What's the reasoning behind.co.uk anyway? Did the british government decide 'uk' was only for them, or what?
It's called logical hierarchy. Rather than lump everything together in one monolithic mass it's broken down into logically related topics. In much the same way as the top-level has com, org and net the UK cc domain has:
Something about my computer time being put to work so that a bunch of scientists can invent a new drug and make lots of money; or put out a new study and get some fame. It just doesn't seem right.
Apparently some of RISC OS is still written in BASIC as well.
Let's knock that one on the head straight away. None of Risc OS has ever been written in BASIC. Some Risc OS applications are written in BASIC but not the operating system.
Re:Small? F***ing huge more like...
on
Tiny Apps
·
· Score: 1
1.44Mb is f***ing huge compared to what it was like in the good old days.
Of course for some of us those good old days have never ended. The descendents of the Beeb still carry the tourch of efficient coding. I have a fully featured professional level DTP package which fits on a single 1.6MB floppy.
It is for this reason I found the assertion that 1.44MB constituted a small program highly amusing.
This might be brute force, but how about add the capability to transfer data over two or more phone lines simultaneously, in parallel, if they exist at a location?
In fact this option is available from 7E and I believe is the version used by the BBC.
Their claim to be the first wireless Internet service in London may or may not be correct. However the post-production houses of Soho have had their own private wireless network for a number of years now.
...but somehow, being a British company, managed to cock it up. Bloody typical.
Is this generally thought to be a truism or just another myth? Why is it that the UK has a great reputation for innovating yet such a poor one for making any money at it?
The UK is full of inovative people and bright ideas. I think it also has a reasonable number of people willing to exploit those ideas.
The problem is that none of these people have the great chunks of wedge required to get such an initiative off the ground. The people who do want nothing to do with an unproven start-up.
In a 180 degree flip since Victorian times (when anything British was obviously and inately superior to anything foreign) British establishment and money-men are dazled by the green-ness of the other guys field.
indeed, the UK must be about the only western European country where "the professions" is commonly understood to refer only to the lawyer/ docter/ bank manager/ teacher class of white-collar activities
It likely is the only European country that still has 'classes'. That's why you lads have such a term at all (French, Spanish, Portugese, Italians, Hungarians, Chechs, Germans, Greeks, Poles, etc, etc: please correct me if I'm wrong).
The original poster was not using class to mean social class which is what I suspect you are refering to. He was using it in it's scientific sense. Meaning a group of things sharing common features.
is the UK the only place where they refer to medical consultants as (using a male example) "Mr" instead of "Dr"?
No. That is to say that Doctors are generally refered to as Dr unless they specifically state that they prefer Mr.
What is odd is that nurses may be refered to as sister even when they are male. Obviously this doesn't happen because people find it awkward but it is possible.
And their first jetliner, which fell apart in the air.
That would be the first jet liner.
Yes, it had problems, you've got to expect that when you're at the cutting edge. The important fact is not that the problems existed but that they where fixed.
The Manchester Machine, built and operated during the Second World War at Manchester University, England, was the very first stored program computer to work. Can't say that it was general purpose, though.
I suspect you are refering to the Manchester Baby which was post war. It was the first stored program digital computer and was general purpose. It predates the other competetor for the title (University of Cambridge) by about a year. It was sold commercially by Ferranti.
It seems that the world's largest and smelliest flower is about to bloom for the 12th recorded time in captivity.
Not quite, it is blooming for the 12th recorded time in the US. A similar specimin flowered in Kew Gardens (UK) during the August of 1999. I don't imagine it has been the only one outside the US either.
I recommend the Brits reading this thread rent the movie U-571 , a historically accurate portrayal of American servicemen capturing the first German Enigma machine, without which said Brits would now be wearing lederhosen.
I think someone should make a blow for historical acuracy here and say: bollocks.
The film is based on a number of seperate events. The first two being entirely British endevours, the third being an entirely US endevour.
Although I haven't seen it I believe the film purports to concern the capture of the first navel Enigma and encryption keys. This act was performed by HMS Aubretia, HMS Bulldog and other escort ships of the Royal Navy.
The US government aren't the only people to have cottoned on to the power of convertnig spoken words into text. The THISL project aims to provide broadcasters and other news gathering organisations with a powerful tool using this tchnique.
Firstly the news archive is passed through a speech recognition system which basically produces transcripts of every news item. Then a powerful text search may be applied to the database to locate information relevent to a particular topic. If this is being done for research it is most likely all the information required can be gleened from the transcript however the original recording may also be retrieved using the archive reference stored in the database.
I have no idea how large the design is, but by the time you find an FPGA that is large enough to hold the design, you may be better off just buying an AMD K6-II and chipset. Not to mention that you need device programmer in order to program the chip.
Or indeed an off-the-shelf ARM 7. While this is a
fascinating project and I can see some uses for it
I don't think it is going to steal away ARMs business over night. After all FPGA's tend to be expensive, power hungry and slow. ARMs selling points are cheapness and bangs/Watt.
The whole article was amusing in that I don't like MS so I like reading things which re-enforce my prejudices. However when you get right down to it this stuff is pretty childish and the constant use of "Chuck" was plain irritating.
However I do have a constructive comment to make. One of the MS questions accuses Sun of using proprietry processor and proprietry operating system. Someone should perhapse point out to our friend Chuck that x86 is proprietry to Intel and Windows is proprietry to MS. Just because they are common doesn't make them any less proprietry than ARM and RiscOS.
Can't reach that URL.
You don't say it, but I have the impression from other posts that the replacement isn't Maglev.
Any ideas why ?
I could access the URL and it has been replaced by a
shuttle bus. Reason being that shuttle busses are
cheaper to run, more reliable and easier to fix when
they do break.
I guess Michelle Yeoh's best reference right now is Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but I finally saw Tomorrow Never Dies last night and she was quite impressive there as well.
I can recomend "The Heroic Trio" as well.
Um. Matrix sequels? Not necessary, methinks. It seems that The Matrix has a sort of pseudocult folllowing, and that's probably who the sequels are aimed at. It was a fun movie, but I don't really have any burning desire to see a sequel.
From my point of view there is no sequel you could usefully add. Everything which needs to be said has been said. From what I hear the films being proposed are actually prequels however they're going to have to pull something fairly impresive out of the bag if they are going to convince me that it was worth while.
The primary use for usenet these days, IMHO, is to be a place where the kiddies go so they don't annoy the people with a clue who left and moved onto real systems to get their stuff done....
I object to that sentiment in the strongest possible manner. I would count myself as a person with a clue and I find Use-Net extremely valuable.
Among my regular haunts are the comp.sys.acorn hierarchy which is full of useful and timely news and information and I have yet to find a better way to get obscure questions answered.
Other groups on my subscription list such as alt.books.pratchett carry high quality debate and discussion.
The signal to noise ratio can become vanishingly small at times but to a large extent that's purely because one mans noise is anothers signal. Of course the same criticism could be leveled at any other similar system.
I think they teach the aliens decimal because we use decimal. It not only tells them a little of what we understand but more importantly, how we understand it. They may even be able to make the not necesarily logical leep of "if they count in base 10 maybe they have 10 extremities on which to count."
The basic problem here is that aliens, by their very nature, are alien so we can't assume anything about how they will react to a given set of stimulie. However for an endevour of this nature to work you have to make certain asumptions. An obvious one to make is that alien geeks (scientists and engineers) are going to be a little like human geeks in the way they think. Give any scientist or engineer a proboblem and sooner or later they are going to grab some paper and a pencil and start drawing diagrams. Therefore we assume that aliens trying to decode this message are going to notice that there are large strings of 1's regularly spaced and maybe try using them as the boundry of an image. Once they do this they will see that there are repeating symbols throughout the frames they create this way. This will hopefully cause them to realise that what they have is a 2D image in which information is convayed through symbolic means.
Even if they never manage to decode one scrap of information from the stream (which I think is unlikely) they will have made an important discovery. That there is an inteligent species somewhere "out there" who are willing and able to put considerable effort into producing an attempt to communicate. It answers the question "Are we alone in the univers" by saying "There are geeks here". As commented by Terry Pratchett in "Interesting Times" simply communicating with no information at least tells you something.
In direct asnwer to some of your other points, Morse Code would be an extremely bad idea since it assumes the receiver understands English and that lived through the evolution of the human species. Language after all is very much routed in historical and cultural development.
This message was sent using a parabolic reflector which has the effect of amplifying the message compared to the background over a spatialy small area. Thus if the receivers are withing the area covered by the signal it will be much louder than anything else they pick up from us. It does depend on them listening at the correct frequency. However if they are already picking up spurious transmissions from us don't you think they would be listening. I'm sure we would be.
Slashdot Mirror
The Scots, who are British. So the point still stands.
It's called logical hierarchy. Rather than lump everything together in one monolithic mass it's broken down into logically related topics. In much the same way as the top-level has com, org and net the UK cc domain has:
- co, ltd, plc for companies
- org for non-profit and other roganisations
- mod for the military
- police for the police
- gov for the government
- me for people
and probably some others.Don't do it then.
Let's knock that one on the head straight away. None of Risc OS has ever been written in BASIC. Some Risc OS applications are written in BASIC but not the operating system.
Of course for some of us those good old days have never ended. The descendents of the Beeb still carry the tourch of efficient coding. I have a fully featured professional level DTP package which fits on a single 1.6MB floppy.
It is for this reason I found the assertion that 1.44MB constituted a small program highly amusing.
In fact this option is available from 7E and I believe is the version used by the BBC.
The companies web site seems like a good place to start.
Their claim to be the first wireless Internet service in London may or may not be correct. However the post-production houses of Soho have had their own private wireless network for a number of years now.
(\/)atthew
The UK is full of inovative people and bright ideas. I think it also has a reasonable number of people willing to exploit those ideas.
The problem is that none of these people have the great chunks of wedge required to get such an initiative off the ground. The people who do want nothing to do with an unproven start-up.
In a 180 degree flip since Victorian times (when anything British was obviously and inately superior to anything foreign) British establishment and money-men are dazled by the green-ness of the other guys field.
The original poster was not using class to mean social class which is what I suspect you are refering to. He was using it in it's scientific sense. Meaning a group of things sharing common features.
No. That is to say that Doctors are generally refered to as Dr unless they specifically state that they prefer Mr.
What is odd is that nurses may be refered to as sister even when they are male. Obviously this doesn't happen because people find it awkward but it is possible.
That would be the first jet liner.
Yes, it had problems, you've got to expect that when you're at the cutting edge. The important fact is not that the problems existed but that they where fixed.
I think someone should make a blow for historical acuracy here and say: bollocks.
The film is based on a number of seperate events. The first two being entirely British endevours, the third being an entirely US endevour.
Although I haven't seen it I believe the film purports to concern the capture of the first navel Enigma and encryption keys. This act was performed by HMS Aubretia, HMS Bulldog and other escort ships of the Royal Navy.
Five seconds of web searching threw up this page.
Except it runs of an Archimedes, not a Mac.
The US government aren't the only people to have cottoned on to the power of convertnig spoken words into text. The THISL project aims to provide broadcasters and other news gathering organisations with a powerful tool using this tchnique.
Firstly the news archive is passed through a speech recognition system which basically produces transcripts of every news item. Then a powerful text search may be applied to the database to locate information relevent to a particular topic. If this is being done for research it is most likely all the information required can be gleened from the transcript however the original recording may also be retrieved using the archive reference stored in the database.
The whole article was amusing in that I don't like MS so I like reading things which re-enforce my prejudices. However when you get right down to it this stuff is pretty childish and the constant use of "Chuck" was plain irritating.
However I do have a constructive comment to make. One of the MS questions accuses Sun of using proprietry processor and proprietry operating system. Someone should perhapse point out to our friend Chuck that x86 is proprietry to Intel and Windows is proprietry to MS. Just because they are common doesn't make them any less proprietry than ARM and RiscOS.
I think they teach the aliens decimal because we use decimal. It not only tells them a little of what we understand but more importantly, how we understand it. They may even be able to make the not necesarily logical leep of "if they count in base 10 maybe they have 10 extremities on which to count."
The basic problem here is that aliens, by their very nature, are alien so we can't assume anything about how they will react to a given set of stimulie. However for an endevour of this nature to work you have to make certain asumptions. An obvious one to make is that alien geeks (scientists and engineers) are going to be a little like human geeks in the way they think. Give any scientist or engineer a proboblem and sooner or later they are going to grab some paper and a pencil and start drawing diagrams. Therefore we assume that aliens trying to decode this message are going to notice that there are large strings of 1's regularly spaced and maybe try using them as the boundry of an image. Once they do this they will see that there are repeating symbols throughout the frames they create this way. This will hopefully cause them to realise that what they have is a 2D image in which information is convayed through symbolic means.
Even if they never manage to decode one scrap of information from the stream (which I think is unlikely) they will have made an important discovery. That there is an inteligent species somewhere "out there" who are willing and able to put considerable effort into producing an attempt to communicate. It answers the question "Are we alone in the univers" by saying "There are geeks here". As commented by Terry Pratchett in "Interesting Times" simply communicating with no information at least tells you something.
In direct asnwer to some of your other points, Morse Code would be an extremely bad idea since it assumes the receiver understands English and that lived through the evolution of the human species. Language after all is very much routed in historical and cultural development.
This message was sent using a parabolic reflector which has the effect of amplifying the message compared to the background over a spatialy small area. Thus if the receivers are withing the area covered by the signal it will be much louder than anything else they pick up from us. It does depend on them listening at the correct frequency. However if they are already picking up spurious transmissions from us don't you think they would be listening. I'm sure we would be.