Occasionally I've pondered releasing the MIDI (or Rosegarden) files for some of my songs, and that's one of the reasons I've balked at it - you need to have a fairly good grasp of MIDI to be able to play it back at all. Most MIDI files you find on the 'net are GM standard, with 128 preset instruments which will play back more-or-less the same on any GM-compatible device.

That works for the music in DOOM, but it all goes out the window once you start writing MIDI files for a Korg Triton EX on one interface, Hammond Organ clone on another, a digital mellotron clone daisy-chained to that, and on the other interface a bunch of analogue polysynths and a monosynth with custom patches, filter sweeps on the controller usually used for changing the MIDI bank, and a pitch bend wheel that spans two octaves. With a bit of effort you could map it to GM (assuming you're not doing minimoog solos which depend on monophonic note priorities), but you'd end up with a pale shadow of the song compared to the recorded version.

How about data retention? That is also a function of the cell size, since the more electrons you have in the charge trap, the greater the difference between 1 and 0. Intel's drives, for example, are only guaranteed to hold their contents for three months without power. And when they are powered, they keep the data alive by periodically rewriting it, which I strongly suspect amounts to a P/E cycle. (Not sure about flash, but a lot of memory devices use an 'erase' to set the bits high, and then short out the ones they want to be zero, so a lot more actions are liable to count as an performing an 'erase' than deleting a file.)

Technically it becomes less and less reliable each time they do a die shrink on the flash. Adding a whole extra bit level makes things worse still. In the early 2000s you were looking at 100'000 P/E cycles, maybe a million for the really good stuff. Good TLC memory seems to be rated around 3000, with a figure of 1000 being widely quoted, and in some cases, less.

Realistically, they've designed the drive to fight tooth and nail to avoid doing rewrites, and in actual fact it looks like they've put a layer of fast SLC cache in front (i.e. the million-cycle stuff). What could be more interesting is the retention period - if the thing is left powered off for three months it could well be left unreadable.

So, does that make Rory his only non-psychopathic role so far?

At a guess, Firewire.

"Shortly after the announcement, Banks married his partner, Adele Hartley, and she survives him." (source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jun/09/iain-banks-dies-59-cancer )

(And yes - those sort of comments reminded me of the folks who sprayed the word "paedo" on a house belonging to a paediatrician.)

BASIC on the Spectrum for me as well. I think I was about 8-9 when I started. Did a bit of machine code (numbers, not assembler!) but didn't get into it. Got a BBC Micro, still programming in BASIC, IIRC I had some assembler routines to handle sprites taken from a magazine.

Things really took off when Dad got a PC around 1991. I started with GW BASIC, but then got my own machine and Borland C 2 a few years later. At that point I bit the bullet and started playing with assembler, and wrote my own graphics library for DOS.

For me, it was a matter of wanting to run DRDOS for its benefits and the occasional Windows program on top. See, the problem was that MSDOS was shit. DRDOS had a lot of polish to it, including a few things like the ability to undelete files (including the first letter) which Windows and even Linux cannot do to this day.

It gave you more memory, and for a command-line OS it was a heck of a lot friendlier than MSDOS, and a real boon for developers and gamers. Mostly it was a lot of little things, like the in-kernel command history. You didn't need DOSKEY or whatever, it did that automatically and unlike MSDOS, it would work inside applications. In DEU, for example, it would remember the command history on the DEU command-line as well as command.com. The CLI editor allowed you to delete words with CTRL-T which Windows 7 can't do. TYPE and virtually every other command could use /p to page the output. Oh, and DISKCOPY could copy two and from disk image files.

At the time, if you were doing DOS application development, it really had a lot going for it.

Yes, but without plugins they're not going to be much use.

I'm not sure there's a future for that. Everyone is moving to a sandboxed model with no plugins and no IPC. That includes Windows, where Metro is so hobbled that even Microsoft can't do it - and that's where they want all new development to go. IIRC they are already referring to the desktop as 'legacy applications'. Sadly OSX seems to be moving in the same direction - iOS and Android are already there, of course.

There is no room for Photoshop, Sonar or Protools in the brave new world that Apple and Microsoft seem to be fashioning, so realistically you may end up with three choices: 1. Try and keep the old stuff going, 2. Hope it gets ported to Linux or some other system with a less draconian application model, or 3. Replace your VST stuff with hardware.

I think the problem is that the new director may be turning CSIRO into a patent troll...

There is a slight problem with that:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PAL-NTSC-SECAM.svg

...the green bits are 30fps. Everything else, i.e about 2/3 of the planet, is 25fps. 25 does not go into 60. I suppose at a pinch it could be run at 24fps with the 120Hz timebase you suggested, but that's not exactly optimal...

I started out with iMovie, but it caused no end of problems for the project I was trying to do, essentially a slideshow with narration. I can't remember what the last straw was, but I switched over to Kdenlive on Linux and although it took a bit of getting used to and the crashes could be extremely frustrating, it worked a lot better for me than iMovie did on Snow Leopard.

You'd use SMPTE format - specify the time and the frame, e.g. 00:03:56:23.

Yeah, you'd still need to preview the video to find the edit points, but as I understand it, this is essentially how it was done from about 1975-1995 or so using systems like CMX, You'd enter the list of edit points, load up the videotapes and the computer would handle the edit/assembly by itself.

I wondered whether the device was actually bypassing the hair cells entirely...