Y: We don't have telephone service in my house, or telephones.
T: Surely you must, sir. How are we having this conversation?
Y: Voices in my head.
T: Sorry?
Y: The telephone company came and took away all the phones. Now they send all calls directly as voices in my head. Unfortunately, it is hard to tell the telephone voices from the ones informing me that Queen Elizabeth is a reptile who must be stopped. What type are you?
T: Huh? I'm sorr...
Y: If you're not one of us, you're one of them. STOP PERSECUTING ME! We're onto you and your mind experiments.
T: Uh...
Y: Listen, this line can only handle one schizophrenic delusion at a time, and I'm expecting a call from my mother, so if you don't mind...
T: I'll call back later. [click]
Actually, they already have this. It is a nice grey bezel box that overlays the contents of the (now frozen) screen with messages in a number of languages
Bah! Nothing beats the bombs that the Atari ST used to display when it crashed.
The Atari console, erm, original pong game, shipped with a scroll wheel. The mouse functionality was rather primitive however.
You mean the paddle, of course. However, it should be possible to get an Amiga or Atari ST mouse to work in one of them (albeit with only the left button readable).
The connectors for those mice are the standard 'Atari' connector, and the 4 bytes used to indicate horizontal/vertical movement are input in the same pins as the joystick 'position' value.
Bear one thing in mind; if you move the mouse even moderately fast, the values for one direction (or both if reasonably diagonal) change very quickly; so fast that a mouse-handler I wrote for my Atari 800XL that only updated during the VBI (50 times per second) wasn't fast enough.
The VCS is far less powerful than the Atari 800 and its offspring, so a mouse handler would doubtless take up much of the CPU time.
The problem I have with early Who, though, is the same problem I have with a lot of early SciFi. It's good, often very good, but I've gotten so spoiled with modern production values that I have to suppress my reaction ton the effects.
Look upon it as a stage play then; apparently, the early Who stories *were* pretty theatrical (e.g. characters move off a short distance and talk as if the other characters are out of earshot), though I haven't really seen enough to comment.
And sadly, someday 'The Matrix' is going to look dated as hell and kids will laugh at it. Even if they're being charitable, they might wonder what the deal was because all that was fresh about it has been appropriated and absorbed, and they weren't around when it was new.
There's a free TV channel in the UK that shows some very dated (in terms of factual content) travel programs (10-15 years old). Some of these programs were originally intended for the 'youth' market (14-24?) with smart graphics and 'up-to-date' dance music in the background. What struck me about watching the repeats is that the style didn't seem dated; it seemed *mainstream*. What was once innovative and fresh gets absorbed and nullified.
I have the same problem with Star Wars, punk and Hendrix, so it's not necessarily an indicator of quality. Ditto Rock n' Roll; when I was growing up it was still 30 years old and the stuff of cheesey nostalgia.
Learn Kung-Fu. It lets you fight off agent Smith, and you can avenger your master after he is slain by ninjas. Plus, I have yet to see someon who holds a MBA or Math degree with those cool Shaolin dragon and lion brands on their wrists.
Later that day, TiggertheMad had his lunch money stolen by a gang of bullies.
He was heard to repeatedly utter the phrase "I know Kung-Fu!" as his head was flushed down the toilet.
I've absolutely *no* interest whatsoever in going anywhere near a university in the forseeable future; quite honestly, I'd rather concentrate on my practical skills.
Frankly, that's mathematical stuff, and I'm not that brilliant at maths.
Pertwee was a bit before my time, but I realised at some stage (having seen the repeats) that I didn't really like him that much. It's that whole earth-bound, part-of-the-army type thing (wasn't the Doctor always a bit of an anti-conformist?).
Haven't seen much of Troughton, but apparently most of his best stuff was wiped, leading to the current skewed perspective of his performance. Cool title sequence for his stuff, at any rate.
Have to admit I liked Peter Davison as a kid... weird thing is, apart from The Caves of Androzani (which I own), I've never seen any of his stuff properly for almost 20 years; so judging from an adult point-of-view is hard. If Androzani was the only measure of his Doctor, I'd have said he was absolutely damn brilliant, easily the best. However, I've heard people saying that it was only in Androzani that he showed what he was truly capable of; and some (very brief) clips I've seen of some earlier stuff come across as uncomfortably nice/bland.
Colin Baker... not sure if he ever could have been that good (at least they took the risk), but he didn't really get the chance. They wanted him to be nasty, he played nasty, people didn't like it and he got the chop. But the rot had set in then anyway.
Sylvester McCoy gets stigmatised because of crapness beyond his control, IMHO. That 'candyman' story, in spite of its silliness, might have worked if it had had an underlying seriousness to it.... but the program had stopped taking itself seriously by that time.
And I still get nauseous thinking of "Dimensions in Time".
The show became too strongly associated with Tom Baker.
Which isn't to say that they didn't do some horrible things to it in the final few years (yeah, there were always slightly camp aspects to it; but latterly it turned into a celeb-laden unfunny pantomime). But the BBC *wanted* it to fail by then (Grade certainly did).
The theme song was good though. Especially when Orbital covered it.
If it ain't Delia Derbyshire or Peter Howell, it ain't worth shit.
Seriously, I don't see the deal with Orbital's version; it's nothing special. Better than the techno version they plastered on that "Children in Need" monstrosity, though.
Bear in mind that what I was trying to show *wasn't* that given an infinite number of characters you couldn't represent all possible computer programs in all languages in a single character. (*)
It was that Braindead could be designed such that it did *not* encompass all possible programs in all computer languages (if all it could do is print 'furbee', then this would be the case), and yet would *still* require an infinite number of characters to represent all possible *Braindead* programs.
(*) Oh, hang on. What happens if we have a language with an infinite choice of characters that can be made up of any number of those characters?
Okay; the even numbers thing was a crap analogy. My point was that if a single character is representing a number, and there are an infinite number of choices for that character, you can still restrict what can be represented with it (i.e. no odd numbers, only even numbers) whilst still *requiring* an infinite number of character-choices (since there are an infinite number of even numbers).
This is somewhat akin to having a computer language whose only valid statement is
printf('furbee');
Well, if the number of times you want to print "furbee" is unrestricted, you'll need one character to represent printf('furbee'); a different one for printf('furbee'); printf('furbee'); another for
printf('furbee'); printf('furbee'); printf('furbee');
And so on ad infinitum; hence an infinite number of characters will be needed for even a single-statement language. *Very* restricted.
Maybe Alan Cox was right when he voted for the UK Independence party to keep Britain out of EU Software Patents.
Nah. Same bunch of extreme Tories who'll rant about Europe whilst probably wanting to kiss America's backside as Tories are wont to do.
Besides, they're too racist for even Robert Kilroy-Silk, so that's saying something.
That having been said, the European Commission do a good job of letting governments do what they really want to do, whilst screeching "Look at the horrible undemocratic EU."
I wouldn't mind researching Peter Mandelson's position on this (as EU Trade Commissioner), actually. Nice way for Tony to get his best chum into power after being kicked out twice, but in a manner less susceptible to the scrutiny (and direct voting power) of the general public.
You should check out my new language, "Braindead". Every program is exactly one character long! Of course, some people complain that they have trouble finding which of the +Inf characters to use, but that's a different problem.
Can we assume then that Braindead encompasses all legal programs in all current computer languages, and then some?
Or do you restrict what can be done, in much the same way that there are an infinite number of even numbers, but you can't use them to express odd numbers (if you see what I'm getting at?)
Either way, I hope you're not using fixed-length encoding for the single character that makes up a Braindead program.
i've got 20 year old cheap-ass no-name-brand notched discs which still work fine. and "true double sided" from maxell, 3m and fuji which went bad in less than 3 days.
Yeah; but when did you buy the Maxells, 3Ms and Fujis? If it was recently, then they're unlikely to have the same quality as the older ones (see this comment).
Apparently the newer 3.5" disks are far less reliable than they used to be; this also goes for the drives.
This is hardly surprising considering the way the prices for these things have come down. Even accounting for dirt-cheap Chinese labour and economies of scale, you can only go so cheap before quality/QA gets sacrificed.
However, combine the "price-beats-everything" mentality of the average consumer, with the unglamorous image of the floppy (know anyone who would pay more for a computer nowadays because it came with a "quality" FDD?) and the fact that they're rarely used now (except for emergency recovery and by clueless uni students who store the only copy of their thesis on them), and the simple fact is people/assemblers will almost always buy the cheapest FDD and disks. Even if that means buying complete ****.
Slashdot Mirror
Alternate ending:
Y: We don't have telephone service in my house, or telephones.
T: Surely you must, sir. How are we having this conversation?
Y: Voices in my head.
T: Sorry?
Y: The telephone company came and took away all the phones. Now they send all calls directly as voices in my head. Unfortunately, it is hard to tell the telephone voices from the ones informing me that Queen Elizabeth is a reptile who must be stopped. What type are you?
T: Huh? I'm sorr...
Y: If you're not one of us, you're one of them. STOP PERSECUTING ME! We're onto you and your mind experiments.
T: Uh...
Y: Listen, this line can only handle one schizophrenic delusion at a time, and I'm expecting a call from my mother, so if you don't mind...
T: I'll call back later. [click]
If you don't want to see sigs then turn them off in your /. preferences.
Quit with the strawman arguments. They weren't complaining about sigs in general; they were complaining about advertising in sigs.
Except an Amiga Guru Meditation
:)
No, no. Cute name, but the bombs were still better. Less informative, though.
And I replaced my ST with an Amiga because it was better, so you can't accuse me of bias
Actually, they already have this. It is a nice grey bezel box that overlays the contents of the (now frozen) screen with messages in a number of languages
Bah! Nothing beats the bombs that the Atari ST used to display when it crashed.
But I only have one finger... you insensitive clod.
Of course, if we're discussing overloaded gamers' mice, almost anyone can say "I only have five fingers, you insensitive clod."
I suspect the offspring of rabid gamers will evolve ten or more fingers on each hand to deal with their mice.
Flaw; this assumes that they'll breed.
The Atari console, erm, original pong game, shipped with a scroll wheel. The mouse functionality was rather primitive however.
You mean the paddle, of course. However, it should be possible to get an Amiga or Atari ST mouse to work in one of them (albeit with only the left button readable).
The connectors for those mice are the standard 'Atari' connector, and the 4 bytes used to indicate horizontal/vertical movement are input in the same pins as the joystick 'position' value.
Bear one thing in mind; if you move the mouse even moderately fast, the values for one direction (or both if reasonably diagonal) change very quickly; so fast that a mouse-handler I wrote for my Atari 800XL that only updated during the VBI (50 times per second) wasn't fast enough.
The VCS is far less powerful than the Atari 800 and its offspring, so a mouse handler would doubtless take up much of the CPU time.
Sounds like something from Tom and Jerry.
Tom eats the house-in-a-bag thinking it's an MRE. A couple of seconds later, he balloons into a massive house-shaped cat (or a catskin house?!)
After a short pause, a chimney pops out of his ear.
Yeah, it has to be a real chimney. This is Tom and Jerry we're talking about here, folks.
Oh, and I just want to say that the person who modded down the parent only did so because they have a small penis :-P
I'm not making assumptions about their gender though; I'd have said the same thing if they were a guy.
Thank you! I'll be here all week, etc....
The local drive-in movie screen still pwns all! hahahaha!
/. after all...
Maybe so, but you need a girlfriend to take with you unless you want to be seen as a loser who goes to drive-ins on their own.
And this *is*
Next!
Correct me if I'm wrong, but does that mean that I'm eventually going to see a naked woman in 1:1 scale?
Don't know about that; but I'm overjoyed personally, as it's the first time my 82-inch penis will be able to be seen in 1:1 scale on an LCD.
Bleh.... seriously, would anyone *really* want an 82-inch penis? Truth is, I'm not that big, but I'm perfectly happy with my 82cm.
What was that at the back? "82mm more like"? Yeah, well maybe so, but it's what you do with it that counts. I hope... *sob*
Fucking Christ on a snack cracker, people.
Didn't they sell one of those on eBay for $20,000?
The problem I have with early Who, though, is the same problem I have with a lot of early SciFi. It's good, often very good, but I've gotten so spoiled with modern production values that I have to suppress my reaction ton the effects.
Look upon it as a stage play then; apparently, the early Who stories *were* pretty theatrical (e.g. characters move off a short distance and talk as if the other characters are out of earshot), though I haven't really seen enough to comment.
And sadly, someday 'The Matrix' is going to look dated as hell and kids will laugh at it. Even if they're being charitable, they might wonder what the deal was because all that was fresh about it has been appropriated and absorbed, and they weren't around when it was new.
There's a free TV channel in the UK that shows some very dated (in terms of factual content) travel programs (10-15 years old). Some of these programs were originally intended for the 'youth' market (14-24?) with smart graphics and 'up-to-date' dance music in the background. What struck me about watching the repeats is that the style didn't seem dated; it seemed *mainstream*. What was once innovative and fresh gets absorbed and nullified.
I have the same problem with Star Wars, punk and Hendrix, so it's not necessarily an indicator of quality. Ditto Rock n' Roll; when I was growing up it was still 30 years old and the stuff of cheesey nostalgia.
Learn Kung-Fu. It lets you fight off agent Smith, and you can avenger your master after he is slain by ninjas. Plus, I have yet to see someon who holds a MBA or Math degree with those cool Shaolin dragon and lion brands on their wrists.
Later that day, TiggertheMad had his lunch money stolen by a gang of bullies.
He was heard to repeatedly utter the phrase "I know Kung-Fu!" as his head was flushed down the toilet.
I've absolutely *no* interest whatsoever in going anywhere near a university in the forseeable future; quite honestly, I'd rather concentrate on my practical skills.
Frankly, that's mathematical stuff, and I'm not that brilliant at maths.
Pertwee was a bit before my time, but I realised at some stage (having seen the repeats) that I didn't really like him that much. It's that whole earth-bound, part-of-the-army type thing (wasn't the Doctor always a bit of an anti-conformist?).
Haven't seen much of Troughton, but apparently most of his best stuff was wiped, leading to the current skewed perspective of his performance. Cool title sequence for his stuff, at any rate.
Have to admit I liked Peter Davison as a kid... weird thing is, apart from The Caves of Androzani (which I own), I've never seen any of his stuff properly for almost 20 years; so judging from an adult point-of-view is hard. If Androzani was the only measure of his Doctor, I'd have said he was absolutely damn brilliant, easily the best. However, I've heard people saying that it was only in Androzani that he showed what he was truly capable of; and some (very brief) clips I've seen of some earlier stuff come across as uncomfortably nice/bland.
Colin Baker... not sure if he ever could have been that good (at least they took the risk), but he didn't really get the chance. They wanted him to be nasty, he played nasty, people didn't like it and he got the chop. But the rot had set in then anyway.
Sylvester McCoy gets stigmatised because of crapness beyond his control, IMHO. That 'candyman' story, in spite of its silliness, might have worked if it had had an underlying seriousness to it.... but the program had stopped taking itself seriously by that time.
And I still get nauseous thinking of "Dimensions in Time".
This is the kind of thing I find very interesting and totally incomprehensible :-/
The show fell apart without Tom Baker.
The show became too strongly associated with Tom Baker.
Which isn't to say that they didn't do some horrible things to it in the final few years (yeah, there were always slightly camp aspects to it; but latterly it turned into a celeb-laden unfunny pantomime). But the BBC *wanted* it to fail by then (Grade certainly did).
The theme song was good though. Especially when Orbital covered it.
If it ain't Delia Derbyshire or Peter Howell, it ain't worth shit.
Seriously, I don't see the deal with Orbital's version; it's nothing special. Better than the techno version they plastered on that "Children in Need" monstrosity, though.
Bear in mind that what I was trying to show *wasn't* that given an infinite number of characters you couldn't represent all possible computer programs in all languages in a single character. (*)
It was that Braindead could be designed such that it did *not* encompass all possible programs in all computer languages (if all it could do is print 'furbee', then this would be the case), and yet would *still* require an infinite number of characters to represent all possible *Braindead* programs.
(*) Oh, hang on. What happens if we have a language with an infinite choice of characters that can be made up of any number of those characters?
Okay; the even numbers thing was a crap analogy. My point was that if a single character is representing a number, and there are an infinite number of choices for that character, you can still restrict what can be represented with it (i.e. no odd numbers, only even numbers) whilst still *requiring* an infinite number of character-choices (since there are an infinite number of even numbers).
This is somewhat akin to having a computer language whose only valid statement is
printf('furbee');
Well, if the number of times you want to print "furbee" is unrestricted, you'll need one character to represent
printf('furbee');
a different one for
printf('furbee'); printf('furbee');
another for
printf('furbee'); printf('furbee'); printf('furbee');
And so on ad infinitum; hence an infinite number of characters will be needed for even a single-statement language. *Very* restricted.
Maybe Alan Cox was right when he voted for the UK Independence party to keep Britain out of EU Software Patents.
Nah. Same bunch of extreme Tories who'll rant about Europe whilst probably wanting to kiss America's backside as Tories are wont to do.
Besides, they're too racist for even Robert Kilroy-Silk, so that's saying something.
That having been said, the European Commission do a good job of letting governments do what they really want to do, whilst screeching "Look at the horrible undemocratic EU."
I wouldn't mind researching Peter Mandelson's position on this (as EU Trade Commissioner), actually. Nice way for Tony to get his best chum into power after being kicked out twice, but in a manner less susceptible to the scrutiny (and direct voting power) of the general public.
You should check out my new language, "Braindead". Every program is exactly one character long! Of course, some people complain that they have trouble finding which of the +Inf characters to use, but that's a different problem.
Can we assume then that Braindead encompasses all legal programs in all current computer languages, and then some?
Or do you restrict what can be done, in much the same way that there are an infinite number of even numbers, but you can't use them to express odd numbers (if you see what I'm getting at?)
Either way, I hope you're not using fixed-length encoding for the single character that makes up a Braindead program.
i've got 20 year old cheap-ass no-name-brand notched discs which still work fine. and "true double sided" from maxell, 3m and fuji which went bad in less than 3 days.
Yeah; but when did you buy the Maxells, 3Ms and Fujis? If it was recently, then they're unlikely to have the same quality as the older ones (see this comment).
BTW, are we discussing 3.5" or 5.25" disks?
Apparently the newer 3.5" disks are far less reliable than they used to be; this also goes for the drives.
This is hardly surprising considering the way the prices for these things have come down. Even accounting for dirt-cheap Chinese labour and economies of scale, you can only go so cheap before quality/QA gets sacrificed.
However, combine the "price-beats-everything" mentality of the average consumer, with the unglamorous image of the floppy (know anyone who would pay more for a computer nowadays because it came with a "quality" FDD?) and the fact that they're rarely used now (except for emergency recovery and by clueless uni students who store the only copy of their thesis on them), and the simple fact is people/assemblers will almost always buy the cheapest FDD and disks. Even if that means buying complete ****.
Mirror here.
That's not a horse; it's the elephant man's skull.