This started life as a wonderful hack to allow limited broadcast of digital information, encoding data into the (supposedly!) non-visible parts of an analogue TV signal.

This lasted for nearly 3 decades, and was only really obsoleted in the days of DVB-T. That's pretty good going, and definitely served a purpose: subtitles, news, stock market information and cheap holiday adverts...

DataBlast, a small magazine that delivered pages of text at 5 per second (I think) during the titles of Bad Influence - a TV programme in the UK devoted to computer games - was probably inspired by Ceefax/Oracle. You needed to record the section on video (remember them?) and then use pause to read the content.

I had the dubious pleasure of writing a system that would genlock and be able to deliver the necessary frame rate live, from an Amiga 1200... Clunky to the extreme, it was canned after 2 seasons because it was so much work still. (My system replaced a system written in AMOS by one of the production crew which relied on hard coding the screens. A step in the right direction, but still a lot of work...)

So respect to the chaps and chapesses that came up with this and managed to fit so much information into essentially dead bandwitdh!

People want what they already have. "People don't know what they want until you show it to them" - Steve Jobs.

The 'how do I start the program I want to run' paradigm is wrong for the vast majority of people, and not what people are coming to expect from their PCs. Admittedly, the /. crowd might be atypical

They want something that gets out of the way and allows them to do what they wanted to do. I'm running Win8, and after a week of use my view is that it does that better than any other UI.

Full disclosure: I now work for Microsoft.

Well, Stallman would be hard pushed to comment on this seeing as he point blank refuses to have a mobile phone, believing them to be tracking devices. Which I suppose they are.

I'm all for bigging up the best solution, however something really isn't right with this article. Yes, this is slashdot and I'm about to commit Karmacide by defending a Microsoft solution... The author of this article seems at best uninformed at worst out to mislead when it comes to some of these points. Let's pick one.

Let's examine that. The first four properties of a style in Word 2010, sitting open next to me.

-Name
-Style type
-Style based on
-Style for following paragraph

So a Style can be based on any other style, or (no style) should you want to start from blank. Does that sound like a hierarchy? It does to me, and I use it as one. Set up what you want. Knock yourself out. It works, and allows you to create a hierarchy.

His piece on list styles/bullets seems slightly ill informed too, as is the tirade on headers and footers, tables of contents... Word can do what is described.

Custom properties, linked to fields, are extensively used by many organisations and what he's describing sounds more like Word than Writer to me. That one has me really confused as metadata management is really quite good in word.

In short, I know Word quite well and I think the 'advantages' that are being proposed as Writer advantages are simply down to the author's lack of knowledge.

I fully expect flamebait moderation for this, but it would be nice if someone could point out where I'm wrong!

>Anyway, what do you guys have in those old city centers?

In the US, the concept of a city centre as known in the UK, Germany, etc, is utterly alien in the majority of cities. If you want to buy something, you go to a mall... I guess Boston is a bit of an exception, and there will be others too, but shopping = mall.

In the UK, city centres are still surviving - just - but there has been quite a change that I've observed: smaller stores are popping up, which is a Good Thing, and occasionally larger empty stores are being taken on by a load of small, independent traders acting as a co-operative.

It used to be every other shop was a shoe shop (see Douglas Adams!), and more recently a phone shop. Thankfully, that trend is reversing and there's more diversification.

Councils are realising that they must be careful not to kill the centre complete, so are slowly reacting to adjust business rates to be affordable for smaller businesses, and are also realising that city centre parking is an important part of the equation: as an example, Leeds has reduced its parking rates from £2-3/h during the week to £1/h at weekends.

City centres are competing with bright, well lit, under cover spaces that provide free parking but are merely carbon copies of any mall you could find anywhere in the UK, or even in Europe... The city centres are becoming more about independent retailers, and less of an indentikit city: we're not there yet, but my observations are that things are moving slowly that way. And more power to them!

Ever heard of this thing called the theory of relativity?

Aaah, so it's Google's fault. I should have known... "Don't be evil" - pah!

Anyone who uses extensions has also been rather knackered by this move. I use 1password, NoScript and a Garmin uploader plugin. All failed to work with FF5 on the day of release.

I have rolled back to 4.0.1 and will move to 5 once all of those things work.

I'm sure, this being slashdot, it will be pointed out they've been fixed already... Well, apart from the Garmin plugin, and they're closed source so that's therefore inherently evil... But that's not the point, really: FireFox has an ecosystem built around it and you can't just shaft that so quickly. Not trolling, but I see no benefits of 5 if it does not fundamentally deliver the web I want, plugins and all!

The Firefox team seem to be feeling a little insecure... ? Opera 11... IE9... Safari 5... Still, at least they can look down on Chrome.

and that it is a Miracle Cure for Cancer* / Carcinogenic* (select one depending on prevailing mood, or coin toss)

To slashdot, thanks for bringing this to my attention! I have far too much data in Amiga archives / disk image formats that previously I had to fire up an emulator to access. With this, and xnview / nconvert along with other tools, I can access my old stuff whenever I want.

The fact it is open source, and deals with rars, and almost every other archive well is an added bonus!

Of course, huge thanks to the author. Donation on its way.

...and I've just noticed that the author provides a lightweight IFF viewer. What a star!

...but wrong.

They say file sharing is bad, mmmkay? Don't do it. They provide examples of what may land you in hot water. One of those was running an unsecured wireless network, which you will be on the hook for: the cheerleader defence does not work!

It's actually good advice. They're not saying "using wifi is a sign of infringement", and no-one with half a clue would dream it said that.

But hey, sensationalist journalism is obviously more important than accuracy or a sound understanding of the basic message that they're trying to get across, and in my view succeeding in. Quite how someone can misinterpret the advice, then get it picked up by slashdot, is beyond me. And no, I'm not new here!

And besides, BC has changed the list - even though I think it's good advice.

To me, Chuck Peddle is an absolute inspiration. He's not done the easy thing, or the materialistic thing, but the right thing many many times in his career.

These were the early days of the computer revolution, and I strongly recommend Brian Bagnell's book, Commodore: A company on the edge, to anyone remotely interested in the era... It's a healthy dose of realism and a perfect antidote to historical revisionism that seems to be coming from a couple of areas in the States...

The guy is a hero, as were the small teams laying the foundations that, ultimately, means we all have more interesting jobs. No article on the 6502 should fail to mention Chuck Peddle and the team at MOStek, which ultimately became part of Commodore... History tells us that what becomes part of commodore burns brightly, but briefly...

Get that book, it's great.

The pope has been found to be catholic, birds fly, fish swim and bears defecate in woods.

This sounded like it might be a fundamental change in something big, but it isn't. As many have already said, anyone with a passing knowledge of chemistry - even misremembered over 19 years like mine - is aware of the underlying reasons and the implications!

It's presented as sensational but it's really not news in any way, shape or form.