* Posts by Stevie

7282 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2008

Decks and plugs and rock and roll: Tascam CD-A750 cassette and CD combo

Stevie

Bah!

Bolting on budget tape kit to CD-equipped, er, equipment started the minute manufatcurers realized they needed to dump all their good but not stellar range of tape transport chasses.

I bought a boom box in 1984. It has servo-driven heads and track search built in, along with all tapes made compatibility and Dolby II noise reduction (which was standard buy then). Cost about $150 if I remember right.

Fast forward ten years and I get a similarly priced box from the same manufacturer featuring two tape decks (woo!) and a CD player. The tape decks feature metal/FeO2 compatibility but not the proper capability to deal with Super Avalyn type coatings. There is no Dolby noise reduction whatsoever. Head movement is by levers under the buttons. In short, old cheap tat.

I would like to add that while I had tape decks go belly up, they were universally the portable ones I strapped to my hip that got well bashed and smashed in a given day, and it was always the door latch that went, *not* the tape transport itself. All my non-portable cassette gear is as good as the day it was bought, practically. I tell a lie, I had a cheap in-car unit eat its own drive belt so I tossed it.

In the same time period I've gone through three mollycoddled CD players due to various failures, usually chip/CB related or read head servo failures that required no bashing or smashing at all.

Myst: 20 years of point-and-click adventuring

Stevie

Bah!

I rather enjoy the laid-back atmosphere of Myst and Riven. I found that spoiling a puzzle ruins the victory. I didn't need to with Myst, but due to an oversight on my part I ended up in a situation in which I couldn't progress. When I found the answer it allowed me to finish but soured the victory out of proportion with the actual cheat involved.

I consider Myst and Riven to be games that "got it right" in every department, allowing the immersion to be almost automatic.

AN example of a game where I feel everyone "Got It Wrong" was the much anticipated (by me at any road) Starship Titanic. It's brilliance in places was marred by awfulness in others - indecipherable graphics, mechanisms that were just annoying rather than entertainingly obstructive and hotspots that were too narrow for the job they were supposed to do.

These problems made the challenge become fighting the design rather than solving the puzzles and soured the game experience to the point I grabbed a cheat book and stopped caring about the game, even the places that had on first sight been so evocative I pined for the fact I couldn't walk further due to there being no more game in that direction (like I did in the Stoneship Age).

A game I wish would be reissued for modern kit is RAMA. It had an innovative game idea: a companion who would explain anything upon request. If Starship Titanic's design team had lifted that one they could have sidestepped the graphical design issues the game had in places. The different races that could be met and interacted with in RAMA made it a really nifty experience and a total time-suck.

But for sheer "I love to walk around here just for the hell of it" I reckon Riven still holds the gold medal. A true labor of love.

Science fiction titan Frederik Pohl dies, aged 93

Stevie

Bah!

I had the pleasure of seeing and hearing him in person at an I-Con many years ago. He was quiet and thoughtful, easily the most intelligent member of that particular panel.

Smaller world.

Punter strikes back at cold callers - by charging THEM to call HIM

Stevie

Bah!

So what is needed is a recorded message "The occupant of the house is at home and will take your call. Your call is important to the occupant. Please stay on the line to speak to the occupant. A premium rate is levied on this telephone line. The amount levied is [x] Euros. This is approximately [y] pounds [z] pence, which at the time of this recording was equivalent to [a] American dollars and [b] cents, or [c] Canadian dollars and [d] cents. The Rupee value of this toll amounts to [e] ... "

"Hello?"

Done right they've already paid for a couple of minutes before they get the bad news, and they can still elect to waste your time at their expense.

Star Wars revival secret: This isn't the celluloid you're looking for

Stevie

Re: I expect to be disappointed

"Isn't that the first line of 'American Pie' (the very long song, not the movie!)..?"

At a piffling 7 minutes in change American Pie is NOT a long song.

*Life* is a long song.

Stevie

Re: Ranking Alien/Aliens/Alien 3/ Alien Comicbook Edition

You and your dad are entitled to your opinions.

I'd never heard of the Dark Horse thing you are quoting "everyone" as expecting to be the plot of Alien 3, so I can't agree with you on that. I had rather high hopes that the 3rd movie would try and get back to the format of the first, as I felt then that the action adventure style, though exciting and very well done, had bled off some of the horror of the Alien, forcing the need for "bigger, more awesome" to put it back again. That said, Aliens remains a favourite of mine.

Personally, I believe the attempts to bring comic book/ graphic novel levels of bubbling awesome to the screen is at the root cause of the death of the franchise. Alien V. Predator was so obviously going to suck balls I never considered attending despite the buzz from friends (who, after paying cashmoney to see said movie looked like they'd sucked balls too), and the comic book sensibilities of AR were most certainly what doomed the production despite there being a bunch of talented actors signed on to try and make it work.

Stevie

Re: Ranking Alien/Aliens/Alien 3/ Alien Comicbook Edition

[TRT] I agree (mostly) with your summation but would like to point out that the core *ideas* of each of those were good, excellent for the most part. It was the execution that f*cked it to a fare-thee-well.

The first two films used well-known techniques from the genres they were working in to get the results they were looking for.

Alien 3's production was marred by the thought that a noir-esque atmosphere demanded pitch-black scenes of unremitting lack-of-ambient-light in order to hammer home what was bleeding obvious. All that money on sets and makeup lost for want of a couple of troopers.

It also suffered in that the American audience had trouble with the regional British accents. I didn't, but then I was brought up to speak in a regional British accent.

AR's production was marred by using a director who thought the thing should look like a copy of Heavy Metal. The action was cartoonish as a result, as were the four-color characters. Difficult to buy-in to the horror aspect when that bloke from Law and Order is bouncing shots off the ceiling and everyone reacts to a devastating fatal wound with some ironic comment or action.

But the ideas in both those films were, in my opinion, solid and fertile ground on which to build a compelling tale of alien-fueled woe.

Stevie

Bah!

That's *Puppeteen*!

Silicon daddy: Moore's Law about to be repealed, but don't blame physics

Stevie

Bah!

Hmm.

Did you know that IBM salesdrones now actually give presentations in which they quote performance increases as 3 ECKS, 5 EKCS etc?

By scrupulously avoiding saying 3 TIMES, 5 TIMES etc they have a weasel clause when the promised "performance increase" (performance is not defined either) fails to show up in real life.

I wouldn't latch on to stupid stuff like this, but IBM have a dictionary of terms you and I throw about freely but which have contractual impact if you buy their kit. The use of the nicely wooly and undefined (but with an expectation built-in that need not be fulfilled) ECKS has me suspecting it can be found in said corporate dictionary.

Why Teflon Ballmer had to go: He couldn't shift crud from Windows 8, Surface

Stevie
Trollface

Re: Change or Revert

"I am hoping that the next CEO is a bit more costumer oriented and less market."

Me too. Nothing drives a message home like the CEO delivering it as a Klingon or Anime character.

Tesla tops $20bn as Elon Musk claims arm-wave design tech

Stevie
Unhappy

Re: The hard part remains, er, hard

The *hard* part about designing rocket parts is, surely, knowing something about designing rocket parts. Moving a drawing about by waving the hands is clever, but unnecessary to the job of building rockets, which can be done using completely mechanical design aids and calculation devices.

We know this because, well, people did it that way during those years that space was actually exciting and inspiring for people *not* sitting on the top of the rockets.

Slide rule and drafting table era: "We'll go to the moon and have moonbases and space stations people can visit"

Calculator and Visual Display Terminal to Mainframe era: We'll build a reusable space Mac Truck that can get to LEO. Maybe we'll do something space stationy, but only the elite will actually get there.

PC and iPad era: Well go to Mars. Honest. Someday. Right now we have to pay the Russians for our last trip to what little of the Space Station that actually saw the light of day.

Thrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrp BoP

Air mattress blast blows German man across room

Stevie

Re: Tyreseal is bloody useless for any job

Well, not fer nuthin', back in the early 80s I had a TR6 with Cobra slot mags that went porous, as a quick dip in the high tech tub-o-water at *my* local tyre depot showed.

I used a tyre sealant spray commonly available from Halfords and it worked perfectly, sealed the wheels for years and a tyre change. No leakage whatsoever.

All I did was follow the destructions on the can.

VMware's Project Zombie gives dumb servers BRAAAAINS

Stevie

Bah!

"... describing how ZED lets him say in a single line "do all these things concurrent, wait, then do all of this." "

Because two or more lines would introduce a pause in which to consider the wisdom of doing "all this" across the enterprise.

Which would be a bad thing.

EXPLICIT VID: Man filmed trying to bang brand new 'budget iPhone'

Stevie
Devil

Re: Bah!

"You would not like to make an poisoned Apple, Snow White"

I believe that I just said I *would*.

Stevie

Re: Bah! - Woods metal

"Not only is it very soft, it isn't very shiny. Having a phone that could suffer a case melt in bright sunshine has its own downsides."

Not from where I'm standing. What makes you believe I didn't think through the "repeat sales" angle?

iPhone U-Fix edition, brining the Dali aesthetic to a summers day.

Stevie

Bah!

Better idea: Clad the things in Wood's Metal and include a mould. If it gets dinged, put it in the mould and put the mould in hot water. Instant new and shiny.

Cheap and fun. Wood's Metal is not suitable for children or people who suck their phones. Dropping the iPhone uFix edition in a Stirbux Bucket O' Latte will void warranty and ruin the coffee (though personally I think all Stirbux products taste like paraffin-burned battery acid). Stevielabs not responsible for Cadmium poisoning due to ingestion of Wood's Metal jacket. Treat it as a phone and you should be ok.

Compared to me Jobs was a piker in the Genius Ideas arena.

Nasty BOFHses. It burns us! It burns...

Stevie

Bah!

That didn't go where I expected it to go.

I was thinking of piping in footage from DEFCON4 and The Stand along with hijacking the internet feed and rerouting it in order to control the story going in and nab the footage coming out, which would be sold as the latest and greatest Reality Show - Bunker Survivors of World War III.

Lenovo to ship all new PCs with Start Menu replacement

Stevie

Bah!

So, to recap, Microsoft ships a UI in which the primary design feature assumes everyone is using a touchscreen, and the fix to adjust this dimwitted view to the real world written by pokki assumes you are permanently connected to the web.

F*ckin' A.

Ubuntu Edge crowdsauce cash stash comes up short

Stevie

Bah!

Very impressive almost-haul.

For sheer more-money-than-senseness though, I think you can't beat the Kickstarter for Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition, and I recommend an hour or so of entertainment looking at the premiums people actually forked over money to get..

One perplexed onlooker has commented that you can pick up real antiquarian tat for half the price of the Red Leather and Gold Rulebook.

UK mulls ban on tiny mobiles to block prison smugglers

Stevie

Bah!

Isn't everyone overthinking the "problem"?

Just squelch cell reception in the prison for Bell's sake!

Gordon Bennet!

In case of LOHAN flight emergency, gobble THIS Iridium-Arduino sandwich

Stevie

Bah!

To what does the opaque term "cut down" refer? I assume it is an emergency balloon deflation of some sort but Google is no help at all, just showing me leggy women in ragged denim shorts in response to my demands for explanation.

Windows NT: Remember Microsoft's almost perfect 20-year-old?

Stevie
Trollface

Re: "there was no spam"

"On the PC, no, but on the fax machine . . ."

We avoided that in my first shop by using only Telex...

Snowden journalist's partner gave Brit spooks passwords to seized files

Stevie

Wow

So the lickspittle British Government is still as eager to kowtow to the Americans as they were during the time depicted in "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" then? How depressing.

Christ, I thought the new mob would have grown some balls in the aftermath of Blair's dismissal.

You know, it occurs to me that The Old Country could reclaim the moral high ground here and become a model for what the United States claims it is all about in that 237 year old document they revere so highly.

How does the old saw go: "Looked good on paper..."

*sigh*

Fanbois taught to use Apple's new killer app: Microsoft Windows

Stevie

Re: Macs are "so expensive" - not.

"I have a G3 power mac staring at me here. It only needs a PSU to be in working condition again. I don't think there would be much point though, except as a curiosity."

Pft. I agree totally, and at the $450 asking price for that PSU it wouldn't be worth the bother or expense. For something made of diamond-encrusted depleted uranium you'd think they wouldn't suspend it over the motherboard with only half the screws the chassis calls for and a , what, foot of drop to get it up to speed, but there you go.

Please downvote me, because it isn't like I've actually pulled one of these pieces of crap apart and rebuilt it for an ingrate relative who used my PC running XP the entire time I was fixing his "better" G3 to do his e-mail.

And 20 bucks for a bios battery? Lasted about the same as my $5 lithium disc but was *much* harder to source. Thrrrp!

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak disses Ashton Kutcher's Steve Jobs

Stevie

Bah!

Everyone does understand this is a movie and not a biography, right?

Stevie

Re: Anpther Steve Jobs Movie?

" Both Jobs and his products have been a lot more influential and risky compared to Microsoft who just generally carried on making stuffy office software."

Apart from the bit where Microsoft put out WIndows 95 and managed to get everyone + dog to buy a PC of course, something Apple had singularly failed to do with years and years head start.

Violent Hamlet 'bard' by British Library Wi-Fi filters

Stevie

Bah!

Dollars to dimes this was yet another overly collective regex at work rather than a clever detection of various subject matters buried in the tortuous iambic pentameter and archaic phrasing.

Sigh.

REVEALED: Simple 'open sesame' to unlock your HOME by radiowave

Stevie

Re: Who..?

" I'm probably going to biometrics soon since it's rather difficult to forget ones hand inside the house when leaving. "

I had the great pleasure of experiencing state of the art consumer biometrics while visiting Universal Studios Islands of Adventure in Florida this year, where the lockers they provide are locked and released by fingerprint.

The biggest issue with the idea seemed to be the high levels of exhaustion exhibited by the people employed to unlock lockers that refused to open again, and the increasing levels of irritation of non-English speaking merry-makers who couldn't get their stuff and couldn't find the locker-opener-upperer. One French lady was reduced to tears by the swinish machine until I found someone to help her out.

I developed the theory it was down to changes in shape of peoples' fingers due to humidity and A/C since people would lock the lockers after standing outside in the heat and/or rain but unlock them after upwards of an hour in cool, dry air, though one of my lockers testily announced that it didn't like the cut of my jib, had quarantined my stuff and wouldn't even attempt reading my fingerprint until I had consulted a human. Presumably the computer was having a bad day and was tired of the names people were calling it.

I wish you well during the depths of a cold wet English winter as you struggle with your own front door. I suggest a backup keyed entry be installed and the neighbours alerted to the possibilities of strong invective.

Stevie

Re: Who..?

"just get a key chain that attaches to a belt"

You know, it took me almost a year to figure out where the horizontal scratches on my new car were coming from. Seemed like every time I drove to the station I would return from work to find a new scratch.

Then I realized that fucktards with dogchains on their belts were dragging past my car while it was parked in the station carpark. I made a point of not parking next to SUVs or pickups after that and the problem was much mitigated.

Then there are those who proudly deploy the belt-mounted retractable key hawser. Why do morons think it is cool to carry a dozen keys and a bottle opener dangling off one hip?

The terrifying tech behind this summer's zombie assault

Stevie

Re: Save the planet: stop the Hollywood movie machine!!

Really? Anyone care to calculate the carbon footprint of the server farms currently hosting pictures of cats or moving peoples 140 character blither around the world?

Stevie

Re: Sigh...

[4 Neil Barnes] Spot on with your comments about depth of field.

I was taken to see the "new" 3D re-rendering of Jurassic Park and though the 3D was stunning when it worked the immediate thing I noticed was that so much of the frame was out of focus.

This, of course, because the original 2D movie was made with standard compositional knowledge and practice built over nearly a century of making films: shoot the things you want people to look at in sharp focus and use depth of field to blur the unimportant stuff. Creatively increasing the depth of field mid-shot is also a boffo way of causing the viewer to understand that the POV character has just become aware of something, often something behind him/her (these days it is usually something that looks like it was sneezed out of Godzilla's nose that has dozens of sharp teeth and claws).

Unfortunately, the large amounts of blurry background that made up the majority of Jurassic Park were jarring in the 3D version, making for a partial fail.

What worked well (and worked well in Despicable Me 2 in which the makers showed admirable restraint until the credits) was the lack of forward-projecting imagery, which meant such imagery wouldn't get truncated abruptly at the screen edge causing a sharp dislocation in the viewer's perception of the action. Avatar suffered from this in spades.

End of an era as Firefox bins 'blink' tag

Stevie

Re: There's "useless and ugly" and there's "USELESS AND UGLY!!"

No, but I remember the hysterical reaction people would have when the browsed the page source and saw the meta tag FrontPage would embed naming itself as the origin, because I had a beautiful, tight and working project rendered broken and ugly because some fuckwit thought I had formatted one page with FrontPage and decided he knew better.

I hadn't and he didn't - I had merely used Front page's excellent and fully working WYSIWYG table building thing to organize his dubious pictorial content c/w urgent new requirement of the day as quickly as possible and forgotten - that one time - to pull the (functionally useless) meta tag before shipping it.

I only remember having a reasonably good time with FrontPage, but that's because I learned how to use it rather than just poking around expecting it to anticipate me.

You could get tight HTML code out of Word too (argh! Say it ain't so!) if you spent five minutes finding out what you didn't know and changed one setting.

It was a feature, not a bug, and one I wouldn't have wanted to tackle on a bet - that when the HTML was produced from a document it should not only look as much like the original as humanly possible, but should be back-translatable into a word document on demand with no loss of formatting information. If you didn't need that, you could turn it off and all those inline styles would vanish.

Of course, no-one is suggesting Word is an HTML editor, but the fact that it can and does generate reasonable HTML when asked properly is a bonus.

I'm constantly shocked by the number of clever people who never follow the Golden Rule with MS products (while at the same time quoting the magic four letters at every opportunity to a Linux/Gimp/Apache/name your software of choice newb).

Stevie

Re: Fonts didn't display at all?

Well spotted, but I'm pretty sure the text between blink tags was only readable about half the time.

Stevie

Bah!

Ironic that I had to read this story while holding one hand over the advert that was blinking "Register Now" in uglyvision right in my eyeline.

Xerox copier flaw changes numbers in scanned docs

Stevie

Re: Everyone is missing the point

No, you are missing the point. These machines are often also used as fax/email printers, by people like doctors and pharmacists (and engineers, who we have found time and time again often have a frighteningly tight focus when it comes to applied intelligence - see story in sharktank last week of an aerospace engineer who wrapped his PC in a blanket to stop the fan noise and cooked the thing).

It isn't reasonable to ask people whose job is nothing to do with computers or copiers or compression algorithm internals to cope with this nonsense. It is the responsibility of the copier supply drones to ensure that a cock-up cannot happen due to the copier designer designate being a total science nerd with zero real-world contact. If there is a danger, there should be a lego-brick sized red light flashing on and off to alert someone of the danger.

Stevie

Bah!

By Jove, I hope my pharmacist has the hi-res setting enabled when my doctor sends my prescriptions through.

The danger of a wrong dosage doesn't bear thinking abarghurrrrrgle!

NASA boffins release Europa mission wish list

Stevie

Bah!

left off list:

Flag Planter (Duh! How else will we know we were there?)

Low muzzle velocity auto-load mirror dispersal mortar c/w wide dispersal airburst loads.

Autonomous Laser-Fitted Tracked telepresence rovers (2).

Rovers+lasers+mirrors=Pong Tanks on Europa. Money well spent.

Queensland bans IBM from future work

Stevie

Bah!

Ask IBM to do a specific bid and they will arrive with a presentation showing your requirements in terms of *their* wish to oversell you (or rather, your Top Brass).

I speak as someone working on state-of-the-art IBM hardware running a very popular top-o-the-line IBM O/S in order to provide an extremely popular and much "sold" Application Server somewhere to run what is supposedly the most up-and-coming document management system on the planet bar none! Huzzah!

Now we ask for training.

And are asked to believe that IBM have NO training course for serious admins using *their* product on *their* hardware with *their* O/S.

We can get piddly load-and-go Windows training (about as necessary as tits on a kettle), we can get training on Linux-hosted versions of the same set-up, but straight bought-and-paid-for IBM all the way down to the chewy center? Nope, not available. Not now, not ever, never.

Wanna guess how much IBM talked about *that* even though training requirements were front and center throughout the bid (and presentation-after-presentation) process?

Would that my own top brass would kick these bastards in the hurtybits just once. Good and hard.

Report: NSA spying deals billion dollar knockout to US cloud prospects

Stevie

Bah!

"Castro"?

I seem to remember that name from somewhere. Something to do with pigs...

Limbaugh: If you hate Apple then you're a lefty blog-o-twat hipster

Stevie

Bah!

*Is* Rush Limberger "the most popular talk show host in America"?

Where does that stat come from?

The man is barely coherent most of the time from the little I've listened to his gibbering.

Stevie

Re: @ Phil O'Sophical

"That's a generalisation and as we all know, generalisations in general are wrong"

Back in New York for exactly 24 hours, drive out to get my new glasses. Encounter my first BMW of the day driven by 30-summat woman, signalling left at the light at Nicolls Rd and Straight Path and pulled too far forward to make the turn. Decides *as I am pulling alongside to go straight-on* to go straight after all, which involves almost sideswiping me as she corrects her line.

Throughout the drive, in my mirror I see her make another three bogus signals and last minute re-decisions not to bother at consecutive traffic lights, to the immediate cost of other drivers. God alone knows how many she made while I wasn't checking the rear view.

She then tailgates me for about a mile and a half, and when I make a turn she gives me the finger for not speeding (to judge by the roar of her engine as she sprinted the last twenty yards to the red light at route 110).

If the generalization wasn't accurate I guess I hit the one in a million chance of getting the BMW muppet.

Village-swallowing MUDCANO was no accident, say boffins

Stevie

Re: Only a liar would say fracking is totally safe.

"As we know with Deepwater Horizon, the moment there is an accident fraudsters start up"

As we know, in order to drill as quickly and cheaply as possible, those involved in the Deepwater Horizon Fiasco knowingly disregarded the safeguard measures put in place by stinking anti-corporate liberals - bent on stopping energy exploitation at all costs - to prevent the very thing that happened, and then they fraudulently lied to the public about it for days until there literally was no rat-hole left for them to shelter in, at which point they started 'fessing up in dribs and drabs.

There. Fixed it for you.

I'll believe what an energy company says about public safety the day they give up their unnecessary and usurious public tax-money welfare, provided in the face of record profits even during severe economic downturn.

Interestingly, it seems that Albertans, who've been fracking away like crazy for years, think we're crazy to do the same thing at such shallow depths. They say it's obvious there's a danger to the water supply in that scenario.

But what would Albertans know about oil, just because the province floats on an ocean of the stuff?

Stevie

Bah!

If fracking were "totally safe" the companies that do it wouldn't be so shy of naming the chemicals they use.

But I of course believe that the reason they won't do that is to protect their proprietary chemical brews from pirates rather than that they know that getting that stuff in the water table is inherently unsafe to the point of being criminal.

The thought *does* occur: If the fracking companies are as trustworthy as they themselves claim (and who am I to argue with facts like that?), who would be so dastardly as to steal another company's secret fracking elixir?

No doubt I am being "overly simplistic" in my thinking and there's a really clever reason why it is important that I not ask what chemicals get into my drinking water.

Ex-prez Carter: 'America has no functioning democracy' with PRISM

Stevie

Bah!

Like G.W. Bush would know what damaging the country entailed.

I've heard it said by political critics who have skin in the game that Carter is, perhaps, the only moral man we've had in the oval office in decades. He's certainly the only one putting his money and person where his mouth is when it comes to using his political name to good purpose.

And you have to respect anyone who willingly and voluntarily lets go of their Secret Service escort so they can get on with useful work. I'll start to respect Team Bush/Cheney (another loudmouth who won't fade into the scenery like a good boy) a little when they do the same.

UK gov's smart meter dream unplugged: A 'colossal waste of cash'

Stevie

Bah!

I've had a smart water meter for years. I *asked* the nice man from National Grid if I could have a smart gas meter too instead of a bunch of threatening letters saying that I have "refused entry" to a meter reader (lies; they come when there's no-one home. They are not refused entry because they don't actually ask anyone if they can come in).

He told me that we couldn't have a smart meter because then they'd be able to read the meters from a van at the kerbside and that would cost jobs.

So that's all right then.

Curiosity team: Massive collision may have killed Red Planet

Stevie

Bah!

"Tunable" laser? Curiosity has a frikkin' tunable laser beam screwed to it?

Is this so it can hunt down and kill Spirit and Opportunity once and for all and free up much -needed grant monies from the claws of the wrinklies still controlling them?

If so, will the Mars Rover Slapdown be filmed and put up on YouTube for all to see?

UK discovers Huawei UK staff auditing Huawei kit: Govt orders probe

Stevie

Bah!

Tuned out after reading "self-policing". Does anyone actually *really* believe in it? Azathoth on a bike, even the Linux community cannot self-police as events this week have demonstrated, and if people who "do it for the sake of it" can't, then what are the chances anyone else will?

1953: How Quatermass switched Britons from TV royalty to TV sci-fi

Stevie

Bah!

Neale==Kneale of course. Stupid brain.

Stevie

Um...

You know, the one thing that stands out for me when I look back on that period as typified by the bleeding edge TV shows, both in the UK and in the USA, is the ready acceptance of high quality Science Fiction as suitable viewing fodder for the masses.

When I say "high quality" I am, of course, referring to the ideas and writing of scripts to encompass them rather than the production values in the face of tighter than a fish's rear end budgets. The extrapolation of basic ideas in Quatermass and The Pit is as purely Science Fictional as any of the acknowledged masters of the field would agree, and presenting it as a visual story showcases the masterful character work Neale did. Would that the same process could triumph over Teh Shinee today.

SPOILER ALERT

I can't be sure, but the idea of a living space ship may well have originated with Quatermass and The Pit (the TV show).

Stevie

Re: "hard for many Britain’s to fill in"

""Gotten" originates in (old) English, so it's really only returning from the colonies."

Upvote for your superior historical knowledge in putting down the anti-American sentiment, sir.

Can we do aluminium/aluminum next?