Re:Eccleston made a good doctor.
on
Dr Who Rolls On
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· Score: 1
As ever, the continuity's full of holes in the cause of good storytelling, so the Daleks have two evolutionary origins in the old series - either they're the accidentally mutated descendents of the peace-loving scholarly Dals who lost a nuclear war with the Thals, (while the Thals evolved into peaeful humanoids) - this is the version in the first Dalek story, by Terry Nation.
Or, in Genesis Of The Daleks in 1975 (also by Nation), the Daleks are the forcibly mutated descendents of the nazi-like militant Kaleds created in an experiment towards the end of their rather more bilateral thousand year war with the similarly nasty Thals.
Either way they were a clear Nazi allegory, with a huge side order of Perils Of The Nuclear Arms Race.
Re:Is regeneration akin to resurrection?
on
Dr Who Rolls On
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· Score: 1
Semi-subversive? The second episode of the new series, "The End Of The World", starts with a shot of a space station in the year five billion and a voiceover of a welcome announcement ending with "Platform One forbids the use of weapons, teleportation devices, and religion". I think Russell T Davies has already covered that one.
The 2005 special's called "The Christmas Invasion", and Russell says it's got Santa in it. I'm SO excited!:)
Re:Will this Dr. Who tackle harsh political issues
on
Dr Who Rolls On
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· Score: 1
Not only "massive weapons of destruction", but also the crashing of a flying vehicle into a landmark tall building (in London) with a dummy pilot to distract attention from the enemy's real identity, to provide a decoy from the real plan, to conquer the Earth just to plunder its resources for a quick buck. As for "Boom Town", it's practically a philosophy lesson (with running and explosions and the only-just-averted End of the World, plus a nice supper at a decent restaurant).
There wasn't an official "first series" / "second series" split in the original 26-years. The first run, from season one (each season consisted of a series of serials, so let's not go into the naming thing) to season twenty-six, was all produced by the Doctor Who Production Office at the BBC, which never shut down during the hiatus of 1985-6. The stories between "An Unearthly Child" in 1963 and "Survival" in 1989 were assigned an unbroken series of production codes from A (An Unearthly Child) to 7P (Survival). The last story before the hiatus, "Revelation Of The Daleks" was story 6Z, the first after the return, "The Mysterious Planet" was 7A.
Like so many things in Doctor Who, the thirteen regenerations idea introduced in The Deadly Assassin was a shameless contradiction of previously stated continuity in the interests of telling a good story at the time (a good sense of priorities, and much easier to get away with in the days before video recording was widespread - one screeening of the episode, and it was gone, Doctor Who was rarely repeated).
In The Brain Of Morbius only ten months previously, the same writer, Robert (we are not worthy) Holmes included a 'mind-wrestling' scen between the Doctor and Morbius, another Time Lord, fighting to regress each other back through their regenerations to the point of non-existence. The Doctor was clearly (and definitely, in the author's intent, he has stated) losing and before William Hartnell, first TV Doctor, we were shown eight other faces (actually shots of various production staff), implying that the Tom Baker 4th TV Doctor was in fact at least the 12th.
Some years earlier, Patrick Troughton's second Doctor stated that Time Lords live "forever, barring accidents".
The Hartnell Doctor climed the regeneration was something the TARDIS did, when his time came. Later it's clearly portrayed as part of Time Lord biology. Over the original 696 episodes, very little was sacrosanct if it got in the way of telling a good story, and the same is true of this year's series. If Doctor Who continues to get some of the highest Saturday night ratings, with a consistent 35% audience share as it has this year, if the time comes, the BBC is not likely to allow a throwaway line used as a plot device in a 1976 episode get in the way of telling a good story and annihilating the opposition channels on a Saturday evening.
To me, the Movie Marvin looks like exactly the sort of twee, cutesy, semi-functional barely-usable rubbish you'd expect from the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation. In other words, perfect.
There's a reasonable chance Tennant will stick around. He's on record saying that he's a massive Who fan and has been since childhood, that Who was a major motivator in his becoming an actor, that he's wanted the part since he was five years old (all this well before the new Series was announced in 2003). He's also taken part in several of Big Finish Productions' Doctor Who audio stories, as well as their Dalek Empire series, for money that's massively below what he could earn elsewhere, which is another positive sign.
The trouble with suing the BBC isn't anything to do with state funding. The trouble is, 'Auntie Beeb' still holds such a huge place in the public's affections that the damage to someone's popularity from being seen to sue the BBC, except in the most exceptionally clear-cut cases, would be far greater than any damage the BBC might have done to one in the first place.
Revealing something true which you agreed not to reveal, is not libel, not even in the UK. Ah, but the potential libel is not that CE is leaving at the end of the season. As you state, this cannot possibly be libellous, becasue it is entirely true.
The potential libel was in the statement that CE was leaving because he found the workload excessive and did not want to be typecast. The second point might or might not have the potential to harm his future work prospects, the first certainly could do so.
It wasn't so much that the BBC blew the surprise, more that someone else (thought to be David Tennant's agent) let slip to the Sun newspaper that the BBC were negotiating with Tennant to take over the role, and when the Sun asked the BBC Press Office, they didn't know the true story, took words from Eccleston's interviews where he had described the hard work involved, didn't want to tell a full-on lie and basically botched the answer.
If you have any information about "The Doctor", if you or anyone you know has seen him, please submit a report to this site, which is trying to put together some sort of coherent answer to the question in the parent post.
Do not approach him if you see him however, as he has a long history of association with death and destruction. Don't bother reporting him to the authorities, as there is evidence of a long-running cover-up, but be very careful as he is clearly an extremely dangerous man.
As opposed to the smooth, jaw dropping, incredible Emmy winning CGI effects that the Beeb effects department are famous for? Obviously, with the budget rumoured to be only about UKP 800,000 per episode, it won't be the best they could possibly achieve given unlimited resources, but bear in mind that the SFX for the new series aren't being done in-house, but by The Mill, which won an Oscar for the effects in Gladiator. Dunno about Emmys, mind.
Interesting too that the Fox TV movie Doctor Who still hasn't had a Region 1 release, but it's been out in Region 2 for at least a year.
ah, that's down to Universal (who co-produced it with the BBC) having a deal for two TV showings before a DVD release in the US market. The first showing was in 1996, the second hasn't yet occurred. so, no TV Movie DVD in Region 1.
Region 2 release was in 2001, for what it's worth. Of course, here in Region 2 it's almost impossible to buy a non-multi-region DVD player...
According to the usually very reliable Outpost Gallifrey, sadly for our US-based friends, Sci-Fi confirmed on the 2nd of March that they have closed negotiations with the BBC and will not be showing the new Doctor Who series. I've got plenty of US-based friends in Who fandom, and I'm gutted to hear it.
This show is for geeks, to an extent, but if only geeks watch it it will die very rapidly. BBC Radio 4 have just confirmed that the first episode will air on BBC 1 at 7pm on Saturday 26th March. It's a primetime, mainstream slot, and from the moment Lorraine Heggessey announced the return in September 2003, the point was always to revitalise the BBC's Saturday evening schedule and eat the opposition's audience show. Just as it was in it's heyday in the 1970's, this revitalised Doctor Who is meant to be a huge mainstream hit. If it doesn't get millions of bums on seats, and millions of kids hiding behind the sofa, forget a second series. This is Doctor Who coming back out of the ghetto it slid into in it's last years in the 1980s. The circulation of doctor Who Magazxine in the UK is about 30,000. To have any chance of Survival, the 2005 series will need to atttract and keep at least 200 times as many people.
There's no 'change of writers' - Steven Moffat's the writer of Coupling, there's nobody else. It's all derived to some extent from personal experience - note that the writer's called Steven and his wife, the producer of the show, is called Sue. Not a coincidence.
Steven's a fairly regular poster on another board I frequent, and as he said there "don't make the mistake of thinking Oliver's the New Jeff. He isn't. Sally is the New Jeff'. Scary, but makes a lot of sense.
People know when they're sitting behind copious bandwidth. And you could well grow accustomed to an all-text page weighing the better part of a megabyte, due to a heinous amount of information parked in hidden JavaScript data structures, giving you that near-whiplash inducing responsiveness.
In fairness, Google Suggest, like Gmail, works very nicely for me on a 56k dialup. Gmail takes a few seconds for its inital load, true, but then it's like lightning. Suggest doesn't even have the slow initial load, since webhp.htm comes in at only 3.6kB. I'm very impressed.
Now I've no doubt that the bandwagon will bring us massive slow bloat as everyone gets his dog to code up vaguely similar functionality, but Google haven't done that.
Bear in mind that in the era when Jackie Stewart won his Championships, F1 was a bloodsport. Jackie Stewart's greatest achievement was survival. Back then, a single mistake in a 200mph race could, and too often did, cost the driver his life. Nowadays (touch wood) barring that one horrible weekend at San Marino in 1994, a 'serious' accident leads to concussion and a few broken bones. Every driver now makes far more mistakes that used to be the case. It's just that they don't die as a consequence.
It's simply unreasonable to compare the skills needed thirty years ago with those needed today. It's not the same game. There are skills needed now that weren't then, and skills needed then that aren't needed now (not destroying your engine with a badly timed gearchange comes to mind).
As a triple World Champion of unimpeachable skill and talent, I don't think Stewart's got anything to be jealous of.
Now you've hit the nail - it doesn't make sense in that precise situation. When it *does* make sense is when the person to whom you give this data then immediately says "that's great. Now could we see how that breaks down by Age?", so you go off and rewrite the query to GROUP BY Age mod 10, say, and go back and show the results, to be met with "Thanks. That's really useful. It would be even better if we could split it into male and female."
So, back to the SQL prompt, GROUP BY sexMF ORDER BY sexMF, back to the end-user, to the inevitable "Thanks, that's just perfect. But... how do the ages and sexes total up across all the countries in Sales Region 3?".
The bonus, for our company anyway, of the Pivot table is that we can write a single query to bring back lots of raw data without any of the GROUP BY clauses in place, and then the Account Managers or Operations Supervisors or whoever can use the Pivot Table feature to choose their own GROUPings and subtotals, counts, averages, sort orders and so forth, in their own time, generating dozens of business-useful reports from a single half-hour chunk of chargeable IT time. And since IT time is recharged at about ten times the price for Account Management time, the Pivot Table approach saves us a lot of time and a lot of expensive IT time to use on more profitable work.
Re:The First Netscape was revolutionary
on
Netscape Turns 10
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· Score: 1
Indeed. They very much were the ones who brought the WWW to the masses..
At the time Netscape appeared, I'd used the www by telnet-ing to info.cern.ch (maimum, what was it, 20 users?), and, in my Uni job, by using Mosaic running on a UNIX server via an x-windows client, again, with capacity for very few concurrent users at our site. To be honest, Veronica was a lot more useful at the time. And WAIS was more powerful. With Mosaic, at least the version we were using, the pages rendered from the top downwards, so text below an image waited for the image before rendering. This made the few graphical pages around very hard to use.
Then some people on a BBS i frequented mentioned a Next Big Thing called Netscape, then at version 0.8-something, and it was staggering. First, all the text and links rendered, with empty boxes where the images would go. Only then did it start filling in the pictures. This made navigation much, much faster than with Mosaic.
Plus Netscape at that point fitted on a floppy, and ran from that floppy, so it lived in my shirt pocket and revolutionised my internet use.
Until v3, Netscape was *the* browser. By v4 it had gone horribly wrong.
Also - the BBC is funded by the British government. When did they get a mandate to spend money developing video codecs.
Most recently, in 1996, when the Royal Charter was most recently renewed. To quote from Section 3 ("Objects of the Corporation") of the current Charter,
3: The objects of the corporation are as follows:
[snipped]
(e) To hold the existing and to construct or acquire or lease additional equipment and apparatus for the transmission and reception and relaying of telecommunication signals over telecommunication systems or by any other method whether now known or hereafter invented or developed and whether or not over paths provided by any material substance in Our United Kingdom, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man, and to use the same for purposes ancillary or related to the purposes aforesaid.
[more snipped]
(i) Subject to the prior approval of Our Secretary of State (or ar appropriate of Our Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs) and to the acquisition (subject as hereinafter provided) of any requisite licences, concessions, rights or privileges, to construct or acquire or lease and establish, instal, equip and use stations for wireless telegraphy and apparatus for wireless telegraphy and telecommunication systems and any other equipment for the transmission of sound, visual images, messages or any combination thereof by any method whether now known or hereafter invented or developed and whether or not over paths provided by any material substance in countries or places without Our United Kingdom, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man, or in space, for the purpose of providing, within the scope or ambit of any such approval for the time being in force, and as may be permitted thereby or thereunder, such sound and television broadcasting services and sound and television programmes of information education and entertainment as may in such approval be specified, for reception in such countries or places as may in or under such approval be designated; and for receiving such services and programmes by such methods and for such purposes as may by or under such approval be permitted.
[more snipped]
(m) To establish and maintain libraries and archives containing material relevant to the objects of the Corporation, and to make available to the public such libraries and archives with or without charge.
[more snipped]
(p) To carry out research and development work in relation to any technology relevant to the objects of the Corporation and to acquire by operation of law, registration, purchase, assignment, licence or otherwise copyright and design right in any matter whatsoever, and any trademarks and trade names and any other intellectual, industrial and commercial property rights, and to use, exercise, develop, grant licences in respect of, or otherwise turn to account the same with a view to the furtherance of any of the objects of the Corporation and to apply for and obtain, purchase or otherwise acquire and turn to account in any manner that may be thought fit any Letters Patent or patent rights or any interest in any Letters Patent or patent rights, brevets d'invention, utility models, licences, concessions, and the like conferring any right or privilege, whether exclusive, non-exclusive or limited, to use any secret or other information as to any invention in relation to any device or machine serving or calculated to serve any useful purpose in connection with any of the objects of the Corporation.
Between then, these Objects Of The Corporation can be taken to pretty much oblige the BBC to continue its long and impressive history of R & D in broadcast technologies.
What's more, if you *are* going to pirate it, don't get it via a p2p network or a torrent. The BBC's bandwidth is so huge it'll never notice a few million people pulling the WMA or Real streams, but they will log the hits which will help to support their continued existence in the run-up to the renegotiation of their Royal Charter in 2006.
Personally, I've been recording it from FM (which is a fab throwback to the time I did the same with Series one when I was 11), WAVing and MP3ing from the tape for the portable, and as sson as Fit The Thirteeth had finished on Tuesday evening I pre-ordered the CDs from BBCshop.com
Re:Down with BBCi - keep Ceefax!
on
Ceefax Turns 30
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· Score: 1
On the slowness of Ceefax, it's speed is actually one of the reason's I'm a heavy user. I just did a little timing test, and admittedly it depends where your chosen page is on the carousel and whaere the carousel is when you request, but the BBC news headlines page (102) took all of 6 seconds to be on screen from the moment I switched on the set. From a powered-down state, my PC can't even get a game in the same park as that. Admittedly, the News Headlines are especially quick to 'load' as they're repeated several times throughout the carousel, but that's just good UI design.
For quick access to certain limited kinds of information, teletext can be fantastic. Especially if, like me, you've got your 'favourites' burned into your brain - for me it's 102 news headlines, 606 what's on TV now and next, 302 football, 340 cricket, 360 motorsport (actually it's usually straight to the Formula 1 lead story which lives on 361)
There's not much depth, but if you just want to SEE FACTS quickly, teletext is a very good thing.
In drop 3, man appears to be set up as an alias to get-help, just as ls is an alias to get-childitem.
So if you do man ls, or get-help ls, or man get-childitem, or get-help get-childitem, you now get a reasonably detailed result of which the following (cut down to keep the lameness filter happy) is a rough synopsis
MSH>man ls
NAME
get-childitem
SYNOPSIS
{snipped for lameness filter}
SHORT DESCRIPTION
Retrieves the child items of the specified location(s) in a drive.
When -Relationship is specified, retrieves the available targets for the relationship.
DETAILED DESCRIPTION {heavily butchered for lameness filter}
Parameters:
NOTES
The current implemenation does not allow seperate filters for items and containers.
EXAMPLES
$ gch . * -exclude [a-e]*,*.dll -recurse -name
Find all the names underneath the current location that don't start with the
letters "a" through "e" or end with ".dll"
Slashdot Mirror
As ever, the continuity's full of holes in the cause of good storytelling, so the Daleks have two evolutionary origins in the old series - either they're the accidentally mutated descendents of the peace-loving scholarly Dals who lost a nuclear war with the Thals, (while the Thals evolved into peaeful humanoids) - this is the version in the first Dalek story, by Terry Nation.
Or, in Genesis Of The Daleks in 1975 (also by Nation), the Daleks are the forcibly mutated descendents of the nazi-like militant Kaleds created in an experiment towards the end of their rather more bilateral thousand year war with the similarly nasty Thals.
Either way they were a clear Nazi allegory, with a huge side order of Perils Of The Nuclear Arms Race.
Semi-subversive? The second episode of the new series, "The End Of The World", starts with a shot of a space station in the year five billion and a voiceover of a welcome announcement ending with "Platform One forbids the use of weapons, teleportation devices, and religion". I think Russell T Davies has already covered that one.
:)
The 2005 special's called "The Christmas Invasion", and Russell says it's got Santa in it. I'm SO excited!
Not only "massive weapons of destruction", but also the crashing of a flying vehicle into a landmark tall building (in London) with a dummy pilot to distract attention from the enemy's real identity, to provide a decoy from the real plan, to conquer the Earth just to plunder its resources for a quick buck. As for "Boom Town", it's practically a philosophy lesson (with running and explosions and the only-just-averted End of the World, plus a nice supper at a decent restaurant).
There wasn't an official "first series" / "second series" split in the original 26-years. The first run, from season one (each season consisted of a series of serials, so let's not go into the naming thing) to season twenty-six, was all produced by the Doctor Who Production Office at the BBC, which never shut down during the hiatus of 1985-6. The stories between "An Unearthly Child" in 1963 and "Survival" in 1989 were assigned an unbroken series of production codes from A (An Unearthly Child) to 7P (Survival). The last story before the hiatus, "Revelation Of The Daleks" was story 6Z, the first after the return, "The Mysterious Planet" was 7A.
:)
Nitpicky doctor Who fan? Surely not?
Like so many things in Doctor Who, the thirteen regenerations idea introduced in The Deadly Assassin was a shameless contradiction of previously stated continuity in the interests of telling a good story at the time (a good sense of priorities, and much easier to get away with in the days before video recording was widespread - one screeening of the episode, and it was gone, Doctor Who was rarely repeated).
In The Brain Of Morbius only ten months previously, the same writer, Robert (we are not worthy) Holmes included a 'mind-wrestling' scen between the Doctor and Morbius, another Time Lord, fighting to regress each other back through their regenerations to the point of non-existence. The Doctor was clearly (and definitely, in the author's intent, he has stated) losing and before William Hartnell, first TV Doctor, we were shown eight other faces (actually shots of various production staff), implying that the Tom Baker 4th TV Doctor was in fact at least the 12th.
Some years earlier, Patrick Troughton's second Doctor stated that Time Lords live "forever, barring accidents".
The Hartnell Doctor climed the regeneration was something the TARDIS did, when his time came. Later it's clearly portrayed as part of Time Lord biology. Over the original 696 episodes, very little was sacrosanct if it got in the way of telling a good story, and the same is true of this year's series. If Doctor Who continues to get some of the highest Saturday night ratings, with a consistent 35% audience share as it has this year, if the time comes, the BBC is not likely to allow a throwaway line used as a plot device in a 1976 episode get in the way of telling a good story and annihilating the opposition channels on a Saturday evening.
To me, the Movie Marvin looks like exactly the sort of twee, cutesy, semi-functional barely-usable rubbish you'd expect from the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation. In other words, perfect.
Share and Enjoy.
There's a reasonable chance Tennant will stick around. He's on record saying that he's a massive Who fan and has been since childhood, that Who was a major motivator in his becoming an actor, that he's wanted the part since he was five years old (all this well before the new Series was announced in 2003). He's also taken part in several of Big Finish Productions' Doctor Who audio stories, as well as their Dalek Empire series, for money that's massively below what he could earn elsewhere, which is another positive sign.
The trouble with suing the BBC isn't anything to do with state funding. The trouble is, 'Auntie Beeb' still holds such a huge place in the public's affections that the damage to someone's popularity from being seen to sue the BBC, except in the most exceptionally clear-cut cases, would be far greater than any damage the BBC might have done to one in the first place.
Revealing something true which you agreed not to reveal, is not libel, not even in the UK.
Ah, but the potential libel is not that CE is leaving at the end of the season. As you state, this cannot possibly be libellous, becasue it is entirely true.
The potential libel was in the statement that CE was leaving because he found the workload excessive and did not want to be typecast. The second point might or might not have the potential to harm his future work prospects, the first certainly could do so.
It wasn't so much that the BBC blew the surprise, more that someone else (thought to be David Tennant's agent) let slip to the Sun newspaper that the BBC were negotiating with Tennant to take over the role, and when the Sun asked the BBC Press Office, they didn't know the true story, took words from Eccleston's interviews where he had described the hard work involved, didn't want to tell a full-on lie and basically botched the answer.
If you have any information about "The Doctor", if you or anyone you know has seen him, please submit a report to this site, which is trying to put together some sort of coherent answer to the question in the parent post.
Do not approach him if you see him however, as he has a long history of association with death and destruction. Don't bother reporting him to the authorities, as there is evidence of a long-running cover-up, but be very careful as he is clearly an extremely dangerous man.
It's all affectionate really, so ...
Kroll! Kroll! Kroll!
It could be argued* that CSO wasn't really ready for what they attempted in Underworld. But even less so for the UNIT tank in Robot.
Could have been worse, could have been the Kandyman.
(* by anyone with at least one functioning eye and a TV)
As opposed to the smooth, jaw dropping, incredible Emmy winning CGI effects that the Beeb effects department are famous for?
Obviously, with the budget rumoured to be only about UKP 800,000 per episode, it won't be the best they could possibly achieve given unlimited resources, but bear in mind that the SFX for the new series aren't being done in-house, but by The Mill, which won an Oscar for the effects in Gladiator. Dunno about Emmys, mind.
Interesting too that the Fox TV movie Doctor Who still hasn't had a Region 1 release, but it's been out in Region 2 for at least a year.
...
ah, that's down to Universal (who co-produced it with the BBC) having a deal for two TV showings before a DVD release in the US market. The first showing was in 1996, the second hasn't yet occurred. so, no TV Movie DVD in Region 1.
Region 2 release was in 2001, for what it's worth. Of course, here in Region 2 it's almost impossible to buy a non-multi-region DVD player
According to the usually very reliable Outpost Gallifrey, sadly for our US-based friends, Sci-Fi confirmed on the 2nd of March that they have closed negotiations with the BBC and will not be showing the new Doctor Who series. I've got plenty of US-based friends in Who fandom, and I'm gutted to hear it.
This show is for geeks, to an extent, but if only geeks watch it it will die very rapidly. BBC Radio 4 have just confirmed that the first episode will air on BBC 1 at 7pm on Saturday 26th March. It's a primetime, mainstream slot, and from the moment Lorraine Heggessey announced the return in September 2003, the point was always to revitalise the BBC's Saturday evening schedule and eat the opposition's audience show. Just as it was in it's heyday in the 1970's, this revitalised Doctor Who is meant to be a huge mainstream hit. If it doesn't get millions of bums on seats, and millions of kids hiding behind the sofa, forget a second series. This is Doctor Who coming back out of the ghetto it slid into in it's last years in the 1980s. The circulation of doctor Who Magazxine in the UK is about 30,000. To have any chance of Survival, the 2005 series will need to atttract and keep at least 200 times as many people.
There's no 'change of writers' - Steven Moffat's the writer of Coupling, there's nobody else. It's all derived to some extent from personal experience - note that the writer's called Steven and his wife, the producer of the show, is called Sue. Not a coincidence.
Steven's a fairly regular poster on another board I frequent, and as he said there "don't make the mistake of thinking Oliver's the New Jeff. He isn't. Sally is the New Jeff'. Scary, but makes a lot of sense.
People know when they're sitting behind copious bandwidth. And you could well grow accustomed to an all-text page weighing the better part of a megabyte, due to a heinous amount of information parked in hidden JavaScript data structures, giving you that near-whiplash inducing responsiveness.
In fairness, Google Suggest, like Gmail, works very nicely for me on a 56k dialup. Gmail takes a few seconds for its inital load, true, but then it's like lightning. Suggest doesn't even have the slow initial load, since webhp.htm comes in at only 3.6kB. I'm very impressed.
Now I've no doubt that the bandwagon will bring us massive slow bloat as everyone gets his dog to code up vaguely similar functionality, but Google haven't done that.
Bear in mind that in the era when Jackie Stewart won his Championships, F1 was a bloodsport. Jackie Stewart's greatest achievement was survival. Back then, a single mistake in a 200mph race could, and too often did, cost the driver his life. Nowadays (touch wood) barring that one horrible weekend at San Marino in 1994, a 'serious' accident leads to concussion and a few broken bones. Every driver now makes far more mistakes that used to be the case. It's just that they don't die as a consequence.
It's simply unreasonable to compare the skills needed thirty years ago with those needed today. It's not the same game. There are skills needed now that weren't then, and skills needed then that aren't needed now (not destroying your engine with a badly timed gearchange comes to mind).
As a triple World Champion of unimpeachable skill and talent, I don't think Stewart's got anything to be jealous of.
Now you've hit the nail - it doesn't make sense in that precise situation. When it *does* make sense is when the person to whom you give this data then immediately says "that's great. Now could we see how that breaks down by Age?", so you go off and rewrite the query to GROUP BY Age mod 10, say, and go back and show the results, to be met with "Thanks. That's really useful. It would be even better if we could split it into male and female."
So, back to the SQL prompt, GROUP BY sexMF ORDER BY sexMF, back to the end-user, to the inevitable "Thanks, that's just perfect. But... how do the ages and sexes total up across all the countries in Sales Region 3?".
The bonus, for our company anyway, of the Pivot table is that we can write a single query to bring back lots of raw data without any of the GROUP BY clauses in place, and then the Account Managers or Operations Supervisors or whoever can use the Pivot Table feature to choose their own GROUPings and subtotals, counts, averages, sort orders and so forth, in their own time, generating dozens of business-useful reports from a single half-hour chunk of chargeable IT time. And since IT time is recharged at about ten times the price for Account Management time, the Pivot Table approach saves us a lot of time and a lot of expensive IT time to use on more profitable work.
Indeed. They very much were the ones who brought the WWW to the masses..
At the time Netscape appeared, I'd used the www by telnet-ing to info.cern.ch (maimum, what was it, 20 users?), and, in my Uni job, by using Mosaic running on a UNIX server via an x-windows client, again, with capacity for very few concurrent users at our site. To be honest, Veronica was a lot more useful at the time. And WAIS was more powerful. With Mosaic, at least the version we were using, the pages rendered from the top downwards, so text below an image waited for the image before rendering. This made the few graphical pages around very hard to use.
Then some people on a BBS i frequented mentioned a Next Big Thing called Netscape, then at version 0.8-something, and it was staggering. First, all the text and links rendered, with empty boxes where the images would go. Only then did it start filling in the pictures. This made navigation much, much faster than with Mosaic.
Plus Netscape at that point fitted on a floppy, and ran from that floppy, so it lived in my shirt pocket and revolutionised my internet use.
Until v3, Netscape was *the* browser. By v4 it had gone horribly wrong.
Most recently, in 1996, when the Royal Charter was most recently renewed. To quote from Section 3 ("Objects of the Corporation") of the current Charter,
Between then, these Objects Of The Corporation can be taken to pretty much oblige the BBC to continue its long and impressive history of R & D in broadcast technologies.
What's more, if you *are* going to pirate it, don't get it via a p2p network or a torrent. The BBC's bandwidth is so huge it'll never notice a few million people pulling the WMA or Real streams, but they will log the hits which will help to support their continued existence in the run-up to the renegotiation of their Royal Charter in 2006.
Personally, I've been recording it from FM (which is a fab throwback to the time I did the same with Series one when I was 11), WAVing and MP3ing from the tape for the portable, and as sson as Fit The Thirteeth had finished on Tuesday evening I pre-ordered the CDs from BBCshop.com
On the slowness of Ceefax, it's speed is actually one of the reason's I'm a heavy user. I just did a little timing test, and admittedly it depends where your chosen page is on the carousel and whaere the carousel is when you request, but the BBC news headlines page (102) took all of 6 seconds to be on screen from the moment I switched on the set. From a powered-down state, my PC can't even get a game in the same park as that. Admittedly, the News Headlines are especially quick to 'load' as they're repeated several times throughout the carousel, but that's just good UI design.
For quick access to certain limited kinds of information, teletext can be fantastic. Especially if, like me, you've got your 'favourites' burned into your brain - for me it's 102 news headlines, 606 what's on TV now and next, 302 football, 340 cricket, 360 motorsport (actually it's usually straight to the Formula 1 lead story which lives on 361)
There's not much depth, but if you just want to SEE FACTS quickly, teletext is a very good thing.
So if you do man ls, or get-help ls, or man get-childitem, or get-help get-childitem, you now get a reasonably detailed result of which the following (cut down to keep the lameness filter happy) is a rough synopsis