Posts by Gordon JC Pearce 26 publicly visible posts • joined 12 May 2008
It was that wacky for the same reason it was laid out similarly on the Apple II - the video hardware could also double as the DRAM refresh. Each "strip" was 256 bytes long, and prodded in turn by the scan generator to keep the 4116 DRAMs that formed the screen memory charged up.
If they had done it "linearly" then it would have taken too long to scan everything and corrupted the memory.
You're close, actually. Without the cones, Mrs. Get-Me-The-Manager in her Audi Q7 will see the Old Folk's Home with smoke coming from the kitchens, street blocked, pumps four and FFs in offensive mode, hoses everywhere, and sit right at the arse of one of the pumps hooting her horn and shouting at them to move because Ollie and Mungo are late for their capoiera lesson.
> I don't know where you live but power sockets around here are limited to 10, 13 amps.
No, your sockets are fused at 32A. They are limited by the total resistance of the wiring and impedance of the transformer that feeds your house, so it's safe to say they're limited to a few thousand amps.
But little Calum knows he's not allowed to touch the video recorder so it couldn't have been him that posted the chewed Duplo man through the slot.
Which does rather suggest that all the foreign objects jammed under the tape carriage are the work of one of the adults in the house...
Maybe the answer would be to develop a drop-in replacement for existing oilburning powertrains, keeping the bodyshells of smelly old diesel cars on the road with clean electric powertrains.
If you came up with something that just dropped in where a PSA Group XUD engine (and derivatives) went in you'd take about half the diesels off the road at a stroke.
> but a 9dB (It's a big 'B'!)
If you're going to be picky about it, it's 9dBi - deciBels over Isotropic, or how much more power you get in the "loudest" direction compared to a point source that radiates equally in all directions.
Since a 9dBi wifi antenna is most likely omnidirectional, you'd be hard pushed to notice any difference in directivity unless you were in a very tall building with radio-transparent floors.
Back when I was a skint youth I supplemented my meagre pocket money with doing a few repairs for the local TV shop, which was next door to where my dad worked and meant I could hang about until he finished and get a lift home instead of going to all the extravagance of bus fares.
One rather nice VCR came across my bench, a front-loading one which would accept a tape, start to drop the carriage, make a clicking sound and eject again. Pretty easy, foreign object in the deck, rolled under the tape carriage, unjammed it, cleaned it up, retimed the mechanism which had skipped a couple of teeth causing it to shut down with a cryptic error code instead of the equally cryptic flashing "12:00 12:00 12:00". Pop tape in, whirr click kachunk whirrr, off it goes, press eject, whirr clunk whirr click, out comes the tape. Great. Pop it on the shelf for Mrs Smallchild to pick up the next day.
The next afternoon, in came Mrs Smallchild with her eponymous small child, who promptly began stress-testing all the buttons on any TV within his reach. "There you go, Mrs Smallchild", I breezed, "but you might want to consider putting it in a cabinet or up out of the reach of little hands."
"How very dare you", exclaimed Mrs Smallchild, "Henry knows he's not allowed to touch the telly or the video, and he's as good as gold, he never goes near it when he's watching his videos."
"Well, okay then, but that only leaves the possibility that it is one of the grown-ups in the house that is responsible for feeding the poor tormented machine a piece of toast, half a Milky Way and three or four very chewed Duplo men..."
I'm lefthanded too, and use the mouse with my left hand with the left and right buttons the normal way round. Why does the side the launcher bar is on make a difference?
FWIW I play the guitar and cello strung the normal way round too. I must admit a left-handed piano would be hilarious and easy to do in software these days.
RF from wireless networking gear *cannot* under any circumstances harm you.
Q. How can a young child or baby tell you if they have a headache when near wi-fi or a mobile mast?
A. They can't, they just live with the constant pain and become moody or quiet.
Uhm, no. they don't get a headache from being near wifi. The reason they're probably moody or quiet is because they've got gas from the mungbean and soy juice drink you've given them in place of milk.
If you shine a fairly bright torch at your hand, more electromagnetic energy is hitting you than from a wireless network card. Do you get headaches from having a torch shone at you?
Anyone who says that wifi equipment or mobile phone masts make them ill is insane. Actually properly delusional insane requiring prompt psychiatric intervention kind of insane.
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