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WebDog posted:Flash! In my stupid younger days developed a website for a friends real estate company using Adobe Director...oops on literally no one having that browser plugin
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Jun 13, 2015 10:23
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"You need to have the latest version of Flash player installed to view video content in Steam." You'd think a dude who is pretty much Gaming Santa would get with the times but apparently not.
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Jun 13, 2015 13:31
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Flash is also a non starter for SEO a lot of times, that's what killed our dwindling interest in it
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Jun 13, 2015 13:32
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axolotl farmer posted:isn't flash still used as middleware for making menus and inteface things in games? Yeah, a couple of games do that using Scaleform.
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Jun 13, 2015 13:40
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Vlad the Retailer posted:Yeah, a couple of games do that using Scaleform. Judging by this list it looks like it's on it's way to being obsolete too.
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Jun 13, 2015 13:48
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 VHS. I know at least some of you, like me, had to remove the lid of a VCR repeatedly to disentangle the tape from all the clockwork, and then from thereafter that spot in the tape would play a little funny. gently caress Video tape.
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Jun 13, 2015 14:04
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SwissCM posted:Judging by this list it looks like it's on it's way to being obsolete too. Flash is slow and between mobile chips (where battery life is a huge consideration) and desktop processors being evolutionary instead of revolutionary developers are coming off the mid-2000s attitude of "CPUs are SO FAST now that we can just throw garbage at them" and realizing that performance still matters. Rage originally used Flash for rendering the UI elements and they ended up ripping out a lot of it towards the end of development after it turned out that just rendering the Flash UI was taking roughly 20% of their frame time. EDIT: Flash overall is dying, but there are still some big websites that need it. If you want to watch Twitch, for example, they only support Flash and HLS, a streaming protocol which is currently only supported by Safari on the desktop. The_Franz has a new favorite as of 14:57 on Jun 13, 2015 |
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Jun 13, 2015 14:45
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Vanagoon posted:
Man I did NOT know it did that. I assumed it read like cassette tape, by sticking the reader head against the tape in situ.
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Jun 13, 2015 14:54
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Me too. In hindsight it makes sense since the entire side of the tape hinges up and there are multiple reading heads, but seeing it in action is pretty mindblowing.
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Jun 13, 2015 15:08
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Vanagoon posted:
Rental tapes were pretty heavy duty compared to the real trash you'd find in a store. If they were just played without incident and rewound properly, I imagine they would last for 10+ years of rental use easily. This of course hinges on the tape not getting food in it, completely unspooled by a child, cut with scissors by an adult, chewed on, used in a VCR that currently had food in it, rewound with a drill, etc. Usually people would tell us if "their kid" hosed up the tape and we'd check it, or at least mark it on the tape itself. Still, people often brought tapes back and complained they wouldn't play and then hand us an armful of crumpled brown plastic and an empty cassette. Or we'd just skim through it on a high-speed deck real quick and find it and fix it, for the minor problems like "this one scene in Titanic completely goes fuzzy" (yes the nude scene). I pushed SO HARD for quickly adopting DVDs when they started to be viable. My boss gave in and got a few DVD players, I hooked one up to show people how much better it looked, and we rented out the players a lot, often for free to good customers. It was mainly to get tapes out of my life.
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Jun 13, 2015 15:10
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All of that pulling the tape way out of the cartridge was why it took so long to get the player to start playing, to stop, and to eject. All the ertnnnertwoooOOOooooShunk was all that mechanism pulling the tape back in before it could eject the tape. The best thing was the player ejecting the tape shell but with several feet of tape still tangled up in the vcr. Just lovely.
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Jun 13, 2015 15:50
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bigtom posted:I wish that IBOC was better implemented - but it's been 10 years, and I only know other radio engineers who have HD Radios...so I'm ready to call it a failure. But the fact it powers live traffic to certain GPS units helps make it less useless. My scion came with an HD radio and it's the best drat thing ever. The "secret" HD stations play better music, sound better, and have less commercials (because no one has an HD radio). There's even a station that plays nothing but dance and house music which is basically unheard of in terrestrial american radio. The only problem is the digital "all-or-nothing" signal cut out.
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Jun 13, 2015 16:00
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SLOSifl posted:I worked at a video store in the 90s, seriously fucks VHS. If thats true it'd help explain why they charged 100 dollars for replacing a movie you could buy for 20. learning a lot about VHS today.
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Jun 13, 2015 16:47
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If I'm interpreting you correctly, does that mean that video rental shops would pay several times what a regular consumer would pay for a VHS?
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Jun 13, 2015 16:49
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1000 Brown M and Ms posted:If I'm interpreting you correctly, does that mean that video rental shops would pay several times what a regular consumer would pay for a VHS? VHS tapes were initially priced absurdly high because the movie industry was pants-shittingly scared that people would buy tapes and not go to movies or screen them for friends or some other such paranoia. $100+ per copy was pretty standard until... Top Gun? Maybe? There was a big movie that kicked off proper affordable home video by being priced at something like $25.
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Jun 13, 2015 16:56
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 memories  Humphreys posted:In my stupid younger days developed a website for a friends real estate company using Adobe Director...oops on literally no one having that browser plugin Remember that Macromedia had Shockwave as their key program for developing interactive CD-Roms which were massive during the 90's, pretty much everything was made in Director. Flash was an animation program with rudimentary navigation support that was meant to be a new way to deliver content for the web (The Simpson's website was one of the first to use this) and it caught on as a thrilling and exciting alternative to the then static HTML or garish JavaScript effects. Flash ended up eating Shockwave / Director as it gradually crossed over as more and more features were added. Nowadays Director is known as a multiplatform game engine. peter gabriel posted:Flash is also a non starter for SEO a lot of times, that's what killed our dwindling interest in it Also other reasons for flash's demise was the rise of obnoxious flash ads (which are still around) which always was not fun to have booming away in a pop-under or just slowed things to a crawl. Or - as mentioned - it's a perfect attack vector for all sorts of drive-by ads as it can easily load in external code from god knows where. ActionScript isn't very efficient and as stuff got more complex things just began to chug even more as people just threw in all sorts of arrays into a horrid melting pot of code. The many times I had to optimize stuff that was a mass of copy paste taken from Flash Planet. And finally the endless sea of landing pages that sent you to update the latest player, often blocked, and then endless loading bars, booming volume with teeny hard to find controls, pages locked at 800x600 squares made it turn into an irritant rather than useful and fast way to display information.
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Jun 13, 2015 16:56
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1000 Brown M and Ms posted:If I'm interpreting you correctly, does that mean that video rental shops would pay several times what a regular consumer would pay for a VHS? Of course they did.
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Jun 13, 2015 17:00
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1000 Brown M and Ms posted:If I'm interpreting you correctly, does that mean that video rental shops would pay several times what a regular consumer would pay for a VHS? Yes. I worked at a video rental place back in the day and would leaf through the catalog when I was bored (I leafed through it a lot). My assumption was that the fees associated with being permitted to rent out a tape were included in the price, but it's possible that those tapes were also more durable. The inventory control program we used (gently caress yeah MS-DOS) would keep track of the ratio of how much we paid to how much we'd made off any particular title, and would alert us to move a movie from "HOT NEW RELEASES" or whatever to "CURRENT HITS" when it hit 1:1 to make room for new stuff. The super blockbuster films like Titanic could easily cost USD$300+ for a single copy, but you were guaranteed to make your money back quickly if you were on top of your game.
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Jun 13, 2015 17:00
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AlternateAccount posted:VHS tapes were initially priced absurdly high because the movie industry was pants-shittingly scared that people would buy tapes and not go to movies or screen them for friends or some other such paranoia. $100+ per copy was pretty standard until... Top Gun? Maybe? There was a big movie that kicked off proper affordable home video by being priced at something like $25. Oh, I see. I'm a bit too young to be aware of that. I guess it kind of makes sense when VHS and home video in general were new and nobody really knew what that market would be like. Of course it's silly to us now with the benefit of hindsight.
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Jun 13, 2015 17:01
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One thing about VHS in the very early days that I always found super fascinating was on kids' tapes after the main program, if you let it ran past the credits, you'd sometimes get some strange unadvertised cartoons or something. I don't think they'd be ads, but things like continuous footage of another show as if someone was just taping over stuff and threw everything into a tape duplicator or something. An odd story regarding that, though, was about 20 years ago a news story where a discount store had a generic animated VHS tapes along those lines that I believe after final cartoon and a few minutes of static, it started showing porn.
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Jun 13, 2015 17:08
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thespaceinvader posted:Man I did NOT know it did that. I assumed it read like cassette tape, by sticking the reader head against the tape in situ. Couldn't store enough data if the data was laid down linearly like that, the length of tape needed would be enormous. Instead, the data's laid down on a VHS tape in tracks that run at an angle across the width of the tape:  So you move the tape past the rapidly-spinning read head at a relatively low speed, and it reads each successive video track as it spins.
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Jun 13, 2015 17:12
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That doesn't surprise me at all. Considering that VHS was so easy to record to it was bound to happen that someone accidentally (or otherwise) recorded porn after their kid's cartoons. IIRC, VHS had a tab on the front that you could break off to enable read-only mode (like all commercial VHS), but you could just cover it with tape to be able to record over anything. Phanatic posted:Couldn't store enough data if the data was laid down linearly like that, the length of tape needed would be enormous. Instead, the data's laid down on a VHS tape in tracks that run at an angle across the width of the tape: Wasn't that a big thing at one point? When VHS machines with four (instead of two) reading heads came out? 1000 Brown M and Ms has a new favorite as of 17:16 on Jun 13, 2015 |
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Jun 13, 2015 17:14
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AlternateAccount posted:VHS tapes were initially priced absurdly high because the movie industry was pants-shittingly scared that people would buy tapes and not go to movies or screen them for friends or some other such paranoia. $100+ per copy was pretty standard until... Top Gun? Maybe? There was a big movie that kicked off proper affordable home video by being priced at something like $25. I remember people freaking out when Star Wars first became available on commercial VHS for only $129.95.
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Jun 13, 2015 17:17
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1000 Brown M and Ms posted:That doesn't surprise me at all. Considering that VHS was so easy to record to it was bound to happen that someone accidentally (or otherwise) recorded porn after their kid's cartoons. It was "big" in the sense that any random numeric increase in a parameter is trumpeted as better than last year's model when selling consumer electronics. See also oversampling with CD players. "This one has 8x oversampling, that one only has 4x, so it's better." "What's oversampling?" "I don't know, but 8's better than 4!" An extra two heads were added and optimized for EP tape speeds; unless you were playing stuff back that was recorded at that speed the extra two heads did absolutely nothing (except give you a better still image when you paused the tape or were going frame-by-frame. Important porn feature!). Then yet another two heads were added to support VHS HiFi, which had improved audio performance
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Jun 13, 2015 17:27
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Thought so. I couldn't figure it out when I was younger so it's good to get confirmation that it was meaningless
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Jun 13, 2015 17:35
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1000 Brown M and Ms posted:Wasn't that a big thing at one point? When VHS machines with four (instead of two) reading heads came out? In the dying days of VCRs there were 6 head and 8 head models. That may have been only useful for long play recording, (tape goes slower to double the minutes available on the tape) Fo3 has a new favorite as of 17:41 on Jun 13, 2015 |
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Jun 13, 2015 17:36
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JediTalentAgent posted:
It actually happened here, but in early 00s, with Bob the Builder tapes being sold in Makro stores. The distributor admitted they refurbished a lot of old various movie tapes, but didn't took into account that porn movies often have 2 hour of footage on them.
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Jun 13, 2015 17:45
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Fo3 posted:The 2 heads to 4 heads may have been mainly about audio quality? Just going by memory the 4 head VCRs is when the "HiFi" audio badging came out.  These suckers were whisper thin and would bind up all but the cleanest machines.
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Jun 13, 2015 17:46
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Fo3 posted:The 2 heads to 4 heads may have been mainly about audio quality? Just going by memory the 4 head VCRs is when the "HiFi" audio badging came out. Makes sense I guess, trying to get the most out of the physical space available. There's a similar thing with hidden tracks in LP records. Some records have hidden tracks in grooves set between the grooves used for regular playback.
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Jun 13, 2015 17:52
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1000 Brown M and Ms posted:If I'm interpreting you correctly, does that mean that video rental shops would pay several times what a regular consumer would pay for a VHS? This is partly heftier construction of tapes, but mostly higher per-copy licensing fees for using the tape in a distribution-for-profit scenario. Copies of everything (book and media alike) are more expensive for libraries than end consumers, too, because the publishing company sees the library as more of a profit drain than selling as many individual copies and so increases licensing fees accordingly.
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Jun 13, 2015 17:57
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Exactly like how software companies don't charge that much and don't give a poo poo about pirating programs for personal use, but they charge a lot and they'll come down on you hard for pirating software for enterprise use?
1000 Brown M and Ms has a new favorite as of 18:07 on Jun 13, 2015 |
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Jun 13, 2015 18:01
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Pretty much - when you buy media or software or whatever you're also purchasing the right to legally use it within certain parameters. For an individual it's the right to show the movie only at home, and not in public - which is that FBI warning at the beginning of pretty much every dvd. When you're a video rental company, though, in order to legally check-out/distribute the copy you have to pay more for the right to make money off of it. Same for using commercial software in an enterprise situation for a lot of programs - you're using their creation to make money, so the software developer wants an extra cut.
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Jun 13, 2015 18:05
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You know, that's actually really reasonable. I, like many others, think that Hollywood and the entertainment busisness in general is pretty lovely, but at the end of the day they need to make a living. Why shouldn't they get a cut if someone else is profiting from their work? That goes for software (and many other industries) as well.
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Jun 13, 2015 18:12
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I loved Flash. I always wished for a version of the program optimized totally for animation, but then it was never meant for the kind of lengthy animations I liked making with it. I should probably learn After Effects to keep doing that kind of stuff.  Wasn't it pretty much Android and iOS rejecting Flash that killed it? Not too surprising when you consider how poor security the program has.
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Jun 13, 2015 18:13
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Look upthread mate. Not sure about Android, but iOS dropping Flash support was a huge blow.
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Jun 13, 2015 18:20
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1000 Brown M and Ms posted:You know, that's actually really reasonable. I, like many others, think that Hollywood and the entertainment busisness in general is pretty lovely, but at the end of the day they need to make a living. Why shouldn't they get a cut if someone else is profiting from their work? That goes for software (and many other industries) as well. Exactly- this is the whole idea behind licensing intellectual property, and the license agreements we rarely read before clicking "ok". I came up against this issue when wanting to use GIMP to do some basic drawings for work that a client would be charged for. We had to have our lawyers vet the GPL and all the other licenses GIMP uses before I started any of the work in order to make sure that we weren't opening ourselves for a lawsuit down the line.
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Jun 13, 2015 18:23
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Well, there was also the long history of security vulnerabilities, the crappy update process, the bloated size, and the constant attempts to bundle McAfee anti-virus software. Those didn't help its case much. But it did fill a huge gap back in the early days of the internet. Browsers didn't do dynamic HTML very well, and Flash video was a huge improvement over RealPlayer and Quicktime.
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Jun 13, 2015 18:24
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I was so surprised how well everything worked on a Windows 8.1 tablet without Flash installed. Well, turns out Internet Explorer by default just secretly comes shipped with its own Flash activeX plugin, deeply tucked away in some folder and automatically updated through Windows Update. I feel cheated.
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Jun 13, 2015 18:37
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slomomofo posted:For an individual it's the right to show the movie only at home, and not in public - which is that FBI warning at the beginning of pretty much every dvd. When you're a video rental company, though, in order to legally check-out/distribute the copy you have to pay more for the right to make money off of it. The closest thing we've ever had to that in the US was the tiered pricing AlternateAccount alluded to above, where the initial release of a home video title was "priced for rental" (often $100+) and a subsequent release many months later was "priced for sellthrough" ($29.95 or whatever)—and that was strictly a marketing decision by the studios, not something required by law. For the initial release they had a captive market in the video stores, who had to cough up the inflated "rental" price or risk building a reputation as the store that never had any copies left of the Hot New Blockbuster on Friday night. Once rental demand dropped far enough the studios would lower the price to something normal people would be willing to pay for a copy that hadn't already been run through other peoples' VCRs a hundred or so times. IIRC Tim Burton's Batman was the first time a studios made a really big push to sell a movie straight to consumers on its initial release.
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Jun 13, 2015 18:39
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Lazlo Nibble posted:This is absolutely, totally, 100% untrue, at least in the US. Unless there's a specific exception in copyright law (which there are for things like sound recordings and computer software) the first sale doctrine allows you to do whatever the hell you want with legally-purchased media as long as you don't make additional copies of it. So video rental stores do not pay, and have never paid, for the right to rent out movies, nor do libraries pay for the right to lend books. Copyright gives the copyright holder the exclusive right to publicly exhibit a movie: The United States Government posted:17 USC 106 . Exclusive rights in copyrighted works
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