Most UK people I know went via CIX. That gave you an OLR that could download/upload Usenet, Email, conference messages etc to minimise the phone bills. I was on CIX around 1992 and that gave me internet email, usenet, gopher and all that wierd long since forgotton stuff. Later on, the UK's first ISP started via a small group of people on CIX when someone said 'If you agree to spend a tenner a month, I'll buy a Unix box and set up Internet access for people. (Demon Internet)
>If nascent code monkeys weren't interested, then you lose the wow factor pretty quickly.
Disagree, having a computer whistling down the phone at you was all the wow factor people needed back then. Having a 'real' computer talking to your Atari, Apple or CBM was epic in itself, it never got tired.
>Too goddamned expensive. $900 in 1983 was $2,080 in 2012 dollars.
I'm not so sure, computer stuff cost a lot more back then. An Atari 800 plus disk drive was $1000 and an Apple II more than that so price wise, it's not bad.
Compuserver was around back then too so I'm not convinced about the cost there either - that had a similar structure, cost per hour etc.
You clearly don't have kids. My friend's son watched back to the future every day for 5 years. I'll agree that most films are done after single view but OTOH, a dvd is way cheaper than seeing it at the cinema if you can wait a few months.
I'm surprised that so many people are complaining about their tapes. Sure, the cheaper brands sucked but then they would, they were cheap. I only ever bought decent/high grade Fuji, Sony and TDK tapes and I'm finding I'm pleasantly surprised as I work through my VHS tapes (going back to 1981) as to how good they still look as I copy them to DVD. There were very few that had gone super grainy anbd those were typically cheap tapes. Like eveyrything, if you paid for quality, you got better results. Ditto for the decks themselves. If your only experience of VHS is a £40 machine from Dixons, no wonder you think it sucked but if you had say a Panasonic £500 deck, you'd find it wasn't too bad. That said, colour bleed on the reds still looks awful:-(
I'm amazed the whole thing was instigated by a Chinese company investigating piracy of their service/product. I thought they were the all time king's of ignoring other people's IP?
I've always lived in semi-rural or town areas in a fairly packed part of the UK. You can see a few stars on a good clear night but there's still a lot of light polution.
I recently went on holiday to a farm in the middle of nowhere in the Yorkshire Dales. I was utterly astounded to find out you can actually see the Milky Way at night - it blew me away. I spent hours just lying on my back in the grass with my mouth open. Wine probably helped. I feel so bad I've missed such a wonder for all these years.
Reminds me of some tests done back in the 70's when they stuck a lie detector type thing on a plant then dropped live prawns into boiling water nearby, Every time a prawn died, the plant showed a response. It was documented in Lyal Watson's Supernature book so take that as you will.
Do note that some Fords have so many parts not made in the US that they qualify as foreign cars.
Back in the 70's/early 80's, in the UK, Volvo turned out to be the cars with the highest % of British parts in them even allowing for the fact we 'made' Fords, GM (Vauxhall to us) and other vehicles in the UK but imported Volvos.
I read the title as there being some breed of supra-light mozzies who were being upset by the speed of light limitation. Still, if that CERN work on possible FTL particles pans out, they'll be all happy again.
I must be officially old
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Seriously? People have stories to tell about text editors? I'd rather have a life, thanks.
I'd tend to agree. I'm self taught but have spent 25 years developing in a bank. I'm not aware of a single bug caused by me that went live (precious few even turn up in testing) or failed to hit any deadline. I write solid reliable code that is clear, readable, well commented and most importantly, easily changed by those that follow me. On the other hand, I've had to do a lot of debugging of 'real programmers' code which can be pretty cryptic. I have no interest in oddball languages unless my job requires it and frankly I have better things to do than learn a 'cool' new language for the 'lulz'
I've been on some courses provided by my employers but in all cases they've been after I've already taught myself the language and got the code out the door. Luckily banks are fairly conservative so it's been mainly Unix/Windows and C/C++/VB6/VB.net, C#, Unix scripts, Oracle & SQl Server. I have used 20+ languages though including some wierd LISP dialect used by a UNIX word processer we had to automate.
Worse still, no degree, just basic O'levels (UK things you do when you're 15/16) and lots of experience.
I must be a terrible hire.
Fair point, the StarPath was 3rd party but it was still one heck of a boost to the VCS's capabilities. Probably also proves the point about what a huge dfference a little more RAM makes.
Heck, the Atari VCS had StarPath, extra RAM and a cassette adaptor to increase its power. Their 5200 or 7800 had game carts with extra RAM and/or sound chips in them to boost the capabilities. The Intellivision had the voice add on. Go faster stripes on consoles are far from new.
A friend on Facebook was distraught to find out that when his young niece died last year, someone set up a page on Facebook which was basically him and about a dozen others posting messages about her about her body, sex life and other really abusive sick stuff. They apparantly used to do this any time they found out about some recently deceased FB user, this was by no means the first or last. They did bother to find out about her, career etc and used that info to personalise the abuse making it far worse. FB took weeks to shut it down and in the end my friend entered a period of depression about the whole sick saga.
I think you nailed it totally. EA will kill any creativity or value formoney tied up in PopCap. A pity, I really liked their games. Plants v Zombies is great fun.
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Most UK people I know went via CIX. That gave you an OLR that could download/upload Usenet, Email, conference messages etc to minimise the phone bills. I was on CIX around 1992 and that gave me internet email, usenet, gopher and all that wierd long since forgotton stuff. Later on, the UK's first ISP started via a small group of people on CIX when someone said 'If you agree to spend a tenner a month, I'll buy a Unix box and set up Internet access for people. (Demon Internet)
>If nascent code monkeys weren't interested, then you lose the wow factor pretty quickly.
Disagree, having a computer whistling down the phone at you was all the wow factor people needed back then. Having a 'real' computer talking to your Atari, Apple or CBM was epic in itself, it never got tired.
>Too goddamned expensive. $900 in 1983 was $2,080 in 2012 dollars.
I'm not so sure, computer stuff cost a lot more back then. An Atari 800 plus disk drive was $1000 and an Apple II more than that so price wise, it's not bad.
Compuserver was around back then too so I'm not convinced about the cost there either - that had a similar structure, cost per hour etc.
You clearly don't have kids. My friend's son watched back to the future every day for 5 years. I'll agree that most films are done after single view but OTOH, a dvd is way cheaper than seeing it at the cinema if you can wait a few months.
I'm surprised that so many people are complaining about their tapes. Sure, the cheaper brands sucked but then they would, they were cheap. I only ever bought decent/high grade Fuji, Sony and TDK tapes and I'm finding I'm pleasantly surprised as I work through my VHS tapes (going back to 1981) as to how good they still look as I copy them to DVD. There were very few that had gone super grainy anbd those were typically cheap tapes. Like eveyrything, if you paid for quality, you got better results. Ditto for the decks themselves. If your only experience of VHS is a £40 machine from Dixons, no wonder you think it sucked but if you had say a Panasonic £500 deck, you'd find it wasn't too bad. That said, colour bleed on the reds still looks awful :-(
I'm amazed the whole thing was instigated by a Chinese company investigating piracy of their service/product. I thought they were the all time king's of ignoring other people's IP?
I've always lived in semi-rural or town areas in a fairly packed part of the UK. You can see a few stars on a good clear night but there's still a lot of light polution.
I recently went on holiday to a farm in the middle of nowhere in the Yorkshire Dales. I was utterly astounded to find out you can actually see the Milky Way at night - it blew me away. I spent hours just lying on my back in the grass with my mouth open. Wine probably helped. I feel so bad I've missed such a wonder for all these years.
I need a lot more warning than this! We won't even be able to have the meeting in time to decide who to invite to the pre-project inception meeting.
What, like the US?
Reminds me of some tests done back in the 70's when they stuck a lie detector type thing on a plant then dropped live prawns into boiling water nearby, Every time a prawn died, the plant showed a response. It was documented in Lyal Watson's Supernature book so take that as you will.
Back in the 70's/early 80's, in the UK, Volvo turned out to be the cars with the highest % of British parts in them even allowing for the fact we 'made' Fords, GM (Vauxhall to us) and other vehicles in the UK but imported Volvos.
I read the title as there being some breed of supra-light mozzies who were being upset by the speed of light limitation. Still, if that CERN work on possible FTL particles pans out, they'll be all happy again.
Seriously? People have stories to tell about text editors? I'd rather have a life, thanks.
I'd tend to agree. I'm self taught but have spent 25 years developing in a bank. I'm not aware of a single bug caused by me that went live (precious few even turn up in testing) or failed to hit any deadline. I write solid reliable code that is clear, readable, well commented and most importantly, easily changed by those that follow me. On the other hand, I've had to do a lot of debugging of 'real programmers' code which can be pretty cryptic. I have no interest in oddball languages unless my job requires it and frankly I have better things to do than learn a 'cool' new language for the 'lulz' I've been on some courses provided by my employers but in all cases they've been after I've already taught myself the language and got the code out the door. Luckily banks are fairly conservative so it's been mainly Unix/Windows and C/C++/VB6/VB.net, C#, Unix scripts, Oracle & SQl Server. I have used 20+ languages though including some wierd LISP dialect used by a UNIX word processer we had to automate. Worse still, no degree, just basic O'levels (UK things you do when you're 15/16) and lots of experience. I must be a terrible hire.
Fair point, the StarPath was 3rd party but it was still one heck of a boost to the VCS's capabilities. Probably also proves the point about what a huge dfference a little more RAM makes.
Heck, the Atari VCS had StarPath, extra RAM and a cassette adaptor to increase its power. Their 5200 or 7800 had game carts with extra RAM and/or sound chips in them to boost the capabilities. The Intellivision had the voice add on. Go faster stripes on consoles are far from new.
I'm guessing you're thinking of 18+ games here?
Well, actually EMACS Lisp, which is significantly different to your standard Lisp.
Waqs it lying somewhere fully formed and he sort of stumbled upon it? Enquiring minds want to know...
My doc put me on SSRIs /because/ I had no highs and lows. No wonder I noticed no difference.
A friend on Facebook was distraught to find out that when his young niece died last year, someone set up a page on Facebook which was basically him and about a dozen others posting messages about her about her body, sex life and other really abusive sick stuff. They apparantly used to do this any time they found out about some recently deceased FB user, this was by no means the first or last. They did bother to find out about her, career etc and used that info to personalise the abuse making it far worse. FB took weeks to shut it down and in the end my friend entered a period of depression about the whole sick saga.
Heck, they're only about GBP10-12 in the UK. They ought to be even cheaper in the US.
OK, this has some extras but white canes with SONAR and feedback existed in the mid 70's if not earlier.
I think you nailed it totally. EA will kill any creativity or value formoney tied up in PopCap. A pity, I really liked their games. Plants v Zombies is great fun.
Byte Compedium, Hackers handbook, old Atari catalogues, that sort of thing. Old issues of Creative Computing, that sort of thing.