betamaxthetape
Joined 7 years ago
Karma
967
Submissions
129
Member since
Dec 8
Email: andrewferguson500 [@ the email service provided by google (5-characters) .com]
View on Hacker NewsRecent submissions
Comment · 3 months ago
Do you have a source for this? Sounds interesting...
Comment · 1 year ago
Note that there is another Comet (4B variant, so one of the later ones) preserved at the National Collections Center [1] near Swindon. However it is not available to view [2].
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_Innovation_Park#Na...
[2] - "[Some items] - including large aircraft - ... are therefore not featured on the tour." https://www.scienceinnovationpark.org.uk/visit-us/public-gui... (at the bottom, "Note on Large Aircraft")
Comment · 1 year ago
> After OS X, I worked on a backend team for AT&T. Their entire mobile network at the time - billing, backend, customer service notes... ALL of it was in NeXTStep being streamed from centralized servers out to basic PCs running Citrix.
Oh, I would absolutely love to know more details about this. I'm fascinated by the history of telecoms. Would you consider writing a blog post about it? (Or if you prefer, my email is in my profile!)
Comment · 1 year ago
Is that stack available anywhere? Or do you have a copy?
Comment · 1 year ago
PhD student here, working on 5G systems. I too would be very interested in this. Email in my profile - and am happy to link you to my academic email once you've reached out if you want to confirm my academic credentials :)
Comment · 2 years ago
Fantastic footage, many many thanks for uploading it. Have you considered openly licensing it under creative commons of some sort?
Comment · 2 years ago
Part of the reasons for the loss at the BBC was due to copyright / licensing issues.
> Long-standing agreements with UK talent and musicians unions made it difficult too. Most UK television programmes were only ever contracted for one domestic repeat broadcast and so once a programme had been repeated once, there was often considered to be no point in further retaining the transmission master. It’s purpose had been served.
From: https://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2017-12-morecambe-wise-video-f...
Comment · 3 years ago
No, please, the UI is one of the best things about it. I can run YouTube on my 20-year-old iMac G4 (PowerPC G4 processor, 1GB of RAM) and it ... just works. Most other sites fail completely - Gmail Basic HTML view and Hacker News being two notable exceptions.
Comment · 3 years ago
An earlier (1968) venue with a similar concept was "The Birds Nest", a pub / nightclub in the UK.
> They renamed The King’s Head, an almost brutalist post-war booze bunker at 2 King Street, installing a state-of-the-art steel dance-floor, light-show projectors and a high-end sound system.
> They also installed an in-pub telephone network so that if you saw someone you liked the look of, you could dial their table and have a chat across the room.
Source: https://boakandbailey.com/2020/10/watneys-birds-nest-pubs/
[This information comes to me entirely second-hand, through articles and an episode of a podcast, so I can't vouch 100% for the accuracy.]
Comment · 3 years ago
Nitpick: the lack of the FM radio stems directly from the lack of headphone jack - the radio relied on wired earphones to work as they were used as an antenna.
So losing the FM radio is more a consequence of the decision to remove the headphone jack, rather than an active decision to remove it.
Still sucks, though. The FM radio was one of the most useful features of my previous phone. By the time I upgraded to a newer phone, its battery lasted for an hour at most during normal tasks, but I could get 12+ hours from the FM radio.
There are now very few phones that have my personal "wishlist" of removable battery + headphone jack + FM radio. And these are all budget phones so if you value a decent camera, you may be out of luck. Add 5G and I'm not sure there are any options.
Comment · 3 years ago
If you are interested in the translations, another copy of the video [0] on YouTube has baked-in English translations.
Disclaimer: I don't speak Korean, so cannot vouch for their accuracy!
Comment · 3 years ago
There are several options. LiveCode [1] (formerly open source, now closed) can open HyperCard stacks and is compatible with round 85% of the native syntax - so some things will work, and some bits will need rewriting. I am pretty sure they offer a free trial so you can check to see how well it does at converting your stack before committing.
If you are on a Mac, the command-line stackimport tool [2] will convert the stack to an XML-based format which you can inspect with regular tools.
As a final option, if you just want to get your stack running on the web (and don't mind it being a bit clunky), HyperCard Online [3] (my project!) lets you upload a stack where it will be available on archive.org, and playable directly in the browser, thanks to in-browser emulation of the entire Mac / HyperCard system. You can see examples of stacks using this technology in the collection [4].
[1] - https://livecode.com/
[2] - https://github.com/uliwitness/stackimport
[3] - http://hypercardonline.com/
[4] - https://archive.org/details/hypercardstacks?sort=-date
Comment · 3 years ago
Interesting. But was it ever developed commercially? I can't find any consumer products actually using the counter (either for rental or for lock/jam-after-certain-plays). But that could just be because I'm using the wrong search term - I imagine that there is a brand-specific term and searching "VHS tape play counter" isn't helpful since all the results are for either repairing VCRs, or for accessing the tape counter functionality in the VCR.
Comment · 3 years ago
Do you have any more information on this? It sounds really interesting, and I'd love to learn more!
Comment · 3 years ago
I still use LXDE, the predecessor to LXQT, on my daily driver: a Thinkpad T420 (~12 years old) with 8GB RAM.
Low resource usage is the main reason I use LXDE. I often need to run several (4+) VMs, each of which can eat up to 2GB RAM. (These are headless VMs running specialist networking software). When running all of them I need to be really, really careful not to use up all my RAM because if I do, my system just freezes. Everything is stuck - cursor, clock, applications, etc. At this point my only choice is to reboot.
I don't know if this is due to a poorly-configured system (isn't swap supposed to prevent this?), but it certainly makes me much, more aware of memory usage.
It's also nice to be able to use the same base system (Debian + LXDE) on my modern T420 as well as a Pentium 3 laptop with 128MB RAM. I don't think I'd be able to say the same with KDE or Gnome!