Oddly, they still seem to be releasing the "classic" era on Blu-Ray now anyway. I can only assume they're using some form of high-quality upscaling, but at the end of the day, while it might lack some of the compression artifacts of DVD, it still doesn't look *that* good to me.

Anyway, that "piebald" mixed film/video look was okay if you were used to it, I guess, because you were used to seeing outside on film and inside on video. I remember seeing an early 70s Pertwee episode (repeated in the early 90s) with a shot that was distracting because they were *supposed* to be outside in a jungle- or similar- yet it was obviously shot on video in a studio.

Most 1970s drama and action shows were shot and edited entirely on film, not videotape. (#) That, ironically, means they're likely to look better today than the shows from the late-80s onwards that were shot on film, but transferred to video for editing and post-processing and are thus stuck at crappy standard definition.

(#) Sitcoms and cheap soaps did tend to be more (analogue) videotape-based, but that's a different thing.

I'm guessing that the deal is they're doing new transfers of videos that were shot on film but originally transferred to videotape for the final masters.

I mean, look at Michael Jackson's "Thriller". It has the appearance and feel of something that was shot on film originally, but you also can tell from the soft appearance of the final result- and the fact it's only in standard def 480p- that even the current official copy is based on a (crappy old-school analogue NTSC) videotape transfer.

In that case, since everything up to and including the final captions and credits (#) was done on film, the potential exists to get a much higher resolution transfer simply by rescanning it. (##)

However, from what I can tell, "Video Killed the Radio Star"- like a lot of videos of its time- appears to have been entirely shot on video equipment in the first place- presumably UK 576 line PAL- so that's all there ever was to it. You might get a pseudo-HD version by sophisticated upscaling, but that's it.

Ironically, a lot of *later* videos- late 80s and much of the 1990s- run into a similar problem again. Due to improvements in digital equipment et al, by that point it was possible to take film-based source footage but do much more of the editing and effects on video equipment. Unfortunately this was still just standard definition. Which means that, unlike the everything-done-on-film-except-the-final-transfer case of "Thriller", if you want (for example) Jackson's 1991 "Black or White" video in HD, you're probably going to have to re-edit it from the original sources and redo a lot of the post-processed effects (many of which would only ever have existed in SD in an early-90s digital effects machine).

(This is also why Star Trek: The Next Generation's remastering was far more complicated than that of the original 1960s series. The latter was shot and edited entirely on film, so it was just a question of doing a better transfer. The former was mostly shot on film, but the editing and a lot of effects were done entirely on SD video equipment).

(#) Note that "judder" on the lettering here that's a trademark of film transferred to video. OTOH, you can also tell that it *has* been transferred to analogue video at some stage by the very minor colour interference/fringing around those same letters. (##) Considering how famous Thriller is, it surprises me they haven't done this already. Maybe it's something to do with the rights. I'd be incredibly surprised if they hadn't archived at least one copy of the final edited film before it was transferred (though stupider things have happened). Maybe they already did it and realised how badly the HD transfer showed up the effects and makeup that were only intended to pass muster at SD?

Sorry, but this is starting to push into silly rose-tinted nostalgia territory.

Even in its heyday- circa ten to fifteen years ago- ThinkGeek was always about pushing a very commodified view of geek culture as some sort of consumerist lifestyle where you showed how much of a geek/nerd you were by how many of their overpriced boys' toys et al you owned. Even at the time this left a somewhat bad taste in my mouth.

Don't get me wrong, everyone's entitled to want a few fun novelties, but I don't think there's any need to romanticise it beyond that.

I mean, yeah, some of the stuff they sold back then probably *was* genuinely interesting. But a lot of it was just flattering the customers ("stuff for smart masses") into buying overpriced caffeinated soft drinks, novelties and the like.

Granted, even *that* compared well to what I've heard of their GameStop-owned latterday incarnation where- by all accounts- they've descended into little more than a pseudo-geek pop culture "Hot Topic" selling bloody Funko Pops and other mass-market shite. But that's the bar set so low it's practically underground...

The only way I'll consider this product remotely credible against malware is if it runs its first scan, detect itself as spyware, then terminates its own installation with extreme prejudice.

Pretty sure that's not how it works, sorry.... ;-/

On the other hand, I can't work out whether you're trolling or whether this is *meant* to be parody. :-)

Sony has apparently been in the music business since the late 1960s in Japan (a tie-up with Columbia records), but it's only since they took over Columbia/CBS's music and film divisions in the late 1980s that they became a major part of their business worldwide.

No, it doesn't. This is an actual, legitimate question.

Betteridge's Law has been around for *years*. You'd think that by now people around here would understand why (and where) it applies instead of kneejerk-yelling "Betteridge" at every headline with a question mark. And yet, I can still reply to stuff like this with a comment I made six years ago:-

Pretty sure that the vast majority of people contributing to Slashdot (a geek-oriented site) know what a factorial is, which is partly why the joke works here- not because I'm under the impression it shows me to be a maths genius(!!)

Now that I think of it, while it's something most people only learn later on, there's really nothing about the concept that couldn't be explained to an average primary school pupil that understood basic multiplication.

Regardless, as the other person noted, the use of a bare exclamation mark in the middle of a sentence like that isn't normal in English. Typically, it would be written in parentheses, like so:-

Also,

Technically, isn't "iff" a widely but not universally accepted non-standardism? Or perhaps that was meant to be the joke? :-)

Quite probably, but they're so damn tempting. :-)

Thanks for the links; haven't had time to do any more than skim them at present, but it does remind me of a comment I read recently that I felt just put its finger on Amazon's recent direction:-

" Amazon is not the same company they were 10 years ago. You can feel the skeeviness is creeping in."

Amazon has 3 x 10^64 planes?! That's... rather a lot.

If it was quite a while ago, I'm assuming that the "retro console" you had was the first generation Atari Flashback. Its Wikipedia article notes that this was based on an "NES-on-a-chip" design that didn't even bother to emulate the original architecture through software, but merely ran what were effectively NES ports of the original games.

The article also notes that those ports "differed in varying degrees from the original games, and therefore the Flashback was unpopular with some purists."

Apparently the Flashback 2 was a single-chip hardware recreation of the VCS (obviously the best solution short of an exact reproduction of the original hardware) and most/all of the later versions use software emulations of the original system.

If you meant the 7.3 *million* they were actually fined, that would probably be the case, yes.

7.3 billion, on the other hand, would sting quite a bit- even for a company the size of Lenovo...!

Not even close. Given that Apple were claiming that a $384 million building was worth $200 (i.e. a factor of almost two million to one), it's far, *far* more literally close to owning an actual $13m Rolls Royce Sweptail and claiming it's a Hot Wheels toy version of that same Ford Fiesta.