In short, Barclays have clearly never tested with anything other than IE on XP.
I'm surprised you say that. I've used konqueror with JavaScript turned off for years with Barclays.
I'm pretty sure I've even used Lynx.
Admittedly that was some time ago before pinsentry. I've got very little money with them now but I'll give Lynx a try again sometime soon.
If anything I'd say Barclays is the safest online bank to use. I've got accounts with NatWest One, Nationwide, Alliance and Leicester and none of those work at all with javascript turned off.
This is all true (although I think the maximum totals for coppers are smaller than 2GBP). But additionally, when using legal tender to settle a debt the creditor is not required to give change (It makes sense really - the creditor is obliged to accept the cash but may be unable to give change).
So if you're in a restaurant that says "we do not accept 50GBP notes - make sure your bill is greater than 50GBP - and you pay the exact amount - if you want to use a 50GBP note anyway.
You can't entirely "withhold" the information. If the CEO of a company suddenly dumps stocks in his own company, that should be a signal that something is up.
You won't see the CEO dumping his shares if insider trading is allowed until long after the market has reacted to the trade about to happen.
The brokers, market makers etc, will use their inside information that the CEO is about to dump shares and front run.
As far as "nuclear waste" is concerned, "nuclear waste" from power plants is just nuclear fuel that hasn't been reprocessed yet because Carter outlawed nuclear fuel reprocessing back in the '70s.
Not completely. It's also rubber gloves, overalls, etc, etc, that workers were wearing but are now classed as too radioactive to dispose of in landfill.
Last time I looked, for the UK put 1 smoke detector in a dustbin (240litres) and it can be collected by the dustmen (legally). Put two smoke detectors in the same dustbin and the whole dustbin load becomes "nuclear waste".
Story I heard from my physics tutor (so I assume it's true).
When the nuclear physics laboratory was built they wanted to put in a 20MeV tandem van-der-graff accelerator. There were two problems - one, there was a building height limit in Oxford and two, the normal cement they use in Oxford is so radioactive that any nuclear plant would immediately be shut down due to excessive radiation.
The first problem was solved by digging two stories down. The second problem was solved by going round all the builders yards with a geiger counter looking for the least radioactive cement.
I think the first solution should be to rush into production the superconducting electric grid part of the Grid 2030 project
I don't think this is realistic with current technology (although I haven't been keeping an eye on what is state of the art).
Superconductors are limited in the amount of current they can carry. IIRC high temperature superconductors are particularly poor in this respect as well as not forming very good wires. But liquid He is so expensive, rare, and energy costly to produce that "normal" temperature superconductors aren't going to be efficient either.
If the pay is right, you will *always* fill the position.
This isn't so. If the pay is "right" you'll get five thousand applicants for the job, four thousand, eight hundred of which clearly aren't up to it a first glance and can be weeded out by HR viewing the CV without any recourse to a techie. (Obviously there will be a few false positives and false negatives here but that doesn't really matter - the false negatives in particular ought to get their act together and learn to write a better CV. If a top end person applying for a top end job with a top end salary can't write a CV that can get past first screening at HR - or find someone to write it for them - then quite frankly I don't consider them up to doing a top end job where, however good they are, they will encounter difficult problems that they won't have done before and they'll be expected to do well)
So now those 200 CVs go to a techie who will then waste three hours culling 30% of them from reading the front page (that's less than 60 seconds per CV, page 2 isn't going to get read, let alone page 10 - and yes, CVs really are that verbose!)
Then there will be a second pass through with a bit more care and maybe a second opinion by which time you're down to something like 50.
Then it goes to a telephone interview. This should be a 10-15 minute job. Really basic questions - for a C expert this would be things like "Does malloc reserve memory on the heap or the stack." A more general question might be "An array is a data structure that can be used to store data. Give an example of another data structure that could be used instead to store the same data." The ten people you'll call in for interview will manage this "test" in 10 minutes. The other 40 will take up 30-45 minutes of a senior persons time before you can draw the interview to a close.
Then you get the 10 in for interview. First interview will basically involve repeating the questions asked on the telephone interview. Three or four won't be able to answer the _same_ questions they supposedly answered on the telephone, the rest you'll be able to start drilling a bit deeper.
You might then decide to call three or four back for a second interview. Now we'll get onto the logical reasoning etc. And It's amazing how many fail here. Reminds me of Feynman's story in Brazil where he had a student who could parrot all the formulas about reflection and refraction but couldn't link that to the fact that light reflecting off the sea must be polarized.
When you've finally eliminated the 4999 who are unsuitable, you discover that the one remaining person has decided to accept a job somewhere else. Almost always there will be nothing you can do about this. The really good people can't be coerced by more money because if that's what is most important to them they'd already have been chasing the super money jobs or contracting and instead are looking at things like commuting time, hours, holiday, what the workplace looks like etc.
I've had one disastrous jobs that I accepted. I managed to stick it for four weeks before I handed in my notice - even then the company wanted me to work two of my four weeks notice and wouldn't just let me go.
The next job I got offered after one interview I asked for a second interview. It was actually quite entertaining because there definitely was an effort on their part to sell the job to me. I did that job for nearly four years before I moved on. (Incidentally, for that job I actually crossed out several clauses in my employment contract that I couldn't sign - they would have been unenforceable anyway but I knew I was in a strong position and I didn't want any unnecessary complications later)
So get up at 5:30, start work an hour early, leave an hour early. By changing the definition of time you're defeating the point of having a clock. Why are people so set in their ways that things must happen at fixed numerical times? If you changed the clock so that 9am occured during darkness, would people still go to work at that time? It's utterly absurd.
You know, my employer has these strange things called employment contracts that includes the hours I'm expected to be at work. And trains for my commute have things called timetables.
And people going to work in the dark? That's absolutely standard for me for half the year. Coming home in the dark as well.
But rather than use up two hours of daylight commuting during the summer I like the clocks to change so that I only have to use up one of them. But they don't change early enough to allow that.
you know, you could do what I do, start at 7:30 am and then I get to leave at 16:00... I get plenty of evening light to do things like sail my boat in the evenings.
Got into the office at 07:40 this morning which is fairly typical. Boy I wish I had a part time job. Leave at 4pm. The markets aren't even closed then. Yesterday I left early - 17:30.
A better solution, and one which businesses seem to be strangely adverse to, is starting work earlier, and knocking off earlier. Same benefits, with none of the pointless government intervention crap that DST requires, and no need to move the clocks around.
So we start with the stock market. On 30th March the London stock exchanges all open at 7am instead of 8am and close at 4:30pm instead of 5:30pm. So now all those people who work in the City need to travel to work an hour earlier. So all the trains have to be re timetabled. The gyms etc that people use before work now all have to open an hour earlier. The starbucks etc now have to open earlier to support those city workers on the way to work. The pub workers have to start their evening shift an hour earlier.
You really think it would be easier to change the time we do things rather than change the clocks?
And I've always wondered why the people who think the moving the clocks is such a problem and the people who like to have light in the evening occasionally when they get home are so unreasonable by not working an hour earlier don't practice what they preach and continue to work exactly the same daylight hours after the clock change. It really isn't difficult to get used to automatically translating times when you are doing it all the time. I do a lot of work with the US - week before last a US college arranged a meeting for 11am. I had just assumed he meant 4pm my time although he was actually in the UK and really meant 11am GMT.
WTF? Are you confusing Daylight Savings Time with Time Zones maybe?
No. It's called living in high latitudes.
In London, even with daylight saving, the sun rises at 04:45 for all of June.
Even now, it's light when I get up in the morning at 06:30 but it's dark before I leave work in the evening.
It's much harder to take advantage of daylight hours in the morning when you are working. I cycle - but I can't go out for half an hour in the morning because I need to be in the shower by 06:35 if I'm going to catch my train to work in the morning, which means I'll be getting at this time of year just around sunrise. Give me that hour in the evening instead and I can have a shower, get cleaned up, whatever, once the sun has gone down.
I'd like summer time in the winter and double summer time in the summer (or even triple summer time). On the longest day It's sunrise at 04:43 - and almost nobody is up and around at that time. But it's sunset at 21:22 and there are lots of people out and about at that time. And that's with summer time giving us an extra hour in the evening.
Several safety groups in the UK claim (I haven't seen the figures) that there's a spike in road traffic accidents to children when the clocks go back. Roughly, it goes from sunset at 17:45 to sunset at 16:45 across the UK.
Aberdeen, at the other end of the UK, gets sun from 04:12 to 22:08 on the longest day. On the shortest day it's 08:46 to 15:27.
P.S. I'm 31 and I can hear 22 kHz just fine. My speakers can't reliably reproduce much higher than that,
You may be able to hear this but I'd be very surprised. It's almost certain that you're hearing harmonics that are being generated, probably by resonances in the speaker.
I'm 37 and I can easily hear 16kHz. 17kHz I can just hear when using headphones and the volume cranked right up but I wouldn't notice it unless I'm listening for it. 18kHz I don't think I can hear at all but it's hard to be certain using these samples.
And to address any further arguments on this, try it! With any multi-tape multi-head system, start out by viewing live tv. Pause for 3 min, do whatever you want with any tape/head. Then try and play back that recording with a 3 min lag behind realtime, keeping playing that 3 min lag with realtime for 12 hours without inturruption in viewing or recording. You should have been able to watch a 12hr marathon uninturrupted and have a 12hr recording without any breaks in the stream.
Can you do it? Didn't think so. Even the simple playback of live tv with a 3 min lag is impossible for a VCR to do.
It wasn't a tape machine. It was videodisk.
But this is EXACTLY what I did with two of these machines for Pioneer - AAIU so that a broadcaster could broadcast a Marathon without it being live but also without having to wait until the end to broadcast.
Because the Pioneer only had IIRC 48000 frames on a disk the maximum delay would have been 32 minutes (PAL) and at the end when you stopped you'd have at most the last two hours still recorded and not erased/overwritten.
Also, because I lost about 100 frames every time I switched from record to erase (it could have been about 15 frames but I was playing safe) the system could only have run for about 5 days.
Throw in more machines and these problems can be finessed. But at 100K (GBP) per machine (1990 prices) you make do with the minimum you can get away with.
Could you watch a live stream and then pause it while continuing to record the live signal and resume playback while still recording and skip sections such as commercials until you caught back up with the live stream?
I think not.
Why would you think not?
The only thing you couldn't do if you were using it with one head recording and one head playing back would be to move the playback head from one point on the disk to another without the output going black for the up to about 15 frames to took to move the head.
If you needed seamless edits then you would have to use both heads in playback mode. In theory there would be little difficulty in building a machine with four heads so you could record onto a disk that hasn't been erased while doing seamless edits on the stuff that has been recorded but I don't believe such a machine ever existed.
I posted in another comment. Pioneer had a professional magneto-optical video disk recorder that could do this back in the early/mid 90s (May have been much earlier but that was when I was using it)
It was a dual head machine that could be used for erase+record, record+playback, erase+playback or playback+playback. (there was only one video output, the playback+playback was so you could do realtime editing)
I used it in all four modes for various commercial endeavours that were used on live TV
They also had a player that could only be used in playback+playback at about half the cost.
I believe it was GoVideo that had the two tape VCR. With this VCR, you could record one show and watch another previously recorded program. You could also start recording a show from the point you wanted to get up. This would allow you to continue watching from the point that you left off. In essence pausing.
Back in the early 90s Pioneer had a (professional) magneto-optical video disk recorder that had two heads.
You could use the two heads in multiple ways.
The standard way would be to use one head to erase and the other to record - this meant you could record on a disk that already had something on rather than have to wipe it first, or use both heads in playback which meant you could do realtime edits.
But it could be used in other ways - for example if you had a pre-erased disk you could use one head to record and the other to playback.
I built a system for Pioneer that, using two of these machines, basically allowed an up to one hour delay in any live video feed. IIRC it basically worked like this (I've got the code somewhere on various backups but I can't be bothered to go and find it now). Initially both disks were erased. When you started up it started recording on the first disk. When that disk was full it started recording on the second disk. When you wanted to start playback the second head on the first disk starting playing back. Once that reached the end of the disk you switched to the second disk to continue playback. Once the first disk was full and playback had to have started before it was full (hence why you were limited to IIRC 48000 frames delay) the record head returned to the start and started erasing the disk. Once the second disk was full the first disk was (almost completely) erased and so recording could start on the first disk again. (I lost something like 100 frames of space each time I recycled a disk - to allow time for the head to return to the start. Actually was only about 15 frames but I allowed plenty of leeway)
I also built a small bit of hardware that had a video sync separator connected to one of the RS232 status lines so the computer that was controlling the two disks and the video switcher could count exactly how many frames had been recorded and I didn't have to worry about clockdrift.
That was roughly 100K (GBP) of kit, but it was "off the shelf". Other than the video sync separator (which wasn't strictly necessary unless you planned to run this thing for a day or more where clock drift might start to matter) the only "novelty" in this over and above what was documented in the manual for the video disk recorder was using two of them to mean you could run the output delay for more than half an hour of input. It would also have been completely trivial to stop and start the playback provided the total delay didn't exceed the capacity of the disks available. Indeed, doing that with just one disk was even suggested in the marketing - the idea being that a sports match could be recorded continuously while highlights could be played back.
I think what he means is, as they're in mortgages, which no-one wants to buy, they can't use them to pay back deposits.
Nobody wants to buy them (or lend against them) at their face value.
But if NR was in administration then they would be sold at the best value that could be got for them. It is inconceivable, even in the current market, that they wouldn't realize enough to pay off the NR depositors.
Even Baring depositors got paid off in full although some will have been very worried for about a week.
IIRC BCCI depositors got about 75% back eventually although it took years.
It isn't tax money. The Bank of England is a central bank, a lender of last resort that can lend essentially unlimited sums in situations where it (and government oversight) deems appropriate.... snip...
The Bank did the right thing in extending credit (albeit at an uncompetitive rate), but the Government did the wrong thing in guaranteeing saver's deposits. They would probably have survived anyway and given the entire industry a harsh lesson in the realities of financing. As soon as they did that the nationalisation genie was out the bottle, and once it's out it is very difficult to put back.
Effectively it is taxpayers money. Either the money has come from government reserves or it has been "printed". Provided NR eventually repays this money then no harm will have been done, but if it defaults then the taxpayer will have lost this money, either in devaluation of the pound or loss of government reserves.
The government had to guarantee saver's deposits. Above everything else, it had to prevent a total loss of confidence and a run on all the banks. Savers money was never in any doubt in the Northern Rock - it had about 100bn of assets to guarantee something like 20bn of deposits (who will have had first call on the money raised from a firesale). So the run was not rational (anybody who was likely to suffer immediate cashflow problems maybe needed to extract a months worth of money), and could easily have spread to any/all of the other banks.
It is somewhat surprising that the government is doing as much as it is to preserve the (remaining) shareholder equity. Many of the "little people" who have shares got them via a windfall when the bank was privatized. On top of that they've received something like 200p/share in dividends over the years. Of course, they're now looking back at those heady days when their 500 shares were worth 6 grand and wishing they'd sold then (there's an approximately 9k annual CGT allowance so the majority would have had to pay no tax at all on the sale).
Slashdot Mirror
In short, Barclays have clearly never tested with anything other than IE on XP.
I'm surprised you say that. I've used konqueror with JavaScript turned off for years with Barclays.
I'm pretty sure I've even used Lynx.
Admittedly that was some time ago before pinsentry. I've got very little money with them now but I'll give Lynx a try again sometime soon.
If anything I'd say Barclays is the safest online bank to use. I've got accounts with NatWest One, Nationwide, Alliance and Leicester and none of those work at all with javascript turned off.
Tim.
Basically these things work by using a generated number by a clock inside the device
I don't believe there is a clock at all. I think it's a pseudo random number generator on the card.
At least for some people in the UK, these devices arrived with a plastic strip that isolated the battery.
(I've seen reports that if you generate a few numbers and write them down you can then use them later. This would also preclude a clock)
Tim.
This is all true (although I think the maximum totals for coppers are smaller than 2GBP). But additionally, when using legal tender to settle a debt the creditor is not required to give change (It makes sense really - the creditor is obliged to accept the cash but may be unable to give change).
So if you're in a restaurant that says "we do not accept 50GBP notes - make sure your bill is greater than 50GBP - and you pay the exact amount - if you want to use a 50GBP note anyway.
Tim.
You can't entirely "withhold" the information. If the CEO of a company suddenly dumps stocks in his own company, that should be a signal that something is up.
You won't see the CEO dumping his shares if insider trading is allowed until long after the market has reacted to the trade about to happen.
The brokers, market makers etc, will use their inside information that the CEO is about to dump shares and front run.
Tim.
seem to recall that you could just put in all 1's for the cd-key for the '97 products in order to install them.
I can't remember now whether it was 3-4 digits or 3-7 digits. But if the last seven digits were divisible by 7 then the key was accepted.
Tim.
As far as "nuclear waste" is concerned, "nuclear waste" from power plants is just nuclear fuel that hasn't been reprocessed yet because Carter outlawed nuclear fuel reprocessing back in the '70s.
Not completely. It's also rubber gloves, overalls, etc, etc, that workers were wearing but are now classed as too radioactive to dispose of in landfill.
Last time I looked, for the UK put 1 smoke detector in a dustbin (240litres) and it can be collected by the dustmen (legally). Put two smoke detectors in the same dustbin and the whole dustbin load becomes "nuclear waste".
Story I heard from my physics tutor (so I assume it's true).
When the nuclear physics laboratory was built they wanted to put in a 20MeV tandem van-der-graff accelerator. There were two problems - one, there was a building height limit in Oxford and two, the normal cement they use in Oxford is so radioactive that any nuclear plant would immediately be shut down due to excessive radiation.
The first problem was solved by digging two stories down. The second problem was solved by going round all the builders yards with a geiger counter looking for the least radioactive cement.
Tim.
I think the first solution should be to rush into production the superconducting electric grid part of the Grid 2030 project
I don't think this is realistic with current technology (although I haven't been keeping an eye on what is state of the art).
Superconductors are limited in the amount of current they can carry. IIRC high temperature superconductors are particularly poor in this respect as well as not forming very good wires. But liquid He is so expensive, rare, and energy costly to produce that "normal" temperature superconductors aren't going to be efficient either.
Tim.
If the pay is right, you will *always* fill the position.
This isn't so. If the pay is "right" you'll get five thousand applicants for the job, four thousand, eight hundred of which clearly aren't up to it a first glance and can be weeded out by HR viewing the CV without any recourse to a techie. (Obviously there will be a few false positives and false negatives here but that doesn't really matter - the false negatives in particular ought to get their act together and learn to write a better CV. If a top end person applying for a top end job with a top end salary can't write a CV that can get past first screening at HR - or find someone to write it for them - then quite frankly I don't consider them up to doing a top end job where, however good they are, they will encounter difficult problems that they won't have done before and they'll be expected to do well)
So now those 200 CVs go to a techie who will then waste three hours culling 30% of them from reading the front page (that's less than 60 seconds per CV, page 2 isn't going to get read, let alone page 10 - and yes, CVs really are that verbose!)
Then there will be a second pass through with a bit more care and maybe a second opinion by which time you're down to something like 50.
Then it goes to a telephone interview. This should be a 10-15 minute job. Really basic questions - for a C expert this would be things like "Does malloc reserve memory on the heap or the stack." A more general question might be "An array is a data structure that can be used to store data. Give an example of another data structure that could be used instead to store the same data." The ten people you'll call in for interview will manage this "test" in 10 minutes. The other 40 will take up 30-45 minutes of a senior persons time before you can draw the interview to a close.
Then you get the 10 in for interview. First interview will basically involve repeating the questions asked on the telephone interview. Three or four won't be able to answer the _same_ questions they supposedly answered on the telephone, the rest you'll be able to start drilling a bit deeper.
You might then decide to call three or four back for a second interview. Now we'll get onto the logical reasoning etc. And It's amazing how many fail here. Reminds me of Feynman's story in Brazil where he had a student who could parrot all the formulas about reflection and refraction but couldn't link that to the fact that light reflecting off the sea must be polarized.
When you've finally eliminated the 4999 who are unsuitable, you discover that the one remaining person has decided to accept a job somewhere else. Almost always there will be nothing you can do about this. The really good people can't be coerced by more money because if that's what is most important to them they'd already have been chasing the super money jobs or contracting and instead are looking at things like commuting time, hours, holiday, what the workplace looks like etc.
I've had one disastrous jobs that I accepted. I managed to stick it for four weeks before I handed in my notice - even then the company wanted me to work two of my four weeks notice and wouldn't just let me go.
The next job I got offered after one interview I asked for a second interview. It was actually quite entertaining because there definitely was an effort on their part to sell the job to me. I did that job for nearly four years before I moved on. (Incidentally, for that job I actually crossed out several clauses in my employment contract that I couldn't sign - they would have been unenforceable anyway but I knew I was in a strong position and I didn't want any unnecessary complications later)
Tim.
So get up at 5:30, start work an hour early, leave an hour early.
By changing the definition of time you're defeating the point of having a clock. Why are people so set in their ways that things must happen at fixed numerical times? If you changed the clock so that 9am occured during darkness, would people still go to work at that time? It's utterly absurd.
You know, my employer has these strange things called employment contracts that includes the hours I'm expected to be at work. And trains for my commute have things called timetables.
And people going to work in the dark? That's absolutely standard for me for half the year. Coming home in the dark as well.
But rather than use up two hours of daylight commuting during the summer I like the clocks to change so that I only have to use up one of them. But they don't change early enough to allow that.
Tim.
you know, you could do what I do, start at 7:30 am and then I get to leave at 16:00... I get plenty of evening light to do things like sail my boat in the evenings.
Got into the office at 07:40 this morning which is fairly typical. Boy I wish I had a part time job. Leave at 4pm. The markets aren't even closed then. Yesterday I left early - 17:30.
Tim.
So just because you can't get your lazy ass out of bed in the morning means you should get more sunlight in the evening
Do I need to walk around like a zombie for days afterwards (again, twice a year!) just because YOU think nature has to adapt to your schedule?
Why don't you just practice what you preach and get up an hour later in the summer?
For me, getting up an hour earlier just means I get up in darkness until mid summer.
Tim.
A better solution, and one which businesses seem to be strangely adverse to, is starting work earlier, and knocking off earlier. Same benefits, with none of the pointless government intervention crap that DST requires, and no need to move the clocks around.
So we start with the stock market. On 30th March the London stock exchanges all open at 7am instead of 8am and close at 4:30pm instead of 5:30pm. So now all those people who work in the City need to travel to work an hour earlier. So all the trains have to be re timetabled. The gyms etc that people use before work now all have to open an hour earlier. The starbucks etc now have to open earlier to support those city workers on the way to work. The pub workers have to start their evening shift an hour earlier.
You really think it would be easier to change the time we do things rather than change the clocks?
And I've always wondered why the people who think the moving the clocks is such a problem and the people who like to have light in the evening occasionally when they get home are so unreasonable by not working an hour earlier don't practice what they preach and continue to work exactly the same daylight hours after the clock change. It really isn't difficult to get used to automatically translating times when you are doing it all the time. I do a lot of work with the US - week before last a US college arranged a meeting for 11am. I had just assumed he meant 4pm my time although he was actually in the UK and really meant 11am GMT.
Tim.
Tim.
No. It's called living in high latitudes.
In London, even with daylight saving, the sun rises at 04:45 for all of June.
Even now, it's light when I get up in the morning at 06:30 but it's dark before I leave work in the evening.
It's much harder to take advantage of daylight hours in the morning when you are working. I cycle - but I can't go out for half an hour in the morning because I need to be in the shower by 06:35 if I'm going to catch my train to work in the morning, which means I'll be getting at this time of year just around sunrise. Give me that hour in the evening instead and I can have a shower, get cleaned up, whatever, once the sun has gone down.
I'd like summer time in the winter and double summer time in the summer (or even triple summer time). On the longest day It's sunrise at 04:43 - and almost nobody is up and around at that time. But it's sunset at 21:22 and there are lots of people out and about at that time. And that's with summer time giving us an extra hour in the evening.
Several safety groups in the UK claim (I haven't seen the figures) that there's a spike in road traffic accidents to children when the clocks go back. Roughly, it goes from sunset at 17:45 to sunset at 16:45 across the UK.
Aberdeen, at the other end of the UK, gets sun from 04:12 to 22:08 on the longest day. On the shortest day it's 08:46 to 15:27.
Tim.
P.S. I'm 31 and I can hear 22 kHz just fine. My speakers can't reliably reproduce much higher than that,
You may be able to hear this but I'd be very surprised. It's almost certain that you're hearing harmonics that are being generated, probably by resonances in the speaker.
http://saunderslog.com/2006/06/12/the-mosquito-ring-tone-this-adult-can-hear-it/
I'm 37 and I can easily hear 16kHz. 17kHz I can just hear when using headphones and the volume cranked right up but I wouldn't notice it unless I'm listening for it. 18kHz I don't think I can hear at all but it's hard to be certain using these samples.
Tim.
Tim.
And to address any further arguments on this, try it!
With any multi-tape multi-head system, start out by viewing live tv. Pause for 3 min, do whatever you want with any tape/head. Then try and play back that recording with a 3 min lag behind realtime, keeping playing that 3 min lag with realtime for 12 hours without inturruption in viewing or recording. You should have been able to watch a 12hr marathon uninturrupted and have a 12hr recording without any breaks in the stream.
Can you do it? Didn't think so. Even the simple playback of live tv with a 3 min lag is impossible for a VCR to do.
It wasn't a tape machine. It was videodisk.
But this is EXACTLY what I did with two of these machines for Pioneer - AAIU so that a broadcaster could broadcast a Marathon without it being live but also without having to wait until the end to broadcast.
Because the Pioneer only had IIRC 48000 frames on a disk the maximum delay would have been 32 minutes (PAL) and at the end when you stopped you'd have at most the last two hours still recorded and not erased/overwritten.
Also, because I lost about 100 frames every time I switched from record to erase (it could have been about 15 frames but I was playing safe) the system could only have run for about 5 days.
Throw in more machines and these problems can be finessed. But at 100K (GBP) per machine (1990 prices) you make do with the minimum you can get away with.
Tim.
Could you watch a live stream and then pause it while continuing to record the live signal and resume playback while still recording and skip sections such as commercials until you caught back up with the live stream?
I think not.
Why would you think not?
The only thing you couldn't do if you were using it with one head recording and one head playing back would be to move the playback head from one point on the disk to another without the output going black for the up to about 15 frames to took to move the head.
If you needed seamless edits then you would have to use both heads in playback mode. In theory there would be little difficulty in building a machine with four heads so you could record onto a disk that hasn't been erased while doing seamless edits on the stuff that has been recorded but I don't believe such a machine ever existed.
Tim.
I posted in another comment. Pioneer had a professional magneto-optical video disk recorder that could do this back in the early/mid 90s (May have been much earlier but that was when I was using it)
It was a dual head machine that could be used for erase+record, record+playback, erase+playback or playback+playback. (there was only one video output, the playback+playback was so you could do realtime editing)
I used it in all four modes for various commercial endeavours that were used on live TV
They also had a player that could only be used in playback+playback at about half the cost.
Tim.
I believe it was GoVideo that had the two tape VCR. With this VCR, you could record one show and watch another previously recorded program. You could also start recording a show from the point you wanted to get up. This would allow you to continue watching from the point that you left off. In essence pausing.
Back in the early 90s Pioneer had a (professional) magneto-optical video disk recorder that had two heads.
You could use the two heads in multiple ways.
The standard way would be to use one head to erase and the other to record - this meant you could record on a disk that already had something on rather than have to wipe it first, or use both heads in playback which meant you could do realtime edits.
But it could be used in other ways - for example if you had a pre-erased disk you could use one head to record and the other to playback.
I built a system for Pioneer that, using two of these machines, basically allowed an up to one hour delay in any live video feed. IIRC it basically worked like this (I've got the code somewhere on various backups but I can't be bothered to go and find it now). Initially both disks were erased. When you started up it started recording on the first disk. When that disk was full it started recording on the second disk. When you wanted to start playback the second head on the first disk starting playing back. Once that reached the end of the disk you switched to the second disk to continue playback. Once the first disk was full and playback had to have started before it was full (hence why you were limited to IIRC 48000 frames delay) the record head returned to the start and started erasing the disk. Once the second disk was full the first disk was (almost completely) erased and so recording could start on the first disk again. (I lost something like 100 frames of space each time I recycled a disk - to allow time for the head to return to the start. Actually was only about 15 frames but I allowed plenty of leeway)
I also built a small bit of hardware that had a video sync separator connected to one of the RS232 status lines so the computer that was controlling the two disks and the video switcher could count exactly how many frames had been recorded and I didn't have to worry about clockdrift.
That was roughly 100K (GBP) of kit, but it was "off the shelf". Other than the video sync separator (which wasn't strictly necessary unless you planned to run this thing for a day or more where clock drift might start to matter) the only "novelty" in this over and above what was documented in the manual for the video disk recorder was using two of them to mean you could run the output delay for more than half an hour of input. It would also have been completely trivial to stop and start the playback provided the total delay didn't exceed the capacity of the disks available. Indeed, doing that with just one disk was even suggested in the marketing - the idea being that a sports match could be recorded continuously while highlights could be played back.
Tim.
True. I hadn't seen that bit. But it also says it runs from Palermo to Alexandria and seamewe3 doesn't go to Palermo.
Tim.
It's managed a link on the front page of news.bbc.co.uk
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7218008.stm
SEA-ME-WE4 and FLAG cables both broken.
Tim.
I think it's the SEA-ME-WE4 cable.
I think you deserved at least a funny for that.
;-)
Hopefully someone will come along and give it underrated to get your karma back
Tim.
Added to which, when you get too many emails you don't read them all which then means that occasionally you miss on.
Just looking at my emails received for today from midnight (GMT).
Received 112, read 35, replied to 12.
Tim.
I think what he means is, as they're in mortgages, which no-one wants to buy, they can't use them to pay back deposits.
Nobody wants to buy them (or lend against them) at their face value.
But if NR was in administration then they would be sold at the best value that could be got for them. It is inconceivable, even in the current market, that they wouldn't realize enough to pay off the NR depositors.
Even Baring depositors got paid off in full although some will have been very worried for about a week.
IIRC BCCI depositors got about 75% back eventually although it took years.
Tim.
It isn't tax money. The Bank of England is a central bank, a lender of last resort that can lend essentially unlimited sums in situations where it (and government oversight) deems appropriate. ... snip ...
The Bank did the right thing in extending credit (albeit at an uncompetitive rate), but the Government did the wrong thing in guaranteeing saver's deposits. They would probably have survived anyway and given the entire industry a harsh lesson in the realities of financing. As soon as they did that the nationalisation genie was out the bottle, and once it's out it is very difficult to put back.
Effectively it is taxpayers money. Either the money has come from government reserves or it has been "printed". Provided NR eventually repays this money then no harm will have been done, but if it defaults then the taxpayer will have lost this money, either in devaluation of the pound or loss of government reserves.
The government had to guarantee saver's deposits. Above everything else, it had to prevent a total loss of confidence and a run on all the banks. Savers money was never in any doubt in the Northern Rock - it had about 100bn of assets to guarantee something like 20bn of deposits (who will have had first call on the money raised from a firesale). So the run was not rational (anybody who was likely to suffer immediate cashflow problems maybe needed to extract a months worth of money), and could easily have spread to any/all of the other banks.
It is somewhat surprising that the government is doing as much as it is to preserve the (remaining) shareholder equity. Many of the "little people" who have shares got them via a windfall when the bank was privatized. On top of that they've received something like 200p/share in dividends over the years. Of course, they're now looking back at those heady days when their 500 shares were worth 6 grand and wishing they'd sold then (there's an approximately 9k annual CGT allowance so the majority would have had to pay no tax at all on the sale).
Tim.