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GeneralRe: ScreenshotmemberCDP18028 Dec '12 - 0:05 
I know a few ladies that are possessive. Or was that possessed?
GeneralRe: ScreenshotmvpOriginalGriff8 Dec '12 - 0:42 
Both, quite frequently.
If you get an email telling you that you can catch Swine Flu from tinned pork then just delete it. It's Spam.

GeneralRe: Bluetooth Winter SmartGlovesmemberZac Greve8 Dec '12 - 13:24 
D'Oh! | :doh: That's a new one.
 
Interesting idea, but, will it sell?

Bob Dole
The internet is a great way to get on the net.

D'Oh! | :doh: 2.0.82.7292 SP6a

GeneralRe: Bluetooth Winter SmartGlovesprotectorAspDotNetDev8 Dec '12 - 13:26 
According to the message on that page, yep:
 
Quote:
Following their appearance on This Morning on the 15th November demand for the Bluetooth Gloves has been phenomenal, and whilst we expect to be able to fulfil existing pre-orders we do not currently expect to have additional stock until very close to Christmas so we cannot guarantee pre-Christmas delivery on any new orders. We are working very closely with our suppliers and will do all we can to get stock out as quickly as possible though.


GeneralRe: Bluetooth Winter SmartGlovesmemberSoMad8 Dec '12 - 14:50 
Seems like a good idea, but how long can you actually "make the classic ‘phone hand’ shape" before you start cramping up? Smile | :)
 
Soren Madsen
GeneralRe: Bluetooth Winter SmartGlovesmemberSteve Echols8 Dec '12 - 19:16 
This is conjuring up memories of Spinal Tap's album "Smell the Glove", for some odd reason.

- S
50 cups of coffee and you know it's on!
Code, follow, or get out of the way.

GeneralI'm Surprised At How Lousy This WorksmemberRoger Wright7 Dec '12 - 20:09 
At the moment I'm simultaneously listening to and copying a CD - audio only. The system is an i7 with 12 GB of RAM, running WIn7 Pro and Nero. I'm listening to a CD in my HP DVD Writer 1170, while burning a backup copy using Nero on a HP DVD Writer 1260. If the copy is as awful as the audio stream I'm hearing, it's going in the trash. I really thought that the state of the art had advanced farther than this, but it's horrible! The audio I'm hearing is much like a cell phone call in a very marginal reception area, with the stream badly broken and barely understandable. If this is multitasking, give me back my beloved DOS...
 
Wow... Both drives just kicked out the disks, without warning, or finishing the recording or playback! Hmmm...
Will Rogers never met me.

GeneralRe: I'm Surprised At How Lousy This WorksprotectorAspDotNetDev7 Dec '12 - 20:35 
You could have a supercomputer running and it wouldn't make disc seeks any faster.

GeneralRe: I'm Surprised At How Lousy This WorksmemberCDP18027 Dec '12 - 20:37 
Compared with what most of us started with, an i7 is a supercomputer.
GeneralRe: I'm Surprised At How Lousy This WorksmemberCDP18027 Dec '12 - 20:36 
If you are listening to one track while making a copy of another that's no big surprise. You are constantly forcing the head of the drive you ar reading from to hop between the two tracks. The processor may be able to do several things at once, but the drive's head certainly not.
GeneralRe: I'm Surprised At How Lousy This WorksmvpOriginalGriff7 Dec '12 - 22:32 
I'm a little surprised that the data isn't cached - since the read-for-write would normally be well ahead of the read-for-play and is normally buffered anyway.
I guess whoever wrote it was feeling lazy that day... Big Grin | :-D
If you get an email telling you that you can catch Swine Flu from tinned pork then just delete it. It's Spam.

GeneralRe: I'm Surprised At How Lousy This Works [modified]memberCDP18027 Dec '12 - 23:19 
What a luxury. Do you have too much memory? I have been playing with the old computer again. I started out with a blank memory and no OS and by now I have the code to do the initialisation, set up the interrupt and DMA for graphics(you can choose between 64 x 32 and 64 x 64 pixel Smile | :) ), the video memory, the stack and the functions for text output. I squeezed all that and even the font into 1 1/2 k memory. That leaves me 2 1/2 k left for any program I want to write. Ah, yes, the function that draws the text characters also can be used to draw sprites.
 
Edit: Screenie[^] (running in emulation on the PC)

modified 8 Dec '12 - 5:36.

GeneralRe: I'm Surprised At How Lousy This WorksmvpOriginalGriff7 Dec '12 - 23:27 
Laugh | :laugh: Never!
But the memory in the PC should cope pretty easily with caching 700Mb - even if it gets paged out, it'll still be way faster than repeated seeks to a slow optical device.
 
You're using assembly and an 8x5 font I assume? Even so, that's pretty neat. Sounds like you are having fun!
Have you added a debug facility yet?
If you get an email telling you that you can catch Swine Flu from tinned pork then just delete it. It's Spam.

GeneralRe: I'm Surprised At How Lousy This WorksprotectorAspDotNetDev7 Dec '12 - 23:36 
OriginalGriff wrote:
the memory in the PC should cope pretty easily with caching 700Mb

 
That's assuming the optical disc isn't the type of blu-ray disc that has over 100GB of capacity. Smile | :)

GeneralRe: I'm Surprised At How Lousy This WorksmvpOriginalGriff8 Dec '12 - 0:02 
Roger did say "copying a CD - audio only" Big Grin | :-D
If you get an email telling you that you can catch Swine Flu from tinned pork then just delete it. It's Spam.

GeneralRe: I'm Surprised At How Lousy This WorksmemberCDP18028 Dec '12 - 0:02 
It's not about the disc's capacity. The problem is the time the mechanical parts of the drive need to access it.
GeneralRe: I'm Surprised At How Lousy This WorksprotectorAspDotNetDev8 Dec '12 - 0:39 
It is about capacity, if the code that caches optical discs is going to generically support all optical discs (then there'd need to be enough RAM to cache the largest disk). As long as the copying process accessed the portions of the disk first that are then subsequently read for playing, then the cache could be accessed rather than read from the disk.
 
Of course, there are a bunch of assumptions in that hypothetical, but that was where I was going with it. Smile | :)

GeneralRe: I'm Surprised At How Lousy This WorksmemberCDP18028 Dec '12 - 1:00 
With my 32 gb RAM I could do that, but what a waste. Even on hardware level we don't access the drives one byte at a time. I think that my old Elf was about the last generation of computers that could not afford read or write buffers. Even a buffer of only 512 bytes already reduces the overhead to 1/512 of single byte access,even more if the disc would have to spin once before the next byte can be read.
GeneralRe: I'm Surprised At How Lousy This WorksmemberCDP18027 Dec '12 - 23:51 
Yes, it's assembly. The resulting code that does very much the same was several times this size when I tried the C compiler. But the characters in the font varies from 1 x 5 to 5 x 5, so it does not have a fixed spacing. This way I can hope to get at least a minimal number of characters into a line. The printable characters in the font are packed together in just 192 bytes (no lower case).
 
Here is a screenshot[^] (emulation on the PC).
 
Slowly I'm getting together what I need: The assembler, Visual Studio as editor, the emulator and also the new program to convert cassette tapes to binary or the other way around for new programs. I use the debugger I have for the old computer and run it in the emulator, together with the program I'm debugging. Fortunately the emulator can be configured to have some more memory.
GeneralRe: I'm Surprised At How Lousy This WorksmvpOriginalGriff8 Dec '12 - 0:09 
Proportional spacing from day one! I'm impressed - the code for fixed width is a good bit smaller and easier to write (and annoyingly can have a smaller font as well)
If you get an email telling you that you can catch Swine Flu from tinned pork then just delete it. It's Spam.

GeneralRe: I'm Surprised At How Lousy This WorksmemberCDP18028 Dec '12 - 0:35 
Fixed width just does not work at such a low resolution. With a fixed 4 x 5 character matrix I could have 16 characters per line and 10 lines. But there are some characters, like 'M' or 'W' that just do not fit into a 4 x 5 matrix and there are quite a few that are actually smaller.
 
I have packed together two characters in one pattern, which makes the font so small. Even the little 8 bit processor can easily shift or mask out the correct bits before drawing the character.
GeneralRe: I'm Surprised At How Lousy This WorksmemberRoger Wright7 Dec '12 - 21:26 
Happily, the copy worked flawlessly, even though the playback was less than satisfactory... Oh well, I've learned that it's silly to expect a system to play back a recording at the same time it's recording the same stream. That's an important thing to know, and I'm glad I know it. Today, apparently, wasn't a complete waste - I learned something, and that's never a waste. Big Grin | :-D
Will Rogers never met me.

GeneralRe: I'm Surprised At How Lousy This WorksmemberGenJerDan8 Dec '12 - 12:17 
Roger Wright wrote:
Wow... Both drives just kicked out the disks, without warning, or finishing the
recording or playback! Hmmm...

 
It heard you bad-mouthing it and went into a snit.
No dogs or cats are in the classroom.
 
My Mu[sic], Films and Windows Programs, etc.

GeneralIs It A Crime?memberRoger Wright7 Dec '12 - 18:27 
I realize that it's a bit tacky to drink Glenlivet from a glass labeled "Johnnie Walker" but is it, technically speaking, an actual crime?
 
A little background here... Last year I got a gift set of Johnnie Walker which came with two very nice glasses. This year I bought meself a gift set of Glenlivet, which was packaged with sample bottles of the 15 year old and the 18 year old, but no glasses. Later I bought my lady another set which had no samplers, but did include two very nice glasses. It turns out now that the set with glasses is only available at a store near her, and the set with samplers is only available at a store near me, and she wants the samplers. So we each bought a set for the other, which we intend to swap this weekend, giving us both nice glasses and samples of the finer versions of this fine concoction. But in the meantime, she's already cracked open my bottle at her house of the 12 year old, yet here I sit, having just put up a bunch of Christmas lights and craving a glass of the good stuff, but lacking a decent glass to pour it in! The Johnnie Walker glass is the best in the house, so to speak, until I can fetch my Glenlivet glasses from her house on Sunday.
 
Is there hope that I might be forgiven this transgression, under the circumstances? Or can I expect the Scotch police to come knocking in the wee hours and cart me off to some dark nether place where they serve only bourbon?Suspicious | :suss:
Will Rogers never met me.

GeneralRe: Is It A Crime?memberpeterchen7 Dec '12 - 20:00 
Roger Wright wrote:
I realize that it's a bit tacky to drink Glenlivet from a glass labeled "Johnnie Walker" but is it, technically speaking, an actual crime?

 
The reverse would be.
 
i.e. spitting Johnny Walker into a Glenlivet glass.

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