Re: same old
I particularly like the third one after they roasted Bezos in Spitting Image:10, which has to be one of the best skits ever.
9611 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Sep 2009
Turkeys voting for Christmas...
Or...
"An Amiglion Major cow. I'll bring him over.
OK, we'll meet the meat. That's cool!
A-hem... Good evening, madam and gentlemen, I am the main dish of the day. May I interest you in parts of my body?
Something off my shoulder, perhaps? Braised in a white wine sauce?
Your shoulder?!
Well, naturally mine, sir. Nobody else's is mine to offer! The rump is very good, sir. I have been exercising and eating plenty of grain, so there's a lot of good meat there. Or a casserole of me, perhaps?
You mean this animal actually wants us to eat it?
It's the most revolting thing I've ever heard! I don't want to eat an animal that's inviting me to!
It's better than eating an animal that doesn't want to be eaten.
That's not the point. Well, maybe it is the point. I don't want to talk about it. I'll have a green salad.
May I urge you, sir, to consider my liver? It must be very rich and tender by now. I have been force-feeding myself for months.
Green salad, please.
A green salad!
Is there any reason why I shouldn't have a green salad?
I know many vegetables that are very clear on that point, sir, which is why it was decided to cut through the whole tangled problem by breeding an animal that actually wanted to be eaten and was capable of saying so clearly and distinctly. And here I am!"
There’s the well known I assume tale of a user who couldn’t log in when standing up but if they sat down on their chair all was well and good. Carpets were ripped up looking for damaged wiring but nought to be found. In the end someone spotted that at some point two key caps had been transposed and when they typed their password when seated muscle memory took over but when standing up they were one-finger typing.
It can be used for files I suppose, but the primary rationale behind it was as a mezzanine encoding format for use in live production. You see it's all well and good compressing video, but if you have to make frame perfect cuts you need the codec to do its work in less than a frame. With HD looming on the horizon, the amount of video you can shove down a single connection quartered, and it would only get worse with 4K and 8K. Hence the need to develop a lightweight, fast, digital compressor. Back at its inception you had to run a CPU flat out in order to squish the data. Dirac could loss-lessly quarter the bandwidth with half the CPU power. I moved on from broadcast studio work quite a few years ago now, but oddly I'm still coming across the same challenges with the bandwidth required for video now I'm back in the biomedical science arena.
Well, Dalton Maag created it. They also revamped KCL's custom typefaces for the digital age. The original King's Logo from the 90's was created by Alan Kitching. Companies are ALWAYS knocking out new typefaces and updating branding and the like. We quickly get used to it. The Circling Hippos and the Teams Together and the Spinning Globes and the Sliding 2... never as good as what they had before, and this feeling will be repeated the next time. There are, however, a few genuine cases where the new isn't just a case of getting used to it but is an actual FUBAR of a job. King's recently attempted a rebrand at some expense and binned the whole deal because it stank. Rinse and repeat for Leeds, UCL, ICL, KCH etc etc.
And the cost is quite high because of all the various languages that the BBC supports. The BBC needed a considerable rage of character sets.
The Daily Fail has one of the worst websites of all time. You can't zoom in or out without adverts flying over the content, you can't reply to comments in the mobile view, half the time comments fail to be recorded... I could go on. Having said that, HYS on the BBC is also pitiful, lacking threaded comments for one.
"What the BBC chose to use is about what is available..."
Same can be said for stereo sound, outside broadcasting, digital text service over the air, etc?
The BBC had internal networks from the 60s, discrete IP networks in the 70s and business wide in the 80s - working WWW services from 1994 on, which I regard as pretty quick to the game; they have always been at the forefront of communications technology, digital and analogue, because communication *IS* their business. Hardware, software and content.
I'll concede that there is stiff competition from the tech giants (NB who have moved into content generation), and there is a standing-on-the-shoulders-of-giants things going on, but the BBC exist in a special niche where they have the freedom to develop their own technology to meet their own needs, be they commercially questionable or not. They are innovators and long may they remain so.
Many of the CIOs were brought it from outside HE and were of the opinion that universities were just schools for grown ups. Focussed on a service delivery revolution for undergraduates, leaving postgraduate and research behind a locked door for later. Many university staff however see universities as centres of postgraduate study and research that offer undergraduates the benefit of their experience and an insight into the cutting edge of knowledge - how to discover new things.
This creates a digital divide. Some institutions manage this well. Others the IT departments tend to treat the research business as petulant ignorants. Never forget... most of the IT stuff on your desk is a product of something dreamt up by a boffin in a university lab.