Let's get to the bottom of in-app purchases that go titsup I have paid to watch a fat French man’s thrusting buttocks on TV. But something has gone wrong. Despite my attempts to display gallic grinding on the living room screen, my TV is – quite literally – not playing ball. It’s not what you think. Actually, on reflection, yes it probably is. I had better explain. This week I …
Well I spent almost an entire day of one of my early teen years installing Windows 95 on a knackered 2x cd rom drive that wasn't screwed into the chassis. I can't have you think you had it so bad without comment thank you!
I expect more tales of 'up north' woe to appear below this one. Only please note I'm not up north I'm in the middle.
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And to think that I spent all my Windows 98 days wondering why MAC users filled 2.5 GB drives with pictures.
It never occurred to me they were pictures of children playing, nor that grown men would spend evenings filming children at birthday parties after spending 2000 quid for the apparatus to make it all worth while.
Which begs the question:
What apparatus did Cyril Smith use?
"To this day, I find SCART an amazing hardware interface"
Don't be. SCART was created to simplify the millions of different cables to cater for Audio, Composite Video, Component Video, RGB, both in and out. It was implied, if one device only had one type of video connection, the receiving device would be able to cater for that. In practice that never happened. Ever.
Worse still, while it was wildly popular in Europe, it wasn't here in Australia, so with the odd device that came into the country with only SCART, we needed adaptors apon adaptors, and made the cable situation worse.
"I purchase a handful of virtual Amazon Coins"
I'd have alarm bells ringing from there. Are they like Itchy and Scratchy money? You know, the pretend "money" you're forced to buy to use within Itchy and Scratchy Land, but no-one there takes it anyway?
Purely invented as a Tarriff wall by French. A TV had to have Peritel (SCART) to be allowed to be imported and sold. It was meant to be really cheap, which meant that the cables would easily fall off. It was a failure for intended purpose as everyone selling to France simply added them. They never really made to USA which prefered RCA connectors for EVERYTHING! (RF, audio, phono, Y/C aka s-video, composite video, stereo record / playback-- four cables instead of a DIN, component video, HD Component etc).
SCART could have done HD, but by time (much later than USA because PAL higher resolution than NTSC) HD came to Europe, copy protected Digital connections preferred.
SCART (Peritel to the French) was invented as a way to easily connect a Canal+ decoder to a TV, and mandated on all TVs as state-aid to Canal+. The tarif-wall advantages only appeared later.
SECAM was a French invention, and in post-1950s Gaullist France there was no way in hell that they were going to pick a German system like PAL to replace it, even though PAL was better and, at the time, cheaper to implement.
That would be an English system like PAL.
And (as an aside) because of the continuous FM colour subcarrier that SECAM uses, it's impossible to mix two SECAM images together. So every French TV studio had to decode video and work in the RGB domain, or (quelle horreur!) do the much cheaper approach of transcoding to PAL, use PAL internally, and transcode to SECAM as the signal left the building...
Afraid it was just a Blackadder reference (Blackadder Goes Forth, Episode 5: Plan E, General Hospital).
As for the Hannover bit ..... Only if you're too cheap to pay for a proper PAL decoder with a delay line :)
The first UK set top boxes were to add Band III (for ITV) to older Band I only sets (BBC 1 only) around 1955. Some earlier sets couldn't work if moved from London to Birmingham as they had only a single factory aligned channel.
Cable TV in USA was probably the first major set box market.
Fire TV and Apple TV are more misleading than AMDs 4 module Bulldozers as they are not TVs, no screen and no tuner. They are media streaming gadgets, not TVs.
Who makes whitespace part of a programming control syntax?
You can't win, though. Fortran pays no heed to whitespace, hence the notorious space program bug where a line like:
DO 20 I = 1,10
(loop to statement 20, 10 times, incrementing I each time) was mistyped as
DO 20 I = 1.10
so instead of a loop the compiler obediently created a variable named "DO20I" and assigned it the value of 1.1, then did the loop code once with some indeterminate value of I.
Who makes whitespace part of a programming control syntax?
Reminds me of Alan Partridge interviewing Michel Lambert, France's second-best racing driver...
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