For Quake III, he helped implement an ingenious hack for computing 1/sqrt(x)

I don't believe Carmack has ever tried to claim credit for that one. It was Kahan, the main person behind IEEE754 floating point.

No one is using a 30cm wide painted strip filled with gravel and missing drain covers, while cars thunder by speeding with a 20cm gap. Clearly that shows there's no demand for cycle infrastructure.

No no you see there are no problems with Wayland! Wayland is just a protocol which means the problems are all somebody else's fault. This is COMPLETELY different from X11 which is also just a protocol, but the wrong kind.

I think the other issue is that there just wouldn't be enough bandwidth with an AM modulated signal, not for reasonable quality video. A physical stylus just can't move that fast, and if they tried the pressure needed would wear out the disc very quickly.

I was originally imagining they varied the capacitance in some analogue encoded way so the capacitance value directly maps to the analogue signal (not via pulses), but now you said how it works, I can't think how one could do it without modulating the analogue signal onto a carrier of some sort.

I sometimes wonder how many people were using RF and how many were on composite.

One of the things that surprised me during my time in the US (early 2000s) was a complete lack of SCART. There was composite, sometimes. Sometimes component. Sometimes s-video. Sometimes a VGA input (rare). It was a mess and RF was the common denominator. Of course every techy had some variant of not RF due to the better quality.

[cds...]

This sounds pretty interesting. Sounds like it's a sort of hybrid with digitised analogue technology working without the aid of anything approximating reasonable CPUs. Fun transitional tech in some ways.

Even if they cancelled those groups, it's not enough, because it's about proving innocence against the Trump regime, which reasons much like you do. They'll yell and squeal and squawk about "woke" until the cots come home no matter how little sense it makes. Except in their case, they have the force of law behind them and that's too risky.

Hmm acknowledging that there have and are systemic biases is "hating men". You sound incredibly fragile if that's your bar for hate.

My understanding is that the machine has an internal 915MHz oscillator, with the stylus in the circuit.

I'm guessing then that the C part of the CED is the C in an LC resonant circuit... I'm assuming you don't want to archive that signal!

which is then passed through a peak detector and you end up with a PWM signal like you get from the laser of an LD player.[...]so to coasts over them rather than moving up and down with each one like an LP.

TIL. I suppose having a pulse modulation scheme of some sort means there are always high peaks present which would keep the stylus at a constant height, i.e.the peak height above the bottom of the groove. I had kind of assumed that the encoding was completely analogue like a record, but that probably wouldn't work as the stylus would dip down in areas of low signal, which would raise the signal effectively.

I have a Hitachi player, which has composite video and stereo audio output, and RF. The video off the disc is composite, but some Laserdisc players did have s-video outputs that were supposed to be better as the player's electronics did some more advanced signal processing.

I suppose if it's basically the raw (well, raw after demodulating the 915MHz signal, doing peak extraction them smoothing) baseband TV signal which is piped straight into the RF modulator with no processing.

With CDs the issues are mainly down to drives not being able to read areas of the disc that are marked in the table of contents as unused, like pre-track gaps that sometimes contain stuff, and subcode channels. The way the SCSI and all subsequent interfaces works, there is just no standard way to read some of that, but people have found debug commands for some drives that let you read the internal cache which contains the wanted data.

huh. I suppose with an audio player, it just runs through at a constant rate, so it will naturally pick them up due to not just tracking rather than seeking.

915MHz carrier

Surely that's not encoded into the disc itself? That seems awfully high.

I haven't found a suitable tap point in the player either, and it may need amplification.

What's the style of board? Also what output format does your one have? Is it RF out for sending into a TV (American style), or does it de-composite the baseband TV signal and output some of the components separately?

DVDs can look very good. You probably saw the Technology Connections video about the budget re-issue ones being worse.

It's on my to-watch lest, not watched it yet.

They are of course much easier to preserve as well. CDs are a bit more complex due, especially audio ones. You would think they were just a really basic kind of filesystem and digital data

yeah the standard is from what I recall, weird. Weird in the way that 600MB was unthinkable in 1982, and people weren't thinking in terms of data storage so much as storing a digital representation of the analogue audio stream in a minimal enough way to be practical when a CPU clocked only a few times the bitrate of CDs.

No-one wants to be a sad middle manager.

I've done my time in the trenches of middle management. One thing you can be sure of: you don't get rid of bureaucracy by firing middle management. Middle management is a symptom of bureaucracy. My time in that job was dealing with all the utterly cursed shite so that my programmers could get on with programming.

BuT bOtH sIdEs.

I'm dead impressed! Have you watched a film on it?

My guess would be archival might be similar: a modern software decoder would probably do a somewhat better job of extracting the various components from the signal than the original electronics.

Any idea what the frequency of the pickup circuit is? You seem like the kind of person who could jab a scope probe or two in there.

Some of the Laserdisc stuff looks practically HD in places.

I've noticed that old DVDs are also surprisingly good. I don't have anything newer than a DVD player, so it's all streaming and there are often visible compression artifacts. DVDs rarely have them visible by comparison, so unless you're up close looking at a static scene, it's somewhat better than I expected.

Quantum mechanics is computable (as far as we know), but binary creates further limitations.

Does it? I thought that was the entire point of the Church-Turing thesis that other than speed all forms of computation were equivalent?

My "favourite" one, and I kinda have a grudging respect for his skills was when he announced that full kill-all-the-jobs general AI was only a few thousand days away. Only a few thousand!!! That'e really close it's just round the corner!

Then I was like... wait a few thousand... say 3000, 365 days per year... oh. 10 years away.

Except everyone knows 10 years away is code for "lol dunno maybe never", but somehow him phrasing it as that bypassed all the usual bullshit checks.

Technology Connections is the reason why I own a CED player.

Come on man don't just drop that and leave the thread!

Details! I need details!!

I don't have a car: my experience of these things is from a variety of reasonably recent rental models. They are at best OK, frankly. My most recent hire was a basic van which had none of them and I didn't miss them. I've got a phone and it's the same in every car.

Sometimes you need a lot of hoops to get the sodding audio to work, if you want some tunes. aux cords worked fine. They've all got USB now, so why not offer basic USB audio while charging happens?

Oh yeah except google maps has relatively recently turned into the most astonishing battery hog. Used to be fine. recent uses of it have absolutely wrecked my battery. Double also, google maps is a bit shit as well.