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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2024

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  • People say it’s against all private property but it only explicitly criticizes private ownership of land. That does not imply Communism, see Georgism.

    …is what I would say if I didn’t always twist the lyrics to praise the compact disc 💿

    How I sing the song. Warning: Cringe

    💿 My pit and your land,
    💿 your pit and my land,
    💿 from err’r correction
    💿 to the sampling theorem
    💿 From the Red Book’s premise
    💿 to the bitstream coders
    💿 CD was made by Sony and Philips.

    💿 My laser’s gliding
    💿 on the spiral pathway,
    💿 my cradle keeps it
    💿 pointed the right way.
    💿 Plastic is never
    💿 made ideally
    💿 but wobbles are no problem for CD.

    💿 There may be dust bits
    💿 that try to fool me,
    💿 disks can be tainted,
    💿 varying light intensity
    💿 But the extra data
    💿 carry everything
    💿 I need to get the music error-free

    💿 Audiophiles
    💿 are total dickheads,
    💿 claiming they can hear
    💿 the “discrete DAC steps”
    💿 But Shannon proved that
    💿 a low-pass filter
    💿 Makes samples match the input perfectly

    💿 My pit and your land,
    💿 your pit and my land,
    💿 from err’r correction
    💿 to the sampling theorem
    💿 From the Red Book’s promise
    💿 to the bitstream coders
    💿 This was made by Sony and Philips.





  • PAL and SECAM could be converted from one to the other pretty much losslessly with a small (but appropriately expensive) piece of industrial-grade equipment, the difference is just the encoding of color into composite (and broadcasters would internally use RGB anyway).

    PAL/SECAM and NTSC were way more tricky as the number of lines (576/625 or 480/525) and refresh rate (25 or 29.97) differed. I think they first had to use film to skip/duplicate every 6th/5th frame and blur the lines; since the 1980s expensive and giant 2MB RAM frame buffers were available with logic that would dispatch missing/duplicate lines and fields accordingly. Today, every phone routinely scales and framebuffers video without batting an eye. Neither method is lossless though.

    Czechoslovakia’s public TV switched from SECAM to PAL in circa 1991. Most old color TVs could have conversion kits installed; post-1985 ones like my family’s Tesla Color 462 were already made future-proof by including rudimentary (non-phase-correcting) PAL decoders. Between cca 1995-2010, virtually all TVs had SCART inputs that fully supported RGBA, bidirectional (TV<->VCR) stereo audio and composite PAL, SECAM or NTSC video, as well as control signals such as aspect ratio. (Yes, late 1990s European CRT TVs don’t need RGB or NTSC mods, they have it all! Just the cable and connector is bulky and falls out often because we hadn’t figured out twisted differential pairs in the 1970s.)

    Still, TV here is broadcast at 25 f/s and 576i if in SD because of all the old content in that format. I’m furious YouTube never allowed 576i, scaling everything down to 480p with awful combing. But yeah, I’m glad we’ve settled on 1080p for modern content; frame rate conversion is less disruptive than scaling.



  • This was not a common item in 1996 Russia, I think. In the 1990s, TV-based games weren’t catching on in the East nearly as much because it was too difficult to create SECAM color video as opposed to NTSC or PAL. (This is part of why most of the East calls them “computer games”, along with the rarity of non-computer consoles à la Pong or Magnavox Odyssey. The only ones I know to have been called “video games” were imported arcade cabinets in trailers that would travel from town to town. Known as “videoherna” (video game room) in Czech, they were rare and loved by “weirdos”. I imagine they were quite lucrative for the handful of people skilled at smuggling and repairing monitors without original parts.) Lucky kids would play on IBM-compatible PCs or Game Boys, less lucky ones on Atari 8-bit computers, ZX Spectrum clones or this:

    This game is Nu pogodi from the Elektronika IM series, a legendary toy in the Eastern Bloc. Manufactured in 1986-1993, it used a chip design stolen from the 1981 Game & Watch Egg game. They didn’t even update the clock to 24 hours, the preferred format in Eastern countries.

    In the US, the state will find you for illegally copying Nintendo games.
    In Soviet Russia, you’ll find that the state has been illegally copying Nintendo games all along!