As someone who owns many Betamaxes, buys them, cleans them up and sells them on eBay, I don’t see why you should consider Betamax a dead format in any way shape or form. I get hundreds of dollars for some machines. Hardly likely to be able to do that with VHS. And VHS is dead, many stores no longer carry VHS vcrs or tapes. There will be no VHS nostalgia groups in existence a decade from now.
Choosing Betamax over VHS was and is great advice. The fact that others stupidly failed to follow it does not make it less great.
As to “winning=better”, that’s sheer nonsense. Many watchers of the tech scene over the last couple decades have noticed a perverse mentality among American shoppers is consistently picking the worst possible tech option.
A lot of people making a poor choice doesn’t make any of them right.
Pit away. You’ll promptly be smacked down by cinephiles and folks with degrees in business, economics, and marketing
No, folks tend to buy products which are cheaper and supported by more companies. Every objective assessment I’ve seen, agrees that Betamax was superior, better sound and picture quality, among other things. But more companies made VHS tapes and machines. This made them easier to find and led to competitive pricing. VHS was inferior, but it was cheaper and more available.
Similar things happened with the console put out by various video game companies.
Flamingbananas My Dad loves sauerkraut. To some people, it is not a condiment but a side dish to be eaten out of a small bowl. He’s also rather fond of cold borscht with chunks of sourcream, and pickled herring- also in sourcream.
Worst advie ever received (from my father): Move from Massachusetts to Texas to increase my chances of getting a job in computer software (early 1980s).
I heard that the reason VHS became popular was that porn producers were not allowed to make videos for betamax so they did it for VHS instead. Evidently vcrs were very expensive and the only people who were willing to drop the five hundred were porn watchers.
Back in 7th grade, we were offered a foreign language class. We could pick either Spanish or French. I signed up for Spanish to be with a friend of mine. My mom was horrified and insisted I change it to French, as that was the language of culture, diplomacy, and international intrigue. So I took 6 years of it.
I have never had a patient who spoke only French. I’ve had literally thousands of them who spoke only Spanish, and still do, on a weekly basis.
[slight hijack] Idiotic Simpsons creators need to learn that! Just because it’s funny when Homer is kind of stupid (toward the beginning of the series), doesn’t mean it’s going to be uproarious when he’s extremely stupid. [/slight hijack]
You’re going to Mardi Gras in New Orleans? Listen, the tourist books don’t tell you this, but the best steaks in town are served in the back room of this club called Rawhide… it’s owned and operated by Quakers.
[QUOTE]
I don’t know about being owned by Quakers, but meat is definitely on the menu there <evil laugh>.
Ah, memories.
Other bad advice:
Don’t wear condoms because they ruin the sensation.
You can quit smoking anytime so enjoy it for now.
Put your passport and money in your checked baggage so it will be extra safe.
Me: So, uh, all this Japanese “hentai” stuff I’m about to buy…is it censored or anything?
J-list rep: Well… [hem, haw, hem, haw]
Me: Okay.
(Little tip for anyone thinking of buying adult material produced in Japan…if the site does not explicitly say, point blank, smoking gun, scouts honor and may Orochi bite my head off if I’m lying that it’s uncensored, it’s been censored to death.)
“I can’t believe you’re thinking of getting a cheat device! They take all the fun out of the game!”
(In my experience, at least 99.999% of the time, it’s the game designers who take all the fun out of the game. I usually need the device to have any fun at all.)
“Swallow!”
(Trust me…it never helps. BTW, the way to eliminate pressure in your ears when you’re in an airplane and it’s descending is to hold your nose and blow through it at the same time.)
And a bit of advice I’d like to give any arcade owner:
“Say, you know what would be even better than those ugly square stickers you’re thinking of slapping on everything? A complete description of every bit of objectionable material in the games taped to the side of the machine. And since accuracy is so important, you shouldn’t put anything up until you’ve made sure it’s all correct.”
The best kind of bad advice…it’s bad, but it leads to a good thing.
I once contacted a rash from English ivy. The rash was similar in looks and level of irritation as poison oak.
Several people told me to keep the rash out of warm/hot water. I did. For several days I was miserable. Then, once while doing dishes by hand, my hands got in the warm water (gasp!). It felt WONDERFUL. I cranked up the heat to where I could barely stand it and ran all the infected areas under it. It was as intense as any orgasm and felt 100 times better than scratching. Best of all, it didn’t irritate the rash, scratch my skin, or do any harm. In fact, the itching stopped, and the effect lasted for hours.
Sometimes in the summer I’ll have about 20 HUGE mosquito bites on my legs–itching so bad I can’t sleep. I get up, run to the tub, run hot water over the bumps…voila, no more itch for the rest of the night.
(Obviously the hot water I’m using is not enough to cause burns.)
Every time a guy has given me advice about women and romance/sex, it has been to steer me away from the woman he wanted and towards the woman he was trying to get rid of.
A guy I work with is giving me advice on office politics, specifically how to get a troublesome co-worker fired. As he was saying it, I realized that I was the one who stood to get fired, which may have been the first guy’s intention.
Clearly, you never had a Betamax. The picture quality relative to VHS was like night and day. Hell, my DVD copy of Clash of the Titans actually looks worse than it used to on the family Beta. (No, my memory is not playing tricks on me- I watched that film on Betamax every day for over a year- over four hundred times- no, I’m not kidding).
Folks do not tend to buy those products that are better than other products. They buy those products that are cheaper, which is why Mercedes sells a third of the cars that General Motors does.
