It's not at all. It's really common. PS3 does it and has resumed discs I played years ago. Blu-ray is more hit or miss because BD-J mucks it all up. Titles without that tend to work, but big studio releases tend to have it so...
My PS5 supports this in the narrowest of cases: the DVD is stopped, power is uninterrupted, the DVD is not ejected. There's definitely no persistent memory of episodes watched. What is your DVD player?
The way that BD-J works prevents it from working reliably even on the highest end systems like the several thousand dollar Magnetars. It just can't be helped.
If you get a nice Magnetar, or even a decent Panasonic it will do it's best and work on DVD and non BD-J blu-ray, but it can't control what the vendor did and it will still fail for those Java discs.
Letting whatever dummy made the disk control the hardware to the extent that BD-J does is just ludicrous.
I think all the recollections above may be correct. IIRC, the DVD spec allows a disc to override some stored user preferences, skip to main menu (ignoring auto-play intro content) and play main content (skipping the menus), but not all DVD players had those user pref options - earlier models often didn't. That could definitely be annoying because some studios loved to force ads, trailers, warnings, etc to play.
Some DVD players, especially later, off-brand models, would ignore a disc's instruction to override the user preference. I remember the presence of these capabilities being a key feature in forum reviews of DVD players. Back then, the holy grail was an inexpensive player that had quick load and seek times, ignored region codes, respected user preferences and had analog component output (or a good composite/S-Video encoder chip). Based on these detailed user reviews, the community would arrive at a handful of players that were worth getting. These lists would be regularly updated as models would change firmware or chips and be sold under different brand names in different regions.
Offered to be paid with stock, took the cash. As someone who’s first startup is no long in business, and having cash in hand is appealing..
But yeah..
“well for a short time I was an employee of Apple Computer, employee number 12 and one day I helped move materials out of this garage. At the time Steve Jobs said that the company was short of loot so he offered to pay me in company shares, but I held out for the money - my mother still reminds me of that incident.”
Cringely says here that he worked part-time at Apple for a few months as a graduate student: https://www.pbs.org/nerds/qa4.html . Mark Stephens was at Stanford at the time (he earned his master's in communication in 1979) so this lines up. I think it's entirely possible that Cringely/Stephens was in fact the 12th person hired by Apple, but didn’t get a formal employee number because he wasn't a full-time employee.
But Cringely stated on Triumph of the Nerds that he was literally "Employee #12". Other than this statement of his, there are no other sources to confirm that this was true. There's a very comprehensive list of early Apple employees with evidence to back them up here: https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_early_Apple_Computer_e...
Mark Stephens does not appear anywhere in this list, nor have any other early employees confirmed that he worked there.
Yes, this might have just been a small slip-up on Cringely's part, but the trouble is that he continued to make claims about being employed by Apple that were clearly fabricated. For example, Cringely claimed to have invented the Lisa's trash can icon in this clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06M64l7pPIk&t=373s but if you read about the same story from other Apple employees, they don't mention him at all: https://folklore.org/Rosings_Rascals.html
These "tall tales" start to add up, and it becomes very hard to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Cringely was a great writer, a great documentarian, and really wonderful at finding the human stories behind the giants of the personal computer industry. Unfortunately, he also often made up stories about himself that were later found to be untrue. He didn't need to do this, because his work stood on its own. It was just a flaw in his personality.
In any case, this is sad news. Rest in peace, Mark Stephens.
That's fair, there's some other stuff that he seems to have verifiably lied about. There's the Lisa stuff you mention, and he lied about being a professor at Stanford when in reality he was either a TA or one level above a TA (sort of like Lex Fridman and MIT). I'm not sure that he'd lie altogether about being an early Apple employee when he was presenting a show that interviewed both Jobs and Wozniak (who would likely see the show and know that he was lying), but who knows.
You might already know this because you seem to know a lot about him, but when I was researching the Lisa claim you brought up I found a CHM oral history with Dan'l Lewin (https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...), where page 20 mentions that Cringely was married to Ellen Nold while she was working on the Lisa project. Maybe that's how he got some of his anecdotes about Apple in the early 80s. EDIT: Cringely's next Apple anecdote in the talk you linked was about AppleLink, and this photo has Nold listed as manager of support programs for AppleLink: https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/ellen-nold-the...
I agree that his tendency to exaggerate his own past is unfortunate but doesn't outweigh all the great journalism he's done.
Many mothers and their children don't find it so intuitive at first. There are lactation consultants who teach mothers (and indirectly the children) what to do.
No. It's about pushing decisions out to the edges and empowering parents (and students) to help run the school system. To frame it this way is to deny the powerful evolution brought about by real choice.
This happened a few years ago before flock. Some idiot drove down the street with a pellet gun shooting at car windows. About five of us needed to pay several hundred dollars a piece to replace the glass.
My street is not "horrible", but everyone on my street would have loved to have a camera that recorded what happened. Even if we didn't get a working license plate number, it would have been useful to see what happened.
It doesn't have to be a "monster crime gap" to get people to vote for these things. It just takes some selfish idiots.
And how much did it cost for the authors to produce the books in the first place? Everyone wants to believe that piracy is okay because the creators costs don't matter.
The old model was designed to split the development costs among all of the readers. Just who is going to write books? Only people with government grants and the rich folks who can self-fund?
Sure, why not? ChatGPT linked me to an 11 year old estimate that public libraries were spending $102 million annually on ebooks[0], and put together a couple numbers to estimate ~$248 million more recently. That sounds plausible to me. Don't authors already sell a pitch to a publishing company? How is it any different to sell a pitch to a grant organization? Or a private crowdfunding organization? We already spend plenty of public money on books, except we don't build that as permanent public wealth.
We should at the very least demand that public money go to public wealth generation. So under the current 100+ year copyright regime, nothing copyrighted.
The old model was that people who enjoyed creating made things. Copyright, starting around 1890, changed that to be about profit above all else. It’s telling that you can’t imagine writing a book if there isn’t the promise of money.
If you can’t feed yourself writing then you have to have a job, which means you won’t have nearly as much time (or energy) to write. Writing long form work is a very long, draining process. That’s why it’s a full time career for many.
I’d love to shoot documentaries I care about all the time but if I’m not getting paid it simply isn’t viable.
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