To have enough spare time to do all the stuff people suggest here. Being married with a family, between commuting, working, doing chores, keeping wife happy, bring up children etc. I get maybe 30mins to an hour a week to myself and then I spend that working on website I sort of inherited after the previous editor bowed out. My commute could be used I guess to do a bit but that's the only time I get to listen to the news etc. on podcasts.
I can't even imagine having time to learn a language or play with programming for the sake of it.
To all those who have the time for this, enjoy it while you can and appreciate it.
>beetroot they insist in throwing on burgers. Kid you not - beetroot.
I had a burger with beetroot once (served up by an aussie chef in London) and though it was fantastic. I'd never have thought of it myself but once tried, I was hooked. Total burger content was burger, cheese, bacon, mushroom, beetroot, lettuce, tomato. It was lovely.
>We do everything America does, only we do a worse job, less efficiently
Maybe it just looks worse because you have nothing to compare to? I'm in the UK and in the last ten years about a dozen friends have emigrated to Australia and without exception they love it and have thrived very quickly - good jobs, great homes etc. A couple now refuse to even come back to the UK to visit they hate it that much in comparison to their new home.
There's an entry on Wikipedia. Turns out it was Anglia TV not BBC and the video is available online these days. Sorry, my memory of 1977 is getting rusty:-(
I still vividly remember watching the BBC 'April Fool' documentary 'Alternative 3' in the 70's which scared the hell out of me. For those that never heard of it, it was a documentry about the various scientists that were going missing at the time (for real, in the UK) and claimed they had found out the Earth was dying and the governments of the world had drawn up 3 solutions. 1 & 2 were something like reducing population growth, killing excess/useless members of the population etc. but 3 was to go to Mars, seed the atmosphere and start to collonise it. They had a thread running through of an encrypted video tape they'd been given. When they managed to get a decoder it showed a clip taken by Voyager of the now familiar rock strewn red surface but as the camera panned, the soil started to move and something was clearly alive there and burrowing about under the surface. The point being Mars wasn't as dead as we first thought.
Oh, and the 'missing' scientists were all on Mars working on the terraforming.
Trouble was, it was supposed to be an April fool joke but got showed about a week later causing Orson Wells/War of the Worlds chaos for a few days until the BBC issued a release saying it was all a joke. A book came out about ten years later saying it was all real and the BBC had been forced to cover it up.
To be clear, it was a spoof - it had lots of people in it who are now well known actors but at the time were unknowns.
Alas, apart from a few very grainy clips, it has never been reshown and is almost impossible to find.
If I'm going up in to space on a giant elevator, I want it to be nailed on to something a bit more substantial sounding that a 'ribbon'. Heck, all the ones I used to read about in 1950's sci-fi books were basically normal elevators, steel girders, nice big box with windows, sliding doors etc., just a hundred thousand feet high. THAT's what I'd feel safe in.
As many pubs require you to get past a bouncer or two, I tend to avoid them now. I go out to enjoy myself, not get drunk by 8PM so don't really fit in Blair's wonderful modern Britain. The idea of a pub needing hired muscle to stop people killing each other after they've got drunk sort of indicates to me something's gone wrong.
Unfortunately, the UK prisons are full, literally. The governments solution was to let some of the less dangerous ones out and put others in police holding cells rather than build new ones. Prisons are of course there to rehabilitate not punish so anyone that does end up spending time there isn't so badly off anyway. When it gets to the point where prisoners in for murder are out in 5 years on licence, something's pretty damned wrong.
I only dropped AOL fairly recently because I didn't have time to use it but for several years it was the chat rooms that kept me there. I had endless fun in rooms like 'War on Terror' swapping abuse with people or on the odd occassion someone with half a clue turned up, debating the issues of the day. The UK eventually blocked direct access to US chat rooms but I had the ones I used most bookmarked and those still provided access. The chat rooms were by and large killed by the restrictions put on them to stop evoildoers using them to take over the world or whatever excuse AOL had at the time.
I would hope most Telewest customers know when they are on to a good thing. I was on Telewest broadband since day 1 and I had maybe one minor outage a year and by the end was on 10mbit. I moved house to a non-Telewest area and had to go to ADSL which in comparison is frankly crap. Very flaky and I'm with what is supposed to be the UK's best ISP (Zen). It was also a rude shock to find out how many ADSL ISPs used packet shaping and low usage caps. I did some maths and realised I was pulling down 100Gb a month with Telewest so the ADSL limits of 5Gb a month or whatever came as a bit of a shock.
I had far better luck with AOL UK.
Me: I want to cancel my account
AOL: IS there a problem with the service?
Me: No, my pc died and I can't afford to fix it for some months.
AOL: OK, but if you come back in the next 6 months you can have your original account names still.
Me: Cool.
AOL: Ok, thanks for your call, bye.
OMG, I think you've just hit the nail on the head about how senior management do their job.
1. Senior Exec throws 2 x D6
2. Looks up chart, adds modifier because it's a Tuesday
3. 'Decides' to fire experienced engineers and offshore work to India
4. Companies reputation drops through floor, nasty products in marketplace etc.
5. Senior exec gets huge bonus for saving money (this year - next year they tank)
6. Profit! (for senior exec)
7. Senior exec moves to next company with CV that says they worked at XX for 18 months and cut costs by $35m so gets huge pay rise, joining bonus etc.
8. Remaining staff stare with open mouths whilst muttering WTF?
Damn you for mentioning Digital, now I've gone all emotional/nostalgic.
What a fine company they were with fine products. I was lucky enough to get to sign a bunch of NDA's and enter their UK R&D labs back in the late 80's and they had some seriously cool stuff on the way. It was frightening how quickly they fumbled the ball and lost the game though but on the plus side (FX:steely glare at Redmond) it gives us hope in other ways.
I just remembered an earlier one. Can't remember the specifics but on the back of the early 80's rash of bands in the UK and 'cheap' home recording gear, someone thought it would be a good idea to release singles as 4 track cassettes for all those masses (?) of 4 track recorders people were buying (Fostex etc) for their home recording/mixing. The idea was you used your 4-track cassette system to mix the 4 different tracks, add reverb or whatever to create your own version of your favourite single. It only lasted a few months before someone grew a brain but ISTR about half a dozen different artists released singles that way.
I remember the Shamen one - 3 x 12inch singles with about 20 remixes and all the components. Cool! Prior to that though there was a Jean Michel Jarre 12inch (Zoolook maybe?) that had many of the samples as seperate elements so you could do your own version and that would have been about 1985.
That I can't help but wonder if some tech company wants to hire some seriously able encryption dudes and as a recruitement aid they shoved this crazy thing out to make everyone mad to inspire them to break the encryption. Whoever gets there first gets the job.
Stranger things have happened..
>Higher birth and immigration rates.
Higher birth maybe but several European countries have higher immigration rates. Alas I'm at work so I don't have my info to hand but there was a chart of the various countries immigration stats and US was surprisingly far down the list, 4th or 5th ISTR.
I certainly remember a huge buzz when the ad was aired. Partly because it was a one off, never to be repeated but also because it was so damn spectacular. The Mac itself was less interesting, sort of a "that's looks neat, better back to my CGA PC/CBM 64/Atari 800 then." The Mac was a bold step forward. Most people didn't know about Xerox Parc so the whole WIMP thing was new to them but what was less obvious was how that would come to dominate the way we interacted withour computers. Back then you used a mouse because you could, not because it made life any better, it was a gimmick.
As another poster noted, comparing the colourful expanadable Apple II to the Mac was a case of "It has a mouse and stuff but I can do so much more with the IIe"
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To have enough spare time to do all the stuff people suggest here. Being married with a family, between commuting, working, doing chores, keeping wife happy, bring up children etc. I get maybe 30mins to an hour a week to myself and then I spend that working on website I sort of inherited after the previous editor bowed out. My commute could be used I guess to do a bit but that's the only time I get to listen to the news etc. on podcasts.
I can't even imagine having time to learn a language or play with programming for the sake of it.
To all those who have the time for this, enjoy it while you can and appreciate it.
>beetroot they insist in throwing on burgers. Kid you not - beetroot.
I had a burger with beetroot once (served up by an aussie chef in London) and though it was fantastic. I'd never have thought of it myself but once tried, I was hooked. Total burger content was burger, cheese, bacon, mushroom, beetroot, lettuce, tomato. It was lovely.
Mmmmm.. Kebab..... Damn you - since I moved house last year to a village I haven't had a single kebab and I miss them. Badly.
>We do everything America does, only we do a worse job, less efficiently
Maybe it just looks worse because you have nothing to compare to? I'm in the UK and in the last ten years about a dozen friends have emigrated to Australia and without exception they love it and have thrived very quickly - good jobs, great homes etc. A couple now refuse to even come back to the UK to visit they hate it that much in comparison to their new home.
There's an entry on Wikipedia. Turns out it was Anglia TV not BBC and the video is available online these days. Sorry, my memory of 1977 is getting rusty :-(
I still vividly remember watching the BBC 'April Fool' documentary 'Alternative 3' in the 70's which scared the hell out of me. For those that never heard of it, it was a documentry about the various scientists that were going missing at the time (for real, in the UK) and claimed they had found out the Earth was dying and the governments of the world had drawn up 3 solutions. 1 & 2 were something like reducing population growth, killing excess/useless members of the population etc. but 3 was to go to Mars, seed the atmosphere and start to collonise it. They had a thread running through of an encrypted video tape they'd been given. When they managed to get a decoder it showed a clip taken by Voyager of the now familiar rock strewn red surface but as the camera panned, the soil started to move and something was clearly alive there and burrowing about under the surface. The point being Mars wasn't as dead as we first thought.
Oh, and the 'missing' scientists were all on Mars working on the terraforming.
Trouble was, it was supposed to be an April fool joke but got showed about a week later causing Orson Wells/War of the Worlds chaos for a few days until the BBC issued a release saying it was all a joke. A book came out about ten years later saying it was all real and the BBC had been forced to cover it up.
To be clear, it was a spoof - it had lots of people in it who are now well known actors but at the time were unknowns.
Alas, apart from a few very grainy clips, it has never been reshown and is almost impossible to find.
Newsflash: NASA discover terrorists on Mars. Bush orders them to send some marines on the next mission.
I didn't actually think it could be built, it was an attempt at humour.
If I'm going up in to space on a giant elevator, I want it to be nailed on to something a bit more substantial sounding that a 'ribbon'. Heck, all the ones I used to read about in 1950's sci-fi books were basically normal elevators, steel girders, nice big box with windows, sliding doors etc., just a hundred thousand feet high. THAT's what I'd feel safe in.
>isn't that an oxymoron?
It would be if it was called America Online. it is marketed purely as AOL with no mention of America Online.
As many pubs require you to get past a bouncer or two, I tend to avoid them now. I go out to enjoy myself, not get drunk by 8PM so don't really fit in Blair's wonderful modern Britain. The idea of a pub needing hired muscle to stop people killing each other after they've got drunk sort of indicates to me something's gone wrong.
Unfortunately, the UK prisons are full, literally. The governments solution was to let some of the less dangerous ones out and put others in police holding cells rather than build new ones. Prisons are of course there to rehabilitate not punish so anyone that does end up spending time there isn't so badly off anyway. When it gets to the point where prisoners in for murder are out in 5 years on licence, something's pretty damned wrong.
I only dropped AOL fairly recently because I didn't have time to use it but for several years it was the chat rooms that kept me there. I had endless fun in rooms like 'War on Terror' swapping abuse with people or on the odd occassion someone with half a clue turned up, debating the issues of the day. The UK eventually blocked direct access to US chat rooms but I had the ones I used most bookmarked and those still provided access. The chat rooms were by and large killed by the restrictions put on them to stop evoildoers using them to take over the world or whatever excuse AOL had at the time.
I would hope most Telewest customers know when they are on to a good thing. I was on Telewest broadband since day 1 and I had maybe one minor outage a year and by the end was on 10mbit. I moved house to a non-Telewest area and had to go to ADSL which in comparison is frankly crap. Very flaky and I'm with what is supposed to be the UK's best ISP (Zen). It was also a rude shock to find out how many ADSL ISPs used packet shaping and low usage caps. I did some maths and realised I was pulling down 100Gb a month with Telewest so the ADSL limits of 5Gb a month or whatever came as a bit of a shock.
I had far better luck with AOL UK.
Me: I want to cancel my account
AOL: IS there a problem with the service?
Me: No, my pc died and I can't afford to fix it for some months.
AOL: OK, but if you come back in the next 6 months you can have your original account names still.
Me: Cool.
AOL: Ok, thanks for your call, bye.
Job done.
OMG, I think you've just hit the nail on the head about how senior management do their job.
1. Senior Exec throws 2 x D6
2. Looks up chart, adds modifier because it's a Tuesday
3. 'Decides' to fire experienced engineers and offshore work to India
4. Companies reputation drops through floor, nasty products in marketplace etc.
5. Senior exec gets huge bonus for saving money (this year - next year they tank)
6. Profit! (for senior exec)
7. Senior exec moves to next company with CV that says they worked at XX for 18 months and cut costs by $35m so gets huge pay rise, joining bonus etc.
8. Remaining staff stare with open mouths whilst muttering WTF?
Damn you for mentioning Digital, now I've gone all emotional/nostalgic.
What a fine company they were with fine products. I was lucky enough to get to sign a bunch of NDA's and enter their UK R&D labs back in the late 80's and they had some seriously cool stuff on the way. It was frightening how quickly they fumbled the ball and lost the game though but on the plus side (FX:steely glare at Redmond) it gives us hope in other ways.
>... when the Linux port will be available? ;)
You want it on Linux? You mad fool!
I just remembered an earlier one. Can't remember the specifics but on the back of the early 80's rash of bands in the UK and 'cheap' home recording gear, someone thought it would be a good idea to release singles as 4 track cassettes for all those masses (?) of 4 track recorders people were buying (Fostex etc) for their home recording/mixing. The idea was you used your 4-track cassette system to mix the 4 different tracks, add reverb or whatever to create your own version of your favourite single. It only lasted a few months before someone grew a brain but ISTR about half a dozen different artists released singles that way.
>he introduced the magical talent of Dido to a wide audience. ;-)
I thought you said you liked Eminem?
I remember the Shamen one - 3 x 12inch singles with about 20 remixes and all the components. Cool! Prior to that though there was a Jean Michel Jarre 12inch (Zoolook maybe?) that had many of the samples as seperate elements so you could do your own version and that would have been about 1985.
>But where's the betamax slot?
Between the 8-track slot and the Elcaset.
That I can't help but wonder if some tech company wants to hire some seriously able encryption dudes and as a recruitement aid they shoved this crazy thing out to make everyone mad to inspire them to break the encryption. Whoever gets there first gets the job.
Stranger things have happened..
>Higher birth and immigration rates.
Higher birth maybe but several European countries have higher immigration rates. Alas I'm at work so I don't have my info to hand but there was a chart of the various countries immigration stats and US was surprisingly far down the list, 4th or 5th ISTR.
I certainly remember a huge buzz when the ad was aired. Partly because it was a one off, never to be repeated but also because it was so damn spectacular. The Mac itself was less interesting, sort of a "that's looks neat, better back to my CGA PC/CBM 64/Atari 800 then." The Mac was a bold step forward. Most people didn't know about Xerox Parc so the whole WIMP thing was new to them but what was less obvious was how that would come to dominate the way we interacted withour computers. Back then you used a mouse because you could, not because it made life any better, it was a gimmick.
As another poster noted, comparing the colourful expanadable Apple II to the Mac was a case of "It has a mouse and stuff but I can do so much more with the IIe"