I didn't get where I am today without several years of Speccie use. Initially the 48K bathmat-keyed case, then eventually the motherboard went into a full travel keyboard doofus, along with Interface 1 and a pair of Microdrives. I had a Brother thermal printing typewriter with an RS232 interface, rather than the dreaded Sinclair sparky printer.
I think I still have a C90 cassette with a pile of games on it somewhere...I can't imagine how so many games got onto a single cassette...
I also had a speech synthesiser doofus. I fiddled with Basic but I couldn't be bothered with Assembler.
I wouldn't be surprised if most Sinclair users have migrated to Linux. Where else can you have so much intellectual stimulation these days?
Good point, weave. I didn't know that the quoted US price could
be gross, rather than the UK net retail price.
Unfortunately as you say it doesn't make up for the fact that
we're being ripped off.
A UK CD costing 12.99 UKP includes VAT (that's sales tax) of 2.27
UKP, so the pre tax retail price is around 10.72 UKP. If the UK
shops were retailing at the UK equivalent of $9.72 plus tax, then
that would be 5.40 UKP plus VAT, making a net retail price of 6.35
UKP. That's less than half UK average price.
UK retailers dare not cut prices to these levels, because if they
did we'd know that we had been ripped off for all these years, and
the political fallout would be huge. But then hey, this is Blair's
Britain! We are being ripped off.
Indeed. So why do CDs sell for $23 (12.99 GBP) and more in "Great Britain"?
That $15.99 quoted is 8.90 GBP according to XE.com's converter. Clearly our CDs are better quality than yours? No?
That $9.72 quoted as Wal-mart's price equals 5.41 GBP. At that price I for one would be buying lots of CDs, but all you can get for that price in the UK is the broken stuff in the remainder bin.
Differential pricing and price pointing are the scourge of modern retailing. I'd love to see Asda (UK arm of Wal-mart) take on the BPI in this way, but I fear it would have consequences for the independent record stores that still exist, not to mention the second-hand record stores.
When I think of the music industry these days I think of King Canute (that one who thought he could hold back the sea by just sticking out his hand and shouting stop).
When I try to use the A9 engine I get warned by some "Finjan Vital Security" software I never knew we had at work, that the site is blocked.
Access to http://a9.com/test was blocked.
Forbidden virus (Trojan horse) 'JS/Exploit-DDay' was detected.
Amusing this, because the info I finally found about this DDay is that it only affects IE, and I was using Firebird...I would upgrade to Firefox but every time I've tried to do so it fails to authenticate through our firewall so I stick to what works.
IE is so deeply integrated into the operating system
you have to use it somewhere.
Which is why I have been playing around with the free version of
98lite, that allows you to install Win98SE (with all its problems no
less) without IE at all, and with the Win95B Explorer.exe. I have yet
to get the time to install Firefox but Thunderbird worked nicely, and
the HTML help support is a separate download.
I am working towards Linux as a full replacement for
Windows, but until I can get a version fully functioning I need a PC
I can rely on, so the 98Lite option is the one I am trying, rather
than shelling out nearly 200GBP or whatever for XP Pro. XP gets for too much attention from hackers for my liking. I use XP Pro at
work, but I don't have to like it, and my home hardware doesn't have
that level of horsepower.
I love Firefox, for example, but I ended up uninstalling it because IE annoyingly gets in the way.
Yes, I ended up reverting to Firebird 0.7 at work because Firefox kept doing weird stuff, possibly due to the ActiveX plugin doofus. I can't quite understand how IE could get in the way. Care to clarify?
Nope, if your house is wrapped in tinfoil, that is opaque, so the van can't see in and you can't see out.
Unless you make a hole through the tinfoil for your telescope, and then your electronic emissions (Tempest?) escape, so you're back to square one. And it gets stuffy. And the guys driving the van create a doohicky for seeing the wrong way down your telescope so as to see in...Good game this.
I think there's more to Pixar's movies as adult entertainment than you are suggesting.
Take the example of ToyStory 2. It works for adults because it speaks of the passage of time, of growing up, of the fear that your children will grow up and leave you alone. It's perhaps a perspective that a parent can relate to more easily, but it boils down to a message that any parent can find a resonance with. I know you don;t mean just sex and violence, but what can be done in anime can't be done in a more mainstream (wrong term perhaps but I apologise) genre. It is hard to achieve an adult/child thematic balance in a film aimed predominantly at the child, but the genius of Pixar is that they manage to speak to such a wide audience.
Don't flame me (oh go one then), but I graduated in Social Sciences and Film and Television Studies some years ago, and I wish I had had the Pixar movies to study back then. Much as I enjoyed Alphaville, I would have found Nemo rather easier to critique!
Never mind 80 years ago, this was the method for school photographs just 30 years ago and probably more recently. I had my photo taken along with the rest of my school, and I found a similar photo in the attic of our house, belonging to the younger guy who lived here before me. So I suspect the equipment may not be so impossible to find now.
Theoretically there's no reason why a camera mount couldn't be designed to do the same thing as the clockwork rotation of the old system. The camera would take a sequence of shots for subsequent stitching together. People do this already, don't they?
You left out the fun part. The old system traversed so slowly that it was possible for a kid at the start of the lineup to run around the back of the bleachers and get in the shot more than once. You could hear the running steps every time this exercise in educational hubris was undertaken. No, not me, I was a good boy. Not. Besides, I was too near to the masters (that's teachers for non-British Grammar school pupils) to get away with it. Alwasys check these pictures for twins!
The obvious answer if afraid of DRM being "switched on" is to try to avoid the urge to update the firmware all the time. That "new firmware for your gizmo! Get it now!" on the manufacturer's website might just be the killswitch. Of course, there may be other ways for it to sneak onto your gizmo.
It can't have escaped your notice that digital cameras and MP3 players have been moving away from Smartmedia and the older flash memory formats onto xD, SD and Memory Stick. Hmm, a new format that includes encryption and DRM. Why would I want my holiday snapshots encrypted and protected by DRM? I don't take those kind of holidays...
If this is a quote from The Jerk (I've seen it but I can't remember this) then I think the Monty Python team should claim prior art. It's the same shtick as the Spanish Inquisition sketch!
NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our chief weapon is
surprise...surprise and fear...fear and surprise....
Our two
weapons are fear and surprise...and ruthless efficiency....
Our
*three* weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency...and an
almost fanatical devotion to the Pope....
Our *four*...no...
*Amongst* our weapons.... Amongst our weaponry...are such elements as
fear, surprise.... I'll come in again.
My former colleagues in the IT unit swore by Jaz disks for backup. I swore at the Jaz disks when they failed, couldn't be taken from one drive to another and still work, etc., etc...
So then my buddies bought Iomega Peerless drives! I was there in the corner wearing the long robe, wailing "beware the ides of March, Iomega are pants...".
Within a week my Peerless cartridge borked (is that the correct usage?) my files and I had to reformat it. Within less than a year Iomega dumped the Peerless drive from its range. I told you so!
I predict these new drives will die horribly within months.
Byt the way, are they called Iomega because the In-Out performance of their drives is so meagre?
When I started looking at the site I was immediately reminded of The
Fabulous Ruins Of Detroit. A ruin is a ruin, but the images taken out of context (and without the obvious headliner of the reactor) could be of any rundown area. Some of them remind me of places near my home, but without the Cyrillic!
What makes this so powerful is the narrative in its fractured English, and the fear. She might well know what she's doing, but would you go there? Serious subject for a Slashdot poll...
I was compiling a doc from various sources in Word 2002 including text and pictures - it
died around page 30 and lost my additions.
I then opened the corpse in OO. I added all the stuff and
ended up with a 101 page document. No crash.
I saved the document in Word format just under 1 MB.
I'd never saved a document in native OO format before
so out of curiosity I tried it. 130 KB.
I know OO has some shortcomings (why is Paste at the bottom of the
right-click menu? Anyone know how to customise this?), but it's
90% or more comparable with say Office Small Business-type edition
for functionality. Email? Thunderbird or Evolution. Access?
Haven't tried MySQL but I was very impressed when I could open
Access databases in OO. And the free PDF distiller and Flash
converter for presentations are a tasty garnish.
Microsoft's marketing guide should come on a roll with
perforations.
I worked many more years ago than I care to admit in a record
store and I got a very handsome discount on music (OK, it was pre-CD
and we did actually have some 8-tracks. Yeah, that long ago). Know
what? I bought loads of music out of my wages and I didn't care that
much if some of it was cack. Now I can afford to buy some music but
as I see such a load of rubbish on sale (Dido? Am I the only one who
thinks she's mooing?) I don't buy much at all. And I don't download.
You've got to really want to hear something before you'll bother
with the faffing around in p2p to find a decent copy.
Music is overpriced. People know that the price of a CD is too
high for its value in terms of entertainment.
As purchasers listen to their new CD they realise that
they've got 2 or 3 decent tracks and a load of filler. How
much did I pay for this junk? As resentment builds and they
see the tracks they want to hear available on p2p networks, they
choose to get the music they want, rather than the music the
industry wants them to have.
The industry is pricing singles at too high a proportion of
the price of a full album. Result: death of the CD single.
The price of a CD album is set at an artificial point to seem
more valuable than the nearest rounded-down price point (example:
$18.99 rather than $14.99). Result: resentment by buyers, who seek
out cheaper sources for their CD's until the industry says Whoa
there! WE can offshore production to save money and increase
profits, but you suckers can still pay our price in your home
territory rather than buy offshore.
Unless the price of CDs and DVDs falls to a lower price point the
industry will face continuing efforts to circumvent copyright. Let's
face it, if a CD cost half of what it does today, would you bother to
download it? To rip it? The industry is NOT giving artists big
royalties and they're not investing heavily in A&R. They are
just coining it, and getting scared that the public have rumbled
their cosy little game.
When a commodity is overpriced in the martketplace, the price must
fall or the market will collapse.
Having read the posts so far I can't see this idea working. Other
posters have explained quite well the history of digital terrestrial
television (DTTV) in the UK. The only way it is working now and has
so many viewers is because it is now free at the point of use. Just
buy your set-top-box and so long as you have a decent antenna and
you've paid your UK TV Licence (we are quaint) you get digital TV channels and
digital radio.
Although we have a new pay-tv service starting up called Top-Up
TV, the same shortcomings of DTTV remain.
You can't broadcast that many channels in acceptable quality.
You can't compete with satellite on choice of channels.
You can't compete with cable on choice of channels.
Freeview works in the UK because it's free! It may have a load of
channels that are pants (according to your taste), but it gives Ma and
Pa a load more to watch without coughing up a monthly subscription
fee. You might have a different experience in the US with this, but
USDTV sounds too much like ONDigital to succeed.
Not the case now for Mozilla. Mozilla Firebird in WinXP is far faster then IE6 and has tabbed browsing so you don't need umpteen separate IE6 windows at the same time. Mozilla 1.4 is NOT slow and clunky.
Sigh. garcia is right about dependencies though. I just looked at the Bluefish thing referenced by Roblimo in "A Week Of Windows". I have to have what? And what? GTK is what? I WANT SO MUCH to use Linux but when I see this sort of thing I think "hmmm, setup.exe is so comfortable". The RPM system is going some way to sort this out but if we want Linux and OSS to be accepted it has to work for non-techies.
So what if it's a troll? Address the issues please.
Slashdot Mirror
I think I still have a C90 cassette with a pile of games on it somewhere...I can't imagine how so many games got onto a single cassette...
I also had a speech synthesiser doofus. I fiddled with Basic but I couldn't be bothered with Assembler.
I wouldn't be surprised if most Sinclair users have migrated to Linux. Where else can you have so much intellectual stimulation these days?
Good point, weave. I didn't know that the quoted US price could be gross, rather than the UK net retail price.
Unfortunately as you say it doesn't make up for the fact that we're being ripped off.
A UK CD costing 12.99 UKP includes VAT (that's sales tax) of 2.27 UKP, so the pre tax retail price is around 10.72 UKP. If the UK shops were retailing at the UK equivalent of $9.72 plus tax, then that would be 5.40 UKP plus VAT, making a net retail price of 6.35 UKP. That's less than half UK average price.
UK retailers dare not cut prices to these levels, because if they did we'd know that we had been ripped off for all these years, and the political fallout would be huge. But then hey, this is Blair's Britain! We are being ripped off.
That $15.99 quoted is 8.90 GBP according to XE.com's converter. Clearly our CDs are better quality than yours? No?
That $9.72 quoted as Wal-mart's price equals 5.41 GBP. At that price I for one would be buying lots of CDs, but all you can get for that price in the UK is the broken stuff in the remainder bin.
Differential pricing and price pointing are the scourge of modern retailing. I'd love to see Asda (UK arm of Wal-mart) take on the BPI in this way, but I fear it would have consequences for the independent record stores that still exist, not to mention the second-hand record stores.
When I think of the music industry these days I think of King Canute (that one who thought he could hold back the sea by just sticking out his hand and shouting stop).
He got wet.
Access to http://a9.com/test was blocked.
Forbidden virus (Trojan horse) 'JS/Exploit-DDay' was detected.
Amusing this, because the info I finally found about this DDay is that it only affects IE, and I was using Firebird...I would upgrade to Firefox but every time I've tried to do so it fails to authenticate through our firewall so I stick to what works.
"Hello ! Yeah, I'm on the bike!"
Which is why I have been playing around with the free version of 98lite, that allows you to install Win98SE (with all its problems no less) without IE at all, and with the Win95B Explorer.exe. I have yet to get the time to install Firefox but Thunderbird worked nicely, and the HTML help support is a separate download.
I am working towards Linux as a full replacement for Windows, but until I can get a version fully functioning I need a PC I can rely on, so the 98Lite option is the one I am trying, rather than shelling out nearly 200GBP or whatever for XP Pro. XP gets for too much attention from hackers for my liking. I use XP Pro at work, but I don't have to like it, and my home hardware doesn't have that level of horsepower.
Yes, I ended up reverting to Firebird 0.7 at work because Firefox kept doing weird stuff, possibly due to the ActiveX plugin doofus. I can't quite understand how IE could get in the way. Care to clarify?Washing off crud from the manufacturing process, IIRC with lovely volatile solvents.
Unless you make a hole through the tinfoil for your telescope, and then your electronic emissions (Tempest?) escape, so you're back to square one. And it gets stuffy. And the guys driving the van create a doohicky for seeing the wrong way down your telescope so as to see in...Good game this.
Get back under the bridge.
Take the example of ToyStory 2. It works for adults because it speaks of the passage of time, of growing up, of the fear that your children will grow up and leave you alone. It's perhaps a perspective that a parent can relate to more easily, but it boils down to a message that any parent can find a resonance with. I know you don;t mean just sex and violence, but what can be done in anime can't be done in a more mainstream (wrong term perhaps but I apologise) genre. It is hard to achieve an adult/child thematic balance in a film aimed predominantly at the child, but the genius of Pixar is that they manage to speak to such a wide audience.
Don't flame me (oh go one then), but I graduated in Social Sciences and Film and Television Studies some years ago, and I wish I had had the Pixar movies to study back then. Much as I enjoyed Alphaville, I would have found Nemo rather easier to critique!
Dr Knackerator? Dominic, is that you?
Theoretically there's no reason why a camera mount couldn't be designed to do the same thing as the clockwork rotation of the old system. The camera would take a sequence of shots for subsequent stitching together. People do this already, don't they?
You left out the fun part. The old system traversed so slowly that it was possible for a kid at the start of the lineup to run around the back of the bleachers and get in the shot more than once. You could hear the running steps every time this exercise in educational hubris was undertaken. No, not me, I was a good boy. Not. Besides, I was too near to the masters (that's teachers for non-British Grammar school pupils) to get away with it. Alwasys check these pictures for twins!
It can't have escaped your notice that digital cameras and MP3 players have been moving away from Smartmedia and the older flash memory formats onto xD, SD and Memory Stick. Hmm, a new format that includes encryption and DRM. Why would I want my holiday snapshots encrypted and protected by DRM? I don't take those kind of holidays...
Now, where's my tinfoil...
NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our chief weapon is surprise...surprise and fear...fear and surprise....
Our two weapons are fear and surprise...and ruthless efficiency....
Our *three* weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency...and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope....
Our *four*...no...
*Amongst* our weapons.... Amongst our weaponry...are such elements as fear, surprise.... I'll come in again.
Thanks to these folks for the quote!
So then my buddies bought Iomega Peerless drives! I was there in the corner wearing the long robe, wailing "beware the ides of March, Iomega are pants...".
Within a week my Peerless cartridge borked (is that the correct usage?) my files and I had to reformat it. Within less than a year Iomega dumped the Peerless drive from its range. I told you so!
I predict these new drives will die horribly within months.
Byt the way, are they called Iomega because the In-Out performance of their drives is so meagre?
What makes this so powerful is the narrative in its fractured English, and the fear. She might well know what she's doing, but would you go there? Serious subject for a Slashdot poll...
I was compiling a doc from various sources in Word 2002 including text and pictures - it died around page 30 and lost my additions.
I then opened the corpse in OO. I added all the stuff and ended up with a 101 page document. No crash.
I saved the document in Word format just under 1 MB.
I'd never saved a document in native OO format before so out of curiosity I tried it. 130 KB.
I know OO has some shortcomings (why is Paste at the bottom of the right-click menu? Anyone know how to customise this?), but it's 90% or more comparable with say Office Small Business-type edition for functionality. Email? Thunderbird or Evolution. Access? Haven't tried MySQL but I was very impressed when I could open Access databases in OO. And the free PDF distiller and Flash converter for presentations are a tasty garnish.
Microsoft's marketing guide should come on a roll with perforations.
I worked many more years ago than I care to admit in a record store and I got a very handsome discount on music (OK, it was pre-CD and we did actually have some 8-tracks. Yeah, that long ago). Know what? I bought loads of music out of my wages and I didn't care that much if some of it was cack. Now I can afford to buy some music but as I see such a load of rubbish on sale (Dido? Am I the only one who thinks she's mooing?) I don't buy much at all. And I don't download. You've got to really want to hear something before you'll bother with the faffing around in p2p to find a decent copy.
Music is overpriced. People know that the price of a CD is too high for its value in terms of entertainment.
As purchasers listen to their new CD they realise that they've got 2 or 3 decent tracks and a load of filler. How much did I pay for this junk? As resentment builds and they see the tracks they want to hear available on p2p networks, they choose to get the music they want, rather than the music the industry wants them to have.
The industry is pricing singles at too high a proportion of the price of a full album. Result: death of the CD single.
The price of a CD album is set at an artificial point to seem more valuable than the nearest rounded-down price point (example: $18.99 rather than $14.99). Result: resentment by buyers, who seek out cheaper sources for their CD's until the industry says Whoa there! WE can offshore production to save money and increase profits, but you suckers can still pay our price in your home territory rather than buy offshore.
Unless the price of CDs and DVDs falls to a lower price point the industry will face continuing efforts to circumvent copyright. Let's face it, if a CD cost half of what it does today, would you bother to download it? To rip it? The industry is NOT giving artists big royalties and they're not investing heavily in A&R. They are just coining it, and getting scared that the public have rumbled their cosy little game.
When a commodity is overpriced in the martketplace, the price must fall or the market will collapse.
...gotta stay home and wax my 'board!
...who read this and thought "John Hurt as Hadden in Contact". Who's playing the Ellie Arroway character?
Having read the posts so far I can't see this idea working. Other posters have explained quite well the history of digital terrestrial television (DTTV) in the UK. The only way it is working now and has so many viewers is because it is now free at the point of use. Just buy your set-top-box and so long as you have a decent antenna and you've paid your UK TV Licence (we are quaint) you get digital TV channels and digital radio.
Although we have a new pay-tv service starting up called Top-Up TV, the same shortcomings of DTTV remain.
You can't broadcast that many channels in acceptable quality. You can't compete with satellite on choice of channels. You can't compete with cable on choice of channels.Freeview works in the UK because it's free! It may have a load of channels that are pants (according to your taste), but it gives Ma and Pa a load more to watch without coughing up a monthly subscription fee. You might have a different experience in the US with this, but USDTV sounds too much like ONDigital to succeed.
But not that excited...
How quickly we forget "The League Of Gentlemen"...
...a Weapon of Meteorological Destruction? Great troll though. You mean this is serious?
Not the case now for Mozilla. Mozilla Firebird in WinXP is far faster then IE6 and has tabbed browsing so you don't need umpteen separate IE6 windows at the same time. Mozilla 1.4 is NOT slow and clunky.
Sigh. garcia is right about dependencies though. I just looked at the Bluefish thing referenced by Roblimo in "A Week Of Windows". I have to have what? And what? GTK is what? I WANT SO MUCH to use Linux but when I see this sort of thing I think "hmmm, setup.exe is so comfortable". The RPM system is going some way to sort this out but if we want Linux and OSS to be accepted it has to work for non-techies.
So what if it's a troll? Address the issues please.