Speaking of exhibits of old games, are we talking about the Llamasoft here? The one that did Gridrunner, Attack/Revenge of the Mutant Camels, Tripatron and Llamatron?
I thought Llamasoft consisted of Jeff Minter and...Jeff Minter. And yet here is a Chris posting under the hallowed name.
Bah! You want a speed comparison? Do you want a speed comparison??!!
Ladies, gentlemen and coders: I give you the Commodore 1541 snaildrive. A joyous piece of design. So elegant, so slim, so quiet, so fast...
Err...well, not quite. This brick of a drive was quite capable of generating localised black holes due to its incredibly weight. Add in the UK power supply, and you could get rid of your house's central heating system.
The speed was so thunderously slow that it was frequently beaten by tape turbo loaders. Yes. Tape beating disk.
You youngsters today, with your ATA this and your UDMA that. You don't know you're born. Why, when I were a lad we had to look on the 1541 as a luxury. Sheer IO heaven.
"...to allow manufacturers to build drives larger than 120GB" but even this advantage isn't generally realised.
Yet.
Wasn't long ago that 40Gig was considered special, now 120Gigs are kicking about and I imagine it won't be all that long before the 120Gig drives are being called 'low end' either.
I don't think he meant they actually thought it was *THE* Bible...[i]t was an illustration of how important it was to them, not an actual statement of fact.
I agree that was the intent. I just thought it was from the same school of diplomacy that had Bush standing stating that he was enlist help from Arabs nations to go on a crusade. A Crusade eh? And err, you'd like some help from the Arabs you say? Hmm...
From Douglas Adams on the universally translating Babel fish: "...the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing the barriers to communication between all civilizations, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of the galaxy."
From the article: "...integration, at this stage, is producing more anger than anything else."
I do. I remember it to be a fantastic game, and spent hours and hours playing it. Sadly, the harsh reality of MAME emulation means that I can play today what I simply remembered before. It can be unforgiving experience - loading it up now I find the magic has gone.
However, your general point on playability is well taken and I entirely agree. How about Jumping Jack Flash on the Spectrum? Mono graphics, a stick figure and some 2-pixel high black lines with gaps. A fabulous game that I still play today.
The Plan: Take the binding of each book and cut it off. Feed into a scanner with duplex and cut-sheet feeder. Scan as a 300 DPI jpeg with compression. Then OCR them overnight. I don't expect the OCR to be perfect, just good enough to use as a searchable index.
Right then. In 1993/4, this is what I did for a living. The company I worked for did quite a lot of this, and one contract in particular sticks in my mind - the digitising of all books in the French National Library.
No doubt the equipment we used has moved on in the intervening decade however. We used Bell & Howell scanners fitted with automatic document shredders. Err...feeders. Yes, automatic document feeders. Not shredders at all. No. Honest.
You see, these were high-speed scanners, and some of the books we received were qute old. Me and the other coder on the project got really quite good at doing "pit stops", or changing the rubber wheels that drove the ADF. What I'm saying is no disrespect to the scanner company - it was the quality of the paper we had to put through it that caused the hassle. Some books, like the 18th century Academie Francais records, were so thin we had to photograph them and scan the photos.
We then scaled, OCR'd, deskewed and indexed the results on decent machines - 25Mhz 486SX, 4Mb RAM and Kofax graphics cards. Everything was then tarred up to DAT.
Hardware moves on, but I'll bet the amount of work remains the same. Do not underestimate the preparation required, and also the ammount of QA.
Oh, and don't use JPEG. Lossy compressionon text? Use TIFF - the image processing industry standard.
I had a headless router that ran nothing except the kernel, init, pppd chat, and ash. No GNU programs at all.
All based on GNU's glibc.
By the way, I'm not arguing in favour of calling things GNU/Linux. I was originally just replying to the person who posted up what it, to my mind, nonsense like GNU/Mandrake and what have you. I just call things Linux. Personally, I think that what gets called an operating system these days is so amorphous that it's hardly worth arguing about.
KDE_or_GNOME/Xfree/GNU/Linux probably meets more people's definition of "operating system'...How long do you extend it as useful packages get added to a distribution?
Well for me, you've already extended it too far. The distribution I use most has none of the features you've just mentioned - no KDE, no GNOME, no printing...nothing. The reason is that it's a headless 1u server running Cobalt's distribution. No graphics there, and yet it still runs an 'operating system'.
GNU/Redhat, GNU/Mandrake, GNU/Debian, etc. are operating systems.
Well now, since we're being pedantic I would point out that:
Linux is a kernel
GNU is a set of programs and libraries
GNU/Linux is the closest to most people's definition of 'operating system', ie. kernel + libraries + tools
Redhat, Mandrake, Debian et. al. are distributions of the GNU/Linux operating systems.
And....I don't care. I call the whole lot Linux, unless I'm referring to particular features of distributions in which case it gets called Redhat, Debian or (in my case) Cobalt.
Technology is letting filmakers realize dreams that could only be slightly approximated back in tha day.
Well...maybe. But then again, maybe not. These new CG thingies date really fast. Have you ever looked at some of the old games you used to worship, and think "huh?". Doom is a great example - stunning in its day, still playable today, but the graphics are now considered poor. That was only six or seven years ago.
You see, I'm of a school that still prefers models for special effects. Take the geek's bible of a film, Star Wars, as a great example. The rehashed Special Edition nonsense already had 'CG' leaping out at you from every turn, and it's so blindingly obvious when it appears. The original, apart from one bad 'airfix' moment when Luke skims over the Death Star, has barely dated. The models and machines look better than the easily-spottable CG bits.
There are other examples. Last Starfighter anyone? Fantastic graphics for the day, awful for today. Babylon 5? Same thing (plot rescues it, but look at the obvious animated texture mapping particularly in the pilot). Terminator 2's reflective surface morphing? Lost its shine a bit, hasn't it? Titanic? Hmm...an awfully straight ship, wasn't it? Those railings must have been aligned with laser sights.
Entirely self-contained CG films, like Toy Story or Shrek, have a much better chance of long-term survival in my opion because there's no point of reference to the real world. However, for me real world+CG dates faster than real world+model.
Is there a long clip from Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here on the tape?
There's some, but there's no link to Marvin supposed to be humming it.
I saw the stage play whilst I was at university - excellent version, and they kept the "Why is your robot humming Pink Floyd" line.
They also played Brockian (spelling?) Ultra-Kricket with the audience at the end, and I remain possibly the only person on the planet to have cheated at it. I apologised to Wowbagger the Infinitely prolonged -before- hitting him...
I'd recommend downloading the full twelve episodes of the Radio Series (Fit the 1st to Fit the 12th) on Kazaa (or any P2P) in MP3 format.
I wouldn't. I'd recommend buying the tapes. Yes, the tapes, not the CDs from which the MP3s were almost certainly made.
I have both tape and CD releases - bought the tapes years ago, bought the CDs shortly after getting my iPod. There are scenes missing from the CDs - one immediate example that springs to mind is the mice talking about buying Arthur's brain. Cut to ribbons on the CD.
Purists will tell you that the tapes have things missing too. I don't know - wasn't ever lucky enough to hear the original broadcasts. However the tapes are more complete than the CDs, and the MP3s have probably been created from the CDs.
...this book...mainly addresses the problem of becoming overly dependent on software for real-life, mission-critical applications. Unfortunately the book, published 10 years ago, appears to be out of print
Ah well you see, that's the problem of becoming overly dependent on paper-based systems for mission-critical applications.
Your contract with the network when you get the show is you're going to watch the spots.
So...am I stealing if I just get up, walk out of the room and make a cup of coffee? What if the phone rings and I choose to answer it during the ad breaks?
In Europe, where I work, it's much harder to do something like this, for better or for worse; most countries don't allow unilateral cuts.
Well, I work in Europe too. London, to be precise. This sort of thing goes on here too, particularly in the financial sector.
It's handled differently though. For me, I recently got a 15% cut as I'm a contractor and hence the contract can be 'renegotiated'. For the permanent employees however, it's handled by cutting bonus. Bonus forms a large proportation of salary in the financial industry, and employers are basically free to play around with as they wish.
One of the reasons I turned contractor was the predictability of it. Even with the cuts, at least I know that for a certain amount of work I get a certain amount of money. No arbitrary bonus nonsense.
Your lotus tops out around 140mph...MY Corvette tops out at 168 mph...personally tested...in Nevada.
Question was about cornering, not speed. Corvettes? Please. I've driven one. I chose a Jaguar XJR over it. Handling-wise the XJR's no Lotus either, but it's a much better cruiser. The Corvette is neither one thing or the other. Quite good value though - price is low for its speed, but if you're looking for value then I'd take the Honda NSX or Toyota Supra over it any day.
Whilst it's likely the author had your best interests at heart there's some chance he didn't.
This is where an application like Virtual PC comes into its own. I have a clean virtual machine, with W2K installed (and kept up to date with patches etc.), a few file sharing clients and nothing else whatsoever. This machine is never used. Instead, I make a copy of it and run that. Then, every couple of weeks or so after the adware has become unendurable, just delete the copy in use and replace it with a new copy from master.
Works perfectly. Spyware can try spying all it likes - I'm not using the machine for anything except use of their own networks, so there's nothing there for them to look at. Also, even if I am '0wn3d' through some obscure hack, it's only an isolated virtual machine and it'll only exist for a maximum of a week or two.
Congratulations on the forthcoming baby. You might want to have a look at my earlier comment about the whole Tivo/new baby thing. I now have a three-month old daughter, and both my partner and I find the Tivo invaluable.
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Chris
Llamasoft
Speaking of exhibits of old games, are we talking about the Llamasoft here? The one that did Gridrunner, Attack/Revenge of the Mutant Camels, Tripatron and Llamatron?
I thought Llamasoft consisted of Jeff Minter and...Jeff Minter. And yet here is a Chris posting under the hallowed name.
Any connection?
Cheers,
Ian
Ladies, gentlemen and coders: I give you the Commodore 1541 snaildrive. A joyous piece of design. So elegant, so slim, so quiet, so fast...
Err...well, not quite. This brick of a drive was quite capable of generating localised black holes due to its incredibly weight. Add in the UK power supply, and you could get rid of your house's central heating system.
The speed was so thunderously slow that it was frequently beaten by tape turbo loaders. Yes. Tape beating disk.
You youngsters today, with your ATA this and your UDMA that. You don't know you're born. Why, when I were a lad we had to look on the 1541 as a luxury. Sheer IO heaven.
Bah.
Cheers,
Ian
Yet.
Wasn't long ago that 40Gig was considered special, now 120Gigs are kicking about and I imagine it won't be all that long before the 120Gig drives are being called 'low end' either.
Cheers,
Ian
Cheers,
Ian
I agree that was the intent. I just thought it was from the same school of diplomacy that had Bush standing stating that he was enlist help from Arabs nations to go on a crusade. A Crusade eh? And err, you'd like some help from the Arabs you say? Hmm...
Cheers,
Ian
"...the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing the barriers to communication between all civilizations, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of the galaxy."
From the article:
"...integration, at this stage, is producing more anger than anything else."
Hmm...
Cheers,
Ian
"They say, `He got it from the Internet.' They think it's the Bible."
Or perhaps they even thought it was Koran? After all, Muslims don't put too much faith in the Bible...
Cheers,
Ian
I do. I remember it to be a fantastic game, and spent hours and hours playing it. Sadly, the harsh reality of MAME emulation means that I can play today what I simply remembered before. It can be unforgiving experience - loading it up now I find the magic has gone.
However, your general point on playability is well taken and I entirely agree. How about Jumping Jack Flash on the Spectrum? Mono graphics, a stick figure and some 2-pixel high black lines with gaps. A fabulous game that I still play today.
Cheers,
Ian
Err...if the court doesn't see it, it's inadmissable as evidence.
Cheers,
Ian
Right then. In 1993/4, this is what I did for a living. The company I worked for did quite a lot of this, and one contract in particular sticks in my mind - the digitising of all books in the French National Library.
No doubt the equipment we used has moved on in the intervening decade however. We used Bell & Howell scanners fitted with automatic document shredders. Err...feeders. Yes, automatic document feeders. Not shredders at all. No. Honest.
You see, these were high-speed scanners, and some of the books we received were qute old. Me and the other coder on the project got really quite good at doing "pit stops", or changing the rubber wheels that drove the ADF. What I'm saying is no disrespect to the scanner company - it was the quality of the paper we had to put through it that caused the hassle. Some books, like the 18th century Academie Francais records, were so thin we had to photograph them and scan the photos.
We then scaled, OCR'd, deskewed and indexed the results on decent machines - 25Mhz 486SX, 4Mb RAM and Kofax graphics cards. Everything was then tarred up to DAT.
Hardware moves on, but I'll bet the amount of work remains the same. Do not underestimate the preparation required, and also the ammount of QA.
Oh, and don't use JPEG. Lossy compressionon text? Use TIFF - the image processing industry standard.
Cheers,
Ian
All based on GNU's glibc.
By the way, I'm not arguing in favour of calling things GNU/Linux. I was originally just replying to the person who posted up what it, to my mind, nonsense like GNU/Mandrake and what have you. I just call things Linux. Personally, I think that what gets called an operating system these days is so amorphous that it's hardly worth arguing about.
Cheers,
Ian
Well for me, you've already extended it too far. The distribution I use most has none of the features you've just mentioned - no KDE, no GNOME, no printing...nothing. The reason is that it's a headless 1u server running Cobalt's distribution. No graphics there, and yet it still runs an 'operating system'.
Cheers,
Ian
Well now, since we're being pedantic I would point out that:
And....I don't care. I call the whole lot Linux, unless I'm referring to particular features of distributions in which case it gets called Redhat, Debian or (in my case) Cobalt.
Cheers,
Ian
I am.
Technology is letting filmakers realize dreams that could only be slightly approximated back in tha day.
Well...maybe. But then again, maybe not. These new CG thingies date really fast. Have you ever looked at some of the old games you used to worship, and think "huh?". Doom is a great example - stunning in its day, still playable today, but the graphics are now considered poor. That was only six or seven years ago.
You see, I'm of a school that still prefers models for special effects. Take the geek's bible of a film, Star Wars, as a great example. The rehashed Special Edition nonsense already had 'CG' leaping out at you from every turn, and it's so blindingly obvious when it appears. The original, apart from one bad 'airfix' moment when Luke skims over the Death Star, has barely dated. The models and machines look better than the easily-spottable CG bits.
There are other examples. Last Starfighter anyone? Fantastic graphics for the day, awful for today. Babylon 5? Same thing (plot rescues it, but look at the obvious animated texture mapping particularly in the pilot). Terminator 2's reflective surface morphing? Lost its shine a bit, hasn't it? Titanic? Hmm...an awfully straight ship, wasn't it? Those railings must have been aligned with laser sights.
Entirely self-contained CG films, like Toy Story or Shrek, have a much better chance of long-term survival in my opion because there's no point of reference to the real world. However, for me real world+CG dates faster than real world+model.
Cheers,
Ian
There's some, but there's no link to Marvin supposed to be humming it.
I saw the stage play whilst I was at university - excellent version, and they kept the "Why is your robot humming Pink Floyd" line.
They also played Brockian (spelling?) Ultra-Kricket with the audience at the end, and I remain possibly the only person on the planet to have cheated at it. I apologised to Wowbagger the Infinitely prolonged -before- hitting him...
Cheers,
Ian
It's not an audio book. The original is the radio series, the books came later.
Cheers,
Ian
I bought the book of Mostly Harmless when it came out. I lent it to a friend to read, and had another queuing to read it after.
On finishing the first friend handed it straight to the second, saying as he did so "I can't believe they all died in the end".
He hasn't lived that particular spoiler down in over a decade now...
Cheers,
Ian
I wouldn't. I'd recommend buying the tapes. Yes, the tapes, not the CDs from which the MP3s were almost certainly made.
I have both tape and CD releases - bought the tapes years ago, bought the CDs shortly after getting my iPod. There are scenes missing from the CDs - one immediate example that springs to mind is the mice talking about buying Arthur's brain. Cut to ribbons on the CD.
Purists will tell you that the tapes have things missing too. I don't know - wasn't ever lucky enough to hear the original broadcasts. However the tapes are more complete than the CDs, and the MP3s have probably been created from the CDs.
Cheers,
Ian
Ah well you see, that's the problem of becoming overly dependent on paper-based systems for mission-critical applications.
Cheers,
Ian
So...am I stealing if I just get up, walk out of the room and make a cup of coffee? What if the phone rings and I choose to answer it during the ad breaks?
Utter nonsense.
Cheers,
Ian
Well, I work in Europe too. London, to be precise. This sort of thing goes on here too, particularly in the financial sector.
It's handled differently though. For me, I recently got a 15% cut as I'm a contractor and hence the contract can be 'renegotiated'. For the permanent employees however, it's handled by cutting bonus. Bonus forms a large proportation of salary in the financial industry, and employers are basically free to play around with as they wish.
One of the reasons I turned contractor was the predictability of it. Even with the cuts, at least I know that for a certain amount of work I get a certain amount of money. No arbitrary bonus nonsense.
Cheers,
Ian
Easy. You reset your system clock to 1st Jan 1900...
Cheers,
Ian
Question was about cornering, not speed. Corvettes? Please. I've driven one. I chose a Jaguar XJR over it. Handling-wise the XJR's no Lotus either, but it's a much better cruiser. The Corvette is neither one thing or the other. Quite good value though - price is low for its speed, but if you're looking for value then I'd take the Honda NSX or Toyota Supra over it any day.
This is where an application like Virtual PC comes into its own. I have a clean virtual machine, with W2K installed (and kept up to date with patches etc.), a few file sharing clients and nothing else whatsoever. This machine is never used. Instead, I make a copy of it and run that. Then, every couple of weeks or so after the adware has become unendurable, just delete the copy in use and replace it with a new copy from master.
Works perfectly. Spyware can try spying all it likes - I'm not using the machine for anything except use of their own networks, so there's nothing there for them to look at. Also, even if I am '0wn3d' through some obscure hack, it's only an isolated virtual machine and it'll only exist for a maximum of a week or two.
Cheers,
Ian
Cheers,
Ian