Word: vcr
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...have not read the book, there is nothing particularly yuppie about the story, aside from its audience and the vast quantities of coke that the narrator, better known as "you," consumes through the fast-turning pages. No one in the story works on Wall Street. No one has a VCR, drives a BMW or listens to CDs. In fact, the protagonist, who in the film has a name, Jamie Conway, works as a fact-checker at a magazine modeled on the stodgy old New Yorker. Even his best buddy, the flashy Tad Allagash (Kiefer Sutherland), is in advertising--not investment...
...Johan de Kleer, a respected knowledge-system designer at Xerox, envisions an all- purpose electrical diagnostician that would have specific knowledge, such as the various laws that govern electrical flow and conductivity. But it would also have the common sense to decide whether it was faced with a broken VCR or a broken computer. To build this system, de Kleer has spent ten years codifying what he calls "qualitative" calculus that will provide the language to build "common-sense physics." The problem with common sense is that it requires the computer to skip nimbly among many different perspectives in order...
Even when American engineers and researchers come up with new ideas and technologies, their companies often fail to follow up. The genesis of the videocassette recorder is a classic case in point. The basic technology for the VCR was invented at a California-based company called Ampex and developed further at R.C.A. Yet it was two Japanese companies -- Sony and JVC -- that bought rights to the technology and modified it. After 10,000 patented improvements, they made the VCR an affordable household product...
...winner Platoon. Yet some big hits, like Top Gun and "Crocodile" Dundee, have been introduced at a much more affordable $29.95 or less. Confused consumers may ask: Why the discrepancy? The answer goes to the heart of a key issue facing the home-video industry: figuring out which movies VCR owners want to rent and which they want...
...disc versions of classics like Citizen Kane and contemporary gems like Blade Runner. "We're talking about radical technology." Technology, it should be added, that has been around for almost a decade. Laser discs hit the market in the late '70s and promptly took a commercial trouncing from the VCR. Laser players could not record, and, in the words of Warner Home Video's president Warren Lieberfarb, "it was a simple conflict for the consumer: Why buy a machine that only plays back when you can get one, for the same price, that records...