The point is, even if we unearth all those missing 106 episodes, the actual episodes might not stand up to all the hype and expectation heaped up on them.
'Tomb of the Cybermen' actually did, for me, at least. I thought it was a rather slick production given the budget. Other stuff from that era is distinctly variable in quality (e.g. the little city model in 'The Krotons' which I honestly thought was supposed to be a heap of stones).
Nostalgia doesn't really enter into it for me because I never got to see the original broadcasts. In actual fact I only got into Dr. Who really when they repeated the Tom Baker episodes in the 90s and I found them to my liking.
These distribution prints - which were 16mm film, not tape - were passed from country to country, usually ending up in the tail ends of the empire in Africa & Asia. They were supposed to have been returned or destroyed at the end of their tours, but it wasn't unusual for them to be put into storage, grabbed by local staff for their own archives, or sold on the sly to broadcasters in neighbouring countries.
I wouldn't be shocked if someone had been striking copies of the films either.
It does seem to be overkill, especially when you realize that the majority of games will be getting played on and streamed from the windows PC elsewhere.
I don't think that's the long-term goal, though. The whole project seems to have kicked into gear because the Windows App Store means they can't rely on Windows indefinitely, and they seem to be trying to get devs to port to Linux natively. That entails a beefier GPU than you'd need for a pure streaming solution.
The way I heard it - which could be yet another rumour - there was a fire but it didn't damage anything significant. However, the Fire Brigade pitched a fit because the BBC had littered the tapes and films here there and everywhere in a bunch of spare rooms. This posed a fire hazard and as a result the BBC decided they needed to have a clear-out.
Oh, one of the more fun stories about the BBC junking master tapes was when they decided to get rid of a lot of audio masters during the 80's. Owing to the bureaucracy involved, the archivist (Mark Ayres) went through the paper trail and discovered that they had been moved into a spare room to be skipped, but then the process had been interrupted and the tapes were all still sitting there a decade or so later. (From the 'Alchemists of Sound' documentary)
It's unfortunate that the BBC were so shortsighted and "recycled" the master tapes of so many great series. Of course, everyone knows the famous Monty Python story of how that series was almost lost too, but was saved by Terry Gilliam (who basically stole the tapes and put them in his attic). But very few series from that era were so lucky.
I did not know that, though I've often wondered why they survived when so much else was lost. Also, "stealing the tapes" is not exactly a trivial exercise - the original Quad tapes were massive - 2" wide, 10.5" diameter and about 5KG each. If they had 2 episodes each, that's about 22 tapes he'd have had to sneak out of the archives. Not exactly something you can fit in your pocket...
Yes, you're right and this is why the weblink I gave above is a kaleidoscope of colours for all the different formats between 1970 and 1974; fortunately all those episodes are now in colour to varying qualities. The "Chroma Dot/Colour Recovery" process of which you speak has been used on 12 episodes of Dr.Who with varying degrees of success, and two non-Dr.Who episodes. But, in a nutshell, the Jon Pertwee now exists in colour in its entirety.
Ah yes, I knew I'd forgotten something - checking that link out. Thanks, it was well worth reading. I particularly liked how the NTSC icon was washed out compare to the PAL one...
AFAIK all the Jon Pertwee episodes exist, but not all of them exist in colour. In these cases, the Quad tapes were erased but the 16mm B/W copies for export survived. Some of them exist in colour but derived from low-quality copies (IIRC they managed to digitally marry the chroma signal from a Umatic copy of the NTSC conversion with the higher-res 16mm print to improve the quality).
A couple of years back someone devised a way of partially reconstructing the colour signal by digitally decoding the RGB triads on a high-res scan of the print, so the B/W-only episodes may yet be colourised.
Can you give any examples of music that is permanently lost to an unpopular format or bad DRM? It may happen in the future that some music is abandoned due to software but music is already being lost due to lack of playback hardware. He can stomp his feet and say that tape is best but there will be a time when no one makes tape players any more, it is pretty unlikely that there will be a point in the future when we stop using computers to play back media.
How about the Doomsday Book? Not music, but an unholy hybrid of laserdisc media using a proprietary variant hooked up to a 512k BBC Micro.
To be sure, there are a lot of examples of things that would have been lost if they had been digital - most of the recovered Dr. Who episodes, that Woody Guthrie concert from 1949, the stereo masters for Jesus Christ Superstar, Court of the Crimson King and untold others.
A lot of people in this thread seem to have been pooh-poohing the idea of using tape as an archival format, saying that you should store everything digitally and constantly reconvert it to new formats - for some reason this isn't seen as a problem, even though all of the things I've listed above were found in a shoe box or in the back of a long-forgotten cupboard etc. 40 years after they were made (nearly 60 for the Guthrie wire recordings).
No, mag tape is not perfect, and yes, some of the more exotic formats are getting difficult to play back. But archival masters are in standard formats for that reason, and it's not outrageously hard to make a machine capable of playing them back - even the sticky shed issue is understood and fixable. Mag tape is not perfect, but it can be played back after being left forgotten in a vault for decades and that is something digital does not currently offer.
Bottom line? Make digital and analogue copies. That way, at least one of them should survive.
The hilarious thing about this is that I don't think anyone even makes analogue tape machines, right now. I checked Fostex, Studer, and Tascam. No tape machines being made.
Given this.. how easy will it be to play an analogue reel to reel tape in a few short years ?
I'd say it's more like decades. I believe Otari are still making the 5050. There are others who are reconditioning older machines (ATR Service for one) and the market for rubber rollers and drive belts has become something of a cottage industry. The big problem for manufacturing new decks is that ebay is flooded with the things and that makes it very, very difficult to compete with new equipment.
Saying tape has a longer life is silly. I'd have no idea where to get an 8-track player today even though it's an analog format.
Same with a record player, but I could make one pretty easily. (there's a reason why we shot a record into space instead of a tape)
Really, though a documented and uncompressed digital file, properly kept track of, could last forever similar to a record even if we lost our codecs it would be easy to write a new one.
To turn your argument around, I've had CD-Rs go bad and those are a digital format... It is worth keeping in mind that archiving something onto tape is a known science, and that 8-track was a cheap, disposable format that no-one ever used for archiving.
There are standard archival formats for tape (1/4", usually 15ips, 2 track, no NR, either NAB or IEC curve depending if you're in the US or Europe). Back in the day this was pretty much the universal format - the album would be mixed to that, the duplication master would go to the pressing plant in that format, when they remaster something from the original master tapes today, the source media will be in that format also. To play it back, you need a machine that runs the tape in front of a pair of coils at a constant 38 cm/sec. Unless the tape is of a type that goes sticky, you should be able to recover the audio, regardless of age, and that is not something you could say the same of for a Protools project on a flash drive.
And the longevity of analog tape? It decays. We have a steady stream of older musicians who are desperate to use our ancient reel-to-reels for a chance to digitize their brittle, fragile old tape recordings.
No storage medium is permanent, but PCM audio has remained mostly unchanged since Max Mathews, Bell Labs, 1957.
There were a lot of problems with tapestock from 1975-1994 which used a synthetic substitute for whale oil. Japanese tapes that carried on using whale oil (Maxell) and formulations prior to this are rock-solid, and Ampex/Quantegy tape from 1995 and later have proven stable to date. When it comes to being able to stick it on a shelf and play it back 20 years later (or in the case of 'Jesus Christ Superstar', 42 years later), digital formats simply aren't in the same ballpark - and I suspect a lot of this is because the density has increased so much.
The other problem with a Midi file (and regular sheet music) is that, while it provides instructions for playing a piece of music, it doesn't give you a means of duplicating a performance exactly. For instance, if someone with thousands of dollars worth of proprietary audio software, sound samples, and production equipment produces a midi file of an orchestra, it's going to sounds pretty damn good. Give the sheet music to a conductor of an orchestra, and it's gong to sound amazing. Give the midi file to a random person with a computer and it's going to sound like it's being played on a gameboy.
Occasionally I've pondered releasing the MIDI (or Rosegarden) files for some of my songs, and that's one of the reasons I've balked at it - you need to have a fairly good grasp of MIDI to be able to play it back at all. Most MIDI files you find on the 'net are GM standard, with 128 preset instruments which will play back more-or-less the same on any GM-compatible device.
That works for the music in DOOM, but it all goes out the window once you start writing MIDI files for a Korg Triton EX on one interface, Hammond Organ clone on another, a digital mellotron clone daisy-chained to that, and on the other interface a bunch of analogue polysynths and a monosynth with custom patches, filter sweeps on the controller usually used for changing the MIDI bank, and a pitch bend wheel that spans two octaves. With a bit of effort you could map it to GM (assuming you're not doing minimoog solos which depend on monophonic note priorities), but you'd end up with a pale shadow of the song compared to the recorded version.
By every meaningful measure these die shrinks improve the technology.
How about data retention? That is also a function of the cell size, since the more electrons you have in the charge trap, the greater the difference between 1 and 0. Intel's drives, for example, are only guaranteed to hold their contents for three months without power. And when they are powered, they keep the data alive by periodically rewriting it, which I strongly suspect amounts to a P/E cycle. (Not sure about flash, but a lot of memory devices use an 'erase' to set the bits high, and then short out the ones they want to be zero, so a lot more actions are liable to count as an performing an 'erase' than deleting a file.)
This was a thing, yes, but only for that brief period when you actually got your slashdot id. Since then? Not so much...
--Q
Technically it becomes less and less reliable each time they do a die shrink on the flash. Adding a whole extra bit level makes things worse still. In the early 2000s you were looking at 100'000 P/E cycles, maybe a million for the really good stuff. Good TLC memory seems to be rated around 3000, with a figure of 1000 being widely quoted, and in some cases, less.
Realistically, they've designed the drive to fight tooth and nail to avoid doing rewrites, and in actual fact it looks like they've put a layer of fast SLC cache in front (i.e. the million-cycle stuff). What could be more interesting is the retention period - if the thing is left powered off for three months it could well be left unreadable.
Okay, he is, now, best known for the Malcolm Tucker role but I remember him better in other roles; the Angel Islington in a BBC adaption of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere (although that show was really stolen by Paterson Joseph's Marquis De Carabas) and as Uncle Rory in the TV adaption of Iain Bank's Crow Road.
And it's kind of nice that the Doctor is portrayed by an actor older than me again. That hasn't happened for a while.
So, does that make Rory his only non-psychopathic role so far?
You're obviously hopelessly USian. In most of the English-speaking world, "partner" in this context does not mean "homosexual partner" although it can. It just means that the two people are a couple but are not married. To my knowledge, Iain Banks partner was, in fact, a woman.
And, at about the same time, Basic on a CP/M machine at my high school...
Later more Basic on Commodore 64, moved on to Pascal and Modula-2 on Atari ST.
BASIC on the Spectrum for me as well. I think I was about 8-9 when I started. Did a bit of machine code (numbers, not assembler!) but didn't get into it. Got a BBC Micro, still programming in BASIC, IIRC I had some assembler routines to handle sprites taken from a magazine.
Things really took off when Dad got a PC around 1991. I started with GW BASIC, but then got my own machine and Borland C 2 a few years later. At that point I bit the bullet and started playing with assembler, and wrote my own graphics library for DOS.
I was surprised they were actually affecting people since it really didn't make sense to run Windows on DR-DOS anyway. You'd run MS-DOS and MS Windows, or you'd run DR-DOS without any GUI (they provided a DOS task switcher with multitasking which was actually fairly decent) or you'd run Desqview. But apparently many people were quite incensed that Windows wouldn't run properly atop DR-DOS.
For me, it was a matter of wanting to run DRDOS for its benefits and the occasional Windows program on top. See, the problem was that MSDOS was shit. DRDOS had a lot of polish to it, including a few things like the ability to undelete files (including the first letter) which Windows and even Linux cannot do to this day.
It gave you more memory, and for a command-line OS it was a heck of a lot friendlier than MSDOS, and a real boon for developers and gamers. Mostly it was a lot of little things, like the in-kernel command history. You didn't need DOSKEY or whatever, it did that automatically and unlike MSDOS, it would work inside applications. In DEU, for example, it would remember the command history on the DEU command-line as well as command.com. The CLI editor allowed you to delete words with CTRL-T which Windows 7 can't do. TYPE and virtually every other command could use/p to page the output. Oh, and DISKCOPY could copy two and from disk image files.
At the time, if you were doing DOS application development, it really had a lot going for it.
If you're calling CSIRO a patent troll, I think you need to have a closer look. As a govt research body, the money they actually make from patents goes into MORE research (unlike actual patent trolls).
I think the problem is that the new director may be turning CSIRO into a patent troll...
...the green bits are 30fps. Everything else, i.e about 2/3 of the planet, is 25fps. 25 does not go into 60. I suppose at a pinch it could be run at 24fps with the 120Hz timebase you suggested, but that's not exactly optimal...
iMovie and Final Cut work pretty well and you never have to boot Windows to use them. I've used Kdenlive and it has a lot of promise but really it's beta software. I did manage to edit 2 hours of video without a crash though.
I started out with iMovie, but it caused no end of problems for the project I was trying to do, essentially a slideshow with narration. I can't remember what the last straw was, but I switched over to Kdenlive on Linux and although it took a bit of getting used to and the crashes could be extremely frustrating, it worked a lot better for me than iMovie did on Snow Leopard.
Because this is an extremely generic use case. When editing video, most often users need to cut at a specific frame not neccesarily time. Unless the user knows that frame 4923 is the one they want before hand somehow, they need to see and playback the video. Now can it be done using a command line and a separate window? Yes. Is that more cumbersome than a graphical UI? Yes.
You'd use SMPTE format - specify the time and the frame, e.g. 00:03:56:23.
Yeah, you'd still need to preview the video to find the edit points, but as I understand it, this is essentially how it was done from about 1975-1995 or so using systems like CMX, You'd enter the list of edit points, load up the videotapes and the computer would handle the edit/assembly by itself.
Slashdot Mirror
The point is, even if we unearth all those missing 106 episodes, the actual episodes might not stand up to all the hype and expectation heaped up on them.
'Tomb of the Cybermen' actually did, for me, at least. I thought it was a rather slick production given the budget. Other stuff from that era is distinctly variable in quality (e.g. the little city model in 'The Krotons' which I honestly thought was supposed to be a heap of stones).
Nostalgia doesn't really enter into it for me because I never got to see the original broadcasts. In actual fact I only got into Dr. Who really when they repeated the Tom Baker episodes in the 90s and I found them to my liking.
These distribution prints - which were 16mm film, not tape - were passed from country to country, usually ending up in the tail ends of the empire in Africa & Asia. They were supposed to have been returned or destroyed at the end of their tours, but it wasn't unusual for them to be put into storage, grabbed by local staff for their own archives, or sold on the sly to broadcasters in neighbouring countries.
I wouldn't be shocked if someone had been striking copies of the films either.
It does seem to be overkill, especially when you realize that the majority of games will be getting played on and streamed from the windows PC elsewhere.
I don't think that's the long-term goal, though. The whole project seems to have kicked into gear because the Windows App Store means they can't rely on Windows indefinitely, and they seem to be trying to get devs to port to Linux natively. That entails a beefier GPU than you'd need for a pure streaming solution.
The way I heard it - which could be yet another rumour - there was a fire but it didn't damage anything significant. However, the Fire Brigade pitched a fit because the BBC had littered the tapes and films here there and everywhere in a bunch of spare rooms. This posed a fire hazard and as a result the BBC decided they needed to have a clear-out.
Oh, one of the more fun stories about the BBC junking master tapes was when they decided to get rid of a lot of audio masters during the 80's. Owing to the bureaucracy involved, the archivist (Mark Ayres) went through the paper trail and discovered that they had been moved into a spare room to be skipped, but then the process had been interrupted and the tapes were all still sitting there a decade or so later. (From the 'Alchemists of Sound' documentary)
It's unfortunate that the BBC were so shortsighted and "recycled" the master tapes of so many great series. Of course, everyone knows the famous Monty Python story of how that series was almost lost too, but was saved by Terry Gilliam (who basically stole the tapes and put them in his attic). But very few series from that era were so lucky.
I did not know that, though I've often wondered why they survived when so much else was lost. Also, "stealing the tapes" is not exactly a trivial exercise - the original Quad tapes were massive - 2" wide, 10.5" diameter and about 5KG each. If they had 2 episodes each, that's about 22 tapes he'd have had to sneak out of the archives. Not exactly something you can fit in your pocket...
Yes, you're right and this is why the weblink I gave above is a kaleidoscope of colours for all the different formats between 1970 and 1974; fortunately all those episodes are now in colour to varying qualities. The "Chroma Dot/Colour Recovery" process of which you speak has been used on 12 episodes of Dr.Who with varying degrees of success, and two non-Dr.Who episodes. But, in a nutshell, the Jon Pertwee now exists in colour in its entirety.
Ah yes, I knew I'd forgotten something - checking that link out. Thanks, it was well worth reading. I particularly liked how the NTSC icon was washed out compare to the PAL one...
AFAIK all the Jon Pertwee episodes exist, but not all of them exist in colour. In these cases, the Quad tapes were erased but the 16mm B/W copies for export survived. Some of them exist in colour but derived from low-quality copies (IIRC they managed to digitally marry the chroma signal from a Umatic copy of the NTSC conversion with the higher-res 16mm print to improve the quality).
A couple of years back someone devised a way of partially reconstructing the colour signal by digitally decoding the RGB triads on a high-res scan of the print, so the B/W-only episodes may yet be colourised.
Can you give any examples of music that is permanently lost to an unpopular format or bad DRM? It may happen in the future that some music is abandoned due to software but music is already being lost due to lack of playback hardware. He can stomp his feet and say that tape is best but there will be a time when no one makes tape players any more, it is pretty unlikely that there will be a point in the future when we stop using computers to play back media.
How about the Doomsday Book? Not music, but an unholy hybrid of laserdisc media using a proprietary variant hooked up to a 512k BBC Micro.
To be sure, there are a lot of examples of things that would have been lost if they had been digital - most of the recovered Dr. Who episodes, that Woody Guthrie concert from 1949, the stereo masters for Jesus Christ Superstar, Court of the Crimson King and untold others.
A lot of people in this thread seem to have been pooh-poohing the idea of using tape as an archival format, saying that you should store everything digitally and constantly reconvert it to new formats - for some reason this isn't seen as a problem, even though all of the things I've listed above were found in a shoe box or in the back of a long-forgotten cupboard etc. 40 years after they were made (nearly 60 for the Guthrie wire recordings).
No, mag tape is not perfect, and yes, some of the more exotic formats are getting difficult to play back. But archival masters are in standard formats for that reason, and it's not outrageously hard to make a machine capable of playing them back - even the sticky shed issue is understood and fixable. Mag tape is not perfect, but it can be played back after being left forgotten in a vault for decades and that is something digital does not currently offer.
Bottom line? Make digital and analogue copies. That way, at least one of them should survive.
The hilarious thing about this is that I don't think anyone even makes analogue tape machines, right now. I checked Fostex, Studer, and Tascam. No tape machines being made.
Given this .. how easy will it be to play an analogue reel to reel tape in a few short years ?
I'd say it's more like decades. I believe Otari are still making the 5050. There are others who are reconditioning older machines (ATR Service for one) and the market for rubber rollers and drive belts has become something of a cottage industry. The big problem for manufacturing new decks is that ebay is flooded with the things and that makes it very, very difficult to compete with new equipment.
Saying tape has a longer life is silly. I'd have no idea where to get an 8-track player today even though it's an analog format.
Same with a record player, but I could make one pretty easily. (there's a reason why we shot a record into space instead of a tape)
Really, though a documented and uncompressed digital file, properly kept track of, could last forever similar to a record even if we lost our codecs it would be easy to write a new one.
To turn your argument around, I've had CD-Rs go bad and those are a digital format... It is worth keeping in mind that archiving something onto tape is a known science, and that 8-track was a cheap, disposable format that no-one ever used for archiving.
There are standard archival formats for tape (1/4", usually 15ips, 2 track, no NR, either NAB or IEC curve depending if you're in the US or Europe). Back in the day this was pretty much the universal format - the album would be mixed to that, the duplication master would go to the pressing plant in that format, when they remaster something from the original master tapes today, the source media will be in that format also. To play it back, you need a machine that runs the tape in front of a pair of coils at a constant 38 cm/sec. Unless the tape is of a type that goes sticky, you should be able to recover the audio, regardless of age, and that is not something you could say the same of for a Protools project on a flash drive.
And the longevity of analog tape? It decays. We have a steady stream of older musicians who are desperate to use our ancient reel-to-reels for a chance to digitize their brittle, fragile old tape recordings.
No storage medium is permanent, but PCM audio has remained mostly unchanged since Max Mathews, Bell Labs, 1957.
Depends on the substrate and adhesive. I suspect there are Nazi-era tapes that are still playable (this was certainly the case as of 1991, see 'The Secret Life of the Video Recorder': http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=gOULWR4h4Io#t=1017 ...17 minutes in)
There were a lot of problems with tapestock from 1975-1994 which used a synthetic substitute for whale oil. Japanese tapes that carried on using whale oil (Maxell) and formulations prior to this are rock-solid, and Ampex/Quantegy tape from 1995 and later have proven stable to date. When it comes to being able to stick it on a shelf and play it back 20 years later (or in the case of 'Jesus Christ Superstar', 42 years later), digital formats simply aren't in the same ballpark - and I suspect a lot of this is because the density has increased so much.
The other problem with a Midi file (and regular sheet music) is that, while it provides instructions for playing a piece of music, it doesn't give you a means of duplicating a performance exactly. For instance, if someone with thousands of dollars worth of proprietary audio software, sound samples, and production equipment produces a midi file of an orchestra, it's going to sounds pretty damn good. Give the sheet music to a conductor of an orchestra, and it's gong to sound amazing. Give the midi file to a random person with a computer and it's going to sound like it's being played on a gameboy.
Occasionally I've pondered releasing the MIDI (or Rosegarden) files for some of my songs, and that's one of the reasons I've balked at it - you need to have a fairly good grasp of MIDI to be able to play it back at all. Most MIDI files you find on the 'net are GM standard, with 128 preset instruments which will play back more-or-less the same on any GM-compatible device.
That works for the music in DOOM, but it all goes out the window once you start writing MIDI files for a Korg Triton EX on one interface, Hammond Organ clone on another, a digital mellotron clone daisy-chained to that, and on the other interface a bunch of analogue polysynths and a monosynth with custom patches, filter sweeps on the controller usually used for changing the MIDI bank, and a pitch bend wheel that spans two octaves. With a bit of effort you could map it to GM (assuming you're not doing minimoog solos which depend on monophonic note priorities), but you'd end up with a pale shadow of the song compared to the recorded version.
By every meaningful measure these die shrinks improve the technology.
How about data retention? That is also a function of the cell size, since the more electrons you have in the charge trap, the greater the difference between 1 and 0. Intel's drives, for example, are only guaranteed to hold their contents for three months without power. And when they are powered, they keep the data alive by periodically rewriting it, which I strongly suspect amounts to a P/E cycle. (Not sure about flash, but a lot of memory devices use an 'erase' to set the bits high, and then short out the ones they want to be zero, so a lot more actions are liable to count as an performing an 'erase' than deleting a file.)
Ok, you're old fashioned.
This was a thing, yes, but only for that brief period when you actually got your slashdot id. Since then? Not so much ...
--Q
Technically it becomes less and less reliable each time they do a die shrink on the flash. Adding a whole extra bit level makes things worse still. In the early 2000s you were looking at 100'000 P/E cycles, maybe a million for the really good stuff. Good TLC memory seems to be rated around 3000, with a figure of 1000 being widely quoted, and in some cases, less.
Realistically, they've designed the drive to fight tooth and nail to avoid doing rewrites, and in actual fact it looks like they've put a layer of fast SLC cache in front (i.e. the million-cycle stuff). What could be more interesting is the retention period - if the thing is left powered off for three months it could well be left unreadable.
Okay, he is, now, best known for the Malcolm Tucker role but I remember him better in other roles; the Angel Islington in a BBC adaption of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere (although that show was really stolen by Paterson Joseph's Marquis De Carabas) and as Uncle Rory in the TV adaption of Iain Bank's Crow Road.
And it's kind of nice that the Doctor is portrayed by an actor older than me again. That hasn't happened for a while.
So, does that make Rory his only non-psychopathic role so far?
Um... what the hell are you babbling about?
At a guess, Firewire.
You're obviously hopelessly USian. In most of the English-speaking world, "partner" in this context does not mean "homosexual partner" although it can. It just means that the two people are a couple but are not married. To my knowledge, Iain Banks partner was, in fact, a woman.
"Shortly after the announcement, Banks married his partner, Adele Hartley, and she survives him." (source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jun/09/iain-banks-dies-59-cancer )
(And yes - those sort of comments reminded me of the folks who sprayed the word "paedo" on a house belonging to a paediatrician.)
And, at about the same time, Basic on a CP/M machine at my high school...
Later more Basic on Commodore 64, moved on to Pascal and Modula-2 on Atari ST.
BASIC on the Spectrum for me as well. I think I was about 8-9 when I started. Did a bit of machine code (numbers, not assembler!) but didn't get into it. Got a BBC Micro, still programming in BASIC, IIRC I had some assembler routines to handle sprites taken from a magazine.
Things really took off when Dad got a PC around 1991. I started with GW BASIC, but then got my own machine and Borland C 2 a few years later. At that point I bit the bullet and started playing with assembler, and wrote my own graphics library for DOS.
I was surprised they were actually affecting people since it really didn't make sense to run Windows on DR-DOS anyway. You'd run MS-DOS and MS Windows, or you'd run DR-DOS without any GUI (they provided a DOS task switcher with multitasking which was actually fairly decent) or you'd run Desqview. But apparently many people were quite incensed that Windows wouldn't run properly atop DR-DOS.
For me, it was a matter of wanting to run DRDOS for its benefits and the occasional Windows program on top. See, the problem was that MSDOS was shit. DRDOS had a lot of polish to it, including a few things like the ability to undelete files (including the first letter) which Windows and even Linux cannot do to this day.
It gave you more memory, and for a command-line OS it was a heck of a lot friendlier than MSDOS, and a real boon for developers and gamers. Mostly it was a lot of little things, like the in-kernel command history. You didn't need DOSKEY or whatever, it did that automatically and unlike MSDOS, it would work inside applications. In DEU, for example, it would remember the command history on the DEU command-line as well as command.com. The CLI editor allowed you to delete words with CTRL-T which Windows 7 can't do. TYPE and virtually every other command could use /p to page the output. Oh, and DISKCOPY could copy two and from disk image files.
At the time, if you were doing DOS application development, it really had a lot going for it.
If you're calling CSIRO a patent troll, I think you need to have a closer look. As a govt research body, the money they actually make from patents goes into MORE research (unlike actual patent trolls).
I think the problem is that the new director may be turning CSIRO into a patent troll...
I really just wish the fucking world would settle on 60 fps.
There is a slight problem with that:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PAL-NTSC-SECAM.svg
...the green bits are 30fps. Everything else, i.e about 2/3 of the planet, is 25fps. 25 does not go into 60. I suppose at a pinch it could be run at 24fps with the 120Hz timebase you suggested, but that's not exactly optimal...
iMovie and Final Cut work pretty well and you never have to boot Windows to use them. I've used Kdenlive and it has a lot of promise but really it's beta software. I did manage to edit 2 hours of video without a crash though.
I started out with iMovie, but it caused no end of problems for the project I was trying to do, essentially a slideshow with narration. I can't remember what the last straw was, but I switched over to Kdenlive on Linux and although it took a bit of getting used to and the crashes could be extremely frustrating, it worked a lot better for me than iMovie did on Snow Leopard.
Because this is an extremely generic use case. When editing video, most often users need to cut at a specific frame not neccesarily time. Unless the user knows that frame 4923 is the one they want before hand somehow, they need to see and playback the video. Now can it be done using a command line and a separate window? Yes. Is that more cumbersome than a graphical UI? Yes.
You'd use SMPTE format - specify the time and the frame, e.g. 00:03:56:23.
Yeah, you'd still need to preview the video to find the edit points, but as I understand it, this is essentially how it was done from about 1975-1995 or so using systems like CMX, You'd enter the list of edit points, load up the videotapes and the computer would handle the edit/assembly by itself.
At 120dB seems likely that such devices will kill the remaining working hair cells.
Hopefully they can find a way to stop/slow "age related" hearing loss: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-03/meae-rdp032713.php
I wondered whether the device was actually bypassing the hair cells entirely...