You probably don't remember what it was like when BT was still the GPO. If it had never been privatised, we would probably still have Strowger and crossbar telephone exchanges as the prevailing telecoms tech running today (as it was, they lasted until the 1990s - there wasn't a serious drive to go digital until BT was privatised), and a months long waiting list if you wanted a new phone line (and then it'd be supplied with a DACS box and not even usable with a 2400 bps modem let alone 56k or ADSL), and you would have to take whatever kind of phone the GPO had, not a phone of your choice...and it would be hardwired into the wall not socketed.
Just look at other places with state owned telcos - laws being enacted to ban things like VoIP.
Microsoft isn't trying to merge with Yahoo, they are trying to take Yahoo over. A bit like Boeing did to McDonnell Douglas - buy them out and then shut them down. The value in buying Yahoo is to eliminate a competitor in the search arena, eat their marketshare, and go after their holy grail which is to next destroy Google.
The irony is, of course, is the ISPs all put out flashy ads about how broadband allows you to get music and video.
But as soon as people do just what the service was explicitly advertised to do...the ISPs all start bleating.
I don't have any sympathy for them. They did it to themselves - they set the expectation you could use broadband to watch video, why are they acting all surprised when people do just that?
Competitors complained that offering internet and media solutions with the operating system harmed competition in the marketplace (despite other operating systems such as Mac OS X and Linux apparently being immune from such criticism).
Of course they are immune from this criticism - the criticism was aimed at a monopoly. Microsoft has a defacto monopoly, Apple and Linux distributions do not. Indeed, Linux distros are the very antithesis of a monopoly.
So of course they were immune from this criticism, because they are not monopolies!
Consumer level video cameras tend to also have Firewire ports for pulling off the video. Except it may be disguised as iLink, but that's just the Sony name for Firewire.
My relatively inexpensive video camera only has Firewire for getting video off of it.
Monochromatic light (and therefore vision) is quite acceptable for street lighting though. We don't need to be able to perceive colours for utility lighting at night, there just needs to be sufficient illumination to see where you're going.
Of course, astronomers prefer low pressure sodium, it's easy to filter. Broad spectrum will put the final nail in the coffin of back yard astronomy unless you live somewhere remote.
It's not an improvement in efficiency, it's a significant regression in efficiency. Low pressure sodium lamps, available for decades and used for streetlighting, is 180 watts per lumen - 40W/lumen better than this new lamp. Replacing low pressure sodium lights with this would significantly increase streetlighting energy usage.
Sure you could. Use a torch (flashlight if you are in the US). I have an insanely bright one, with a 3 watt Luxeon power illuminator, which fits in my pocket quite handily. It has a clip so it also can mount on my bike, and I routinely ride on unlit roads at night with this light. It's bright enough that oncoming drivers dip their headlights, thinking I'm a motorcycle.
Thing is they aren't more efficient than streetlights. Low pressure sodium, available for decades, is 180 lumens/watt; 40 lumens/watt better than these. If low pressure sodium streetlights are replaced by these it will *decrease* efficiency and *increase* pollution.
Astronomers prefer low pressure sodium too since they can be easily filtered. Full spectrum lights will be the bane of astronomy.
Funnily enough, our game was shamelessly based on Shades, too. Not the location data, that was all our own work, but the general hack-and-slash character of the game, and the levels (I copied the levels and scores pretty much verbatim from Shades). There were some other parts rather shamelessly borrowed from Shades - while we didn't have a castle or Mad King's Room or anything like that, we did have the Shifting Sands with a rusty longsword hidden within, and items that were answers to puzzles.
I've actually since got back in touch with the head of computing (who is still the head of computing). He still has the floppies our MUD is saved on, in SJ Research format DD discs. At some point I need to go there with my hard disc equipped BBC Micro and a DD disc drive, and do a bitwise copy of those discs.
Not weird in the slightest. If the rows of pixels were stacked atop each other in 8x8 cells, it made it much faster to render text in graphics mode, and only made a trivial impact on graphics speed. If it was a simple raster, you would have to compute, when building up each character, how many bytes wide each scan row was, then add that many to the memory address pointer. If you stack the rows of 8 on top of each other, you only have to increment the memory address pointer by 1 to write the next line of bits making up the character.
The Sinclair Spectrum at first blush had a far stranger frame buffer layout. Bytes were arranged along the scanline - but when you came to the end of the scanline, the next address would actually be 8 rows lower. However, if you examine the Spectrum scheme more closely with knowledge of how 16 bit pointers are formed on the Z80 CPU, it makes sense: you can move one row left or right by incrementing/decrementing the low half of the register pair making up the screen pointer, and move up/down by incrementing or decrementing the high half of the register pair.
It was definitely the rich kids who had the Beebs at home. But I got to use this superb machine back in the day at least at school, and we had econet!
At home, I had a Speccy.
I now have 6 Spectrums and 2 BBC Micros. They are both awesome in their own ways - the Spectrum did an awful lot with very little, and the BBC was very well engineered.
Small gas turbines might be smooth, but efficient they are most definitely NOT. Reciprocating engines are miles ahead of turbines in terms of thermodynamic efficiency.
Gas turbines only start getting efficient when you're talking about a Rolls-Royce Trent 700 or a GE90.
The one we wrote was on similar lines, except the admin (me!) was immortal and had infinite mana. Zap was only available to wizards, everyone else had to make do with KILL and hope for the best.
You could summon other players if you had enough mana. The higher your level the more likely the spell was to succeed. However, there was a non zero chance of the summon backfiring in some way. Indeed, most spells could backfire, but the more powerful spells tended to backfire in nastier ways.
One of the monsters (mobiles) could summon, and would occasionally attempt to summon and slay a player. It didn't do it very often.
*PROT would stop anyone else causing mischief to your econet station (including poking stuff into your keyboard, reading the screen, remote rebooting the computer etc.) Most of us had *PROT as the first line of our login scripts, as well as *FX 201,1 which made sure memory was cleared out when you pressed break.
The SJ Research fileservers had a better way of managing quota (other users couldn't steal your quota in the way you say). Still had a few drawbacks and you could still have some mischief with it, though.
All of us called it the Beeb. I didn't know anyone who called it a 'BBC' in casual conversation. Typically, Beeb meant a model B. A BBC Master was just known as a 'Master'.
Plenty of working BBC Micros exist. They are still fun to play with, I have two. If you're into hobby electronics, a BBC is a much better machine to have around than a PC, because the user port and 1MHz bus is so much trivially easier to hook a breadboard up to for some experiments than a PCI slot or USB port.
Actually, most games on all plaforms were pretty crap if the truth be known - which is a constant that continues to this very day.
There were many excellent games for the BBC Micro. Many were also available for other platforms. My favorites are Thrust (multi platform, but runs by far the smoothest on the Beeb), of course Elite (again, smoothest on the BBC), Starship Command (BBC only), Chuckie Egg (pretty much identical on all platforms, very playable platformer), Zalaga (runs as fast and smooth as the arcade game it was taken from, Galaga), Castle Quest (BBC only), Revs (BBC only) - about the only decent race driving game on any 8 bit platform.
While the frame buffer did tend to eat up space, much of this could be recovered on game launch - since you were no longer using the BASIC ROM, you could reclaim some of the zero page, BASIC workspace, and if you weren't going to use the disc drive again, you could reclaim a lot of space in lower RAM.
The BBC for us was an exciting machine. We had an Econet network of them, with the SJ Research fileserver.
We wrote a MUD. It became so popular that we were restricted to 3 days a week only! Things like the inline assembler, and the best BASIC for its day made it fun to write. Other great things that the BBC had was that all the system calls were vectored through RAM, so you could easily add your own extensions. Oh, the mischief I used to have with that feature. It was so funny to watch the kid next to me get random spelling mistakes because a little hook I wrote was occasionally adding an extra keystroke here or there:-)
We couldn't afford a Beeb at home, I too had a Spectrum, and learned Z80 asm on that machine. The Spectrum was also fun, but in different ways. I now own 6 Spectrums (two rubber 48K, a plus, a toast rack 128K, an Amstrad made +3, and a bare Issue 4S 48k motherboard awaiting repairs) and 2 BBC Micros (one tricked out with sideways RAM, an internal IDE hard disc, adfs formatted, and a double density disc controller, the other rather more standard with just the intel single density disc controller).
I have two BBC Micros (one with an internal IDE hard disc and double density floppy controller, sideways RAM banks, and another fairly standard one with the Intel single density disc controller).
Back 'in the day', a friend and I wrote a MUD (multi user dungeon) for the BBC Micro, on Econet, since our school had quite a few of them connected together via econet.
It was an ungodly mish-mash of 6502 asm and BBC BASIC. It's a wonder that it worked at all, let alone reasonably well. Since we couldn't get the game into one machine, we made it client/server before either of us had actually heard the term client/server! The server was an almost unused Torch BBC compatible machine, donated to the school - no one wanted to use it because it had a rather odd keyboard layout and a few other non-standard things, but otherwise, worked like a BBC Micro and had a Z80 second processor (unused by our server). Clients displayed things like location descriptions, item descriptions etc. while the server kept track of game state.
Some things were also peer-to-peer, if a player 'shouted' a message, it went peer-to-peer. But if a player used 'tell' to privately tell someone else something, it was routed via the server which only sent it to the right econet station. The server kept track of what was allowed, so people couldn't cheat by loading a different exits file into the client.
We could only run it three days a week because it was pretty popular. We were only allowed to run it at all because the head of computing obviously saw that we were learning from the experience of writing and maintaining the monstrosity we had created. It taught me many valuable lessons about software that communicates.
I only had a Spectrum at home (couldn't afford a Beeb!), but it's another 8 bitter I really like. I have six of those now, and I'm designing an ethernet card for the Speccy. Once the Spectrum one's done, I'll do the same for the Beeb (which should be electronically far simpler, because the BBC has much better support for adding new ROMs, and a proper formal way of telling the MOS that you've done it).
Slashdot is overtly *nix-type OS oriented; it was never supposed to be a Windows fansite and never will be. If you want to have a similar site for Windows, you ought to go and start Cee Colon Backslash Greaterthan.
Guess what, when I graduated there was a downturn in the tech industry. The UK had an unemployment rate over twice as high as it is now, and I had student loans, too - maintenance grants had been abolished by the time I went to uni except if your family was broke. (I did get a grant in my 4th year, but both my parents were unemployed at the time so could not provide support. And I agree, grants for tuition should never have been abolished). I'm not right wing, nor is my knee jerking. But we've all been there, and most of us didn't whine about it. People graduating ten years before me were going into a country with 3.5 million unemployed and inflation heading towards 10%, and interest rates that peaked at 15%, too - and people ten years prior to that were graduating in an environment of 3 day weeks, the power being turned off at 8pm, and the winter of discontent. The current economic conditions are a tempest in a teacup compared to what people had to put up with from about 1970 to 1987.
Whatever industry you want to go into you'll find the same thing - you have to start at the bottom and work your way up because you don't have any experience yet. The only way of avoiding that is if you strike it lucky with a business idea you can capitalize on. If you want to be an employee, it doesn't matter what you do - you will start on shit wages because well, you don't know shit yet. IT generally isn't too bad on the shitty starting wage scale. A friend of mine was in aircraft engineering and started on half of what the typical IT graduate started on, so we actually have it quite easy by comparison to some other skilled trades.
I started on moderately poor wages, but instead of bitching about it I got some experience and a track record of doing good work, then I could command a good salary. Unless you're an entrepeneur you'll have to do the same thing. It has nothing to do with the NASDAQ. You are to blame for your own bitchiness.
While it may not be your fault, until you get a few years experience you just can't command high wages in ANY industry, from plumbing, to maintaining aircraft, to IT. _All_ of us had to do our apprenticeship some way or other. If you are bitter about it you'll be bitter about it whatever you go into and you'll just make yourself into an unpleasant human being if you just tear yourself up about not hitting a pot of gold straight out of uni. It doesn't happen, it never has happened and never will happen, except for the very few who manage to strike a business idea that works spectacularly well, and if you do, good luck to you.
Slashdot Mirror
You probably don't remember what it was like when BT was still the GPO. If it had never been privatised, we would probably still have Strowger and crossbar telephone exchanges as the prevailing telecoms tech running today (as it was, they lasted until the 1990s - there wasn't a serious drive to go digital until BT was privatised), and a months long waiting list if you wanted a new phone line (and then it'd be supplied with a DACS box and not even usable with a 2400 bps modem let alone 56k or ADSL), and you would have to take whatever kind of phone the GPO had, not a phone of your choice...and it would be hardwired into the wall not socketed.
Just look at other places with state owned telcos - laws being enacted to ban things like VoIP.
Microsoft isn't trying to merge with Yahoo, they are trying to take Yahoo over. A bit like Boeing did to McDonnell Douglas - buy them out and then shut them down. The value in buying Yahoo is to eliminate a competitor in the search arena, eat their marketshare, and go after their holy grail which is to next destroy Google.
The irony is, of course, is the ISPs all put out flashy ads about how broadband allows you to get music and video.
But as soon as people do just what the service was explicitly advertised to do...the ISPs all start bleating.
I don't have any sympathy for them. They did it to themselves - they set the expectation you could use broadband to watch video, why are they acting all surprised when people do just that?
Of course they are immune from this criticism - the criticism was aimed at a monopoly. Microsoft has a defacto monopoly, Apple and Linux distributions do not. Indeed, Linux distros are the very antithesis of a monopoly.
So of course they were immune from this criticism, because they are not monopolies!
Consumer level video cameras tend to also have Firewire ports for pulling off the video. Except it may be disguised as iLink, but that's just the Sony name for Firewire.
My relatively inexpensive video camera only has Firewire for getting video off of it.
The trouble is, in "real life", you don't respawn when you get shot.
Monochromatic light (and therefore vision) is quite acceptable for street lighting though. We don't need to be able to perceive colours for utility lighting at night, there just needs to be sufficient illumination to see where you're going.
Of course, astronomers prefer low pressure sodium, it's easy to filter. Broad spectrum will put the final nail in the coffin of back yard astronomy unless you live somewhere remote.
It's not an improvement in efficiency, it's a significant regression in efficiency. Low pressure sodium lamps, available for decades and used for streetlighting, is 180 watts per lumen - 40W/lumen better than this new lamp. Replacing low pressure sodium lights with this would significantly increase streetlighting energy usage.
Sure you could. Use a torch (flashlight if you are in the US). I have an insanely bright one, with a 3 watt Luxeon power illuminator, which fits in my pocket quite handily. It has a clip so it also can mount on my bike, and I routinely ride on unlit roads at night with this light. It's bright enough that oncoming drivers dip their headlights, thinking I'm a motorcycle.
Thing is they aren't more efficient than streetlights. Low pressure sodium, available for decades, is 180 lumens/watt; 40 lumens/watt better than these. If low pressure sodium streetlights are replaced by these it will *decrease* efficiency and *increase* pollution.
Astronomers prefer low pressure sodium too since they can be easily filtered. Full spectrum lights will be the bane of astronomy.
No, I didn't go there.
Funnily enough, our game was shamelessly based on Shades, too. Not the location data, that was all our own work, but the general hack-and-slash character of the game, and the levels (I copied the levels and scores pretty much verbatim from Shades). There were some other parts rather shamelessly borrowed from Shades - while we didn't have a castle or Mad King's Room or anything like that, we did have the Shifting Sands with a rusty longsword hidden within, and items that were answers to puzzles.
I've actually since got back in touch with the head of computing (who is still the head of computing). He still has the floppies our MUD is saved on, in SJ Research format DD discs. At some point I need to go there with my hard disc equipped BBC Micro and a DD disc drive, and do a bitwise copy of those discs.
Not weird in the slightest. If the rows of pixels were stacked atop each other in 8x8 cells, it made it much faster to render text in graphics mode, and only made a trivial impact on graphics speed. If it was a simple raster, you would have to compute, when building up each character, how many bytes wide each scan row was, then add that many to the memory address pointer. If you stack the rows of 8 on top of each other, you only have to increment the memory address pointer by 1 to write the next line of bits making up the character.
The Sinclair Spectrum at first blush had a far stranger frame buffer layout. Bytes were arranged along the scanline - but when you came to the end of the scanline, the next address would actually be 8 rows lower. However, if you examine the Spectrum scheme more closely with knowledge of how 16 bit pointers are formed on the Z80 CPU, it makes sense: you can move one row left or right by incrementing/decrementing the low half of the register pair making up the screen pointer, and move up/down by incrementing or decrementing the high half of the register pair.
It was definitely the rich kids who had the Beebs at home. But I got to use this superb machine back in the day at least at school, and we had econet!
At home, I had a Speccy.
I now have 6 Spectrums and 2 BBC Micros. They are both awesome in their own ways - the Spectrum did an awful lot with very little, and the BBC was very well engineered.
How can the Aptera even qualify? It doesn't have enough wheels (it needs 4 or more, I count only three).
Small gas turbines might be smooth, but efficient they are most definitely NOT. Reciprocating engines are miles ahead of turbines in terms of thermodynamic efficiency.
Gas turbines only start getting efficient when you're talking about a Rolls-Royce Trent 700 or a GE90.
The one we wrote was on similar lines, except the admin (me!) was immortal and had infinite mana. Zap was only available to wizards, everyone else had to make do with KILL and hope for the best.
You could summon other players if you had enough mana. The higher your level the more likely the spell was to succeed. However, there was a non zero chance of the summon backfiring in some way. Indeed, most spells could backfire, but the more powerful spells tended to backfire in nastier ways.
One of the monsters (mobiles) could summon, and would occasionally attempt to summon and slay a player. It didn't do it very often.
I guess no one told you about *PROT
*PROT would stop anyone else causing mischief to your econet station (including poking stuff into your keyboard, reading the screen, remote rebooting the computer etc.) Most of us had *PROT as the first line of our login scripts, as well as *FX 201,1 which made sure memory was cleared out when you pressed break.
The SJ Research fileservers had a better way of managing quota (other users couldn't steal your quota in the way you say). Still had a few drawbacks and you could still have some mischief with it, though.
All of us called it the Beeb. I didn't know anyone who called it a 'BBC' in casual conversation. Typically, Beeb meant a model B. A BBC Master was just known as a 'Master'.
Plenty of working BBC Micros exist. They are still fun to play with, I have two. If you're into hobby electronics, a BBC is a much better machine to have around than a PC, because the user port and 1MHz bus is so much trivially easier to hook a breadboard up to for some experiments than a PCI slot or USB port.
Actually, most games on all plaforms were pretty crap if the truth be known - which is a constant that continues to this very day.
There were many excellent games for the BBC Micro. Many were also available for other platforms. My favorites are Thrust (multi platform, but runs by far the smoothest on the Beeb), of course Elite (again, smoothest on the BBC), Starship Command (BBC only), Chuckie Egg (pretty much identical on all platforms, very playable platformer), Zalaga (runs as fast and smooth as the arcade game it was taken from, Galaga), Castle Quest (BBC only), Revs (BBC only) - about the only decent race driving game on any 8 bit platform.
While the frame buffer did tend to eat up space, much of this could be recovered on game launch - since you were no longer using the BASIC ROM, you could reclaim some of the zero page, BASIC workspace, and if you weren't going to use the disc drive again, you could reclaim a lot of space in lower RAM.
That was just an issue with your teachers!
:-)
The BBC for us was an exciting machine. We had an Econet network of them, with the SJ Research fileserver.
We wrote a MUD. It became so popular that we were restricted to 3 days a week only! Things like the inline assembler, and the best BASIC for its day made it fun to write. Other great things that the BBC had was that all the system calls were vectored through RAM, so you could easily add your own extensions. Oh, the mischief I used to have with that feature. It was so funny to watch the kid next to me get random spelling mistakes because a little hook I wrote was occasionally adding an extra keystroke here or there
We couldn't afford a Beeb at home, I too had a Spectrum, and learned Z80 asm on that machine. The Spectrum was also fun, but in different ways. I now own 6 Spectrums (two rubber 48K, a plus, a toast rack 128K, an Amstrad made +3, and a bare Issue 4S 48k motherboard awaiting repairs) and 2 BBC Micros (one tricked out with sideways RAM, an internal IDE hard disc, adfs formatted, and a double density disc controller, the other rather more standard with just the intel single density disc controller).
I have two BBC Micros (one with an internal IDE hard disc and double density floppy controller, sideways RAM banks, and another fairly standard one with the Intel single density disc controller).
Back 'in the day', a friend and I wrote a MUD (multi user dungeon) for the BBC Micro, on Econet, since our school had quite a few of them connected together via econet.
It was an ungodly mish-mash of 6502 asm and BBC BASIC. It's a wonder that it worked at all, let alone reasonably well. Since we couldn't get the game into one machine, we made it client/server before either of us had actually heard the term client/server! The server was an almost unused Torch BBC compatible machine, donated to the school - no one wanted to use it because it had a rather odd keyboard layout and a few other non-standard things, but otherwise, worked like a BBC Micro and had a Z80 second processor (unused by our server). Clients displayed things like location descriptions, item descriptions etc. while the server kept track of game state.
Some things were also peer-to-peer, if a player 'shouted' a message, it went peer-to-peer. But if a player used 'tell' to privately tell someone else something, it was routed via the server which only sent it to the right econet station. The server kept track of what was allowed, so people couldn't cheat by loading a different exits file into the client.
We could only run it three days a week because it was pretty popular. We were only allowed to run it at all because the head of computing obviously saw that we were learning from the experience of writing and maintaining the monstrosity we had created. It taught me many valuable lessons about software that communicates.
I only had a Spectrum at home (couldn't afford a Beeb!), but it's another 8 bitter I really like. I have six of those now, and I'm designing an ethernet card for the Speccy. Once the Spectrum one's done, I'll do the same for the Beeb (which should be electronically far simpler, because the BBC has much better support for adding new ROMs, and a proper formal way of telling the MOS that you've done it).
Good times.
Slashdot is overtly *nix-type OS oriented; it was never supposed to be a Windows fansite and never will be. If you want to have a similar site for Windows, you ought to go and start Cee Colon Backslash Greaterthan.
THat's quite ironic - an anti-hate group hating Google :-)
Guess what, when I graduated there was a downturn in the tech industry. The UK had an unemployment rate over twice as high as it is now, and I had student loans, too - maintenance grants had been abolished by the time I went to uni except if your family was broke. (I did get a grant in my 4th year, but both my parents were unemployed at the time so could not provide support. And I agree, grants for tuition should never have been abolished). I'm not right wing, nor is my knee jerking. But we've all been there, and most of us didn't whine about it. People graduating ten years before me were going into a country with 3.5 million unemployed and inflation heading towards 10%, and interest rates that peaked at 15%, too - and people ten years prior to that were graduating in an environment of 3 day weeks, the power being turned off at 8pm, and the winter of discontent. The current economic conditions are a tempest in a teacup compared to what people had to put up with from about 1970 to 1987.
Whatever industry you want to go into you'll find the same thing - you have to start at the bottom and work your way up because you don't have any experience yet. The only way of avoiding that is if you strike it lucky with a business idea you can capitalize on. If you want to be an employee, it doesn't matter what you do - you will start on shit wages because well, you don't know shit yet. IT generally isn't too bad on the shitty starting wage scale. A friend of mine was in aircraft engineering and started on half of what the typical IT graduate started on, so we actually have it quite easy by comparison to some other skilled trades.
I started on moderately poor wages, but instead of bitching about it I got some experience and a track record of doing good work, then I could command a good salary. Unless you're an entrepeneur you'll have to do the same thing. It has nothing to do with the NASDAQ. You are to blame for your own bitchiness.
While it may not be your fault, until you get a few years experience you just can't command high wages in ANY industry, from plumbing, to maintaining aircraft, to IT. _All_ of us had to do our apprenticeship some way or other. If you are bitter about it you'll be bitter about it whatever you go into and you'll just make yourself into an unpleasant human being if you just tear yourself up about not hitting a pot of gold straight out of uni. It doesn't happen, it never has happened and never will happen, except for the very few who manage to strike a business idea that works spectacularly well, and if you do, good luck to you.