It probably was possible to tokenise but then you need to add more code to do the tokenizing and handling of syntax errors. I assume Sinclair just stuck with what they had from the ZX81 because it worked well. Generally speaking once you got used to it it was an easy system to work with. On the flip side if you use a ZX Spectrum emulator these days it's almost impossible without a keyboard overlay to tell you what buttons do what.
Uridium was mono in the play area because attribute clash was especially visible in a sideways scroller. Most games which had scrolling were mono. It tended to be games with static top down or isometric layouts which would put more colour in and ensure that sprites were multiples of characters to minimize clash. e.g. Sabre Wulf, Jet Set Willy etc.
I don't recall any game explicitly mixing colours to make more than two though perhaps some did use dithering a bit. IMO the game that managed to exploit the Spectrum's graphics the best was called Trap Door. It used massive graphics that managed to minimize attr clash while still making for a colourful game.
The BBC model B cost a lot of money, far more than the C64 or ZX Spectrum. If people used the BBC it was most likely in schools where it enjoyed far more popularity than it did in the home. When Acorn finally released an affordable home computer called the Electron it was so gimped that it didn't really hold much attraction for anybody.
Personally I think the keycodes was kind of elegant. It meant less syntax errors, simplified parsing and meant the program occupied less space in memory. The ZX Spectrum inherited the feature from the ZX81 and ZX80.
Later ZX Spectrums from the the Spectrum 128 onwards actually allowed you to type programs manually but only in 128K mode. If you booted into 48K mode the ROM still enforced the old style. The first Spectrum 128 printed all the keycodes onto the buttons but the +2 and +3 only printed a couplemaking it enormous fun trying to figure out which button meant what. Most Spectrum owners can probably still recall the sequences for calling LOAD "", POKE and cursor keys with little trouble.
My father in law still uses the Irish equivalent to Ceefax called Aertel for horse racing results. He has no computer and it's easy to punch the page number in and get live results.
Don't know what he would do if Aertel goes but I assume the MHEG-5 replacement would offer something analogous even if it is accessed some other way.
Digital channels have broadcast teletext at various points, even on Sky. I think the shutdown is just recognition that it is replaced by something better and it costs money to run two services in parallel so the old one is going. It may linger on as some placeholder that says push 888 for subtitles but that's about it.
DVB has subs as part of its standard. Data comes in its own stream as bitmaps. I assume some channels are doing it the old way for legacy reasons or save a little space but they don't need to. It's even possible to have subs in different languages but there aren't many channels aside from Euronews where this happens.
The behaviour is weird. The bulbs often start flickering when they're about to die, sometimes they go to about 1/4 light. But after functioning like this for a while they inevitably die outright. If I remove the bulb I can see that one of the LEDs as blown (it's all charred) but the others are fine. Basically I think the circuitry is not able to cope with this failure and eventually blows. It's kind of stupid really given that each bulb might have 20-30 LEDs in it. Maybe some other brands are more reliable.
DVB-T / DVB-S boxes support MHEG-5 multimedia content and both the BBC and ITV have digital equivalents to Ceefax / Teletext. MHEG-5 is a declarative layout language that can combine video, graphics, text and other elements. It's interactive enough for simple games and for navigation. It can also host program streams as part of the page and even tune to different program streams within a transport. The BBC usually puts this to good effect e.g. for Wimbledon they set up different live streams for different matches and you could switch between them interactively. I expect that London 2012 Olympics will see them build out something even bigger so you can flip between events, see scores etc.
The disadvantage of MHEG-5 is it's still a bit shit as a language and many DVB-T / DVB-S boxes are so underpowered that it takes ages for the page to render properly. Additionally pages are also delivered up carousel style so you might have to wait a while for the page you're after to be sent over the signal. Ceefax was carousel style too (cycling through numbers from 100 to 999) but the content was so small that most modern TVs were able to cache everything as it passed through making it quite fast.
I agree with most of your points. The alt + power off thing is a bit annoying though I suppose you could see it from the perspective that modern machines can save / resume state these days so a full power off is not what most users probably want given it takes longer to restart.
I do not think there are fundamental issues with GNOME 3 though, just a lack of maturity and refinement. I hope as it progresses through 3.4, 3.6 etc. that most of these will disappear and the number of shell extensions will increase to augment the default behaviour where there is an itch to be scratched.
Yes I'm used to it but it works and it is not unreasonable to demand that whatever replaces it offers equivalent functionality or provides some better way of doing it. I do not believe Metro does this on a desktop PC. I believe it's a horrible retrograde experience in its current consumer preview incarnation. Hauling the mouse around virtual screens full of icons to accomplish what the start menu does in about 1/8th of the screen and does without hiding your work is not a good experience at all.
I have suggested ways it could be improved and perhaps MS will implement some of them. But the consumer preview is all I have to go on and IMO it is a heap of shit. Metro was designed for fingers and small tablets and the experience on mouse / keyboard with large screens still feels shoehorned in. An afterthought. It has to improve. Maybe it has in the intervening time since the preview came out and if it has I'll revise my opinion when I get to mess around with it again.
Theoretically these things last 20 years but in practice I doubt they all do. I have about 35 spot lights in my house with LED bulbs. In the last 30 months I've replaced about 8 of them. They've saved money over halogens and still blow less than halogens but I'm not getting 20 years. The most common failure appears to be a single led in the bulb goes and then the whole bulb dies. That's the sort of thing which sucks because one would have thought that they build redundancy into a bulb so one dead LED doesn't take out the entire thing.
The start menu is okay. I wouldn't call it great but it's mature, compact, provides the functionality users expect and is designed to work properly with a mouse and keyboard. I would expect nothing less from whatever replaces it.
I have no issues with radical UI changes. I'm one of the few people (it seems) with positive things to say about GNOME 3. But I think GNOME got a lot of things right that Microsoft screwed up in their consumer preview. e.g. in GNOME 3 even if you don't know you can mouse into the top corner, there is a big prominent label marked "Activities" that you can click on instead. It's discoverable in other words. In Metro there is nothing obvious at all to tell you the corner does anything. Even if you discover it does something it still requires a second click to actually activate and there is no reason for this. And if you miss the corner, e.g. by slightly jogging the mouse on that second click you can find yourself launching Internet Explorer because the icon is too close to the corner.
Metro is just replete with annoyances like this that only show up with a mouse or on a large screen. I'm sure MS will fix the worst of them but I wonder how many will remain. Windows 8 is meant to be out this year and I wonder if it's already in feature freeze. If the consumer preview is representative of the final product I think it will royally suck on the desktop. It'll probably be fine on a tablet with fingers and gestures but that's cold comfort to people who don't use a tablet.
The Metro UI is a heap of shit on the desktop. It wastes too much space, requires far too much mouse travel, is wholly unsuited to the 100+ program icons that most users would have in a typical start menu. It isn't even discoverable either, being hidden in the corner with no clue its there. It can be fixed but as it stands in the consumer preview it is horrible. It needs a launcher icon (e.g. reinstate the windows logo), multiple selection, sort functionality, zoom in / zoom out, program grouping and more besides. With all that it might stand a chance as a replacement for the Start menu.
The Pi is basically a media player without a case or remote or power supply. As such it can most obviously be turned into media player. But it's running Linux albeit through a low powered SOC so it can be used for anything Linux can be used for, e.g. web server, mail server, NAS, router, firewall and so on. It also has a GPIO so you could hook it up to sensors or use it to control something like a milling machine, robot or whatnot.
So it's not useless. It's certainly of limited form factor but it has a lot of uses. I suspect the majority of Pi's purchased for home use will end up running XBMC or similar.
If a dev writes a game that needs permissions to look at my address book or send / receive SMS messages then alarm bells should ring in Google land. If a new developer dumps 5 or 6 apps on the market then alarm bells should ring. If a developer pushes out anything with "sexy" in the title then alarm bells should ring. If a dev releases a substantially sized free app which contains no advertising APIs of any kind then alarm bells should ring. And all apps should be subject to a randomized security scan either during submission or post submission.
What would outright suck however is Google becoming more like other stores and putting a delay between upload and release. I LIKE the fact that I can rapidly upload updates to my apps. There have been occasions where I've turned around an update in under 30 minutes. If I tried to turn around a fix on any other store, e.g. Amazon's or the Blackberry store I'd be looking at the better part of a week for an update to appear. I have no idea what the hell they do in that time but somehow I doubt they're looking for malware or would be capable of spotting it even if it were there.
I expect he will be arrested, stuck on trial and then the case will be laughed out of court. His high crime was offending the sensibilities of some religion by debunking a "miracle" with some primary school level science. The reason for the miracle is so laughably obvious that I am surprised anyone would be fooled by it.
I think it more likely that moral structures and codes of conduct are inherent to human nature and then religion comes along and proclaims them to be commandments handed down by some supernatural being. Religion is just an extension of tribalism basically.
I think it's a perfectly reasonable thing to tax assuming it legally gets copyright holders off the backs of users. If users are still liable for prosecution then I really don't see it justifiable at all.
I'm sure their "miracle" is extremely profitable. They can't make money when someone is saying it's just water seepage. Obviously the person who investigated and solved this pathetic miracle is a blasphemer and must be denounced.
Yea, worst of all worlds. It only runs web apps but few are so totally 100% always on that they are going to be comfortable with that. So now they add a desktop but it has fewer apps than any other possible system and will for a while unless they dump a ton of cash into it. Even Linux (as in a typical Linux/GNU/X distribution) has tons more apps.
To be fair they're not just web apps. You can compile C/C++ apps using PNaCL and run them natively in a sandbox. It would have been better of course if Google had used LLVM instead of architecture specific assembler.
I do think Chrome OS is a waste of time. It's main claim is it boots fast into a browser. Other than that it's pretty useless. Google already have a perfectly functional tablet / netbook OS called Android. They should shitcan Chrome OS and move some of the work they've done on optimizing battery & boot time into that.
I realise that but the standard Android compatible device document makes it mandatory that you can override the default activities. Most Android 3/4.x tablets with the exception of the Galaxy Tab are using the standard home launcher anyway so it's not like you'd be able to delete it. It does bug me the amount of crap some devices bake into their firmware though.
Slashdot Mirror
It probably was possible to tokenise but then you need to add more code to do the tokenizing and handling of syntax errors. I assume Sinclair just stuck with what they had from the ZX81 because it worked well. Generally speaking once you got used to it it was an easy system to work with. On the flip side if you use a ZX Spectrum emulator these days it's almost impossible without a keyboard overlay to tell you what buttons do what.
I don't recall any game explicitly mixing colours to make more than two though perhaps some did use dithering a bit. IMO the game that managed to exploit the Spectrum's graphics the best was called Trap Door. It used massive graphics that managed to minimize attr clash while still making for a colourful game.
The BBC model B cost a lot of money, far more than the C64 or ZX Spectrum. If people used the BBC it was most likely in schools where it enjoyed far more popularity than it did in the home. When Acorn finally released an affordable home computer called the Electron it was so gimped that it didn't really hold much attraction for anybody.
Later ZX Spectrums from the the Spectrum 128 onwards actually allowed you to type programs manually but only in 128K mode. If you booted into 48K mode the ROM still enforced the old style. The first Spectrum 128 printed all the keycodes onto the buttons but the +2 and +3 only printed a couplemaking it enormous fun trying to figure out which button meant what. Most Spectrum owners can probably still recall the sequences for calling LOAD "", POKE and cursor keys with little trouble.
Don't know what he would do if Aertel goes but I assume the MHEG-5 replacement would offer something analogous even if it is accessed some other way.
Digital channels have broadcast teletext at various points, even on Sky. I think the shutdown is just recognition that it is replaced by something better and it costs money to run two services in parallel so the old one is going. It may linger on as some placeholder that says push 888 for subtitles but that's about it.
DVB has subs as part of its standard. Data comes in its own stream as bitmaps. I assume some channels are doing it the old way for legacy reasons or save a little space but they don't need to. It's even possible to have subs in different languages but there aren't many channels aside from Euronews where this happens.
The behaviour is weird. The bulbs often start flickering when they're about to die, sometimes they go to about 1/4 light. But after functioning like this for a while they inevitably die outright. If I remove the bulb I can see that one of the LEDs as blown (it's all charred) but the others are fine. Basically I think the circuitry is not able to cope with this failure and eventually blows. It's kind of stupid really given that each bulb might have 20-30 LEDs in it. Maybe some other brands are more reliable.
The disadvantage of MHEG-5 is it's still a bit shit as a language and many DVB-T / DVB-S boxes are so underpowered that it takes ages for the page to render properly. Additionally pages are also delivered up carousel style so you might have to wait a while for the page you're after to be sent over the signal. Ceefax was carousel style too (cycling through numbers from 100 to 999) but the content was so small that most modern TVs were able to cache everything as it passed through making it quite fast.
I do not think there are fundamental issues with GNOME 3 though, just a lack of maturity and refinement. I hope as it progresses through 3.4, 3.6 etc. that most of these will disappear and the number of shell extensions will increase to augment the default behaviour where there is an itch to be scratched.
I have suggested ways it could be improved and perhaps MS will implement some of them. But the consumer preview is all I have to go on and IMO it is a heap of shit. Metro was designed for fingers and small tablets and the experience on mouse / keyboard with large screens still feels shoehorned in. An afterthought. It has to improve. Maybe it has in the intervening time since the preview came out and if it has I'll revise my opinion when I get to mess around with it again.
Theoretically these things last 20 years but in practice I doubt they all do. I have about 35 spot lights in my house with LED bulbs. In the last 30 months I've replaced about 8 of them. They've saved money over halogens and still blow less than halogens but I'm not getting 20 years. The most common failure appears to be a single led in the bulb goes and then the whole bulb dies. That's the sort of thing which sucks because one would have thought that they build redundancy into a bulb so one dead LED doesn't take out the entire thing.
I have no issues with radical UI changes. I'm one of the few people (it seems) with positive things to say about GNOME 3. But I think GNOME got a lot of things right that Microsoft screwed up in their consumer preview. e.g. in GNOME 3 even if you don't know you can mouse into the top corner, there is a big prominent label marked "Activities" that you can click on instead. It's discoverable in other words. In Metro there is nothing obvious at all to tell you the corner does anything. Even if you discover it does something it still requires a second click to actually activate and there is no reason for this. And if you miss the corner, e.g. by slightly jogging the mouse on that second click you can find yourself launching Internet Explorer because the icon is too close to the corner.
Metro is just replete with annoyances like this that only show up with a mouse or on a large screen. I'm sure MS will fix the worst of them but I wonder how many will remain. Windows 8 is meant to be out this year and I wonder if it's already in feature freeze. If the consumer preview is representative of the final product I think it will royally suck on the desktop. It'll probably be fine on a tablet with fingers and gestures but that's cold comfort to people who don't use a tablet.
What?
The Metro UI is a heap of shit on the desktop. It wastes too much space, requires far too much mouse travel, is wholly unsuited to the 100+ program icons that most users would have in a typical start menu. It isn't even discoverable either, being hidden in the corner with no clue its there. It can be fixed but as it stands in the consumer preview it is horrible. It needs a launcher icon (e.g. reinstate the windows logo), multiple selection, sort functionality, zoom in / zoom out, program grouping and more besides. With all that it might stand a chance as a replacement for the Start menu.
So it's not useless. It's certainly of limited form factor but it has a lot of uses. I suspect the majority of Pi's purchased for home use will end up running XBMC or similar.
What would outright suck however is Google becoming more like other stores and putting a delay between upload and release. I LIKE the fact that I can rapidly upload updates to my apps. There have been occasions where I've turned around an update in under 30 minutes. If I tried to turn around a fix on any other store, e.g. Amazon's or the Blackberry store I'd be looking at the better part of a week for an update to appear. I have no idea what the hell they do in that time but somehow I doubt they're looking for malware or would be capable of spotting it even if it were there.
Taxes do not have to be set in stone. There is nothing to stop them enacting something which can be adjusted every year.
I expect he will be arrested, stuck on trial and then the case will be laughed out of court. His high crime was offending the sensibilities of some religion by debunking a "miracle" with some primary school level science. The reason for the miracle is so laughably obvious that I am surprised anyone would be fooled by it.
I think it more likely that moral structures and codes of conduct are inherent to human nature and then religion comes along and proclaims them to be commandments handed down by some supernatural being. Religion is just an extension of tribalism basically.
I think it's a perfectly reasonable thing to tax assuming it legally gets copyright holders off the backs of users. If users are still liable for prosecution then I really don't see it justifiable at all.
I'm sure their "miracle" is extremely profitable. They can't make money when someone is saying it's just water seepage. Obviously the person who investigated and solved this pathetic miracle is a blasphemer and must be denounced.
Sorry yes I meant that.
Yea, worst of all worlds. It only runs web apps but few are so totally 100% always on that they are going to be comfortable with that. So now they add a desktop but it has fewer apps than any other possible system and will for a while unless they dump a ton of cash into it. Even Linux (as in a typical Linux/GNU/X distribution) has tons more apps.
To be fair they're not just web apps. You can compile C/C++ apps using PNaCL and run them natively in a sandbox. It would have been better of course if Google had used LLVM instead of architecture specific assembler.
I do think Chrome OS is a waste of time. It's main claim is it boots fast into a browser. Other than that it's pretty useless. Google already have a perfectly functional tablet / netbook OS called Android. They should shitcan Chrome OS and move some of the work they've done on optimizing battery & boot time into that.
I realise that but the standard Android compatible device document makes it mandatory that you can override the default activities. Most Android 3/4.x tablets with the exception of the Galaxy Tab are using the standard home launcher anyway so it's not like you'd be able to delete it. It does bug me the amount of crap some devices bake into their firmware though.