Date : Mon, 01 Aug 2011 08:59:55
From : heyrick.beebsoc@... (Rick Murray)
Subject: [BeebSoc] Auntie, dear Auntie
On 01/08/2011 14:11, Mick wrote:
> So the original intention was not for public use? Captioning for what?
> Do you mean subtitles?
Captioning == Subtitles. ;-)
> It still shows forward thinking and ability to adapt.
I'm inclined to think that the use of VBI for data transmission is
ingenious use of otherwise wasted bandwidth. But, never so ingenious as
the ability to shoe-horn colour into a monochrome standard while keeping
it COMPLETELY compatible with the older mono receivers. Hell, with all
the flippin' codecs flying around calling themselves "MPEG4", it's a
lesson we might need to learn all over again.
> These days sponsorship is rife and it would more likely have been the
> Lloyds Micro,
Hahaha, don't you mean The FaceBook Micro? Damn thing signs you in as
"available for a chat" every time you turn it on...
> Also, the BBC actively encouraged internet use. Remember beeb.net?
I remember a lot of failed attempts at the same thing - WHSmith did one,
ITV did one (still does, www.bushinternet.com is ITV stuff), Tesco did
one... Around 1999, everybody and their uncle bought and rebranded bits
of Pipex.
I think that the Beeb's attempts were riding the increasing popularity
of the Internet allowing one to access the world for the price of a
London phone call.
The true pioneers had a Demon account and spent hours puzzling over
getting ka9q to work. Later, the Freenet kit made life a little simpler.
Shortly after, Argonet took Fresco and the Freenet suite and customised
them into a rather clever thing that promised:
1. Insert floppy disc. Install some stuff. Sign up. You're on.
That's how I got on to the internet. It was a call to Chichester. Then
it was a call to Docklands. And then, around about the time beeb.net was
devised (1999), all my internet calls were a 08xx number and local call
tariff. I frequently used WHS CD-ROMs for my internet explorer updates
(the Tesco ones dicked around with an older version - too much
rebranding for my liking). As I was already with Argo, I didn't try
Beeb.net. In actuality, I liked Argo because getting online for the
first time was pointy-clicky.
I want to play, y'see. The figuring it out bit comes later.
It's the same reason I've mostly avoided Linux until the Ubuntu era. My
first foray into Linux was a Slackware CD and book combo. It booted on
mom's old Aptiva 486/66 from a boot disc, loading the rest from CD. A
sort of LiveCD before such things existed. It was interesting, but slow.
I like the multicolour directory listings.
But the book. It told me the generic kernel was rubbish and step one
was... first build your kernel. It seemed to assume you installed the
system, without anywhere telling you what bits you needed and what bits
you didn't...
Even today, running a LiveCD-with-persistence version of xubuntu on an
SD card on my eeePC, I cannot get my Brother DCP-165C working with the
system. There are two methods, neither of which are written in language
suitable for a newbie. One method seems to involve ripping out the print
subsystem by brute force and ramming in something similar-but-different.
Perhaps when Ubuntu can identify hardware and look on ubuntu.org for
instructions to update itself by itself, it'll be an operating system of
use. Until then, I only use it (in a PortableLinux incarnation) for
compiling stuff for my OSD (my video recorder) since the OSD's build
environment is so hairy it would probably crash&burn under Windows -
though I max out my 640Mb allocation trying to build some parts of Qt4,
who the hell writes code SO inefficient that a compiler operating in an
environment giving half a gig of memory (assuming 512Mb available after
virtual environment) RUNS OUT OF MEMORY. What the hell?!?
> It was a welcome alternative to high AOL / Compuserve charges.
Not to mention that AOL and Compuserve were walled gardens. I test-drive
Compuserve back circa '95 and it took a *lot* to get out of Compuserve
and look at external websites. And what was up with those icky numerical
mail addresses?
I avoided AOL like the plague for two reasons:
1. I got an AOL CD-ROM damn-near weekly. Sometimes twice a week.
2. I don't know about later setups, but the earlier ones I saw came
complete with NCSA Mosaic.
Seriously, in the early days of IE6, I know *three* AOL users stuck
with Mosaic, which was... what? HTML 1.0 compliant? Even Webite did
a better render!
> I agree. It surely would have been possible you have kept the old system
> and transcoded digital data to screen lines this assuming your TV allows
> the text function through an external input.
Digital broadcasting provides for teletext. There is a minor
complication in how it is sent (it is sent as digital data and the
satellite receiver regenerates the VBI - for such things wouldn't work
if compressed), however any half-assed receiver has this capability
(whether or not the firmware actually allows it). Even Sky Digiboxen do
this - tune to Sky News, the teletext there is/was some sort of horse
betting nonsense.
HOWEVER, I think the reason for the demise of teletext is, due to
formatting differences, getting news onto both services at once is...
tricky. Time/personnel (=money) consuming. You might say a filter ought
to be able to push digital text content into a teletext blank for
transmission. Try EuroNews' teletext, if it is still running. I think
the news articles are reformatted from website copy (unless it is a
digital service incompatible with British equipment?) because funny
formatting (word-wrap on a long word) can throw the end of the article
off the page...
> I really don't like nor use the new glossy (lossy?) text services.
Me neither. I have a Freesat box, a generic Sky Digibox (2006 era, I
think), plus my itty-bitty SL-65 receiver. I use the SL-65 because it is
the quickest and friendliest. Cost ?35 from Lidl and has outperformed
*everything*. I will *cry* when that receiver loses its magic smoke.
I don't use the others. Not so much because of the DiSEqC twin-LNB
thing, but because they are slow, clumsy, crap at being customised (the
SL65 means I can delete *everything* I'm not interested in) and utterly
bog-standard in terms of picture quality. Like, why the hell does Sky
continue to persist in shunning S-video connections?
I used the Digibox red button extensively (pre-Internet days) and also
tried out the laughable Freesat red button. Both were tedious.
Now? I have a thing on my phone that regularly scans RSS feeds from
services of interest - BBC news, Kyodo news, Orange news, Hanner's Anime
blog, and TheRegister. If I see something of interest, I can read it. I
can also browse the headlines for a fill-in of what else is going on (a
bit like reading p102 and ignoring the rest).
> I dial the page number for text. Wait... wait... wait...#Press text
> to enter... Wait...Wait...
;-) It annoys [Sky Digibox version] that some pages are "full service"
and some pages overlay the broadcast. It isn't unusual to find yourself
going back and forth between live TV and the text microcosm.
> Then get a very unsatisfying menu containing nothing I want.
Learn the page numbers - you can go directly to the page you want. Press
"text", wait, wait, wait, and when the menu arrives, tap in 1001. You
may or may not need to [Select] it? I forget. I think BBC and ITV and
Sky each handled this differently. Meh.
Oh, and unless you have an ass-kicking receiver, smile awkwardly to
yourself as you can tap out 1001 *before* it even appears on the screen.
> Text dies (archives aside) on the 18th of April 2012 (Crystal Palace)
> as far as I'm concerned.
Yup, and if I was in the UK, I would make a little wooden coffin, put my
teletext decoder in it, and go and present it to the BBC on that day.
> It's replacement a mere shadow of what it one was.
Indeed. Ooooh, fonts. Ooooh, in-line video. It's like the Apple "oooh,
shiny!" brigade. Mediocrity glossed up to look like something special.
> Even if the technology worked, the content is not there.
Oh, but you're forgetting one important thing. The content is, these
days, mostly irrelevant. You might argue that not everybody has a
computer, but with the benefits of many internet packages it becomes
more attractive for the benefits. My internet is horribly pricey (normal
for France :-( ), but on the other hand I can (and have!) call you and
talk for HOURS, internationally, and I pay *zero* as it is a VoIP line.
People in fringe areas could get their 6Music from the BBC's website
instead of FM. You find me an advert on telly these days that doesn't
point you to a website? Some are so damn lazy they just say "search for
'army recruitment' online".
Every teenager in the country with a fondle-phone probably has as much
internet as your computer, in a clarity that can blow away anything that
can run on an Acorn machine *ever*. You think NetSurf rocks? Try the
bog-standard Android browser...
Hell, Freesat boxes don't even have a modem connection on the box. It's
RJ45 LAN nowadays.
Given this, there isn't really that much incentive to have a decent text
service any more, is there?
>> actually has sufficient memory available to cache an *entire* service,
>> and it snapshots it in realtime.
> Very nice. Is there any way of saving the complete cache to media?
Possibly by hacking the box? You must remember that older-generation
satellite boxen aren't really designed for more interfacing than the odd
serial port for optional firmware upgrades and, in some cases (such as
the SL-65) downloading and uploading channel lists.
I've not done this with my SL-65, however, as it *appears* to pull a
dump of the Flash across a serial line with *no* flow control. I don't
fancy pushing that back to the box. An XML file would have been nicer...
> You could save sub pages with a beeb.
My brief play with a cheese-wedge teletext receiver [*] was astonishing.
The system looked and felt a lot more responsive than I was expecting,
and I dare say it was actually niftier in use than the RISC OS receiver
boxes [#].
* - which will soon become a home to a 6502 co-pro card.
# - the Ground Control / Octopus ones are stunted by having a single 2K
SRAM so can look for a single page at a time; which is cheap and
$#!+ because the hardware can cope with an 8K SRAM to permit four
simultaneous fetches. The hardware cost enough, why did it not come
with 8K onboard?!?
>> No, the BBC commissioned it for internal networks.
> So without Auntie, it probably wouldn't have existed? That's enough for
> me. :-P
No, it would have turned up later. Cinema offers stereo, VHS tapes
offered stereo mid-80s. Hell, I even had a Sony Beta deck that recorded
in stereo. All satellite broadcasts were in Stereo (some of you might
remember the Panda on the analogue kit, and playing with the
pre-emphasis to make the sound crisper).
It was inevitable that TV broadcasting would become stereo, if not Beeb
then somebody else.
> Or a massive gas explosion that kills everyone in an instant.
Wasn't that Brookside?
> If the telly is on in the background and Emmerdale Farm comes on, I
> may just leave it on depending on my grumpy rating that day, ditto
> Coronation St. But... as soon as I hear the first drum beat of the
> Deadenders theme sheer panic sets in. I rush around like a headless
> chicken trying to find the remote
I *tolerate* Emmerdale. But Corrie or Enders will have me
channel-hopping faster than a soft-focus sex scene [yawn!] in an '80s movie.
> Really? How awful. Never trust promises made by a commercial
> organization. Perhaps it's a repeat ;-)
The American one has web feeds. So you can watch the housemates sleep.
WTF? There must be something monumentally wrong in your life (or mind?)
if you actually willingly give your time to watch a live feed of some
twat *sleeping*.
>> Anyway, if I had to cull a random BBC station, I might consider Radio
>> 1 extra;
> You'd be their only listener :-D Perhaps you should try radio 2.
You might want to look up what the word "cull" means. ;-)
Best wishes,
Rick.