Toby
Member
Registered: Jul 2000
Location:
Posts: 3034 |
quote:
Originally posted by ubik
Oh, for the love of God, get over yourself!
I'm not under myself.quote:
I don't need to "be more careful" about a damned thing.
*sigh* I'm not saying 'be more careful' in the sense of endangering anyone/thing. I'm saying be more precise in what you're saying. If you've spent enough time on this to get this bent out of shape, you could have saved yourself lots of time by not preaching to the choir.quote:
You need to spend more face to face time with real people, and less time admiring how biting your own comments can be when you have an hour or two to 'fire off' an indignant email from the relative comfort and anonymity of your computer.
LOL...that's funny. Does it really take you that long to compose a response that you think it must be so for everyone?quote:
Perhaps if you got out more you would learn that it is no great transgression that people must be wary of, to tell you when you have made an error.
No, what I'm saying is that you were pointing out the wrong error from the wrong person. I didn't make the analogy (or carry it out in the same way) in the first place. Beta is obviously such a pet peeve for you that you missed that I suppose.quote:
No, you AND the poster you were arguing with, were debating the merits of the various expansion technologies for PDAs in the context of the tired and inaccurate old Beta analogy. That was why I went "off on a rant."
*sigh* No, I wasn't using the same Beta analogy. Sorry that you missed that.quote:
Well, see, the thing is that some of us have actual life experience, and know better than to use the internet as the final arbiter of what really happened.
The internet wasn't the final arbiter there. It was a convenient source of refutation (based on real world sources which they cited).quote:
I was alive in the days of Beta,
So was I.quote:
and even have owned a few Beta machines, as well as ED Beta machines, and several VHS and S-VHS machines. I don't need a web page to tell me how things were, I experienced them for myself.
You experienced _your_ experiences of how things were. Those don't necessarily have any bearing on 'how things were'. That's the problem with anecdotal evidence. Mine may have been totally different, and yet neither is more 'right' or 'wrong' than the other.quote:
<Sigh> The first sign of people who have mistaken internet forums for the real world is that they loose the ability to assimilate any information that doesn't include http://!
I didn't ask for an URL. I asked for a _source_. Is the source your own experiences? Obviously it is, and deserves the same weight as any other individual's direct experiences (including my own), which while they may become significant in aggregate don't mean much on an individual level (from either side). If the source were a company history from Sony or JVC, that would also have its own weight (or lack thereof) appropriate to it.quote:
Try going to the local CompUSA, Fry's, or Wal-Mart and asking the sales rep at the PDA counter for an estimation of the number of SD, MS, MMC, or SB memory modules they sell in comparison to expansion modules.
Which would give me about the same level of information as just aggregating the people I support along with other peripheral relationships.quote:
The numbers speak for themselves. If you just can't believe it unless you see it on a web page, then search on this very site, and you will notice that one version of the memplug or another always tops the polls of people's favorite/ most useful/ must have modules.
Which one of needs to 'get over themselves' again?quote:
How cute! I don't agree with you, so I must be basing my opinion on anecdotal evidence.
Do you even know what anecdotal evidence is?quote:
Sorry, but I don't really have much anecdotal evidence for this, since I don't spend a lot of time asking people about their PDAs.
Neither do I. They come find me.quote:
I am afraid I am having to base my sloppy assumptions on inconclusive and highly subjective measurements like sales numbers and inventory figures of retail outlets.
No, you're not even doing that. You're asking sales people at computer stores if you're doing what you recommend I do. If you were asking a manager to see the books and going to multiple stores and doing the same and aggregating the numbers, you might be closer to looking at really meaningful measurements. Asking a sales rep for their take on what sells the most is the very _definition_ of anecdotal evidence. It only accounts for the people that asked that rep for a specific memory expansion and said that they were using it in a PDA. It wouldn't include all sorts of useful information.quote:
I clicked it, but just because someone puts together their opinions on the subject, puts them on the internet, and then sites some sources, does not make that the truth.
Then please cite a source which shows where the information is wrong.quote:
Notable omissions and errata from that link are:
1- Japan Victor Corp. (JVC) was, at the time of the first VHS machine's development, merely the Japanese division of RCA due to the fact that the laws in Japan require Japanese subsidiaries of foreign corporations to be registered as a separate Japanese corporation to operate inside Japan.
2- Home 1/2" VCRs were far less reliable than the 3/4" professional machines in use at that time, not the other way around as the article says. That is measurable in the mean hours between failures, and is not a subjective measurement.
They don't mean 'reliable' in those terms, if you're reading for context. The author would have been clearer to use 'user-friendly'.quote:
3- Beta had notably higher resolution and color fidelity. I actually checked this on professional test equipment with test patterns, so please don't give me some crap about subjective value judgments.
I didn't give you any crap about that, but again, you're not using the right context. The article specifically said that Beta could be shown to be 'better' on sensitive test equipment. Ultimately, though, it didn't make a difference on consumer TVs at the time. Much like the average person might not be that impressed with DVD on a regular TV compared to a relatively new video, the difference just wasn't obvious right away.quote:
4- The article completely ignored ED Beta, a consumer format with broadcast quality resolution and color fidelity.
It didn't ignore it anymore than it ignored S-VHS. That wasn't its purpose. It's purpose was to refute common misconceptions about why Beta 'failed' and to illustrate what happened in comparison to those misconceptions. Its purpose was not to soothe the souls of Beta advocates.quote:
I point all of this out simply to make clear that this is hardly an authoritative text on the Beta format or its demise.
I didn't say it was. Quite the contrary. It's a source that shows that Beta didn't die the death that people think it did.quote:
I am sure that if you search the internet long enough, you can find a source of documentation with several refferences to support the argument that Beta machines were actually engineered by aliens, and saying you can still find them at the center of crop circles, but that doesn't make it true.
I bet I couldn't find such an article citing Consumers' Research, Video Magazine, Popular Electronics, Business Week, High Fidelity, Stereo Review, Forbes, Time, etc. along with specific issues and page numbers which could be verified.quote:
This is my last post on the subject, as I really am sure I can find something better to do than argue endlessly with someone so enamoured of their own words that they can't even admit that they fell prey to a bad analogy in the middle of an argument.
What you still fail to grasp is that you're not arguing against anything that I'm arguing for. You're so caught up in championing Beta that you missed the fact that I'm not against it. I'm saying that Beta was a format that didn't catch on in the consumer market for reasons that most people misunderstand, but it still lives a healthy life within its own little niche. The springboard should be so lucky. However, it's much more likely that Sony's other product, the memory stick will have that fate in the PDA space, since although they have the momentum in other spaces, that doesn't necessarily translate to dominance in the PDA space.
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05-21-2002 08:14 AM
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