As many televsion (and film) fans are aware, many early - and not so early - recordings have been destroyed over time. Ignorance has played a large part in this. The BBC, for example, famously claimed that nobody wanted to watch Black & White stuff any more.

We now know, of course, that this is completely untrue, and that the owners of said companies would have been able to figure this out if they'd bothered to go out and ask anyone.

However, not all hope is lost. Most, but not all. Every so often, a recording that has been missing, believed destroyed, surfaces. Once in a great while, it is a large haul, most times it is a single episode of some popular series.

Three missing episodes have surfaced, in recent years. Most famously, episode 2 of the Doctor Who story "The Crusades" was located in New Zealand. Not so famously, but just as significantly, episode 2 of "The Dalek Masterplan" has been recovered. This was found in January 2004, although there is very little publicly known. I have yet to see any comments even on the condition of this latest discovery.

In another series, The Avengers, a missing episode has turned up. "The Girl on the Trapeze" is a first season story, featuring Dr Keel (played by Ian Hendry). Steed (played by Patrick McNee) does not appear in this story. This is only the second story to have been recovered from the first season. As such, it is practically like gold dust. Accounts suggest that it's in good shape, but there is absolutely no word as to who is going to do the restoration work (if any is needed). Nor are the companies most involved with The Avengers (such as A&E) even remotely skilled in this area. This simply isn't their field. Unfortunately, it's not like you can get another master tape, if you destroy the only known surviving one.

This brings me to my next point. Restoration work of any kind is a specialist field. However, the number of specialists in it is very small, the resources they generally get are limited, and they have to split the time between restoration and doing stuff that pays them money.

This is a stupid, half-baked way to go about doing things. If collectors are out there, hoarding tapes, it's not terribly surprising. I'd not willingly hand over something unique, valuable and precious in the eyes of a great many people to the hands of people I'm not certain can do the job but where I am certain they'll try in ways that could be very destructive.

Now to my final point. It must be obvious (3 finds in 7 years is a pretty high ratio) that other missing material exists. Very very little from the British ABC, Thames TV, the BBC, etc, from before 1980 still exists. They even trashed their copies of the Apollo 11 moon landings!!!

What have they done to rebuild their collections? Well, they've threatened finders with copyright lawsuits. They've sent rather garbled letters to various TV studios (but never followed up on any of them). That's about it. No "finder's fee". The BBC will let the finder keep the original once it's been duplicated, but other TV and movie companies don't even do that.

In short, nobody is exactly making a determined effort to uncover those episodes still out there that might be salvagable. The ones who could - the corporations - are happy making loads of money off their newer products. Old lines don't really interest them, money-wise.

Smaller groups, and individual fans, have almost zero hope of finding anything. Unless they happen to live near a TV station. Some Dr Who stories have been discovered by accident in forgotten parts of archives, or even in trash bins outside. Nor does the average person have the money it would take to do the detective work it'd take to track down any episodes in the hands of collectors.

What hope, then? Probably none. Unless TV companies realise that although the past won't make them as rich as Bill Gates, the past is still desirable to viewers and would still make more money than doing nothing.

A short diary entry, for a change. I recently moved to Portland, Oregon, as it's probably the most high-tech place in the US outside of California. (It's also a lot cheaper.)

However, there really aren't as many jobs as all that, and those that do exist are massively over-applied to. The State has one of the nations' worst unemployment rates and most new jobs are in the low-end service industries.

PDX is an interesting place (if you like books - or think you are a book) and is probably one of the most progressive cities in America. It still falls a little short of perfection, however. As well as there being a lack of jobs, I've noticed a lot of polarization. You really don't need a resume, if you've got a street address.

On the more progressive front, it seems to have a very strong Linux following (proof of enlightenment? Or maybe some other window manager). Public transport in and around Portland is excellent and seems better run than that in much of Europe or Britain. The Internet Cafe's are definitely good. It even has a pet volcano (Mt. Tabor) inside city limits.

As systems go, the hardware is great, but the coding is horrible. For example, you can't control volume through the box. Huh?!? The signal goes through it, so why not?

What are the ports for? Apparently, nothing. That part of the code was never written.

Poor MPEG encoding makes the box do worse MPEG decoding. Artifacts are commonplace on digital boxes. Anti-aliasing and other smoothing techniques escaped the makers completely.

The more recent "upgrades" are worse, having boot-up times comparable with Windows 2000 on a low-end Pentium.

Enough of the rant. Does anyone know how to upload Linux into this beast of burden, in particular in a way that lets it still work?

With the introduction of PCI-X 2.0, the world has yet another closed standard. Only individuals who are employed by paid-up member organizations of PCI-SIG are able to read that specification. What does this mean?

Well, the first thing it means is that it's a lot harder to get Open Source/Free software that takes advantage of the new hardware. After all, member organizations may well write Open Source/Free drivers, but how complete are they? Do they make best use of the capabilities? Are there capabilities that aren't implemented? We don't - and won't - know. There's no way to know.

PCI-X 2.0 is only the latest in a long line of such TecSpec Substance Abuse. ISO and CCITT (now ITU) are notorious for limiting access to specifications, Microsoft claims not to have any, and SCO just sues those who might have them.

As well as programming, I design. But I can't design if I have nothing to design with! Without a spec, I cannot do anything for or with closed standards for software or hardware.

It is no coincidence that there are no Open Source X.400 e-mail servers. X.400 is certainly a more comprehensive standard than SMTP, and it certainly supported attachments a long time before SMTP servers/clients did. It's a very powerful system. It's also a very dead system. Powerful is irrelevent, when nobody can use it. All the power in the world attains nothing, if it's locked away, out of reach of those who need or want it. People go for the alternatives.

Intel tried to lock up the specs for their processors and chipsets, so rival companies produced incompatiable versions. Those rival companies are bashing huge chunks out of Intel's market, and Intel can't claim that back -- their system is (by definition) equally incompatiable with those of their rivals.

The danger for PCI-X is this -- if a rival standard is developed, that's about as fast, preferably cheaper to implement and - above all - open, PCI-X will be as dead as PS/2. Which, incidently, was also a closed standard. And expensive.

Thus, I throw open a challange. There's no "prize", other than bragging rights (and the possibility of world domination). Sorry. The challange is to produce a fully-Open specification for a bus that competes with HyperTunnel and PCI-X on performance and capability, while being cheaper than either to implement.

It doesn't matter if this spec is never implemented. What matters is whether the mere possibility of a threat to the closed model can do for hardware what the IETF, Linux, *BSD, the FSF, et al, have done for software. Be present enough to terrify the dinosaurs, force them to move their mind-sets 250 million years forwards into the modern-day era.

On the other side of the galaxy, there was another group. "The Sisters of Mercy". This group consisted of an Eldrich voice, a drummer second only to the guy from Def Leppard (hey! that's what their web pages say!), and assorted guitarists over time.

Their drummer, a Doktor Avalance, is apparently a military-grade, heavily-armoured synthesizer system linked to an aging ISA-era PC.

Their knowledge of technical stuff is fascinating, with a basic familiarity with real-time systems, hardware compatibility issues, high-availability system architectures, UNIX and DOS.

This goes a bit beyond the "can't figure out e-mail" stage, and is strongly indicitive of geeks who hack in the audio spectrum, as well as in hardware and software.

Whether you like "The Sisters of Mercy" or not is not the point. Imagine an age in which the bands and labels were technically-aware. Where they could understand the difference between a bit-bucket and KFC basket. Where they understood what technology did, because they did it.

We're not going to see such an age, in music, simply because there are way too many airheads who have way too much money. What we can do, though, is cheer on those who do make the effort, and to remind the monotonous, slavish Voice From The Deep that it is the ignorant who are complaining, and the wise who simply learn.