Date : Tue, 02 Aug 2011 15:36:01
From : heyrick.beebsoc@... (Rick Murray)
Subject: [BeebSoc] Auntie, dear Auntie
On 02/08/2011 03:10, Mick wrote:
>> Captioning == Subtitles. ;-)
> Thanks.
So when Yanks write Closed Captioned (or [CC] ), it just means there's
subtitling. Give 'em credit, the FCC mandated everything had to support
captions, so you'll find caption-capable NTSC videotapes. That's
something we never sussed.
> No! Go back to a time when the internet was the fidonet (not literally)
?
Fidonet was an ad-hoc collection of computers calling each other
directly. Public and private messages could be passed, and sometimes
files too, but its aim, spirit, and abilities are about as different to
The Internet as a dial-up BBS is to Twitter.
This bit, beebsoc, mailing list, is very similar to an echo. ;-)
>> , ITV did one (still does, www.bushinternet.com is ITV stuff),
> Is that AyeTeeVee? Haven't you got a gadget that only connects to
> BushInternet?
Yes, I have a Bush Internet box that only connects to BushInternet
(don't even know if the number is still valid!), but if you go to
www.bushinternet.com it oughta come up with ITV branding.
Bush lost a packet on the project. Poor Pace lost an absolute w*nkload,
and it ought to stand as a testament to how dumbing something down TOO
much will kill it.
[Amstrad @-mailer, anybody?]
>> Tesco did one... Around 1999, everybody and their uncle bought and
>> rebranded bits of Pipex.
> What, Pipex that is now StalkStalk?
<sigh> Once upon a time, the Big Pipes were Demon and Pipex.
That was in the world of Web 1.0 where people Gave A ****, everybody
loved kittens, banner adverts in GeoCities and Tripod were the worst
thing imaginable, Google was a newbie search engine, and nobody had a
clue what "monetize" and "SEO" meant.
<nostalgic sigh>
My oh my, haven't we totally cocked up the internet!
> Certainly their helpline was an premium rate call.
Quel surpris!
>> 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.
> :-D
You're forgetting the part where I'm pinned to the ground by a
machine-gun toting MET officer who is responding to an evacuation of
Television Centre on account of a terrorist bomb presented in a little
wooden coffin. I will say I live in France, I will be mistaken for being
French, and then I'll be shot in the back of the head.
Lessons will be learned, etc.
> It was so easy to work with too. *SAVE filename 7C00 8000 7C00 7C00 and
> you had the page saved.
!?!? Two clicks and a filename would save it. On my debug build, Alt-S
would autosave by page number with the least significant three bytes of
the system clock appended ( "ppp_dddddd" ), so one keypress...
>> Cinema offers stereo,
> Off the side of the film at the time.
Most cinema audio is embedded in the film, to ensure perfect sync.
Don't make the mistake of thinking it is a linear sound track - pretty
much anything sexier than Super8 had optical audio [some experimented
with timecode-synced CDs, but most were optical]
Take a peek at: http://www.dvdaust.com/film_sound.htm
> I've still got a Ferguson 3V43 which offers analogue and Hifi stereo.
> (No NICAM decoder though).
My 1999(ish?) Daewoo VCR, bought from Tesco (!) was my first stereo VCR.
HiFi, NICAM decoder, and LP/SP, it was pretty good for the sixty-ish
asking price. And getting telly in digital stereo was a mindblowing
novelty for me. Not to mention taping stuff and having a decent bass
response (for linear audio in LP mode is quite displeasing).
>> Hell, I even had a Sony Beta deck that recorded in stereo.
> Does Sony mean suicide in any language? Everything they seem to invent,
> they kill.
Maybe in Japanese? ;-)
Yes, there's many excuses for the video format wars, but the bottom line
is Beta was better, by a long shot. I've got some L750 tapes, and some
Betacam BCT-20K tapes. The Betacam tapes used to confuse the more
intelligent decks that could determine tape length by rotational speeds
of the spindles, and tell you how much tape remained. Yes, brother, Beta
was really quite sophisticated!
[plus the complicated tape wrap gave a really pleasing set of noises as
the tape was threaded into the machine - don't get that with the VHS
method!]
>> Wasn't that Brookside?
> Dunno? Is that how it ended eh? Or did *Terry make the tea to the
> closing credits?
I think in total I watched maybe three episodes? I didn't much like
their accents...
> Perhaps perverts could get something out of it. "Cor, did she just
> scratch her raspberry ripples"????
You'd have to be a pretty pathetic pervert to watch people sleeping for
*hours* in order to catch a peek at somebody scratching something. I
mean, it's on-line right? Isn't on-line supposed to be the great
purveyor of porn?
Geek porn!
<http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/af/Ibm5100_%282297950254%29.jpg>
[bonus points if you know why I chose this specific thing]
> This lexdyxia is geeting worst...
Could be worse, could be a programmer with dyscalculia... :-/
Best wishes,
Rick.