> Satellite TV uses a file system called an MPEG transport stream that allows multiple audio, video, or data layers to be packaged into a single stream file.
Interesting read but that part really made me question my own sanity. It’s probably just lost in translation.
I wouldn't describe Transport Stream as a "file system" but most people probably aren't familiar with the term multiplexing. It's true if you record a TS (e.g. to a .ts file) you can later split out the different Program Streams which can hold pretty much anything.
Pedantry alert: you're generally extracting Elementary Streams from a given TS. A Program Stream is basically a variant of a TS that's meant more for files at rest - say, on a DVD, or a PS2 game (which did use MPEG-2 PS extensively in the PSS file format, except storing the audio as XA ADPCM in a data stream) - while a TS is a bit more robust for transmission
that's how it works. point a free-to-air dish at the right place in the sky, demodulate the DVB-S2 signal, and it's often IP traffic moving through mpeg transport streams.
The difference between a file system and a container format is mostly a matter of perspective - indeed OSX literally uses "disk images" as their container format. Is .zip a filesystem? You probably wouldn't want to use it natively on a disk, but for a lot of purposes it's the same kind of thing.
File system is the wrong word.
What they should have used is file format.
It is not wrong that you can have a file (bits and bytes encoded in the shape described by a file format) on some remote point. If you have an index of those files where you can programmatically choose between multiple files that could even pass as a crude "file system". But I doubt this is what they meant to refer to.
It is likelier they wrongly assumed a file system is the system in which a file is organized, where in fact they meant file format.
I think they were going for a reasonable analogy, especially when a stream is saved to disk to have its contents extracted: each channel contained in the stream can then be thought of as a separate file, not unlike files in a zipped directory.
This is getting totally out of hand. Nobody can pay a subscription for every single news site.
If they were smart they would do a Netflix of news where you subscribe to one service and it gives you access to a ton of different subscription news sites.
I've tried a dozen different paywall bypass services including bpc & archive.today and I can't get it to bypass this. I think the Google Rich Text trick might work but I'm on mobile atm.
> If they were smart they would do a Netflix of news where you subscribe to one service and it gives you access to a ton of different subscription news sites
Except it doesn't work with links, which is usually how I find news stories. I have Apple One (which includes News), but If I click on a link to the WSJ, I get the paywall. To read the article, I have to copy the article title or headline (if I can find it!), and paste it into the News app to read it.
Even netflix suffers from this, for a while they were great, pay them watch anything. but then the traditional publishing houses started cutting their works off from netflix in favor of running their own streaming. which had two results, a balkanization of streaming video (you can't just go to one place anymore) and netflix investing into making their own content so they have something to stream.
I understood that ads paid for newspapers. The nominal fee they charged was probably for pulp and barrels of ink. (If the papers were completely free people would just grab armloads to line their bird cages.)
When the physical paper is gone and delivery is over the wire, free should in fact be doable.
Perhaps the local news fucked up by accepting Google ads. Had each regional, metropolitan area put together their own ad agency they could have served up local ads and likely kept something closer to their previous business model—likely reaped more dosh?
I would like paywalls, but only if they had been extremely different from the current paywalls.
First, I almost never find subscriptions acceptable, but I would happily pay for downloading anything that I am interested in, after seeing a preview that would convince me that the content is worth it.
Second, the procedure for paying would have to be very simple and more importantly, the prices would have to be very low, e.g in most cases not significantly bigger than $1.
I can easily read many hundreds of articles per month, or even per day. A price of e.g. $30 per article is not feasible, except in very rare occasions, for something unusually valuable. In most cases even $10 would be too much for a single article.
I actually subscribe to a few paywalled libraries, but I frequently prefer to take the content that I am paying for from some pirate sites, because those have much faster content searching and instant downloading, while if I go on the sites for which I pay dearly, I waste a lot of time with inferior searching and especially with various slow and annoying steps for authorization.
You can copy/paste (or share to, if you set that up) what is visible before the paywall into Perplexity or similar service to see if the article is syndicated elsewhere paywall free, or find similar sources, e.g. https://www.perplexity.ai/search/apple-privately-threatened-...
If you have Apple news you can share to that in a similar way.
We're talking about a news provider that is one of the 3 original broadcast systems licensed in the US (NBC, CBS, & ABC). They've been provided public journalism since the dawn of radio & TV. They've been offering access to all their articles on their news websites without a paywall since at least the 1990s.
It's just shocking when you see media company after media company go completely behind a paywall out of the blue when last week I was reading it with advertisements.
With a TV there was no easy way to block ads. Sure you could change the channel or get up and do something else but people didn't bother.
Now with news websites most people are running ad blockers. What are the news sites meant to do? Their employees are working, and they expect to be paid for that work. just like I expect to be paid for my job. Where is the money going to come from?
Alternatively, how would you suggest content that takes time and effort to make be funded?
I get that it's sad, but I'd gladly pay a monthly sub to use a not enshitified internet, rather than the cluster fuck of ads and data stealing that exists in the modern web. Spending time on the 90s and early 2000s internet and comparing it to this dumpster fire makes me so darn sad.
Were you paid to write this comment? If not, then your statement is either true (and therefore slop), or false (because what made the early web awesome was people like you putting their thoughts online... for free).
Counterpoint: paywalls are what allow actual journalists to be on the web. If you’re not paying them, you should ask yourself why they would spend time writing something for you to read.
In the 90s I spent many hours on IRC and newsgroups reading all kinds of wonderful, and some not so wonderful things. I even had my own website, with photos, a web log, and a guest book! None of us were paid.
Sure, it wasn't as dressed up, but it was joyful and charming.
Not everything is about money, and not everything needs to be done for money. On the contrary; money seems to drain the charm and joy.
Because somebody else is paying them? Public funding, indvidual donations, corporate and non-profit sponsorship all come immediately to mind.
Commercial journalism could also be funded with profits from other lines of business. While shareholders might revolt if Disney started streaming World News Tonight ad and subscription free, Michael Bloomberg could remove Bloomberg News paywalls with a phone call.
> Subscription revenue is gone because newspapers don't monopolize their localities.
What do you mean by this? Do you mean newspapers don't utilize their localities as much as they could, or that they're unable to create monopolies on local information nowadays?
Just genuinely curious, I have a brother in law who's the editor at his small town newspaper, so I'm tangentially interested in this kind of thing.
A local newspaper traditionally paid wire services[1] like the Associated Press or Reuters for the majority of their articles.
They would only assign journalists for important or local content.
The daily newspaper was a news aggregation subscription service more than a news creation service.
It was inherently geographical because they had to print the newspaper overnight and deliver it to you every morning.
They would also select different articles depending on what might interest readers, e.g. an Iowa paper might syndicate an article on corn subsidies that a Floridian paper would ignore.
Computers fixed both the distribution problem and the recommendation problem.
The New York Times can distribute news nationwide instantly and simultaneously tailor my feed to my specific interests. They can do so better than local publications thanks to economies of scale. If you do have a subscription, it won't be to the Syracuse Herald-Journal but to the New York Times.
[1] named after telegraphic wire, which is how old this business model is.
A free press is important to democracy, so the government should move some tax money to journalists, and then this link could instead be to a taxpayer funded site (like NPR) instead of to a for-profit ad-powered spam-site run by billionaires who pay journalists as little as possible while pocketing as much as they can.
Unfortunately, PBS and NPR are so severely under-funded that they need to run donation drives and can't do journalism of this level.
We adopted this in Canada and Facebook/Instagram have banned news since 2023.
The idea is that social media companies offer summaries of news that replace reading the article for most people. Thanks to commenters bypassing paywalls they can get the full article too!
News companies cannot effectively negotiate with large social media companies for a slice of ad revenue due to discrepancies in size.
The government proposed a compulsory licensing scheme where websites with an "asymmetric bargaining position" (i.e
Big Tech) that link to news must pay.
Google is paying $100 million,[1] Meta walked away from the negotiating table.
I can’t believe someone actually makes this suggestion after seeing what has happened in the last year. The Trump administration cut funding for PBS and NPR because he didn’t like what they were saying.
This isn’t new. The government has been trying to cut funding for PBS since the 60s.
Why would anyone want the government to fund the press? How would you actually expect it to cover government corruption?
It functions fine in many countries though. E.g. a lot of European countries have public broadcasters paid by tax money and they sure do criticize and mock government.
Commercial broadcasters tend to lean towards entertainment (needs ad revenue), so news becomes entertainment too.
It works as long as the state and public believes in democracy, accountability, etc. It’s very vulnerable, but everything in democracy is. Democracy and free press can only work if the population also defends it, which is what is failing in the US. The majority of population does not want to defend democracy.
So my point is invalid that you shouldn’t depend on government funding of media because if the government doesn’t like what you say they will remove funding when that’s exactly what they did?
But I think the hard on for PBS that conservatives have is that PBS admitted gay people exist.
Back in the 60s PBS was controversial partially because it showed black and white kids playing together on Sesane Street…
Well it worked for 80 years it seems and now that the USA does not have a democratically acting government anymore they want to get rid of the funding.
Press that does not need to be profitable is extremely valuable to a democracy as it can openly talk about any issues without a conflict of interest.
Good democracies have that funding and no meddling of politicians with the content enshrined in their constitution.
So exactly when was the US a “good democracy”? 80 years ago segregation was still in the South based on a ruling by the Supreme Court “separate but equal”.
Even until the 80s it was legal to arrest a homosexual couple for having sex in their own home based on “sodomy” laws.
Today women are dying because doctors are afraid of performing medical necessary abortions to save their lives because they might go to jail
They have been trying to get rid of funding since at least 1969 when Mr. Rogers himself went before Congress to try to keep it.
Let's be clear that Democrats support democracy and the democratic process. Republicans support oligarchy and a new gilded age of robber barons.
If government actually funded news in the public interest, it would mean that Democrats were in charge. Sure, Republicans could always cut funding or pressure publicly funded news if they returned to power. It would be our job to make sure that didn't happen. Publicly funded media can't work under corrupt Republican administration.
But, it's also true that commercial media is being bent under pressure from the Trump administration. Republicans will try to break anything which they perceive as limiting their power. Your narrow focus on publicly funded media seems to miss that big picture.
Democrats don’t support “wrong speak” any more than Republicans - it’s just a different type of wrong speak. I a socially liberal Black guy who supports almost every type of equal rights imaginable would immediately get cancelled and liberals would try to de platform me once I speak out against the one bridge too far for me - biological men in women’s sports or other women only competitions.
>One can always suppose the identified individual is a double, triple, quadruple agent.
yes in general it's not good reasoning but given that in this case we know that we're talking about someone who tried to stay anonymous and comes out of the cypherpunk culture we can pretty much assume that if they've been interviewed they've denied it.
It's not like that accusation is random, it's that this is what the real Nakamoto, whoever it is, would have said
One theory I saw argued the punch card size was the reason for 80x24. But why were punch cards that size? They were designed off of the cards used for the census. Why were the census cards that size? Because they were modeled after the dollar bill size.
I do love thought experiments like this but do believe they’re insatiably unresolvable.
And the reason they were modeled after the dollar bill size is because there were already many types of systems for storing and organizing them. That came in handy for the census.
The old BBC Connections series has a segment with James Burke using the old census tabulators.
That one also turned out a myth :) CD size was determined by Cassette tape dimensions (diagonal, human can still hold one in one hand) and that combined with conservative pits/lands/track pitch choice drove the play time.
thus CD runtime was derived from something "what we had at the time".
The story as told may be inaccurate but it wasn’t simply ‘what we had at the time’ either.
The 74 minute length resulted from Sony rejecting the Philips 60 minute 11.5cm diameter “Pinkeltje” disc size in favor of a 12cm diameter.
It’s quite possible that Sony’s Norio Ohga simply argued that the 9th symphony or various operas fitting would be enough of an advantage for the slight size increase without meaningfully decreasing portability.
Meanwhile the LP crowd was flipping sides like it was Ultima VIII (slight exaggeration). Why would it be critical for a new format to do away with multi-disc releases if the customer base has already grown accustomed to them?
For classical music it's a problem because the long track lengths mean that you'll have to flip the record over in the middle of a piece. This was enough of an annoyance that one French label in the 70s created special records just for classical music with extra tightly packed grooves that could hold close to an hour on each side (https://www.discogs.com/label/184887-Trimicron). The downside of this is that the maximum recording volume is significantly reduced so there's a lot more background noise than on a normal record.
The symphony story might be a legend, but it's pretty well known that the original design was somewhere in 10-11cm range, but this was eventually increased to 12 cm.
The "diagonal cassette size" seems extremely far-fetched - first, who cares about this? If you are worried about boxes, shelves etc.. you want horizontal size, which 10 cm. And you are worried about holding in hand, 12cm is not very convenient for the smaller hands, a smaller size would be better.
When respectfully handling them out of the box, I always stuck my index finger in the central hole and the thumb on the border. I have large hands but I rarely held them by the borders.
If anything, I'd have guessed that the size of an 8-track in a car stereo was probably a larger influence on potential form factors for CD audio. Since car stereos were at least somewhat normalized in the early 80's. Not speaking to an adapter, just in terms of what would "fit" in a typical stereo hole in a car.
That said, I doubt that's the reality either... it's probably a number of factors. I am slightly surprised that a USB based read-only media format standard for players hasn't materialized, though it seems that online/rental models are what the industry really wants.
Source is Dr. Kees A. Schouhamer Immink. Philips’ principal engineer in the joint efforts of Sony and Philips to develop the Compact Disc (CD) https://www.turing-machines.com/pdf/cdstory.htm:
>The disk diameter is a very basic parameter, because it relates to playing time. All parameters then have to be traded off to optimise playing time and reliability. The decision was made by the top brass of Philips. 'Compact Cassette was a great success', they said, 'we don't think CD should be much larger'.
>As it was, we made CD 0.5 cm larger yielding 12 cm. (There were all sorts of stories about it having something to do with the length of Beethoven's 9th Symphony and so on, but you should not believe them.)
> The 8-14 bit channel code was agreed and all the specifications between them led to a playing time of 75 minutes.
No, it's made by systems made by people, systems which might have grown and mutated so many times that the original purpose and ethics might be unrecognizable to the system designers. This can be decades in the case of tech like SMTP, HTTP, JS, but now it can be days in the era of Moltbots and vibecoding.
Usually slug, headline and teaser are all considered important parts to optimize. My wife works for a big online news company and while news journalists write headline and teaser, they have editors in chief who edit those again and a separate SEO team who will assign slugs.
Thanks for doing the detective work for your friends on mobile. This fact severely diminishes the message of this medium. I’ll check for myself later; but until then, I will hope it leverages the techniques it describes.
Interesting read but that part really made me question my own sanity. It’s probably just lost in translation.
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