I just watched the pilot episode of the original series on Youtube when it occurred to me that I'd never seen the beginning, only a few episodes here and there during it's original run in the 1980's.
Personally, I'd rather they leave Blakes 7 alone, it was great for it's time. If anyone were to bring it back it should be the BBC, like they've done with Doctor Who.
As for other shows that should be back on TV there's Stargate Universe which was cruelly cancelled before its time. Why not help out to get it back on the air again via Netflix and sign the Change.org petition linked below. There's little point asking SyFy as they don't seem to know anything about science fiction anyway.
The other day there were 3000 signatures, today it's over 4000. With the help of Slashdot I reckon we could hit over 10K in no time. The target is 100K I think.
I've been following the guys down at Reaction Engines and their SABRE engine concept for a few years. These are the same guys who came up with the HOTOL concept at Rolls Royce in the 1980's. No word on what they'd use for thermal protection on re-entry but they're a clever bunch and if I came into a billion pounds I'd shove a fair chunk of it at these guys to build me a fleet of spaceships to rule the world;-)
If they could get government funding we could lead the world in launch capabilities. However, what would probably happen is that we'd end up handing it over the the USA as our leaders are too short sighted and too cheap to fund anything truly visionary or world beating.
I'm glad that this 'advert' got posted to Slashdot. I wouldn't have been aware of it otherwise and have now given $10 to get these games for my Mac. I used to have Darwinia ages ago, but I think it was just the demo. I've been aware of the other games for some time and will play them when I get around to it. Time to post a link on Facebook and inform my friends as well.
I've got two friends who are now homeless and have lost everything apart from the clothes on their backs and their mobile phones after scum broke into a jewellers in Tottenham on Saturday night and then proceeded to torch the place. They lived above the shops and barely got out with their lives. For twenty minutes the Police were nowhere in site. My friends were posting on Facebook as the riots got closer and were frightened that they'd have to arm themselves to protect against a home invasion and then their worse fear happened - fires were started.
These kids aren't making a statement, they aren't fighting the system, they aren't protesting against jack shit. They just want to run riot, smash shit up and set fire to stuff whilst getting away with stealing as much as possible.
I'm quite happy the RIM are helping. Hopefully Skype, MSN, etc. will be on the case too. I'd send in the army with tear gas and rubber bullets (to start with) if I was in charge.
We use litres for fuel, at least at the pump. The guys on Top Gear still talk in gallons because they're dinosaurs and like to be eccentric. I'm a big fan of Top Gear myself. Cars speedos are in MPH mainly because large distances, like between towns, are measured in miles. We drink pints of beer (real beer btw). When you go to the shops for milk it's in pints with a litre measurement on the carton as well. Most other foodstuffs are in metric, 0.75 litres of wine, 330ml in a can of Coke, 400g of crackers, etc.
I'm usually confused by imperial weight measurements, as I'm under 40 and wasn't taught ounces, pounds and stones at school. I work in grams and kilograms. For my weight I know and measure myself in kg (91kg, down from 107kg last year, that's about 14st 5lbs) and have to convert it to stones and pounds for other people.
Please start calling them 'American units'. Two reasons. Firstly in the UK most people work in metric (at least if they're under 30) for weights and measurements. The exceptions being that we measure large distances in miles (car speed in miles per hour) and person weight in stones (st & lbs) rather than just pounds like in the US. You're supposed to sell fruit & veg in metric, but in reality shops show both imperial and metric measurements along side each other for the sake of older people. Food packets and drinks are in litres and grams/kg. The second reason is if they're called American units that other remaining countries will want to change over to metric, leaving you to use them on your own.
An odd aside, I remember as a kid, seeing an American recipe for cookies years ago and it had mysterious measurements like 'a cup of flour'. WTF? How big a cup? You take these things for granted, but I had no idea. Most recipes call for so many grams of flour and there's no confusion.
In addition, no one else has lost a space probe due to the difference between imperial and metric, only you guys.
Sorry, I didn't see anything about relativity in the video or the article apart from them referring to it. Is he published? I'm agree that he's very smart and has learnt a lot of math. Can anyone provide links to a critique of his work or his actual work? I'm interested to read more.
As for Macs.... It wouldn't work because of the two major changes in architecture. The original Macs were Motorola 68000 based, then 020, 030, 040. Then they moved to PowerPC 601, 603, 620, G3, G4, G5. Then they transitioned again to x86 Pentium D, Core Solo/Duo's, Core 2 Duo, Xeon's and now Core i3, i5 & i7.
I think you can run from System 1 to 8.6 (or similar) on 680x0. OS 8 was both PPC & 680x0 compatible I think. OS 9 was PPC only if I remember correctly.
You could go from OS X 10.0 to 10.5 on a G3 PPC machine like an iBook or Powerbook. I've personally upgraded an old Powerbook G3 from OS 10.2 to 10.5. Snow Leopard (10.6) is Intel only. Tiger (10.4) was available for both PPC and Intel, as was Leopard (10.5). Lion (10.7) will be 64 bit Intel only, so won't work on pre Core 2 Duo CPUs.
You can still run PPC software using Sheepshaver (or similar, sometimes known as Classic on Intel). Apple included 680x0 emulation in the OS for old apps when they moved over to PPC. Apple also included 'Classic' OS support for OS 9 apps in OS X until the Intel transition.
Personally, on balance I'm quite happy using modern software designed to work on the latest versions that take advantage of new system APIs and features. Software has evolved a lot since MacPaint, etc. and I'm happy to use Photoshop CS5 instead. Would you prefer to use Mosaic or Netscape Navigator than Safari/Firefox/Opera/IE9, etc.?
Still got to say that the video is excellent and informative. My hat is off to the guy who made it.
I've suggested this elsewhere for other wind farms. How about having a hydrogen electrolysis plant nearby where water can be turned into Hydrogen that can be turned back into electricity during non-peak wind (tidal, or whatever) periods. Hydrogen can be burnt turning it back into water easily and produces heat that can be turned into electricity cheaply and easily. The most expensive part of the whole unit would be the hydrogen storage. This can safely be placed underground to avoid leaks and explosions if required.
How about they put the prize money into a scholarship fund. Surely he couldn't object to this. He could outline the type of benefactor he'd like to receive a stipend from time to time and leave the actual selection to a committee formed by associates of the Millennium Prize board.
I will be happy to continue reading the Telegraph website (especially for the Alex and Matt cartoons), The Guardian website and the BBC News website. I also check news.google.co.uk every day. I doubt I'll be left out of the loop at all. Occasionally I even click on links to stories on the Daily Mail or The Sun websites, newspapers that I probably would never consider buying (for differing reasons).
Thing is, I do buy physical issues of The Times at the weekend, once or twice a month, mostly on Sunday but sometimes on Saturdays as well. It just depends how busy I am and what my routine for the day will end up being.
Isn't the logical conclusion that if millions of people find a particular type of behaviour acceptable that it should be legalised? Otherwise it's socially unjust. We're not talking about murder or actual *stealing*. We're talking about copyright infringement. If we think it's a bad thing then we should also be allowed to decide how bad the punishment is, whether it's a small fine or a prison sentence.
I visit the cinema on average once a week and every time the copyright warning is displayed and mentions 10 years in prison for recording a movie in a cinema I cringe. That's more than people get for killing and maiming people, robbing banks and committing other violent crimes. The MP's are in the pockets of the media companies. I'm not talking about small indie film studios, but the distributors and those who own them like Sony, etc. They've been persuaded that if the penalties are high enough people will not perform actions that are trivial to execute and have no visible consequences. This has been shown not to be true time and time again.
I buy lots of DVDs and DVD boxsets. I probably spent about £500 a year on these. I pay for the cinema one a week. I buy music on iTunes and only search elsewhere online if I can't find what I want. As a kid I pirated every virtual computer game in existence in the 8/16 bit eras. Now I rarely play games, apart from on my iPhone which I pay for. I don't have TV at home, so *sometimes* I get TV shows I like online before going out and buying the full season boxset as soon as it becomes available. I might consider buying them on iTunes or similar if they were available at a reasonable price, but they're not. Most episodes of TV shows cost far more than the equivalent DVD for lower quality and no physical media to keep and store and are non-transferable to other machines, etc.
I hope I'm not one of the people discovered in this haul of IP addresses, but I do not download movies, only a little bit of TV. Fingers crossed.
I can tell you're not a Photoshop user..PST files are Microsoft Outlook mailbox (or archive) files..PSD is a Photoshop document file.
No big deal, but pointing it out. Seeing a reference to PST in a Photoshop thread made my eyes jump out on stalks like in a cartoon.
One of the biggest reasons people and companies are not upgrading to Vista is backwards compatibility. Microsoft have a free product called Virtual PC that anyone can download. They should include a suitable version of XP with very Vista license and include Virtual PC in the standard install. If you can run all your mission critical apps in a compatibility layer like this (think 'Classic' on the old PPC Macs) then they could really move forward with Vista and make it a modern OS and drop the old cruft they've been carrying for years in the name of backwards compatibility. If they wanted to they could even include Win95/Win98/WintNT or even Win3.1 virtual environments.
If Parallels and VMware can make the desktop sharing between Mac OS X and Windows easy, why can't Microsoft make it easy between Win9X/NT/XP and Vista easy?
Problem is no one at Microsoft in interested in doing this. I was invited to Microsoft's London offices last month and suggested it to a few of their top engineers and sales/marketing people and no one wanted to admit that Vista was a relative failure. You can downgrade to XP but you need your own DVD/CD media, and can't run Vista and XP at the same time, it's one licence or the other. Madness!
I've just made an internal decision of my own, never to use another Yahoo site, or related property again. That includes Flickr and any other Yahoo owned property.
From now on Yahoo is blocked on my network as well. Sorry, it was an 'internal decision' to block it.
Normal service will resume when (if?) Yahoo pull their socks up.
What makes Mac OS X special is not the glitz and glamour on the surface, it's what's underneath. The Cocoa framework for Objective C is head and shoulders above the MFC/Win32 programming approach. it's built on BSD and Mach and is now officially a Unix certified OS. It's built in a logical and elegant way. You can run Linux/Unix apps on it. X11 is included, although an optional install. OpenGl and Aqua make it beautiful to look at. There are literally hundreds of reasons why I prefer it, but won't go into them here.
Simply skinning XP with an' aqua' style skin and adding a dock does not make it anything like OS X. Any more than putting a Ferrari shell on top of a ford doesn't make it a Ferrari.
Xerox got Apple stock in return for licencing their intellectual property, which Xerox saw little commerical value in and had been sitting on for years. Microsoft stole Apple's implementation of 'WIMP' after becoming an Macintosh developer and snaffling all the documentation. It still took them over ten years to produce what Apple did in two.
I'd suggest testing the RAM, it could need replacing. Also if it's a model with a fan or air vents for cooling that it has enoug hair flow around them and they are not blocked by cables, etc.
Most G4's run quite cool and shouldn't suffer, but a few older ones were clocked quite a bit higher than they maybe should have been, as Apple were feeling the pinch in the speed stakes against Intel and were waiting for Motorola/IBM to improve the design.
Hdd's are simple enough to test, as you can run off a copy of your main HDD by using SuperDuper on an external drive via FireWire without having to swap it out. An enclosure should be quite cheap to pick up in a store or online. That way when you do decide to put the drive inside the machine you have an device to connect the old drive as extra storage space, or you can purchase another cheap drive, both of which should be ok for using Time Machine with (that is if you upgrade and your machine meets the minimum requirements).
Does anyone have any news if this affects 'Preview' on OS X. I hate the Adobe Reader and never use it.
I understood that PDF is virtually native on the Mac. This is in part due to the design of Quartz and now NeXT used to use display Postscript , which PDF grew out of in a way.
Some applications now use scaled PDF icons for resolution indepenence, such as Coda for example. Should we be worrying about this at all?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually I think you mean Leopard (10.5) is the last supported PPC release, not Tiger.
10.4 Tiger - launched as PPC only before Intel announcement
10.4 Tiger - Intel - first Intel Macs came with this
10.5 Leopard - PPC/Intel - Shipped with native support for both architectures (PPC via Rosetta)
10.6 Snow Leopard - Intel Macs only (PPC via Rosetta) (available for free online apparently according to info I've seen around)
10.7 onwards Intel (no PPC support) (still a paid upgrade from Apple)
We're on 10.9 now. So that's 3 fairly major revisions since Snow Leopard: Lion, Mountain Lion, Mavericks (free upgrade from 10.7).
I just watched the pilot episode of the original series on Youtube when it occurred to me that I'd never seen the beginning, only a few episodes here and there during it's original run in the 1980's.
It's here for anyone wanting to watch it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMjYChwuqMI
Personally, I'd rather they leave Blakes 7 alone, it was great for it's time. If anyone were to bring it back it should be the BBC, like they've done with Doctor Who.
As for other shows that should be back on TV there's Stargate Universe which was cruelly cancelled before its time. Why not help out to get it back on the air again via Netflix and sign the Change.org petition linked below. There's little point asking SyFy as they don't seem to know anything about science fiction anyway.
http://www.change.org/petitions/netflix-save-stargate-universe
The other day there were 3000 signatures, today it's over 4000. With the help of Slashdot I reckon we could hit over 10K in no time. The target is 100K I think.
Just thought I'd point you in the direction of Reaction Engines ideas for a mission to Mars. Take a look at the detailed PDF and the movie.
http://www.reactionengines.co.uk/troy.html
I've been following the guys down at Reaction Engines and their SABRE engine concept for a few years. These are the same guys who came up with the HOTOL concept at Rolls Royce in the 1980's. No word on what they'd use for thermal protection on re-entry but they're a clever bunch and if I came into a billion pounds I'd shove a fair chunk of it at these guys to build me a fleet of spaceships to rule the world ;-)
If they could get government funding we could lead the world in launch capabilities. However, what would probably happen is that we'd end up handing it over the the USA as our leaders are too short sighted and too cheap to fund anything truly visionary or world beating.
I'm glad that this 'advert' got posted to Slashdot. I wouldn't have been aware of it otherwise and have now given $10 to get these games for my Mac. I used to have Darwinia ages ago, but I think it was just the demo. I've been aware of the other games for some time and will play them when I get around to it. Time to post a link on Facebook and inform my friends as well.
I've got two friends who are now homeless and have lost everything apart from the clothes on their backs and their mobile phones after scum broke into a jewellers in Tottenham on Saturday night and then proceeded to torch the place. They lived above the shops and barely got out with their lives. For twenty minutes the Police were nowhere in site. My friends were posting on Facebook as the riots got closer and were frightened that they'd have to arm themselves to protect against a home invasion and then their worse fear happened - fires were started.
These kids aren't making a statement, they aren't fighting the system, they aren't protesting against jack shit. They just want to run riot, smash shit up and set fire to stuff whilst getting away with stealing as much as possible.
I'm quite happy the RIM are helping. Hopefully Skype, MSN, etc. will be on the case too. I'd send in the army with tear gas and rubber bullets (to start with) if I was in charge.
We use litres for fuel, at least at the pump. The guys on Top Gear still talk in gallons because they're dinosaurs and like to be eccentric. I'm a big fan of Top Gear myself. Cars speedos are in MPH mainly because large distances, like between towns, are measured in miles. We drink pints of beer (real beer btw). When you go to the shops for milk it's in pints with a litre measurement on the carton as well. Most other foodstuffs are in metric, 0.75 litres of wine, 330ml in a can of Coke, 400g of crackers, etc.
I'm usually confused by imperial weight measurements, as I'm under 40 and wasn't taught ounces, pounds and stones at school. I work in grams and kilograms. For my weight I know and measure myself in kg (91kg, down from 107kg last year, that's about 14st 5lbs) and have to convert it to stones and pounds for other people.
Please start calling them 'American units'. Two reasons. Firstly in the UK most people work in metric (at least if they're under 30) for weights and measurements. The exceptions being that we measure large distances in miles (car speed in miles per hour) and person weight in stones (st & lbs) rather than just pounds like in the US. You're supposed to sell fruit & veg in metric, but in reality shops show both imperial and metric measurements along side each other for the sake of older people. Food packets and drinks are in litres and grams/kg. The second reason is if they're called American units that other remaining countries will want to change over to metric, leaving you to use them on your own.
An odd aside, I remember as a kid, seeing an American recipe for cookies years ago and it had mysterious measurements like 'a cup of flour'. WTF? How big a cup? You take these things for granted, but I had no idea. Most recipes call for so many grams of flour and there's no confusion.
In addition, no one else has lost a space probe due to the difference between imperial and metric, only you guys.
Sorry, I didn't see anything about relativity in the video or the article apart from them referring to it. Is he published? I'm agree that he's very smart and has learnt a lot of math. Can anyone provide links to a critique of his work or his actual work? I'm interested to read more.
As for Macs.... It wouldn't work because of the two major changes in architecture. The original Macs were Motorola 68000 based, then 020, 030, 040. Then they moved to PowerPC 601, 603, 620, G3, G4, G5. Then they transitioned again to x86 Pentium D, Core Solo/Duo's, Core 2 Duo, Xeon's and now Core i3, i5 & i7.
I think you can run from System 1 to 8.6 (or similar) on 680x0. OS 8 was both PPC & 680x0 compatible I think. OS 9 was PPC only if I remember correctly.
You could go from OS X 10.0 to 10.5 on a G3 PPC machine like an iBook or Powerbook. I've personally upgraded an old Powerbook G3 from OS 10.2 to 10.5. Snow Leopard (10.6) is Intel only. Tiger (10.4) was available for both PPC and Intel, as was Leopard (10.5). Lion (10.7) will be 64 bit Intel only, so won't work on pre Core 2 Duo CPUs.
You can still run PPC software using Sheepshaver (or similar, sometimes known as Classic on Intel). Apple included 680x0 emulation in the OS for old apps when they moved over to PPC. Apple also included 'Classic' OS support for OS 9 apps in OS X until the Intel transition.
Personally, on balance I'm quite happy using modern software designed to work on the latest versions that take advantage of new system APIs and features. Software has evolved a lot since MacPaint, etc. and I'm happy to use Photoshop CS5 instead. Would you prefer to use Mosaic or Netscape Navigator than Safari/Firefox/Opera/IE9, etc.?
Still got to say that the video is excellent and informative. My hat is off to the guy who made it.
I've suggested this elsewhere for other wind farms. How about having a hydrogen electrolysis plant nearby where water can be turned into Hydrogen that can be turned back into electricity during non-peak wind (tidal, or whatever) periods. Hydrogen can be burnt turning it back into water easily and produces heat that can be turned into electricity cheaply and easily. The most expensive part of the whole unit would be the hydrogen storage. This can safely be placed underground to avoid leaks and explosions if required.
How about they put the prize money into a scholarship fund. Surely he couldn't object to this. He could outline the type of benefactor he'd like to receive a stipend from time to time and leave the actual selection to a committee formed by associates of the Millennium Prize board.
I will be happy to continue reading the Telegraph website (especially for the Alex and Matt cartoons), The Guardian website and the BBC News website. I also check news.google.co.uk every day. I doubt I'll be left out of the loop at all. Occasionally I even click on links to stories on the Daily Mail or The Sun websites, newspapers that I probably would never consider buying (for differing reasons).
Thing is, I do buy physical issues of The Times at the weekend, once or twice a month, mostly on Sunday but sometimes on Saturdays as well. It just depends how busy I am and what my routine for the day will end up being.
I visit the cinema on average once a week and every time the copyright warning is displayed and mentions 10 years in prison for recording a movie in a cinema I cringe. That's more than people get for killing and maiming people, robbing banks and committing other violent crimes. The MP's are in the pockets of the media companies. I'm not talking about small indie film studios, but the distributors and those who own them like Sony, etc. They've been persuaded that if the penalties are high enough people will not perform actions that are trivial to execute and have no visible consequences. This has been shown not to be true time and time again.
I buy lots of DVDs and DVD boxsets. I probably spent about £500 a year on these. I pay for the cinema one a week. I buy music on iTunes and only search elsewhere online if I can't find what I want. As a kid I pirated every virtual computer game in existence in the 8/16 bit eras. Now I rarely play games, apart from on my iPhone which I pay for. I don't have TV at home, so *sometimes* I get TV shows I like online before going out and buying the full season boxset as soon as it becomes available. I might consider buying them on iTunes or similar if they were available at a reasonable price, but they're not. Most episodes of TV shows cost far more than the equivalent DVD for lower quality and no physical media to keep and store and are non-transferable to other machines, etc. I hope I'm not one of the people discovered in this haul of IP addresses, but I do not download movies, only a little bit of TV. Fingers crossed.
I can tell you're not a Photoshop user. .PST files are Microsoft Outlook mailbox (or archive) files. .PSD is a Photoshop document file.
No big deal, but pointing it out. Seeing a reference to PST in a Photoshop thread made my eyes jump out on stalks like in a cartoon.
Absolutely. Ayn Rand was correct.
As the law stands in the UK you have have sex at 16 lawfully but can not take photographs or record it on video as the participants are under 18.
I know, it's ridiculous, just as this proposed law is.
One of the biggest reasons people and companies are not upgrading to Vista is backwards compatibility. Microsoft have a free product called Virtual PC that anyone can download. They should include a suitable version of XP with very Vista license and include Virtual PC in the standard install. If you can run all your mission critical apps in a compatibility layer like this (think 'Classic' on the old PPC Macs) then they could really move forward with Vista and make it a modern OS and drop the old cruft they've been carrying for years in the name of backwards compatibility. If they wanted to they could even include Win95/Win98/WintNT or even Win3.1 virtual environments.
If Parallels and VMware can make the desktop sharing between Mac OS X and Windows easy, why can't Microsoft make it easy between Win9X/NT/XP and Vista easy?
Problem is no one at Microsoft in interested in doing this. I was invited to Microsoft's London offices last month and suggested it to a few of their top engineers and sales/marketing people and no one wanted to admit that Vista was a relative failure. You can downgrade to XP but you need your own DVD/CD media, and can't run Vista and XP at the same time, it's one licence or the other. Madness!
I've just made an internal decision of my own, never to use another Yahoo site, or related property again. That includes Flickr and any other Yahoo owned property.
From now on Yahoo is blocked on my network as well. Sorry, it was an 'internal decision' to block it.
Normal service will resume when (if?) Yahoo pull their socks up.
What makes Mac OS X special is not the glitz and glamour on the surface, it's what's underneath. The Cocoa framework for Objective C is head and shoulders above the MFC/Win32 programming approach. it's built on BSD and Mach and is now officially a Unix certified OS. It's built in a logical and elegant way. You can run Linux/Unix apps on it. X11 is included, although an optional install. OpenGl and Aqua make it beautiful to look at. There are literally hundreds of reasons why I prefer it, but won't go into them here.
Simply skinning XP with an' aqua' style skin and adding a dock does not make it anything like OS X. Any more than putting a Ferrari shell on top of a ford doesn't make it a Ferrari.
Xerox got Apple stock in return for licencing their intellectual property, which Xerox saw little commerical value in and had been sitting on for years.
Microsoft stole Apple's implementation of 'WIMP' after becoming an Macintosh developer and snaffling all the documentation. It still took them over ten years to produce what Apple did in two.
I'd suggest testing the RAM, it could need replacing. Also if it's a model with a fan or air vents for cooling that it has enoug hair flow around them and they are not blocked by cables, etc.
Most G4's run quite cool and shouldn't suffer, but a few older ones were clocked quite a bit higher than they maybe should have been, as Apple were feeling the pinch in the speed stakes against Intel and were waiting for Motorola/IBM to improve the design.
Hdd's are simple enough to test, as you can run off a copy of your main HDD by using SuperDuper on an external drive via FireWire without having to swap it out. An enclosure should be quite cheap to pick up in a store or online. That way when you do decide to put the drive inside the machine you have an device to connect the old drive as extra storage space, or you can purchase another cheap drive, both of which should be ok for using Time Machine with (that is if you upgrade and your machine meets the minimum requirements).
Does anyone have any news if this affects 'Preview' on OS X. I hate the Adobe Reader and never use it.
I understood that PDF is virtually native on the Mac. This is in part due to the design of Quartz and now NeXT used to use display Postscript , which PDF grew out of in a way.
Some applications now use scaled PDF icons for resolution indepenence, such as Coda for example. Should we be worrying about this at all?
I'm sure I've seen an Apple Inc. patent for a device that does this. It might even have been posted here on Slashdot.
Hopefully these sensors only work up close like a scanner, rather than like a webcam.