The new service's "page numbers" are not consistent in any way, however, which is why I said "the only reasonable way to navigate to pages is via a deep menu system of pages".
It is true that many of them are similar to the old Ceefax numbers, however, the system only seems to have numbers for the index pages for sections rather than sub-pages. It's also a darn more tedious system to use.
As for speed, you may see a comment to another comment made above, I've used lots of equipment and it's all seemed just as cumbersome. This is Freeview and Freesat and low and high end equipment.
Other than the usability design issues and the speed, I do miss the comprehensiveness of the old service. The web system is not an ideal replacement as it requires me to change to a different device, possibly even boot it up and wait for that. (Oh, and the usability of the BBC's web site is poor as well. Style over content rules.)
I've tried using the new text service on a number of systems, both low-end and high-end and both Freeview and Freesat. They're all as tardy.
Indeed, early teletext was pretty slow (but it was fun watching the page numbers fly by at the top right of the screen). However, with the advent of the "Fastext" page caching system, the initial page was fast enough and far faster than the new system. (And I do remember the original implementation too, having played with a teletext TV in the local library when the service first started in the mid-'70s.
The most unfortunate part of the whole affair is that the "more advanced" digital service which is replacing the old teletext system is actually less useful and feels slower than what it replaces.
The old system may have been text only (except for some block colour "graphics") and take a while for each page to be transmitted but it was clear and easy to read. Also, the art of providing content in the limited text space available had become an art and hence the content itself was good.
The new system which replaces it take an age to start up (up to a minute) as opposed to the almost instant teletext system and because it only uses the right-hand third of the screen to display in (most of the time) has less space for information. If you add to this the fact that the only reasonable way to navigate to pages is via a deep menu system of pages (each page taking up to 30 seconds to load), rather than being able to memorise a three digit number for the page, it becomes too painful to actually use at all.
There is little support for HDMI within the seminar room equipment available, it's practically all VGA only. It's only very high end kit which has HDMI support. If you add to that most, if not all, "presenter" units (that is the back-lit camera systems people can use to show objects or hand-written notes) are VGA output only, the only real solution is analogue video, even though it doesn't travel long distances well (though this can be worked around with video senders).
The reason I know this is that only a couple of years ago I was on a committee running the kitting out of some lecture theatres and seminar rooms. None of the tendering A/V companies could supply a complete system using DVI, HDMI or any other digital video technology even though we asked them to look into it.
VGA is *THE* de-facto lowest common denominator computer video format, it's likely to stay that way for a *VERY* long time.
I've been using "ip" for at least 8 years now...it actually allows you to assign multiple IP addresses to a single network device. I don't know how anyone lives with ifconfig anymore.
You mean like?:
ifconfig eth0:1 10.0.0.1 netmask 255.0.0.0 broadcast +
Of course, changing this in the Linux world merely moves Linux further and further away from the mainstream UNIXes, making managing a heterogeneous environment even more of a pain than it once was.
Better to stay as close to a POSIX/XPG4.2 tool set for interoperability reasons.
This will merely increase the density of individual memory modules. However, with processors using multiple memory channels (for performance reasons) you will still require a separate memory unit per memory channel. For Intel Core i5/i7 processors this would be two units. For Xeons it would be sets of three.
Seeing as the aim of the project is to create a tinkering platform for nascent, teenage programmers I was wondering why the idea to write a full, tutorial programming manual was dropped. The whole of the early '80s micro boom and bedroom coders was based upon not on the "cheap" hardware such as the BBC Micro and the Sinclair ZX81/Spectrum but mainly the comprehensive and very educational manuals which came with them.
So, why was the idea of the accompanying educational material dropped?
Actually, due to a lop-sided treaty Tony Blair got through parliament after 9/11, basically the US can request the extradition of anyone without having to give evidence. The idea behind this was so that "terrorists" could be moved between the two countries without disclosing sensitive intelligence. The original treaty would have been two-way but the US legislature blocked the treaty at the US end. Unfortunately, because the treaty didn't have a clause which meant that it only came into power if both sides ratified it the UK end became binding even though the US end wasn't.
Tony Blair stuffed it up again.
That had more to do with IBM using an architecture they opened up than Microsoft in a lot of ways...
Indeed this is very true.
In the mid-80s there were a number of machines on the market which ran MSDOS but were not strictly PC compatible, for example the ACT Apricot F1, but these all fell by the wayside as not all software played by the rules and expected either a specific memory layout or specific type of graphics card (e.g. MDA, Hercules or CGA) to work. This was true of Lotus 1-2-3 and early versions of MS Word, where you needed specially modified versions to run on the Apricot.
Yes I have, and it's an attempt to retro-fit a useful security model to a system not designed to have such security from the beginning.
Of course, because of the poor security decisions made by Microsoft in the 1980s and compounded in the 90s, such as allowing application installs to use the OS directory structure to place DLLs and configuration files and combining the system and application registries into one database, etc. If you add to that the 3rd party software producers who weren't forced to build software which had to operate in a non-privileged environment and hence required to run as Administrator who's applications are still causing problems and you still have a major security problem on your hands.
Microsoft let the genie out of the bottle and it's very difficult to put it back in. That's entropy for you.
The story has the correct title but rather misses the point.
Yes, it's not time to panic. There is a set of malicious tojan horse programs out there for MacOS. The current crop require the user to authorise their installation. i.e. the security weakest link (at the moment) being exploited is the one behind the keyboard. Very often this is the places where security is the weakest, just watch WarGames if you doubt this.
MacOS is by design, with a greater degree of privilege and OS/Application separation, more resistant to attack than Microsoft Windows has been. However, this is not to say that it is not vulnerable. All systems are, be it design flaws or merely implementation flaws. Yes, I'm looking at you Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, HP/UX and AIX. No-one can rest on their laurels.
Surely these days it's, "I don't bother re-implementing basic Unix commands, I write a hardware emulator in Javascript and boot a new copy of Unix in it."
You may find the Wikipedia page on the Nurburgring useful: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%C3%BCrburgring
You're obviously not a great follower of international motor sport or the sport's history. (And have obviously not played Gran Tourismo 5 on the PS3:-))
Actually.... This is no-longer true.
Food is sold in metric units of weight and volume. Petrol is sold in litres.
The only exceptions are road speeds and distances are still in miles and beer is sold in pints, as is milk (though the metric volume equivalent has to be the main description of size).
As you can see, there's been a general trend downwards, in jumps, since July-Sept. 2009.
The filters being used here are (1) IP addresses with valid DNS entries, (2) DNS blacklists, (3) ClamAV (with spam signatures added), followed by (4) SpamAssassin, which has been detuned so that it doesn't produce any false positives. Seeing as only a few spams actually get past ClamAV this is merely to catch those which don't have a signature yet.
As you can see, both the volume and percentage of spam relative to legitimate e-mails is down to the lowest levels in a couple of years, by an order of magnitude (in terms of volume) from its peak in July 2009.
Well, the Sinclair QL was available before the Amiga.
Useless fact: The original version of AmigaDOS was written on a Sinclair QL by Metacomco using their BCPL compiler. It was based upon Tripos, a little known M68K OS developed in Cambridge.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIPOS
As for the QL itself, it was hobbled by the 68008 especially as by the time of its launch the full 68000 was cheaper. The reason for its use was that the QL had originally been designed as an 8 bit computer and it was only in the later stages of design that it switched from the Z80 to the 68008.
The other part which knobbled it was that instead of using a dedicated serial chip, sound chip and keyboard controller it used an underpowered 4 bit Intel chip to try to do all three. (Well, at least one side of the serial interface.) This caused problems with keyboard input when playing a sound and meant that serial communications were never really fast enough to handle even 300 baud.
In its defence, QDOS was lovely to program for, SuperBASIC was an excellent dialect and the pre-emptive multitasking did work (without windowing).
Oh, and those Microdrives everyone decried, they were fine. In fact, the last time I had the QL down from the loft (about 2 years ago) all but one of the Microdrives still read fine, unlike the 3.5" floppy disks I used later it its "life".
Slashdot Mirror
Well, my only comment on how modern, high-speed equipment is slower:
;-)
Time to boot into a usable state to start programming:
BBC Micro: 2 seconds.
Dual, quad-core Xeon processor PC running Windows 7: 2 minutes.
The new service's "page numbers" are not consistent in any way, however, which is why I said "the only reasonable way to navigate to pages is via a deep menu system of pages".
It is true that many of them are similar to the old Ceefax numbers, however, the system only seems to have numbers for the index pages for sections rather than sub-pages. It's also a darn more tedious system to use.
As for speed, you may see a comment to another comment made above, I've used lots of equipment and it's all seemed just as cumbersome. This is Freeview and Freesat and low and high end equipment.
Other than the usability design issues and the speed, I do miss the comprehensiveness of the old service. The web system is not an ideal replacement as it requires me to change to a different device, possibly even boot it up and wait for that. (Oh, and the usability of the BBC's web site is poor as well. Style over content rules.)
I've tried using the new text service on a number of systems, both low-end and high-end and both Freeview and Freesat. They're all as tardy.
Indeed, early teletext was pretty slow (but it was fun watching the page numbers fly by at the top right of the screen). However, with the advent of the "Fastext" page caching system, the initial page was fast enough and far faster than the new system. (And I do remember the original implementation too, having played with a teletext TV in the local library when the service first started in the mid-'70s.
The most unfortunate part of the whole affair is that the "more advanced" digital service which is replacing the old teletext system is actually less useful and feels slower than what it replaces.
The old system may have been text only (except for some block colour "graphics") and take a while for each page to be transmitted but it was clear and easy to read. Also, the art of providing content in the limited text space available had become an art and hence the content itself was good.
The new system which replaces it take an age to start up (up to a minute) as opposed to the almost instant teletext system and because it only uses the right-hand third of the screen to display in (most of the time) has less space for information. If you add to this the fact that the only reasonable way to navigate to pages is via a deep menu system of pages (each page taking up to 30 seconds to load), rather than being able to memorise a three digit number for the page, it becomes too painful to actually use at all.
Wrong, just plain wrong.
There is little support for HDMI within the seminar room equipment available, it's practically all VGA only. It's only very high end kit which has HDMI support.
If you add to that most, if not all, "presenter" units (that is the back-lit camera systems people can use to show objects or hand-written notes) are VGA output only, the only real solution is analogue video, even though it doesn't travel long distances well (though this can be worked around with video senders).
The reason I know this is that only a couple of years ago I was on a committee running the kitting out of some lecture theatres and seminar rooms. None of the tendering A/V companies could supply a complete system using DVI, HDMI or any other digital video technology even though we asked them to look into it.
VGA is *THE* de-facto lowest common denominator computer video format, it's likely to stay that way for a *VERY* long time.
OK. That's the obvious stupid example. Now try this:
10 FOR y=1 TO 1000
20 FOR x=0 TO 7
30 INK x : PAPER 7 - y
40 PRINT "Oh! Pretty colours! Annoying sounds!"
50 BEEP 1,x
60 NEXT x
70 NEXT y
How many modules will you now have to load? How many APIs will you now have to learn?
I've been using "ip" for at least 8 years now...it actually allows you to assign multiple IP addresses to a single network device. I don't know how anyone lives with ifconfig anymore.
You mean like?: ifconfig eth0:1 10.0.0.1 netmask 255.0.0.0 broadcast + Of course, changing this in the Linux world merely moves Linux further and further away from the mainstream UNIXes, making managing a heterogeneous environment even more of a pain than it once was. Better to stay as close to a POSIX/XPG4.2 tool set for interoperability reasons.
This will merely increase the density of individual memory modules. However, with processors using multiple memory channels (for performance reasons) you will still require a separate memory unit per memory channel. For Intel Core i5/i7 processors this would be two units. For Xeons it would be sets of three.
Seeing as the aim of the project is to create a tinkering platform for nascent, teenage programmers I was wondering why the idea to write a full, tutorial programming manual was dropped. The whole of the early '80s micro boom and bedroom coders was based upon not on the "cheap" hardware such as the BBC Micro and the Sinclair ZX81/Spectrum but mainly the comprehensive and very educational manuals which came with them. So, why was the idea of the accompanying educational material dropped?
There was also a Tangerine [http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=166] and I remember a cheap Apple knock-off called a Pinapple.
Of course, the acorn is the fruit of the oak tree. So, technically, Acorn was named after a fruit.
Actually, due to a lop-sided treaty Tony Blair got through parliament after 9/11, basically the US can request the extradition of anyone without having to give evidence. The idea behind this was so that "terrorists" could be moved between the two countries without disclosing sensitive intelligence. The original treaty would have been two-way but the US legislature blocked the treaty at the US end. Unfortunately, because the treaty didn't have a clause which meant that it only came into power if both sides ratified it the UK end became binding even though the US end wasn't. Tony Blair stuffed it up again.
That had more to do with IBM using an architecture they opened up than Microsoft in a lot of ways ...
Indeed this is very true.
In the mid-80s there were a number of machines on the market which ran MSDOS but were not strictly PC compatible, for example the ACT Apricot F1, but these all fell by the wayside as not all software played by the rules and expected either a specific memory layout or specific type of graphics card (e.g. MDA, Hercules or CGA) to work. This was true of Lotus 1-2-3 and early versions of MS Word, where you needed specially modified versions to run on the Apricot.
Yes I have, and it's an attempt to retro-fit a useful security model to a system not designed to have such security from the beginning. Of course, because of the poor security decisions made by Microsoft in the 1980s and compounded in the 90s, such as allowing application installs to use the OS directory structure to place DLLs and configuration files and combining the system and application registries into one database, etc. If you add to that the 3rd party software producers who weren't forced to build software which had to operate in a non-privileged environment and hence required to run as Administrator who's applications are still causing problems and you still have a major security problem on your hands. Microsoft let the genie out of the bottle and it's very difficult to put it back in. That's entropy for you.
The story has the correct title but rather misses the point. Yes, it's not time to panic. There is a set of malicious tojan horse programs out there for MacOS. The current crop require the user to authorise their installation. i.e. the security weakest link (at the moment) being exploited is the one behind the keyboard. Very often this is the places where security is the weakest, just watch WarGames if you doubt this. MacOS is by design, with a greater degree of privilege and OS/Application separation, more resistant to attack than Microsoft Windows has been. However, this is not to say that it is not vulnerable. All systems are, be it design flaws or merely implementation flaws. Yes, I'm looking at you Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, HP/UX and AIX. No-one can rest on their laurels.
Surely these days it's, "I don't bother re-implementing basic Unix commands, I write a hardware emulator in Javascript and boot a new copy of Unix in it."
You may find the Wikipedia page on the Nurburgring useful: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%C3%BCrburgring You're obviously not a great follower of international motor sport or the sport's history. (And have obviously not played Gran Tourismo 5 on the PS3 :-))
Maybe he developed this hardware so everyone can play Elite 4 when it comes out? (Elite 4 is proving to be the next Duke Nukem....)
Actually.... This is no-longer true. Food is sold in metric units of weight and volume. Petrol is sold in litres. The only exceptions are road speeds and distances are still in miles and beer is sold in pints, as is milk (though the metric volume equivalent has to be the main description of size).
I've noticed very much the opposite at work.
As you can see, there's been a general trend downwards, in jumps, since July-Sept. 2009.
The filters being used here are (1) IP addresses with valid DNS entries, (2) DNS blacklists, (3) ClamAV (with spam signatures added), followed by (4) SpamAssassin, which has been detuned so that it doesn't produce any false positives. Seeing as only a few spams actually get past ClamAV this is merely to catch those which don't have a signature yet.
P.S.: Off topic: Right on commander! ;-)
See the the comment I made above
Have a look at the statistics I've been gathering at work:
Oxford University Dept. of Earth Sciences spam statistics.
As you can see, both the volume and percentage of spam relative to legitimate e-mails is down to the lowest levels in a couple of years, by an order of magnitude (in terms of volume) from its peak in July 2009.
Here, here!
Well, the Sinclair QL was available before the Amiga.
Useless fact: The original version of AmigaDOS was written on a Sinclair QL by Metacomco using their BCPL compiler. It was based upon Tripos, a little known M68K OS developed in Cambridge.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIPOS
As for the QL itself, it was hobbled by the 68008 especially as by the time of its launch the full 68000 was cheaper. The reason for its use was that the QL had originally been designed as an 8 bit computer and it was only in the later stages of design that it switched from the Z80 to the 68008.
The other part which knobbled it was that instead of using a dedicated serial chip, sound chip and keyboard controller it used an underpowered 4 bit Intel chip to try to do all three. (Well, at least one side of the serial interface.) This caused problems with keyboard input when playing a sound and meant that serial communications were never really fast enough to handle even 300 baud.
In its defence, QDOS was lovely to program for, SuperBASIC was an excellent dialect and the pre-emptive multitasking did work (without windowing).
Oh, and those Microdrives everyone decried, they were fine. In fact, the last time I had the QL down from the loft (about 2 years ago) all but one of the Microdrives still read fine, unlike the 3.5" floppy disks I used later it its "life".