921001/default_default... is unavailable, but the old wordpress images are still online and available: https://www.msgnetworks.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/chamberlain_041213_RA-770x385.jpg https://www.msgnetworks.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/chamb...
smackeyacky 4y ago
One fun fact I learned when I was toying with Laserdisc is why it was so popular in Japan: the humidity encourages video tape to grow mold[0] unless it's stored somewhere cool and dry. I would love the room to play with more of the obscure / dead video formats but Laserdisc is enough for me. Others here have recommended Techmoan[1] as a good source of vicariously seeing obsolete video formats. [0]https://lunchmeatvhs.com/blogs/blog/rescue-your-awesome-analog-treasures-from-moldy-malfunction-with-help-from-tapehead-chip-parton https://lunchmeatvhs.com/blogs/blog/rescue-your-awesome-anal... [1]https://www.youtube.com/@Techmoan https://www.youtube.com/@Techmoan
troone 4y ago
[flagged]
- jszymborski 4y ago
  And people wonder why Foone doesn't want their posts on here.
NautilusWave 4y ago
Is Hacker News secretly funded by J. K. Rowling? Was there a singular precipitating event that got trans folks pissed at HN? Is it a series of factors that I'd have to sift through millions of comments to understand??
- P0l83q4p1Hw3Ul 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - satellites 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - P0l83q4p1Hw3Ul 4y ago
      I meant Foone Turing specifically. No comment on the correlation between mental illness and trans.
    - deadbeeves 4y ago
      This sounds like a reason to not like the Internet. You can read comments like this on just about any open forum. And it's perfectly fine to not like that, but that doesn't mean you get to dictate whether other people can talk about what you publish. If one doesn't like one doesn't have to read it.
      - ponchodeli 4y ago
        [flagged]
        deadbeeves 4y ago
        >They are dictating what can happen on HN about as much as you are dictating what they can post on their twitter. Hardly. I never said, "Foone mustn't say X on Twitter", or even "they should not say X on Twitter". The latest post actually contains the phrase "NEVER POST ME ON YOUR SITE EVER AGAIN." I'm not even gonna say that they should not make this demand, I just find it pretty funny that they think anyone is going to respect it.
deleted 4y ago
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BxGyw2 4y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 4y ago
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- nayuki 4y ago
  Foone is not the only one expressing this sentiment. Here's another recent example: > Note: unfortunately, Hacker News found this post. I think I got them to go away. But if you're coming from there, please read about the parable of the Nazi bar and take a hard look at the company you keep, or just fuck off. Thanks. -- https://cohost.org/arborelia/post/868933-how-to-destroy-a-cer https://cohost.org/arborelia/post/868933-how-to-destroy-a-ce... Previous edit (private archive): > oh shit it's hacker news / I've heard that people from the orange VC site are linking to this post! You are absolutely not welcome here. Cohost is not a place for you. Your site is full of sexism and racism that you can't report to the main moderator because he approves of it. / you are bad and you hang out with white supremacists. please leave. HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34446704 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34446704
  - deadbeeves 4y ago
    They sound like people bitter because they couldn't get a moderation team on their side. Good! I'm not fond of Nazis, but I don't need or want them silenced. Let them condemn themselves with their own words.
- krapp 4y ago
  You should have more empathy for people, and rather than diagnose someone expressing a negative opinion about this community with mental illness, assume you might lack the necessary context with which to interpret their frustration. You can find some of that context in the pile of flagged comments at the bottom of this thread, or any thread where foone's content is posted.
- xyzzy_plugh 4y ago
  It's not pure mental illness. To many, this site is a pox on our society. Here's a past explanation foone's position: https://twitter.com/foone/status/1440697266059153439 https://twitter.com/foone/status/1440697266059153439 And in a way you've even proven foone right. You're insinuating that they are mentally ill. I don't know why you feel that it's okay to treat other humans like that, but I hope you get the help you deserve.
zoklet-enjoyer 4y ago
[flagged]
- lando2319 4y ago
  The original post is still viewable if you check the root URL This appears to be a special message just for us.
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 4y ago
    You can also just scroll down a bit to find the original post. There is another (also interesting) post in between.
- knaik94 4y ago
  This particular author seems to be frustrated by some repetitive and minimizing comments from HN in past discussions of their work. Part of the discussion used to be people sharing that twitter threads are annoying and not discussing the contents. [1] And there was a pattern of a few HN comments minimizing past posts saying "it's nothing new" as well as twitter bot spam. [2] Edit: They also posted further down: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34634289 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34634289 The original article can also be seen if you just go their tumblr homepage as they made a copy of it. https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1440695609913053194 https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1440695609913053194 https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1310434318490034176 https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1310434318490034176
halotrope 4y ago
What is it with the message to hacker news?
- piperswe 4y ago
  Foone hasn't had a particularly good history of not being insulted for their posting style (particularly Twitter/Fediverse threads) on Hacker News
- jdiff 4y ago
  HN is quite transphobic. Any post they make devolves into harassment over that and (usually) pointless whining about the format their posts are usually made in (long tweet/toot threads).
melagonster 4y ago
[flagged]
dusted 4y ago
[flagged]
deafpolygon 4y ago
Now points to: https://foone.tumblr.com/post/705446706461949953/hello-hacker-news-never-post-me-on-your-site-ever https://foone.tumblr.com/post/705446706461949953/hello-hacke... What?
- npteljes 4y ago
  They don't like traffic from HN for some reason, and this childish reaction is because of that. In order to view the content, check this archive link: https://archive.is/I00Gh https://archive.is/I00Gh
  - deafpolygon 4y ago
    What's wrong with traffic from HN? I mean, more readers = good thing?
    - npteljes 4y ago
      They reflect on it here: https://twitter.com/foone/status/1440375176604966924 https://twitter.com/foone/status/1440375176604966924 Or in a saner format (when it loads): https://nitter.net/foone/status/1440375176604966924 https://nitter.net/foone/status/1440375176604966924
      - deafpolygon 4y ago
        Oh.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]

449 points by pzb 4y ago

Sounds like a job for Technology Connections. Or Cathode Ray Dude.

> So DuArt Media Services got to work trying to rescue the tape . . . . DuArt then made a documentary about this, called “Lost and Found: The ’73 Knicks Championship Tape”. It won an Emmy. The punchline? That documentary seems to be lost. I'm just speechless.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
funwares 4y ago
The IMDb page for the film [0] does appear to have an Emmy win as trivia, but I can't find anything about this documentary on the 2013 Sports Emmy Awards Wikipedia page [1] or its source [2]. 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/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2883206/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/34th_Sports_Emmy_Awards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/34th_Sports_Emmy_Awards [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20131118154841/http://www.emmyonline.org/mediacenter/sports_34th_winners.html https://web.archive.org/web/20131118154841/http://www.emmyon...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- zerocrates 4y ago
  This was aired on MSG Network, a local network for New York sports, so I figured it was probably a local Emmy (like when your local news talks about winning some large number of Emmys). 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_Emmy_Awards_Winners_Press_Release_Nov_4_2016_2_.pdf https://www.nyemmys.org/media/files/files/7c2ad17b/57th_NY_E...
  - yellowapple 4y ago
    Are there local versions of the Grammys, Oscars, and Tonys, too? Maybe an EGOT ain't as out of reach as I once thought.
- michaelcampbell 4y ago
  Imdb can be quite innaccurate; an ex colleague of mine is listed as some minor production staff in one of the Star Wars movies, but he never was involved whatsoever. He told me but I can't remember how he got listed.
ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago
ABC Britain made this probably amazing anthology series in 1962 called Out of This World [1]. 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://www.imdb.com/title/tt0163475/?ref_=fn_al_tt_4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_of_This_World_(British_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_of_This_World_(British_TV_... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-RX1GT4GT0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-RX1GT4GT0 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Name_of_the_Rose#:~:text=The%20solution%20to%20the%20central%20murder%20mystery%20hinges%20on%20the%20contents%20of%20Aristotle%27s%20book%20on%20Comedy%2C%20which%20has%20been%20lost https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Name_of_the_Rose#:~:text=T....
- pessimizer 4y ago
  The loss of the DuMont archives adds to our extremely distorted idea of the entire celebrity environment of the past. Some of the biggest entertainers have had their entire careers lost, notably Ernie Kovacs: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/dumont-network-gleason-lost-kinescope https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/dumont-network-gleason... > 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.gov/film/pdfs/tvadams.pdf 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-kovacs-comedy https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/edie-adams-ernie-kovac...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

standardUser 4y ago

This is incredibly fascinating. The one thing I don't get is how the Cartrivision was used to record off of TV. Was it a built-in feature? Did they sell blanks? Or maybe it was some kind of hack? EDIT: According to Wikipedia they did have a built-in record feature and the Wiki page even shows an image of a blank tape. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartrivision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartrivision

jayd16 4y ago
You can just record over used magnetic tape, no? You don't necessarily need blanks.
- Finnucane 4y ago
  But the player has to have the record function. Did it allow for that or did someone mod the hardware?

amelius 4y ago

And I can't watch it on my Oculus Quest, because Zuck is watching over my shoulders ...

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

downvoteme1 4y ago

[flagged]

RajT88 4y ago
I won't argue with the downvotes as you're advocating piracy, but this appears to be technically accurate. It seems possible indeed to obtain the film there and view it. You know. For science.
jrnichols 4y ago
I agree. After reading this article, that was the first thing I thought of. Copy protection mechanisms like these were downright obnoxious and it's no surprise that customers get sick of them and go with the cracked/pirated versions. Things like DiVX were doomed from the start.
pessimizer 4y ago
It's a $6 legal download: https://www.somethingweird.com/product_info.php?products_id=57912 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.

throwawayacc3 4y ago

[flagged]

sleepychu 4y ago
foone uses they/them pronouns :-)
- csours 4y ago
  I'm sure I'm not the first to say this, but I'd prefer to use they/them as the default for people I don't know well (ie, everyone on the internet that I don't have a social or parasocial relationship with)
  - Veen 4y ago
    Who is stopping you from doing that? Use whichever pronouns you want. Unless of course by ”I prefer” you mean “everyone should,” which is a different matter.
jsnell 4y ago
I bet that the kvetching doesn't happen now that it's a single Tumblr post rather than a tweet thread. And if it does, the complaints can be flagged instead of the post.
- fknorangesite 4y ago
  > I bet that the kvetching doesn't happen now that it's a single Tumblr post rather than a tweet thread. Maybe. But also HN doesn't have a great reputation re: gender, and foone is non-binary. So there are multiple reasons.
sschueller 4y ago
I don't understand? Why would you post a blog on the public internet and then have an issue over it being shared? It's not like HN is reprinting it and the discussions are interesting. I would not have know about this format if it hadn't been posted here.

sys32768 4y ago

Very fascinating. Reminded me of FlexPlay from 2003, "self destructing" DVDs for short-term rentals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexplay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexplay

agotterer 4y ago
Before that it was DIVX, Digital Video Express (not the codec), who in the late 90s tried to create an alternative to video rentals: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIVX https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIVX.
crunchyfrog 4y ago
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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIVX
- ghaff 4y ago
  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.
  - flomo 4y ago
    The real issue with DIVX wasn't the rental/PPV model, it was certain studios who were boycotting DVD, due to poor DRM security. (Which they eventually 'patched' legally.) So it was imperative that DIVX failed to avoid a format war.
  - mrguyorama 4y ago
    The problem isn't the different pricing. The disgusting greedy thing is purposely designing something to destroy itself to enforce that false dichotomy.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      How is that any different from "buying" a digital rental on Amazon that expires after some length of time?

s5300 4y ago

[flagged]

jedberg 4y ago
If they didn't want their posts linked from HN, they could block it like jwz.org does.
- s5300 4y ago
  It was to my knowledge that they had tried in some method, but for whatever reason it was repeatedly worked around & their work kept showing up here, typically leading to them being harassed on Twitter by users coming from here. You can now see, that for various reasons including this, they no longer use Twitter I may be remembering some things incorrectly, but that’s the jist. Just thought I’d pass along the knowledge of their hatred for this site out of respect, as I don’t think most who repeatedly post & upvote their work know. Feels. Grimy as fuck to me, but I’m nobody.
apocalypstyx 4y ago
[flagged]
- FredPret 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - apocalypstyx 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - FredPret 4y ago
      Seems like both sides want that
      - apocalypstyx 4y ago

MissTake 4y ago

Not about the format here; but I was interested in the image for “Brother Rat” downplaying Ronald Reagan’s billing, whereas the three posters available on IMDB has him basically on top billing. Wonder what changed…

greenburger 4y ago
I don't know, but it must have happened to Jane Wyman too.
bigmattystyles 4y ago
Ronald Reagan, the actor!?
- BizarroLand 4y ago
  And Jack Benny is Secretary of the Treasury!

getoffmyyawn 4y ago

I was surprised to find that there is at least one working Cartrivision system out there[0] and the host of the video says to contact him if you have one you want fixed! 0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcpouZiZ4UE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcpouZiZ4UE

Semaphor 4y ago

Heh, I read it and remembered knowing a lot of it already. Of course, it turns out it was them even then [0] ;) And yay! They are on tumblr! So much easier to read and I can subscribe to their posts. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28302722 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28302722

Semaphor 4y ago
Just wondering, am I getting downvoted because I correctly gender them, or because I’m happy to read content in a format that I can read without it being a mental issue for me?

shp0ngle 4y ago

When I googled, it seems the document didn’t actually win an Emmy.

philwelch 4y ago
Local Emmy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34631203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34631203

labrador 4y ago

The old "Tantalean punishment" reworked as a sexual fetish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tantalus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tantalus

krupan 4y ago

Too bad about the click bait title (I almost skipped reading because of it, but then I saw it was Foone), this is a great history lesson on technology and copyright stupidity!

thiht 4y ago
I clicked because of the title! I expected something like a legal oddity, but wasn’t disappointed, this is way better!

eternalban 4y ago

Adultery for fun and profit, 1971 /g https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1817219 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. *

danbruc 4y ago

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.

delecti 4y ago
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 the precise terms for the various concepts, but hopefully that shows how specific to a given format the reader needs to be.
- Y_Y 4y ago
  hence the name: Vertical Helical Scan
  - delecti 4y ago
    That's a backronym. VHS originally was an abbreviation for "Video Home System". 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".
- EvanAnderson 4y ago
  I don't know about DAT as an audio format but DAT in its data storage format "Digital Data Storage"[0] is also helical scan. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Data_Storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Data_Storage

LAC-Tech 4y ago

[flagged]

antisthenes 4y ago
I'd rather hear about their porn habits than endless virtue signalling that's prevalent in the 21st century USA.
- RangerScience 4y ago
  real / not real question but like when does lamenting about virtue signaling itself become virtue signaling?
  - dpkirchner 4y ago
    And when will the people crying about virtue signaling admit the concept goes way, way back. Look at how popular necklaces with crosses are, as a prominent example.
    - antisthenes 4y ago
      Just because something goes way back, doesn't mean one shouldn't complain about it. It was crass 1000 years ago and it's still crass now.
      - dpkirchner 4y ago
        Oh, sure, I agree. But it's never considered. People just seem focused on modern virtue signaling like sharing their belief that some people are transgender (or that that's even a thing). It's a weird right-wing cry fest, which is ironic because the right is associated with the aforementioned cross-based virtue signaling.
    - RangerScience 4y ago
      Haha, excellent point. And fitting - I can't shake the thought that the OP article is also "unlicensed bread goes back to 1973" ref: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-...

temptemptemp111 4y ago

[dead]

trononono 4y ago

[flagged]

trononono 4y ago

[flagged]

patapong 4y ago

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.

sneak 4y ago
My NAS running Jellyfin would like a word.
- patapong 4y ago
  You are the person opening the red tapes to be able to watch them again!
- SergeAx 4y ago
  Right after my torrent client, please.
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  Either you broke the law many times to fill that NAS, or you have massive gaps in content because those items have never been broadcast or released on disc. So it doesn't disagree very well.
Pxtl 4y ago
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.
- mywittyname 4y ago
  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.

Animats 4y ago

I came across a Cartrivision rewinder in a surplus store once. It was a simple device, with a motor, some limit switches, a key switch, and a counter. The counter tracked how many cartridges had been rewound, for billing purposes. 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.

betamaxthetape 4y ago
Do you have any more information on this? It sounds really interesting, and I'd love to learn more!
- Animats 4y ago
  The play counter? Lots of patents in the 1980s. 3M, IBM, CBS, Polaroid. Dead end commercially. [1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US4586101A/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US4586101A/en
  - betamaxthetape 4y ago
    Interesting. But was it ever developed commercially? I can't find any consumer products actually using the counter (either for rental or for lock/jam-after-certain-plays). But that could just be because I'm using the wrong search term - I imagine that there is a brand-specific term and searching "VHS tape play counter" isn't helpful since all the results are for either repairing VCRs, or for accessing the tape counter functionality in the VCR.
Wistar 4y ago
In the early 80's, I modified a VHS cassette by placing a cylindrical high-strength magnet adjacent to the tape path on the takeup side. There was a nearly perfect pre-existing pocket in the case webbing to put the magnet with a dot of glue. The idea was to make a play-once, self-erasing cassette. Although not perfect, it was effective enough to really screw up the second playback. Probably screwed up the tape deck, too, but I don't recall any real evidence of that.

nemo44x 4y ago

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 music that was only recorded that way.

soneil 4y ago
Seems somewhat ironic that this is tape?
jesboat 4y ago
> 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 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.
- nemo44x 4y ago
  He uses magnetic tape that has been in use for nearly 100 years and continues to be.
Dylan16807 4y ago
> 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.

pessimizer 4y ago

Aside from the great technical trivia, it looks like the late Mike Vraney at SWV found this movie and saved it: https://www.somethingweird.com/product_info.php?products_id=57912 https://www.somethingweird.com/product_info.php?products_id=... https://www.iafd.com/title.rme/title=adultery+for+fun+and+profit/year=1971/adultery-for-fun-and-profit.htm https://www.iafd.com/title.rme/title=adultery+for+fun+and+pr... http://distribpix.com/blog/adultery-fun-and-profit-1971 http://distribpix.com/blog/adultery-fun-and-profit-1971

spiritplumber 4y ago

foone should be followed on the birdsite as well, it's worth the time.

jml7c5 4y ago
Foone stopped posting on Twitter shortly after Musk bought it. They're over on Mastodon now: https://digipres.club/@foone https://digipres.club/@foone

Pxtl 4y ago

This reminds me of Jay Bauman's rant about how VHS is a shit format when his Youtube team (RedLetterMedia) obliterated every VHS copy of Nukie they could find in a wood-chipper. https://twitter.com/JayBauman1/status/1613910812632186881 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.

tezza 4y ago

lol. i am sure to that there are some porn magazines which no longer open

foone 4y ago

[flagged]

camdenlock 4y ago
[flagged]
- dang 4y ago
  Please stop breaking the site guidelines. You've done it repeatedly and we've asked you more than once before. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - pooooopeee 4y ago
    [flagged]
colonwqbang 4y ago
Why don't you want people to link to your site?
- McGlockenshire 4y ago
  Every time foone gets posted here, there is, in rough order: 1) Misgendering, usually out of ignorance. foone is aggressively agender and goes by they/them. 2) Someone correcting the misgendering. 3) The same circular discussion of why foone doesn't like being posted to HN. 4) The same circular discussion of pronouns and the culture war. 5) Culture warriors come out and do their thing and often get their comments flagged and sometimes, though not nearly often enough, get banned. 6) Many of these posts get nuked. Both yours and mine are likely candidates. It's a guaranteed pattern and foone got sick of it long ago and has asked that submissions of their stuff be banned here. That hasn't happened and thus the cycle will continue endlessly as long as foone does cool shit.
  - TheHappyOddish 4y ago

graton 4y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20230202165438/https://foone.tumblr.com/post/705446706461949953/fun-fact-i-own-porn-i-cant-watch https://web.archive.org/web/20230202165438/https://foone.tum...

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

capableweb 4y ago

Here is an archive of the original content before it was replaced: https://archive.is/I00Gh https://archive.is/I00Gh

ashurov 4y ago

it seems that they didn't migrate the video. https://players.brightcove.net/5387496921001/default_default/index.html?videoId=5453961780001 https://players.brightcove.net/5387496921001/default_default... is unavailable, but the old wordpress images are still online and available: https://www.msgnetworks.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/chamberlain_041213_RA-770x385.jpg https://www.msgnetworks.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/chamb...

smackeyacky 4y ago

One fun fact I learned when I was toying with Laserdisc is why it was so popular in Japan: the humidity encourages video tape to grow mold[0] unless it's stored somewhere cool and dry. I would love the room to play with more of the obscure / dead video formats but Laserdisc is enough for me. Others here have recommended Techmoan[1] as a good source of vicariously seeing obsolete video formats. [0]https://lunchmeatvhs.com/blogs/blog/rescue-your-awesome-analog-treasures-from-moldy-malfunction-with-help-from-tapehead-chip-parton https://lunchmeatvhs.com/blogs/blog/rescue-your-awesome-anal... [1]https://www.youtube.com/@Techmoan https://www.youtube.com/@Techmoan

troone 4y ago

[flagged]

jszymborski 4y ago
And people wonder why Foone doesn't want their posts on here.

NautilusWave 4y ago

Is Hacker News secretly funded by J. K. Rowling? Was there a singular precipitating event that got trans folks pissed at HN? Is it a series of factors that I'd have to sift through millions of comments to understand??

P0l83q4p1Hw3Ul 4y ago
[flagged]
- satellites 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - P0l83q4p1Hw3Ul 4y ago
    I meant Foone Turing specifically. No comment on the correlation between mental illness and trans.
  - deadbeeves 4y ago
    This sounds like a reason to not like the Internet. You can read comments like this on just about any open forum. And it's perfectly fine to not like that, but that doesn't mean you get to dictate whether other people can talk about what you publish. If one doesn't like one doesn't have to read it.
    - ponchodeli 4y ago
      [flagged]
      - deadbeeves 4y ago
        >They are dictating what can happen on HN about as much as you are dictating what they can post on their twitter. Hardly. I never said, "Foone mustn't say X on Twitter", or even "they should not say X on Twitter". The latest post actually contains the phrase "NEVER POST ME ON YOUR SITE EVER AGAIN." I'm not even gonna say that they should not make this demand, I just find it pretty funny that they think anyone is going to respect it.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

BxGyw2 4y ago

[flagged]

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
nayuki 4y ago
Foone is not the only one expressing this sentiment. Here's another recent example: > Note: unfortunately, Hacker News found this post. I think I got them to go away. But if you're coming from there, please read about the parable of the Nazi bar and take a hard look at the company you keep, or just fuck off. Thanks. -- https://cohost.org/arborelia/post/868933-how-to-destroy-a-cer https://cohost.org/arborelia/post/868933-how-to-destroy-a-ce... Previous edit (private archive): > oh shit it's hacker news / I've heard that people from the orange VC site are linking to this post! You are absolutely not welcome here. Cohost is not a place for you. Your site is full of sexism and racism that you can't report to the main moderator because he approves of it. / you are bad and you hang out with white supremacists. please leave. HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34446704 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34446704
- deadbeeves 4y ago
  They sound like people bitter because they couldn't get a moderation team on their side. Good! I'm not fond of Nazis, but I don't need or want them silenced. Let them condemn themselves with their own words.
krapp 4y ago
You should have more empathy for people, and rather than diagnose someone expressing a negative opinion about this community with mental illness, assume you might lack the necessary context with which to interpret their frustration. You can find some of that context in the pile of flagged comments at the bottom of this thread, or any thread where foone's content is posted.
xyzzy_plugh 4y ago
It's not pure mental illness. To many, this site is a pox on our society. Here's a past explanation foone's position: https://twitter.com/foone/status/1440697266059153439 https://twitter.com/foone/status/1440697266059153439 And in a way you've even proven foone right. You're insinuating that they are mentally ill. I don't know why you feel that it's okay to treat other humans like that, but I hope you get the help you deserve.

zoklet-enjoyer 4y ago

[flagged]

lando2319 4y ago
The original post is still viewable if you check the root URL This appears to be a special message just for us.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 4y ago
  You can also just scroll down a bit to find the original post. There is another (also interesting) post in between.
knaik94 4y ago
This particular author seems to be frustrated by some repetitive and minimizing comments from HN in past discussions of their work. Part of the discussion used to be people sharing that twitter threads are annoying and not discussing the contents. [1] And there was a pattern of a few HN comments minimizing past posts saying "it's nothing new" as well as twitter bot spam. [2] Edit: They also posted further down: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34634289 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34634289 The original article can also be seen if you just go their tumblr homepage as they made a copy of it. https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1440695609913053194 https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1440695609913053194 https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1310434318490034176 https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1310434318490034176

halotrope 4y ago

What is it with the message to hacker news?

piperswe 4y ago
Foone hasn't had a particularly good history of not being insulted for their posting style (particularly Twitter/Fediverse threads) on Hacker News
jdiff 4y ago
HN is quite transphobic. Any post they make devolves into harassment over that and (usually) pointless whining about the format their posts are usually made in (long tweet/toot threads).

melagonster 4y ago

[flagged]

dusted 4y ago

[flagged]

deafpolygon 4y ago

Now points to: https://foone.tumblr.com/post/705446706461949953/hello-hacker-news-never-post-me-on-your-site-ever https://foone.tumblr.com/post/705446706461949953/hello-hacke... What?

npteljes 4y ago
They don't like traffic from HN for some reason, and this childish reaction is because of that. In order to view the content, check this archive link: https://archive.is/I00Gh https://archive.is/I00Gh
- deafpolygon 4y ago
  What's wrong with traffic from HN? I mean, more readers = good thing?
  - npteljes 4y ago
    They reflect on it here: https://twitter.com/foone/status/1440375176604966924 https://twitter.com/foone/status/1440375176604966924 Or in a saner format (when it loads): https://nitter.net/foone/status/1440375176604966924 https://nitter.net/foone/status/1440375176604966924
    - deafpolygon 4y ago
      Oh.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]