I was under the impression that the issue with IE was not that it was holding things back, but that it (in addition to autocorrecting html and javascript syntax errors) implemented a number of features that were exclusive to IE that no one else *could* support.

and considering chrome these days, I wouldn't think aspiring to match that would be entirely a positive thing.

corporations whose management publicly espouse particular viewpoints should not be making political donations to causes inimical to those public positions.

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...

to expand a bit, the aclu defended the right to say what you want, not to be free of the consequences of having said it...

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.

A photography teacher I had in college held that the problem with creating artwork while listening to music was that when you are creating, you are creating until you feel good about the creation. if you are listening to music, it may make you feel good. How do you know when you're done?

over the years I've noticed that whenever I work (creatively) to music, when I look at the work later, it's always bad. working mechanically to music, (i.e. simply performing a process) it's different, because how you feel about the work is less important.

Captain Marvel (referring to the black woman version) was a member of the Avengers, never the X-Men. though carol danvers hung out with the X-Men when the first Brood story occurred. that's when she turned into Binary and gained a bunch of the other powers. this was about the time when Rogue had joined the X-Men unbeknownst to Carol and was on the receiving end of a pretty serious punch...

the original male Captain Marvel famously died of cancer in one of the first marvel graphic novels.

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. :-)