People have got 8 channels out of the Spectrum's beeper. The 3.5MHz Z80 is fast enough to do pulse density modulation for this many channels (essentially the beeper circuit contains a low pass filter, which acts as a DAC, just like SA-CD works except it's not as refined).
Some of the Speccy beeper music demos are pretty astonishing.
The teacher who ran the school's computer lab in the 1980s sent me the floppy discs from the fileserver (dated 1989). We had a network of BBC Micros and Masters (which used Econet networking), and in those days had an SJ Research fileserver, which had a hard disc plus two floppy drives. A friend and I wrote a multi-user dungeon to run on econet.
So a couple of months back I received all the floppies, written in 1989 on the SJ fileserver, which used a filesystem called MDFS.
The discs all read perfectly. I used a USB stick to transfer the "SJFiler" program - downloaded it to my Mac, copied it to the USB pendrive, and connected the pendrive to my BBC Master (which has something called a "Datacentre" - which is an IDE interface plus USB interface for the BBC Micro/Master) and used SJFiler to read the discs. So I can get all the stuff back that I wrote in the mid to late 1980s for the Beeb (programs, data files etc.) It was quite amusing browsing some of the files:-)
I have to do a bit of work to recover all the data - the problem being that SJFiler doesn't make disc images, and ADFS (the native format supported by my BBC Master) can't store as many files in a single directory as MDFS can, and many of the directories on the MDFS floppies have far more files than the ADFS limit (I think it's something like 63 files per directory in ADFS).
I have a whole pile of DFS discs for the Beeb, and all of them still work, many are almost 30 years old. The 5.25 inch floppies are so much more reliable than the later 3.5in drives (particularly the floppies from 2000+ - often they would last one read cycle before failing).
Authoritarian != fascist. Soviet Russia was authoratarian, but not fascist. Iran has an authoratarian but not fascist government. Spain's current government is not fascist nor beats with a fascist heart, but it is one of the more authoratarian European governments, right up there with the British government.
Take a point called Z in the complex plane Let Z1 be Z squared plus C And Z2 is Z1 squared plus C And Z3 is Z2 squared plus C and so on If the series of Z's should always stay Close to Z and never trend away That point is in the Mandelbrot Set
What a load of BS. Dual stacks is not at all hard, it's easy, and transparent and just works.
I turned on IPv6 on at home and on the development network at work. Everything which does IPv6 autoconfigured itself, Windows PCs, Linux PCs, Macintoshes, even my damned iPhone autoconfigured an IPv6 address, and it all *works*. IPv4 only services work, and IPv6 services work. It's easy. Both "legacy" IPv4 is supported and works, and the new IPv6 works.
The only trouble is 6to4 sucks, you tend to get lots of connectivity problems with the real IPv6 internet. A tunnel broker tends to be much more reliable than 6to4 (and usually the tunnel broker's end point is the same place as the 6to4 traffic goes to).
The address space for network prefixes alone is 4 billion times more than the number of IP addresses available on the IPv4 internet (the basic network prefix size of a/64 - 64 bits). Given that the address is 128 bits long, each subnet alone is 4 billion times the size of the entire IPv4 internet. 128 bits makes for a very very large number.
The stupid thing about the charges that if you're on (say) O2 UK and go to Ireland and use O2 in Ireland - the same company! - you get hit with roaming charges. Or where one company owns another, for example Telefonica owned O2, but you would be hit with huge roaming charges to use the Telefonica network even though they owned O2.
I remember a home made gun turret made by a student that was covered by Slashdot a few years ago, the guy who made it used his brother as a test subject. The turret carried a toy BB gun...still looked like it hurt when it nailed his brother quite comprehensively.
Wish I could find a link. IIRC it used a cheap webcam and an image processing library to recognise a human form, and just pointed the gun that way and started firing.
Worse still it made Starcraft 2 non-functional. I tried to have a quick game of SC2 last night, and as far as I could get was a frozen log-in screen and no way to either proceed or exit.
I ended up having to ssh into my machine and kill -9 the Stacraft 2 process to get back to the desktop.
FTP ought to be deprecated already (and years ago). sftp/scp has been much better for authenticated users, and has existed for a while now, and has things like chrooted sftp/scp only implementations if you need to keep users separated. It has clients available on pretty much all operating systems. HTTP is better for anonymous users. FTP with the requirement for two connections to be opened (one on a random port) adds complexity to firewalls.
No, these leaks do show important information, not just diplomatic tittle tattle.
It shows for example: - Iran's Arab neigbours wanted the US to bomb Iran to stop their nuclear programme. - The United States put pressure on Spanish judges to avoid prosecutions to do with the US's use of torture. - It shows the systematic disdain (from the top to the bottom of the US government and its representitives) for the very principles that the US continually crows about, and says other nations should follow.
It's not all about the USA: - It shows worrying and close and corrupt links between an EU leader (Berlusconi) and Putin and the Russian mafia.
It shows plenty of things our governments are saying in public, only to do the opposite in private.
Because they just work, and don't have the annoyances of Windows laptops. They look nice, too. And they are durable.
My current laptop is a PowerBook (12in) that I bought in 2004, it's over 6 years old and it's still my everyday laptop, it's been all around the world with me and never mollycoddled (it just gets stuffed in my backpack). It's been dropped several times (last time a couple of weeks ago onto a concrete floor from about 3 feet, that one actually put a dent in the case as it landed right on a corner), and it still works. I still get over an hour of battery life from the 6 1/2 year old battery pack.
My colleagues with similar spec PC laptops don't seem to keep them for more than two and a half years. So they end up spending as much, if not more.
And much of the problem is that the Germans and French ran the euro for their own benefit, with interest rates wholly inappropriate for the periphery (especially Spain) resulting in the enormous housing bubble they had there which has brought their economy crashing down. If the euro had been run for the benefit of all European countries, perhaps the problems wouldn't have been so severe.
So it's quite right the Germans and French have to pay, after all they reaped the benefits of the euro's monetary policies being run for their benefit during the good years.
The Windows Phone 7 sold 40,000 units on its first day, according to TFA.
By contrast, the original iPhone sold (on June 29th/June 30th 2007 - I can't find the "first day" sales figures, just the first quarter which happens to only be the first two days of the 1st gen iPhone's sales) 270,000 units. If sales were evenly distributed amongst both days, that would mean first day sales of 135,000 units.
It must be a strange world where selling 135,000 (more than 3 times as many) is "not much better" than 40,000 units.
Lack of a socket library in a communications device!? That, to my mind is unforgivable.
Even my Sinclair ZX Spectrum has a socket library. For a "modern security device" that connects to the Internet to not have a socket API leaves me, well, speechless.
While the occasional harrassment of some unfortunate tourist taking a photo of the Gherkin has been reported, it's going to be news to a *lot* of people that you need a license to take "professional" phots.
And there's also an *awful* lot of waffle in these types of things, too.
When I was a first year student, one thing I had to do on my degree course was Industrial Socieology. A group of us were sitting around in one of the computer rooms one evening, having been given an assignment for this course, and we were having a bit of a group-moan about the awful paper we had been forced to read first. The first paragraph of this tortured and abused the English language as far as it would go: a single run-on sentence full of long obscure words and we decided the authors of these ghastly things did it just to sound "academic" and "learned" when in fact the whole damned thing was completely devoid of actual content.
So what we did is found some English "obfuscation" program on the net (I don't remember what it was called, this was a while ago, but think of one of those "Jivespeak" things except it turns what you wrote into "academicspeak") and turned our essays, by means of this program (and a little, but not a lot, of correction of the obvious grammatical problems the program introduced), to convert all our essays into "Sociologyspeak".
A+ grades all round. What we handed in looked pretty unintelligible.
Some years later I got around to reading "Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman". I was most amused to see that Richard Feynman had made exactly the same observation as we had (he explained he read this mountain of impenetrable prose which basically translated to "People listen to the radio. People read books", and that was about it). I felt vindicated:-)
Perhaps the new motto ought to be: Land of the sheep, home of the scared?
US paranoia has reached an incredible level. Yesterday I was in Madrid Barajas airport to travel to Liverpool, and there were automatic announcements advising passengers should turn up at the gate for US-bound flights an hour and a half before the boarding time of the aircraft to make it though enhanced security. If you have luggage to check I suspect you now have to turn up at the airport 3.5 to 4 hours before the actual departure time for a US bound flight.
Slashdot Mirror
People have got 8 channels out of the Spectrum's beeper. The 3.5MHz Z80 is fast enough to do pulse density modulation for this many channels (essentially the beeper circuit contains a low pass filter, which acts as a DAC, just like SA-CD works except it's not as refined).
Some of the Speccy beeper music demos are pretty astonishing.
There are usually several 5.25in drives for sale on ebay. There are also vintage computing people around who can probably help you.
The teacher who ran the school's computer lab in the 1980s sent me the floppy discs from the fileserver (dated 1989). We had a network of BBC Micros and Masters (which used Econet networking), and in those days had an SJ Research fileserver, which had a hard disc plus two floppy drives. A friend and I wrote a multi-user dungeon to run on econet.
So a couple of months back I received all the floppies, written in 1989 on the SJ fileserver, which used a filesystem called MDFS.
The discs all read perfectly. I used a USB stick to transfer the "SJFiler" program - downloaded it to my Mac, copied it to the USB pendrive, and connected the pendrive to my BBC Master (which has something called a "Datacentre" - which is an IDE interface plus USB interface for the BBC Micro/Master) and used SJFiler to read the discs. So I can get all the stuff back that I wrote in the mid to late 1980s for the Beeb (programs, data files etc.) It was quite amusing browsing some of the files :-)
I have to do a bit of work to recover all the data - the problem being that SJFiler doesn't make disc images, and ADFS (the native format supported by my BBC Master) can't store as many files in a single directory as MDFS can, and many of the directories on the MDFS floppies have far more files than the ADFS limit (I think it's something like 63 files per directory in ADFS).
I have a whole pile of DFS discs for the Beeb, and all of them still work, many are almost 30 years old. The 5.25 inch floppies are so much more reliable than the later 3.5in drives (particularly the floppies from 2000+ - often they would last one read cycle before failing).
ARM *already is a dominant brand*. ARM outships all other processor architectures (including x86) put together already.
Authoritarian != fascist. Soviet Russia was authoratarian, but not fascist. Iran has an authoratarian but not fascist government. Spain's current government is not fascist nor beats with a fascist heart, but it is one of the more authoratarian European governments, right up there with the British government.
Take a point called Z in the complex plane
Let Z1 be Z squared plus C
And Z2 is Z1 squared plus C
And Z3 is Z2 squared plus C and so on
If the series of Z's should always stay
Close to Z and never trend away
That point is in the Mandelbrot Set
http://bradleymonton.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/mandelbrot.jpg
Tell me that's not beautiful.
What a load of BS. Dual stacks is not at all hard, it's easy, and transparent and just works.
I turned on IPv6 on at home and on the development network at work. Everything which does IPv6 autoconfigured itself, Windows PCs, Linux PCs, Macintoshes, even my damned iPhone autoconfigured an IPv6 address, and it all *works*. IPv4 only services work, and IPv6 services work. It's easy. Both "legacy" IPv4 is supported and works, and the new IPv6 works.
Facebook is on IPv6. So is Google.
Actually, it's kind of embarrassing that Facebook is on the IPv6 internet before Slashdot.
The only trouble is 6to4 sucks, you tend to get lots of connectivity problems with the real IPv6 internet. A tunnel broker tends to be much more reliable than 6to4 (and usually the tunnel broker's end point is the same place as the 6to4 traffic goes to).
The address space for network prefixes alone is 4 billion times more than the number of IP addresses available on the IPv4 internet (the basic network prefix size of a /64 - 64 bits). Given that the address is 128 bits long, each subnet alone is 4 billion times the size of the entire IPv4 internet. 128 bits makes for a very very large number.
The stupid thing about the charges that if you're on (say) O2 UK and go to Ireland and use O2 in Ireland - the same company! - you get hit with roaming charges. Or where one company owns another, for example Telefonica owned O2, but you would be hit with huge roaming charges to use the Telefonica network even though they owned O2.
Regional weather is not global climate.
I remember a home made gun turret made by a student that was covered by Slashdot a few years ago, the guy who made it used his brother as a test subject. The turret carried a toy BB gun...still looked like it hurt when it nailed his brother quite comprehensively.
Wish I could find a link. IIRC it used a cheap webcam and an image processing library to recognise a human form, and just pointed the gun that way and started firing.
Worse still it made Starcraft 2 non-functional. I tried to have a quick game of SC2 last night, and as far as I could get was a frozen log-in screen and no way to either proceed or exit.
I ended up having to ssh into my machine and kill -9 the Stacraft 2 process to get back to the desktop.
It's also kind of embarrassing that Facebook is on the IPv6 internet before Slashdot...
FTP ought to be deprecated already (and years ago). sftp/scp has been much better for authenticated users, and has existed for a while now, and has things like chrooted sftp/scp only implementations if you need to keep users separated. It has clients available on pretty much all operating systems. HTTP is better for anonymous users. FTP with the requirement for two connections to be opened (one on a random port) adds complexity to firewalls.
No, these leaks do show important information, not just diplomatic tittle tattle.
It shows for example:
- Iran's Arab neigbours wanted the US to bomb Iran to stop their nuclear programme.
- The United States put pressure on Spanish judges to avoid prosecutions to do with the US's use of torture.
- It shows the systematic disdain (from the top to the bottom of the US government and its representitives) for the very principles that the US continually crows about, and says other nations should follow.
It's not all about the USA:
- It shows worrying and close and corrupt links between an EU leader (Berlusconi) and Putin and the Russian mafia.
It shows plenty of things our governments are saying in public, only to do the opposite in private.
Because they just work, and don't have the annoyances of Windows laptops. They look nice, too. And they are durable.
My current laptop is a PowerBook (12in) that I bought in 2004, it's over 6 years old and it's still my everyday laptop, it's been all around the world with me and never mollycoddled (it just gets stuffed in my backpack). It's been dropped several times (last time a couple of weeks ago onto a concrete floor from about 3 feet, that one actually put a dent in the case as it landed right on a corner), and it still works. I still get over an hour of battery life from the 6 1/2 year old battery pack.
My colleagues with similar spec PC laptops don't seem to keep them for more than two and a half years. So they end up spending as much, if not more.
And much of the problem is that the Germans and French ran the euro for their own benefit, with interest rates wholly inappropriate for the periphery (especially Spain) resulting in the enormous housing bubble they had there which has brought their economy crashing down. If the euro had been run for the benefit of all European countries, perhaps the problems wouldn't have been so severe.
So it's quite right the Germans and French have to pay, after all they reaped the benefits of the euro's monetary policies being run for their benefit during the good years.
Oh really?
The Windows Phone 7 sold 40,000 units on its first day, according to TFA.
By contrast, the original iPhone sold (on June 29th/June 30th 2007 - I can't find the "first day" sales figures, just the first quarter which happens to only be the first two days of the 1st gen iPhone's sales) 270,000 units. If sales were evenly distributed amongst both days, that would mean first day sales of 135,000 units.
It must be a strange world where selling 135,000 (more than 3 times as many) is "not much better" than 40,000 units.
Lack of a socket library in a communications device!? That, to my mind is unforgivable.
Even my Sinclair ZX Spectrum has a socket library. For a "modern security device" that connects to the Internet to not have a socket API leaves me, well, speechless.
[citation needed]
While the occasional harrassment of some unfortunate tourist taking a photo of the Gherkin has been reported, it's going to be news to a *lot* of people that you need a license to take "professional" phots.
Less than 25% of IBM offices are in the United States. Or do you expect IBM to fill all its foreign offices and subsidiaries with US employees?
And there's also an *awful* lot of waffle in these types of things, too.
When I was a first year student, one thing I had to do on my degree course was Industrial Socieology. A group of us were sitting around in one of the computer rooms one evening, having been given an assignment for this course, and we were having a bit of a group-moan about the awful paper we had been forced to read first. The first paragraph of this tortured and abused the English language as far as it would go: a single run-on sentence full of long obscure words and we decided the authors of these ghastly things did it just to sound "academic" and "learned" when in fact the whole damned thing was completely devoid of actual content.
So what we did is found some English "obfuscation" program on the net (I don't remember what it was called, this was a while ago, but think of one of those "Jivespeak" things except it turns what you wrote into "academicspeak") and turned our essays, by means of this program (and a little, but not a lot, of correction of the obvious grammatical problems the program introduced), to convert all our essays into "Sociologyspeak".
A+ grades all round. What we handed in looked pretty unintelligible.
Some years later I got around to reading "Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman". I was most amused to see that Richard Feynman had made exactly the same observation as we had (he explained he read this mountain of impenetrable prose which basically translated to "People listen to the radio. People read books", and that was about it). I felt vindicated :-)
Perhaps the new motto ought to be: Land of the sheep, home of the scared?
US paranoia has reached an incredible level. Yesterday I was in Madrid Barajas airport to travel to Liverpool, and there were automatic announcements advising passengers should turn up at the gate for US-bound flights an hour and a half before the boarding time of the aircraft to make it though enhanced security. If you have luggage to check I suspect you now have to turn up at the airport 3.5 to 4 hours before the actual departure time for a US bound flight.