Delicious LiveJournal Links for 1-6-2010

[andrewducker]

• A Chess program in 1K
  Actually, in 672 bytes.
  (tags: programming history software games zx81 assembly chess)
• The Gentle Seduction - a short story
  The Singularity, as experienced by a non-geek.
  (tags: fiction scifi science singularity transhumanism nanotechnology)
• Stunning pictures of the world's newest tallest building's opening ceremony
  (tags: photography pretty architecture)
• Kodak wireless picture frames are trivially easy to read over the internet and update. For anyone. Oh dear.
  (tags: EpicFail technology kodak)
• The Things - a short story telling the story of The Thing from its point of view.
  (tags: sf short_story writing)
• Heroes is a hit as the most pirated TV show that is
  It (and Dexter) have more people pirating it than watching it live...
  (tags: tv piracy copyright)
• What's up with the Beep driver in Windows 7?
  (tags: windows audio history computers hardware)
• Obama makes first trans-gendered appointment
  (tags: transgender usa politics)

Comments

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

Ha - I think I recall that ZX81 program! There were a few bugs, IIRC, as the poster mentions.

And the 'slow' statement for the faulty-ROM-ed machines - classic! I'd forgotten about that little quirk of the early Zx81s.

I think I might have been a real programmer back then....

[supergee.livejournal.com]

"The Gentle Seduction" is one of my all-time favorite sf stories. Thanks for reminding me.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

Meh serve them right. If ever there was a gadget that's just a piece of pointless carbon-burning headed for eventual tech landfill it's those wanky photoframes. BUY A REAL ONE. IF YOU HAVE SEVERAL PHOTOS GET A BIGGER ONE.

BTW your apostrophes are failing... is that the incoming data?

[andrewducker]

I have 2000 photos I would like to have displayed. What size photo frame do you recommend?

And yes, I blame bad apostrophes in the original RSS.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

Be more selective?

[andrewducker]

Dear Dr Musicaux, I would like to listen to music in my home. What would you suggest as a method of doing so? I have heard of modern devices such as "CD Players" which would allow access to a wide variety of music. Is this what I need?

Yours,

Intrigued By Music

=====

Dear Intrigued,
CD players are just pieces of pointless carbon-burning headed for eventual tech landfill. If you wish to listen to a wide variety of different music then I suggest you learn how to play the piano.

Yours,

Dr Musicaux

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

A) Is not quite the same thing. You need electronics to play CDs in the first place.

B) Thank you. That is just what I did. :p

Seriously, come on. They really are technical gizmowank for the arse of it.

[andrewducker]

a) You don't need electronics to play music though. Any more than you need electronics to see pictures.
b) Yes. It is.

No more than CD players are. If you want to listen to a huge range of music very easily then you have a machine that plays music. If you want to carry around (or display) a huge range of pictures very easily then you have a machine that displays pictures. Certainly, not everyone has a need for this, but when my cousin came back from Kenya he carried around a photoframe-like device for a while because it meant he could show people his holiday snaps without either printing off hundreds of pictures of needing to be near a PC. It was very handy. I'm not sure why you object to this.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

Heh. Okay, that's a use of the thing that hadn't occurred to me. So far I've only seen them on people's desks where they just sit there cycling through photos and aren't even looked at -- hence a total waste of everything and just another bit of desk gadgetry.

[andrewducker]

Anything sitting there unobserved is, indeed, a waste of electricity and space. So yeah, ones on desks that are never off are a waste. Probably not any worse than all the energy taken up by people watching awful TV though :->

Beep()

[call-waiting.livejournal.com]

I must admit I'm confused as to what the ADA requirement is. It certainly sounds like he's saying that the requirement is that calling Beep() should cause something in the machine to emit a beeping sound. But that can't possibly be what the blog post is about, because if that were the issue, they'd have done that twenty years ago. Right?

Re: Beep()

[andrewducker]

"The ADA? What on earth could the ADA have to do with a PC making a beep? Well it turns out that at some point in the intervening 25 years, the Win32 Beep() was used for assistive technologies – in particular the sounds made when you enable the assistive technologies like StickyKeys were generated using the Beep() API. There are about 6 different assistive technology (AT) sounds built into windows, their implementation is plumbed fairly deep inside the win32k.sys driver.

But why does that matter? Well it turns out that many enterprises (both governments and corporations) have requirements that prevent them from purchasing equipment that lacks accessible technologies and that meant that you couldn’t sell computers that didn’t have beep hardware to those enterprises."

So what he's saying is that the assistive technologies needed sound to go with them - and that the standard method of them doing so was to call "Beep" as you could be assured that all PCs would produce a beeping sound when this happened.

Re: Beep()

[call-waiting.livejournal.com]

That's exactly how I read it. Except that that's crazy. The obvious thing to do would have been to change Beep() so that it uses proper sound hardware if it's available, and fall back to the timer sound generator if no proper hardware is available.

What I'm basically saying is this: Beep() is an API. It should be abstract. There is no requirement that it be implemented in any particular way, only that it work.

So for the last 20 years, hardware manufacturers have been manufacturing PCs with something that looks like an 8254 in them, just to make a beeping sound when a Windows program calls Beep(), when it would have been far simpler to change the software implementation of Beep() to use the *real* sound system.

What I am basically saying is this: that is crazy. ;)

Re: Beep()

[andrewducker]

Not just when Windows calls Beep - also for POST.

And nobody ever got around to changing Beep, because it wasn't high priority.

I'm not sure when we transitioned to every motherboard having a sound card built in. 5 years ago? 10?

[kurosau.livejournal.com]

I don't like the article about pirating Heroes, because as is the normal case with that sort of thing, it misrepresents the statistics involved. Are those all unique users, or total downloads of Heroes torrents? If so, then a fraction of those people are watching each episode. And is that live tracker data, showing how many people have connected and downloaded a program? Or are we seeing an aggregate of how many people have downloaded the torrent file? Bad data screams at me.