Re: ada to C++ translation

[dewar@gnat.com (Robert Dewar)]

"Chad R. Meiners" <crmeiners@hotmail.com> wrote in message news:<a60is1$21tb$1@msunews.cl.msu.edu>...

> Please search Google groups in comp.lang.ada for Dr.
> Dewar's argument why the Beta vs. VHS analogy is not well 
> formed.

To save people the trouble, the summary is as follows.

VHS dominated Beta because it was technically superior. In
what respect? In respect to the playing time you could get
on a tape. Yes, the image was not as good, but the market
place spoke loud and clear, playing time was more important than image
quality, and Sony failed to understand this.

You still see this today in the DVD market. Many DVD's are
over compressed, but people prefer to have hours and hours
of junk extras to having just the movie at the highest quality. The
few "superbit" DVD's that are available show
the difference in quality quite clearly (compare for example the
Superbit transfer of Air Force One to the
standard transfer). Many DVD's have significantly poorer
quality than the corresponding laser disks, at least partly because of
digital artifacts from excessive compression,
but the market place likes the long playing times.

(my own taste is to prefer laser disks still in many cases
to the corresponding DVD's, though there are exceptions,
and perhaps my observations are not really level playing
field, since I have an HLD-X9 laser player :-)

How's that for getting off the topic completely? [well
*someone* thought once again that beta vs VHS was a relevant analogy,
sigh]

Anyone interested in home theater is welcome to visit me
in NYC to see my setup here :-)