You make an interesting point, but I believe you're wrong about Germany.
The last time Germany was a world leader in science and engineering? Um, how about right now? "Getting lots of attention" was never of much importance to most mature nations, except, oh, maybe the US.
Germany makes the best cars in the world, which is a highly visible aspect to their engineering prowess. Also Airbus is whupping Boeing's ass with high tech engineering. In science they have some of the most heavily funded university research programs that exist. Much of this isn't very visible, but maybe it's because they do real science rather than the publicity seeking Studies Of Blinding Obviousness (SOBO(TM)) which is what sadly passes for much of US funded research. Germans also have forward thinking ideas about the environment and equality, etc, which the rest of the world would be a better place for adopting. Your stereotyped view of the country is just that, a stereotype, and unjustified at that.
Your view is just as silly as the "you lost the war" and "world cup '66 forever" attitude of some of my countrymen.
And they don't have a chimp for president.
Sorry, but you're wrong. For the very reason you state: "...the meat of the problem is that spaces are natural language delimiters". That's why people should be able to use them in a filename. If my Mum(TM) wants to name her file "recipe for bakewell tart" then she should be free to do so; she isn't a geek and would not understand why she'd be forced to type "recipe_for_tarts" or whatever. The fact that spaces are used as delimiters in command lines is unfortunate, though arguably equally natural. That these two are incompatible is a problem to be overcome, but the solution is NOT to eliminate spaces from one or the other, but to deal with it in some other way. If one has to give, then the benefit of the doubt MUST go to the non-geek user - the geeks have the knowledge to deal with the limitations in the much narrower special case they deal with. Frankly it would be pretty easy to add something like using parentheses or quote marks to delimit a filename with spaces on a command line, and not too onerous to deal with. The obvious difficulty is the sheer volume of the legacy of NOT having done it this way years ago, since when the CLI conventions were established the geeks ran the place.
Much as I despise virus writers, frankly after having been forced to use Windows for the last few days, I hope this destroys the damn platform. I normally try and keep a neutral attitude to platform wars, but these last few days have really opened my eyes to just how bad Windows is. It sucks so bad, I simply cannot fathom why it is so popular. I normally use OS X, but idiosyncracies aside, Windows designers truly seem to have no clue about what makes the difference between a productivity aid and a productivity hindrance. At every step some "feature" of Windows either doesn't work, or else does too much, requiring further steps to undo some of what it did. It cannot lay text out properly half the time. Its character mapping is totally broken, with different fonts having different character mappings. I could rant on....
Frankly, these viruses are great news for those of us who just want a bit more balance in the marketplace. I'm fed up with having to apologise for being a minority Mac user - fuck it, Macs let me get my work done, no fuss, no frustration, no stress, and no bad temper which makes me post rants to slashdot!! Windows users - piss off and call me back when your platform of "choice" is fixed. That's all.
...this sort of thing wouldn't be an issue. Who established the shortcuts of +X, C, V for Cut, Copy, Paste? Apple! Likewise nearly every common shortcut. The fact that on 'doze they decided to use a DIFFERENT modifier should not be a problem now laid at Apple's feet - M$ shoulda copied it more thoroughly!
The problem is just as bad going he other way, from Mac to Win - I keep trying to paste and getting a bloody menu popping down.
Another thing that really bugs me on Windows is typing accented characters - on the Mac most of these work in a moderately intuitive way once you've seen it once - you can nearly always guess the right key combo based on what you want to appear (i.e. option e + e gives you é, option u + u gives you ü). On 'doze you have to either learn very arcane character codes or else use the severely broken character palette - which, when you cut/paste from it also forces a new FONT and COLOUR on the text you paste - like I just wanted a character, I already formatted that text you stupid !@#$%!!!
Hardware manufacturers just need to design the CPUs to use a separate area for the return address stack that isn't cluttered with data. What is the problem with doing this?
Early Mac OS's used a "Mixed Mode Manager" as well as a weird "Universal Procedure Pointer" structure to handle context switches and memory accesses. This foundation hung around even after the OS and all current apps were ported to PPC completely, adding unneeded cruft to OS 9. They were finally removed during the transition to OS X and Carbon.
While you're not wrong, just to clarify: The Mixed Mode Manager came in with System 7.2, which was not really an "early" mac OS - sort of middling. UPPs weren't "weird", they were in fact a very elegant and inspired piece of design - for 68K code, UPPs were just pointers, plain and simple. So existing 68K binaries still worked. But for PowerPC code, they became a small transparent wrapper to a trap mechanism that determined whether the caller required the use of the 68K emulator, and if so, started it up. The result was that code of either flavour "just worked". It has been noted that this is possibly the only time that a dual ISA has ever been successfully implemented without having a separate emulation "box" on the system. The great thing was that as a programmer, if you just used the UPP macros, there was nothing special you had to do to support this dual architecture - 68k and PPC code could be mixed more or less freely. Neat.
This new-fangled vinyl will never catch on. Wax cylinders are where it's at! They sound so much better... mind you, the original scratch on tinfoil wrapped around a bar was better than anything, but the limited choice of recordings (just "Mary had a little lamb", which gets kinda old after the 200th play) mean that wax is still the way to go for variety AND quality.
This is quite right. THD is a meaningless number in reality. When I was very young and started to get into hi fi (mid 70s), we pored over catalogues comparing these sorts of figures. Fights would break out between those who fancied the Akai over the Technics. We were all wrong, and never bothered to actually LISTEN to any of the equipment. THD is TOTAL harmonic distortion, it tells you nothing about the frequencies of the distortion components. In general even harmonics will be tolerated to far higher levels than odd harmonics, and, in general, valve amps generate distortion with even harmonics and transistors generate odd ones.
The argument about feedback is also interesting, valves are large and expensive, transistors small and cheap. So valve equipment tends to carefully extract maximum performance from each stage, rather than taking the "op amp" approach. What I think is interesting though is that most equipment used to process audio signals these days is chock full of op-amps, so by the time you hear it, it has been through hundreds of such stages between the musician's instrument and your ears. It's lots of negative feedback all the way. The fact that the last "few yards" is through a valve stage is kind of irrelevant - yes that stage can contribute a change in the sound, but it can't magically improve it except subjectively by inserting MORE distortion of the even kind. It can sound better, because your ear and brain likes the distortion. So ignore THD!
One reason transistors create odd harmonics is because when they hit saturation they clip hard. Valves tend to round out rather than clip hard. However any clipping is a Bad Thing - so don't overdrive your amps so they clip. That's why any decent quality amp (regardless of whether it's tube or tranny) with lots of power and a really decent power supply will sound better even at low volume than a smaller one that's straining. In fact the power supply is extremely important - sadly much commercial domestic equipment is a joke in this area, even though the audio components might be OK. A 50W+50W power amplifier should have more than a 4700 uF capacitor on its power supply rails, which is what you typically see. That'll barely get rid of the ripple let alone hold the rail up when a musical transient needs to be delivered, the resulting lack of delivery at the crucial moment can cause the output stage to clip momentarily and sound bloody apalling. Sine wave measurements might look great though! (Who listens to steady sinewaves?). This also has a bearing on valve sound - many power amps are class A and have enormous power supplies to cope with the inherent inefficiency; where push-pull stages are used the softer characteristics of the crossover and clipping will mask or "ride out" the transient distortion as well.
...don't forget that Apple ship their development tools with every system for free. And they are good ones, you don't need anything else. Writing Cocoa apps with Objective C is the most productive way to program on any modern platform, by such a huge margin it's just not funny.
RealBASIC doesn't count. (Even if it did, Cocoa is still much quicker).
I can't believe how much time I've wasted over the years on C++, just bowing and scraping to the language and the compiler. I've seen the light brother!!!:)
Starck is a pretentious twat who couldn't design his way out of a paper bag. The first rule of design is Form Follows Function. Anyone unfortunate enough to have been bamboozled by his very expensive lemon squeezer that did the rounds of the likes of John Lewis a few years ago will know what I mean. It is actually terrible at squeezing lemons, and singularly fails to fulfil its basic function at all well, and costs over 40 GBP!! Here's what's wrong with it:
you need a separate container to catch the juice (not included!)
the gap between the legs does not permit the average bowl or cup to fit below it to catch the juice.
its centre of gravity is so high that it easily topples over when any sort of pressure (like actually trying to squeeze a lemon) is applied.
that's assuming you can get the legs on a flat surface around the juice catcher - if not you're totally fscked.
it doesn't catch the pips, so they end up in the juice.
its shape means that the juice runs off awkwardly, often running down the legs onto the surface instead of into the catcher.
Frankly, it's a travesty. I have a plastic lemon squeezer I bought in the local supermarket for 99p that does the job perfectly - it has its own container, it catches the pips, and it is strong enough to take as much force as the lemon will. If this mouse is anything like the squeezer, it'll cost a fortune, won't function well, and will probably just end up in the back of a cupboard somewhere. But there will probably still be some pretentious tossers who'll go for it.
Currently, the only methods for making things fly involve high velocities (rotors, props, turbines) and the associated noise from those moving things.
Funny, last time I went gliding, it was fairly quiet.
Work? Ha! Getting paid to think up, design and build model planes with the backup of a large R&D budget... sigh, I knew I should have done something different somewhere way back when - but what?
In fact, it's a myth that Gates stole the idea of a GUI from Mac OS. They both toured PARC and saw the machine.
I'm not sure there is any documented evidence that Gates toured PARC, but he may have. What is a fact is that Apple were a) invited by PARC and b) many PARC engineers went to work on the LIsa and Mac projects subsequently - and apart from the money I guess their motivation ewas to see their work going into something that would sell and make money, not just an abstract research adventure, good as it might have been. In addition, Apple added many features to the GUI that made it feasible - like overlapping windows (imagine a GUI without that - it didn't come from PARC). Like icons representing files. Like pull-down menus. Really Apple's biggest miss was Smalltalk.
Gates on the other hand was an early visitor to the Mac project, because Apple needed MS on-side to make business apps for the Mac. Everything in today's Office started on the Mac. In fact Windows only came into existence because Gates needed a way to sell more Office - and Windows was just an expedient way to make the IBM PC capable of doing so. Less of an OS and more of a bridging hack that allowed Office to run....
True, although despite appearances ClarisWorks used no code whatsoever from MacWrite, even though that was also a Claris product. Not that that matters, the original message was talking about the word processing concepts established by MacWrite (not Word) that were themselves a leap forward in their day.
In fact the threat that MS could have pulled Office off the Mac if Apple had competed is irrelevant - MS were much smaller back then and there was no platform like the Mac that would have supported Office. In fact one could say that MS's desire to develop Windows was exactly because of this - MS realised that the Office/Word approach was the way forward and so they needed way to bring the functionalirty of the IBM PC up to a point where it could support Office in the same way as the Mac. I guess Apple's error was to assume that the IBM was so inferior it would never compete, and so they left it to MS to provide Mac versions of Office. Somewhere in there is possibly the one, true "what they should have done was..." that would have led to a different outcome, but so what? It's not important now.
The interesting story of ClarisWorks' development is available here
Word for Windows completely changed everything. It was powerful, AND easy... and visual! You could SEE what you were laying out. It was absolutely brilliant, probably the single best word processor ever done.
And also something of a rip-off of MacWrite, which also came out 6 years before. It was MacWrite that was everything above you claim for Word, and it inspired Word for Mac, which long predated the Windows version. So if your argument has merit, one could say that what Apple should have done was to develop MacWrite and make it available for Windows as well, much like their modern iTunes strategy.
...is nothing new. The Tridents, BAC 1-11s and VC10s (all British!) of the early 1960s had it. Don't try and pretend Boeing invented everything - they are the Microsoft of the skies - not much invented here....
being scared of the future is usually called "reactionary", or, even worse "Conservative".
The way the world is is not some natural law imposing itself, it's just the outcome of the chaotic muddle we call "life". If something changes, the muddle simply rearranges itself accordingly. This is a continuous process. Get used to it.
Bump the headlight switch just right and the headlight pods would finally break free from the rust-crusted brackets and fall through onto the road, not to mention the similarly afflicted doors would implose under the force from operating the window winders. And then there was the days when if the temperature was just a tad too high the carbs would get so hot that fuel would vapourise and the damn thing would just stop - often for hours until it cooled down enough.
In fact there wasn't a weekend I wasn't up to my elbows in grease trying to keep it running. Head gasket, heater pipes, brakes, alternator, distributor, and a gearbox with so few teeth left that I learned how to expertly double-declutch on every change just to tootle down to the shops. However, I forgave it all these things because on a twisty road with the top off and (if mechanically it could pull itself together) it was an absolute joy to drive! I'd have another one....
Slashdot Mirror
You make an interesting point, but I believe you're wrong about Germany. The last time Germany was a world leader in science and engineering? Um, how about right now? "Getting lots of attention" was never of much importance to most mature nations, except, oh, maybe the US. Germany makes the best cars in the world, which is a highly visible aspect to their engineering prowess. Also Airbus is whupping Boeing's ass with high tech engineering. In science they have some of the most heavily funded university research programs that exist. Much of this isn't very visible, but maybe it's because they do real science rather than the publicity seeking Studies Of Blinding Obviousness (SOBO(TM)) which is what sadly passes for much of US funded research. Germans also have forward thinking ideas about the environment and equality, etc, which the rest of the world would be a better place for adopting. Your stereotyped view of the country is just that, a stereotype, and unjustified at that. Your view is just as silly as the "you lost the war" and "world cup '66 forever" attitude of some of my countrymen. And they don't have a chimp for president.
...so no comment.
Sorry, but you're wrong. For the very reason you state: "...the meat of the problem is that spaces are natural language delimiters". That's why people should be able to use them in a filename. If my Mum(TM) wants to name her file "recipe for bakewell tart" then she should be free to do so; she isn't a geek and would not understand why she'd be forced to type "recipe_for_tarts" or whatever. The fact that spaces are used as delimiters in command lines is unfortunate, though arguably equally natural. That these two are incompatible is a problem to be overcome, but the solution is NOT to eliminate spaces from one or the other, but to deal with it in some other way. If one has to give, then the benefit of the doubt MUST go to the non-geek user - the geeks have the knowledge to deal with the limitations in the much narrower special case they deal with. Frankly it would be pretty easy to add something like using parentheses or quote marks to delimit a filename with spaces on a command line, and not too onerous to deal with. The obvious difficulty is the sheer volume of the legacy of NOT having done it this way years ago, since when the CLI conventions were established the geeks ran the place.
Much as I despise virus writers, frankly after having been forced to use Windows for the last few days, I hope this destroys the damn platform. I normally try and keep a neutral attitude to platform wars, but these last few days have really opened my eyes to just how bad Windows is. It sucks so bad, I simply cannot fathom why it is so popular. I normally use OS X, but idiosyncracies aside, Windows designers truly seem to have no clue about what makes the difference between a productivity aid and a productivity hindrance. At every step some "feature" of Windows either doesn't work, or else does too much, requiring further steps to undo some of what it did. It cannot lay text out properly half the time. Its character mapping is totally broken, with different fonts having different character mappings. I could rant on....
Frankly, these viruses are great news for those of us who just want a bit more balance in the marketplace. I'm fed up with having to apologise for being a minority Mac user - fuck it, Macs let me get my work done, no fuss, no frustration, no stress, and no bad temper which makes me post rants to slashdot!! Windows users - piss off and call me back when your platform of "choice" is fixed. That's all.
...this sort of thing wouldn't be an issue. Who established the shortcuts of +X, C, V for Cut, Copy, Paste? Apple! Likewise nearly every common shortcut. The fact that on 'doze they decided to use a DIFFERENT modifier should not be a problem now laid at Apple's feet - M$ shoulda copied it more thoroughly!
The problem is just as bad going he other way, from Mac to Win - I keep trying to paste and getting a bloody menu popping down.
Another thing that really bugs me on Windows is typing accented characters - on the Mac most of these work in a moderately intuitive way once you've seen it once - you can nearly always guess the right key combo based on what you want to appear (i.e. option e + e gives you é, option u + u gives you ü). On 'doze you have to either learn very arcane character codes or else use the severely broken character palette - which, when you cut/paste from it also forces a new FONT and COLOUR on the text you paste - like I just wanted a character, I already formatted that text you stupid !@#$%!!!
Hardware manufacturers just need to design the CPUs to use a separate area for the return address stack that isn't cluttered with data. What is the problem with doing this?
Early Mac OS's used a "Mixed Mode Manager" as well as a weird "Universal Procedure Pointer" structure to handle context switches and memory accesses. This foundation hung around even after the OS and all current apps were ported to PPC completely, adding unneeded cruft to OS 9. They were finally removed during the transition to OS X and Carbon.
While you're not wrong, just to clarify: The Mixed Mode Manager came in with System 7.2, which was not really an "early" mac OS - sort of middling. UPPs weren't "weird", they were in fact a very elegant and inspired piece of design - for 68K code, UPPs were just pointers, plain and simple. So existing 68K binaries still worked. But for PowerPC code, they became a small transparent wrapper to a trap mechanism that determined whether the caller required the use of the 68K emulator, and if so, started it up. The result was that code of either flavour "just worked". It has been noted that this is possibly the only time that a dual ISA has ever been successfully implemented without having a separate emulation "box" on the system. The great thing was that as a programmer, if you just used the UPP macros, there was nothing special you had to do to support this dual architecture - 68k and PPC code could be mixed more or less freely. Neat.
This new-fangled vinyl will never catch on. Wax cylinders are where it's at! They sound so much better... mind you, the original scratch on tinfoil wrapped around a bar was better than anything, but the limited choice of recordings (just "Mary had a little lamb", which gets kinda old after the 200th play) mean that wax is still the way to go for variety AND quality.
This is quite right. THD is a meaningless number in reality. When I was very young and started to get into hi fi (mid 70s), we pored over catalogues comparing these sorts of figures. Fights would break out between those who fancied the Akai over the Technics. We were all wrong, and never bothered to actually LISTEN to any of the equipment. THD is TOTAL harmonic distortion, it tells you nothing about the frequencies of the distortion components. In general even harmonics will be tolerated to far higher levels than odd harmonics, and, in general, valve amps generate distortion with even harmonics and transistors generate odd ones.
The argument about feedback is also interesting, valves are large and expensive, transistors small and cheap. So valve equipment tends to carefully extract maximum performance from each stage, rather than taking the "op amp" approach. What I think is interesting though is that most equipment used to process audio signals these days is chock full of op-amps, so by the time you hear it, it has been through hundreds of such stages between the musician's instrument and your ears. It's lots of negative feedback all the way. The fact that the last "few yards" is through a valve stage is kind of irrelevant - yes that stage can contribute a change in the sound, but it can't magically improve it except subjectively by inserting MORE distortion of the even kind. It can sound better, because your ear and brain likes the distortion. So ignore THD!
One reason transistors create odd harmonics is because when they hit saturation they clip hard. Valves tend to round out rather than clip hard. However any clipping is a Bad Thing - so don't overdrive your amps so they clip. That's why any decent quality amp (regardless of whether it's tube or tranny) with lots of power and a really decent power supply will sound better even at low volume than a smaller one that's straining. In fact the power supply is extremely important - sadly much commercial domestic equipment is a joke in this area, even though the audio components might be OK. A 50W+50W power amplifier should have more than a 4700 uF capacitor on its power supply rails, which is what you typically see. That'll barely get rid of the ripple let alone hold the rail up when a musical transient needs to be delivered, the resulting lack of delivery at the crucial moment can cause the output stage to clip momentarily and sound bloody apalling. Sine wave measurements might look great though! (Who listens to steady sinewaves?). This also has a bearing on valve sound - many power amps are class A and have enormous power supplies to cope with the inherent inefficiency; where push-pull stages are used the softer characteristics of the crossover and clipping will mask or "ride out" the transient distortion as well.
overpricing it's iTunes
overpricing it is iTunes - what does that mean?
In case you haven't heard it, the joke is this:
Woman 1: My husband's a ship's captain, he works for Cunard. Woman 2: Well my husbands a postman, and he works pretty hard too!
...don't forget that Apple ship their development tools with every system for free. And they are good ones, you don't need anything else. Writing Cocoa apps with Objective C is the most productive way to program on any modern platform, by such a huge margin it's just not funny.
:)
RealBASIC doesn't count. (Even if it did, Cocoa is still much quicker).
I can't believe how much time I've wasted over the years on C++, just bowing and scraping to the language and the compiler. I've seen the light brother!!!
Isn't is in fact a 0% increase in complexity? After all, they never actually invent anything new.
87% of statistics simply made up on the spot.
[Vic Reeves].
Anyone unfortunate enough to have been bamboozled by his very expensive lemon squeezer that did the rounds of the likes of John Lewis a few years ago will know what I mean.
It is actually terrible at squeezing lemons, and singularly fails to fulfil its basic function at all well, and costs over 40 GBP!! Here's what's wrong with it:
you need a separate container to catch the juice (not included!)
the gap between the legs does not permit the average bowl or cup to fit below it to catch the juice.
its centre of gravity is so high that it easily topples over when any sort of pressure (like actually trying to squeeze a lemon) is applied.
that's assuming you can get the legs on a flat surface around the juice catcher - if not you're totally fscked.
it doesn't catch the pips, so they end up in the juice.
its shape means that the juice runs off awkwardly, often running down the legs onto the surface instead of into the catcher.
Frankly, it's a travesty. I have a plastic lemon squeezer I bought in the local supermarket for 99p that does the job perfectly - it has its own container, it catches the pips, and it is strong enough to take as much force as the lemon will. If this mouse is anything like the squeezer, it'll cost a fortune, won't function well, and will probably just end up in the back of a cupboard somewhere. But there will probably still be some pretentious tossers who'll go for it.
I'd love to live in a dark, gritty Blade Runner style world.
You do.
Currently, the only methods for making things fly involve high velocities (rotors, props, turbines) and the associated noise from those moving things.
Funny, last time I went gliding, it was fairly quiet.
What they need is more ICE!
Work? Ha! Getting paid to think up, design and build model planes with the backup of a large R&D budget... sigh, I knew I should have done something different somewhere way back when - but what?
In fact, it's a myth that Gates stole the idea of a GUI from Mac OS. They both toured PARC and saw the machine.
I'm not sure there is any documented evidence that Gates toured PARC, but he may have. What is a fact is that Apple were a) invited by PARC and b) many PARC engineers went to work on the LIsa and Mac projects subsequently - and apart from the money I guess their motivation ewas to see their work going into something that would sell and make money, not just an abstract research adventure, good as it might have been. In addition, Apple added many features to the GUI that made it feasible - like overlapping windows (imagine a GUI without that - it didn't come from PARC). Like icons representing files. Like pull-down menus. Really Apple's biggest miss was Smalltalk.
Gates on the other hand was an early visitor to the Mac project, because Apple needed MS on-side to make business apps for the Mac. Everything in today's Office started on the Mac. In fact Windows only came into existence because Gates needed a way to sell more Office - and Windows was just an expedient way to make the IBM PC capable of doing so. Less of an OS and more of a bridging hack that allowed Office to run....
True, although despite appearances ClarisWorks used no code whatsoever from MacWrite, even though that was also a Claris product. Not that that matters, the original message was talking about the word processing concepts established by MacWrite (not Word) that were themselves a leap forward in their day.
In fact the threat that MS could have pulled Office off the Mac if Apple had competed is irrelevant - MS were much smaller back then and there was no platform like the Mac that would have supported Office. In fact one could say that MS's desire to develop Windows was exactly because of this - MS realised that the Office/Word approach was the way forward and so they needed way to bring the functionalirty of the IBM PC up to a point where it could support Office in the same way as the Mac. I guess Apple's error was to assume that the IBM was so inferior it would never compete, and so they left it to MS to provide Mac versions of Office. Somewhere in there is possibly the one, true "what they should have done was..." that would have led to a different outcome, but so what? It's not important now.
The interesting story of ClarisWorks' development is available here
.
Word for Windows completely changed everything. It was powerful, AND easy... and visual! You could SEE what you were laying out. It was absolutely brilliant, probably the single best word processor ever done.
And also something of a rip-off of MacWrite, which also came out 6 years before. It was MacWrite that was everything above you claim for Word, and it inspired Word for Mac, which long predated the Windows version. So if your argument has merit, one could say that what Apple should have done was to develop MacWrite and make it available for Windows as well, much like their modern iTunes strategy.
...is nothing new. The Tridents, BAC 1-11s and VC10s (all British!) of the early 1960s had it. Don't try and pretend Boeing invented everything - they are the Microsoft of the skies - not much invented here....
being scared of the future is usually called "reactionary", or, even worse "Conservative".
The way the world is is not some natural law imposing itself, it's just the outcome of the chaotic muddle we call "life". If something changes, the muddle simply rearranges itself accordingly. This is a continuous process. Get used to it.
Bump the headlight switch just right and the headlight pods would finally break free from the rust-crusted brackets and fall through onto the road, not to mention the similarly afflicted doors would implose under the force from operating the window winders. And then there was the days when if the temperature was just a tad too high the carbs would get so hot that fuel would vapourise and the damn thing would just stop - often for hours until it cooled down enough.
In fact there wasn't a weekend I wasn't up to my elbows in grease trying to keep it running. Head gasket, heater pipes, brakes, alternator, distributor, and a gearbox with so few teeth left that I learned how to expertly double-declutch on every change just to tootle down to the shops. However, I forgave it all these things because on a twisty road with the top off and (if mechanically it could pull itself together) it was an absolute joy to drive! I'd have another one....