I still bemoan selling the first couple of years of issues to someone on ebay. I needed to get the stuff out of the basement, but feels like I should have kept them just for the technology history lessons.
I'm still looking for the very early Wired issue that has an ad that goes something like "they laughed at you when you were growing up because you were different. now they wear a uniform with their name on it. and you don't."
Yep. The low hanging fruit principle in action. You can’t make anything completely secure so you put up more obstacles than your neighbor so the attackers go visit the neighbor instead.
Or in the case of targets with no neighbors like missile bases, you know approximately how long it might take an attacker to succeed, then put big guys with guns within that distance measured by time.
I'm still stunned by Captain Haynes's grace under pressure:
Sioux City Approach: "United Two Thirty-Two Heavy, the wind's currently three six zero at one one; three sixty at eleven. You're cleared to land on any runway."
Haynes: "[laughter] Roger. [laughter] You want to be particular and make it a runway, huh?"
Although there are a number of charging stations designed for IOS devices that have bright blue LEDs that you can't turn off. Some good number of these devices are going on someone's nightstand where a bright blue LED is exactly what most buyers don't want.
It would be interesting to know the who and how of the fiber cut. We're a tiny company in the heartland and have seen two separate fiber cuts in different parts of the state. Both tickets indicated that they were believed to be malicious, intentional cuts. In one case, fiber was cut in two places many hundreds of meters apart.
What may be outdated here is our trust in humans to not destroy critical parts of our infrastructure.
In my neck of the woods, we have mostly aerial fiber and not a lot of redundancy, so I hear about a lot of of fiber cuts. In the past several years we've had a lot of wires downed by trees, a couple by cars running into poles, several cuts that seem like intentional cuts --- usually attributed to people cutting lines to try to steal copper, a couple times people shooting down cables cause shooting things is fun; and then we also have tree trimmers that trim the fiber instead, and we also had an underwater cable taken out by someone driving a piling in the wrong place (I've seen a report saying the place not to disturb was clearly marked).
Outside plant is basically indefensible, so if you can't trust humans not to destroy it, you've got problems.
Mid 1980s, I worked at an record store that was also heavy into stereos and other audio / visual equipment. We were fortunate enough to have not only a huge 40" Sony set (which weighed about 300lbs) but also a 36" Fisher console set that I think weighed close to 400lbs. So, so much heavy glass.
There were lots of reasons why you wouldn't want to buy one of these behemoths at the time (cost, weight, heat) but maybe the most significant was how bad NTSC video looked when you spread it across a 40" screen. I recently pulled out an old laserdisc player and connected it to a 65" OLED set and it looks absolutely terrible.
One does not do it like that. There needs to be a hardware video signal upscaler in between. Of which many different versions at different capability and price points exist.
My first job out of uni in the mid 2000s was working on line doubling and film mode detection for Imagination Technologies (makers of the graphics chip in the Dreamcast). Faroudja was our benchmark!
Felt like a real baller with a giant HDTV on my desk, but less fun was watching test scenes from Titanic at 1FPS over and over.
Wow :) I got a 18 inch office-display by Fujitsu-Siemens with S-PVA panel, long ago.
Broke down after a long time. Repaired it by resoldering some simple capacitors.
During the repair I had a look at the chips. One (or two?)had that Faroudja label on it.
At the time I didn't know about that, and just wondered WTF is that? Searched the net and "got it". They meanwhile got bought up by someone, Wiki as of now says STMicroelectronics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faroudja
That display is still working but mostly gathering dust, some 8800 km away from me, atop a 4x kvm, managing some old stuff, also gathering dust :)
Laserdisc will output 480i rather than 240p (it's just an encoding of the NTSC signal) and lag isn't really an issue, and the linked page doesn't really cover the other advantages. I can imagine that a TV's scaler isn't optimised for composite signals (or even ingesting and filtering the composite signals in the first place), but also laserdisc is just going to look kind of bad compared to modern formats even under the best of circumstances. Even back in the 90s, when encoders were at their worst, DVD was considered a meaningful step up from laserdisc.
My link has a link to 240p, which also goes into 480i.
That aside, all that stuff was made for CRT technology, with dot/slit masks, and phospors with varying intensity of afterglow. Bigger computer CRT screens worked similar in principle, just not interlaced(mostly), and higher resolutions.
What they both have in common is resolution independency within their technical limits.
Flat displays of today don't have that, no matter which panel technology they are based on.
Their internal upscalers may compensate for the resolution, but not for the effects of phosphor, and it's afterglow, after the beam raced over them, until its hitting them again, through the mask.
There is a reason that hardware stuff exists, more so than much so called 'audiophile' stuff, though it's still 'niche'. Once you have seen it in direct comparison, with, or without, you'll know.
Or you've been lucky, and have a really good screen.
Or bad eyesight/perception, not noticing the difference.
^^^^ Not meant to be condescending, but I've seen that IRL.
When my dad's old Sony KV-25XBR bit the dust, he replaced it with a 32" Toshiba flat-screen CRT. That thing was a chunk indeed.
In my opinion, even though it was really quite a good set, you're absolutely right about NTSC looking horrible on big screens. From day one I noticed that the scan lines very much made it look like watching through very fine Venetian blinds.
Upscaling NTSC and putting it on a big flat panel isn't really so great either.
Something that hit me hard about this one is the purported full quote from Alex ends with "See you tomorrow." Given the context of Chiang's story, leaving this off just adds to the gut punch for me.
“Sorry, the commission budget is out of money for this budget year. You sold way too much which made the company a ton of extra money. Sadly that means it’s your fault we can’t pay you the commissions you were promised.”
