Posts by Jim 59

Wot, no Ferragraph Neal ? (ramble alert)

Great article. Fascinating to discover that tape was originally not *intended* for hi-fi or even music reproduction. That explains a lot. Later, its main strength was in being the only way to play your own music on the go. Like others I made copies of LPs for this purpose, but quality was always difficult to achieve. The biggest drawback was probably power consumption. A mid 80s walkman / getto blaster could not rewind many tapes before going flat (AAA batteries), I recall using a pencil just to save juice.

In the mid 80s a borrowed Ferrograph Neal unit appeared in our house, a massive thing of impressive weight and build quality. Even the mechanical buttons were electrified. Combined with expensive tapes, it made the best recordings I heard. But tape was never hi-fi by any stretch, it always had that bloomin' hiss. Dolby seemed like a crude low pass filter.

I also recall a Garrard "hi fi" unit where to insert a tape you put tour hand right into a big hole at the front and laid the tape in at about 45 degrees- ramble filter cut off

Re: The electron taught me a real lesson

I was revolving 3D shapes on screen...

I did that too. Just simple BASIC and color swapping, nothing real time. Making simple mathematical patterns was strangely fascinating.

Yeah obviously and Stephenson's Rocket was a POS too I mean top speed 15 mph the guy is having a laff, I don't even know why he is a selebrity

Re: Illegal?

Hand guns weren't banned as such, just the owning and selling of them in most circumstances.

Likewise, the Relax record wasn't banned, only playing it on the BBC. If it had been banned the shops couldn't have legally stocked it.

Re: Always seemed odd...

... notwithstanding the strong convenience arguments laid out above..

Re: What about any semblance of security...

Relax, it's only for reading the latest Telepgraph headlines while drinking coffee. Common sense says nobody is going to do confidential computing activities in Starbucks. Amirite ? Phones and tablets are too small for doing real internet "work" anyway. Reading headlines is pretty much all you can do on them as a grown-up.

Re: Does the Archbishop of Canterbury..

The Church put out a polite notice saying Archbishop could no longer be patron of the RSPCA due to other commitments. But it is inevitable seen as a snub for the reasons above.

Maybe time for Her Maj to withdraw the "Royal" prefix too.

Re: >"Vodafone insisted it was fully compliant with existing tax laws"

...and he did so without consulting HMRC's internal legal experts, thus breaking even the Revenue's internal procedures. (Private Eye). According to Wikipedia he is "the most "wined and dined" civil servant in Britain, having been treated to corporate hospitality 107 times over a period of three years.". Now working for Deloitte and Touche.

Makes you proud.

Re: So what he's asking for is...

"Write-once, read-never is probably the spec for a lot of this

It's called /dev/null.

Snarky comments aside though, intriguing article.

Vitriolic ? You didn't read the article

Re: Ok so who is fiddling the voting?

What appears at first glance to be a harmless story from the Department of the Bleeding Obvious turns out to be the colossal middle finger which El Reg has been dying to give its commentards all these years. Impressive. Now can you put the PHP back and stop messin' around.

Re: I find it amusingly ironic

It is absurd to compare the modern USA with USSR, or to compare Snowden with Russian dissidents. People could not even leave the USSR on holiday, whereas every American citizen is free to travel the world. The supreme soviet was unelected, whereas the US citizens have full suffrage. The USA has to keep people out, not shoot people trying to escape like the USSR. Snowden is being pursued by a democratically elected government that wants to bring criminal charges and give him an open trial. The USSR could not give anyone a free trial because it didn't have an independent judiciary.

The Snowden issue is important, and I am undecided if he has done us a favour or not by revealing PRISM etc. But comparing him to dissidents like Solzhenitsyn is the sort of thing someone only does if they are looking for upvotes from the fruitcake fringe the Reg commentariat.

Re: That man is a bunghole.

@Shadow Systems - much more of that and you'll have his job

@Maharg

Because opposing opinions exist does not prove the BBC is unbiased, or that the opinions are 50-50 split. The large preponderance of opinion has it that the BBC pushes a consistent political agenda, and that the agenda is set by a small number of people living in the wealthy areas around Hampstead.

Listen to News Quiz on Radio 4. How many Tory voters do you think work on that programme ?

Re: Security

You're saying that the system call interface was slow and put an overhead on software. Improvements such as threading and memory mapping have come about partly to improve that situation. It's not the drivers that are at fault it seems to me, but rather the system call / privileged access interface which is inefficient. Ok maybe bad drivers too.

Basically, Microsoft appeared to rush Dave Cutler into doing a bad job, releasing NT without the proper multi-user safeguards a grown up OS ought to have. Result: 20 years of virus anarchy.

Well done

That's nice journalism and it will be intriguing to follow the story.

RSPCA also loves prosecuting the elderly and infirm. From Private Eye: The RSPCA is thought to be the most prolific private prosecutor in the country.... Its sister organisation in Scotland, the Scottish SPCA, does not carry out private prosecutions... the same is true of the RSPB, which used to prosecute but stopped in 1992..."

...RSPCA's "inspectorate" [has been described as] "an officious, sub standard, pretend police force"... RSPCA officers wear uniforms which are almost indistinguishable from police garb, leading to confusion about their powers when they doorstop people...

Is the RSPCA a nasty piece of work?

Re: DR

DR is expensive, usually reserved for a company's most critical stuff. Companies tend to categorize web servers as less critical, rightly or wrongly. I have worked with several clients on their DR tests, often it is covering a production data warehouse or similar. But some don't have it. DR tends to be a subject managers don't like to think about.