According to the Wikipedia article, the "Agilent" name is still being retained for the "life sciences, diagnostics and applied markets(?!) [remainder of the post-spinoff company]". Which ties in with what this person said.

But, yeah. What a crap name.

Worth remembering that both the "halves" of the current HP are just the remainder of the original company after its previous split/spin-off of Agilent anyway. Agilent was arguably closer to HP's original business (i.e. test equipment and the like) than what remained of "HP" (nominally the former parent) after that.

In short, the current HP is already the result of a split, and the "new" HP will be whatever bit keeps the name, but will it have any meaning beyond a badge?

It's a similar case to Motorola, which had already split or spun-off parts of its business more than once into On Semiconductor, and a few years later into Freescale before the remaining "Motorola" split into two distinct companies with that name (one of which was later bought by Google).

Yeah, but the point is, they were still far from being solely focused around the cartoons- those were just a part of the whole.

As I mentioned, I don't strongly associate cartoons with Saturday morning TV, but the examples you give were more late-1980s and 1990s, by which point I would have been in my teens and losing interest in such shows, so perhaps things had changed by then, or maybe it's just how I remember things. My primary memory is a bit earlier than that (i.e. the 80s alone, I'm old enough to vaguely remember Tiswas, just!), though I do recall SMTV being on circa the late-90s/early-noughties and from what I remember of that, it was still far from focused on the cartoons- there was a lot of Ant and Dec and Cat Deeley doing comedy and messing about as well.

Additional; I should also have made clear that the magazine shows referred to were mostly live (and hence obviously live-action, not animated), obviously contrasting with the primary animated US model, and that the earliest of them- Tiswas- apparently grew out of attempts to liven up the continuity between the mish-mash of kids shows shown on early-70s Saturday morning ITV.

The balance of humour, style and gimmickry varied between the different shows, but they all followed the basic template to some extent.

You might find this article informative (though I suspect that unless you were actually there at the time, you probably won't want to read *that* much on the subject!)

From what I've heard, those *did* exist (and still do to a limited extent), but even at their peak weren't remotely as common nor as prominent as most people in the west seemed to believe. Apparently most of the ones around were associated with nearby sex/erotica shops, i.e. generally more out-of-the-way locations.

Back to Saturday morning cartoons... I get the impression that this is (or was) an American cultural phenomenon(?) In the UK, both the BBC and ITV showed a lot of US import cartoons when I was a kid, but my primary memory of those is of them being shown on weekday afternoons, after school. I don't recall them ever being generally referred to as "saturday morning" cartoons here.

Indeed, that's probably because though Saturday morning television on the two main channels (BBC1 and ITV) *was* aimed at kids, it was primarily in the form of circa three-hour magazine shows like Tiswas, Swap Shop, Going Live!, SMTV, etc. Those generally included lots of different segments and features. Though they did include some cartoons as part of the mix, that was never the sole focus- far from it, it's certainly not what I associate with them.

This was pretty much the standard "Saturday morning" format here from the mid-70s until the decline of such programming on the main channels in recent years.

I get the impression that this format wasn't so common in the US, at least not in the "golden era" the "Saturday morning cartoons" nostalgia seems to be harking back to. Though I understand that many cartoons were shown as part of "The [Main Feature Character] Hour" and the like (where a number of cartoons were tied together under the banner of the most well-known one), that's still basically "all cartoons" and somwhat different to the live format shown on UK TV.

I dunno... I hear that "Worker and Parasite" didn't play too well with US audiences ;-)

1956 called, it wants its demographic stereotypes back.

Australia has changed significantly in recent years. Even in the late-80s, people were complaining that "Neighbours" didn't reflect the multicultural reality of the country, and it's far moreso now. 2011 Census reveals one in four Australians is born overseas.

Yeah, Londoners. Never guilty of assuming the world revolves around *their* f****g insular metropolitan bubble, are they?

To be fair, I don't think "Snakes on a Plane" was ever quite that cynically-minded in the first place; remember that, back when it happened, the "self-consciously cheesy B-style-movie" thing wasn't such a cliche, and they apparently changed the title to "Pacific Flight 121" at one point before Samuel L Jackson supposedly made them change it back. (I wonder if "Snakes on a Plane" was only originally intended to be a working title reflecting a high concept movie).

Yes, they did reshoot and alter parts of the film in response to its pre-release Internet fame, but I don't think it started out as being cynical. It's only when soulless Hollywood t***s try ripping off and repeating the phenomenon that it leaves a nasty taste in the mouth.

Of course, the irony with "Snakes on a Plane" is that despite becoming a massively-popular Internet meme, this didn't translate into box-office success. Despite heightened expectations of its performance, the film itself turned out to be a relative flop, so go figure.

When I first saw this on the BBC news site my first thought was that this was beyond parody.

Charlie Brooker apparently stopped doing TV Go Home (a bizarre send-up of British TV listings) when reality TV ideas started coming up with ideas that were becoming as strange as his joke versions (e.g. "Touch the Truck in which contestants must continually touch a truck for 24 hours in order to win the truck as a prize").

This is the movie version of that- it already sounds like something that would have belonged in a comedy parody in recent years. You could try sending it up or taking the p***, but why bother?

The particularly silly bit in the BBC report is the comment, "In this new universe, as you'll soon find out, there's much more to Tetris than simply clearing lines." Er, no, there isn't. That's why you're going to have to make up virtually everything about it.

When the "Space Invaders" film was mooted, I (along with everyone else) thought it was ludicrous, since the original game was little more than "you are shooting waves of aliens [which we understand are "invading" from "space" going by the two-word "plot" written on the arcade cabinet]". It was likely to be little more than transparent attempt to graft a nostalgia-invoking brand on a generic sci-fi movie, which- going by recent Hollywood films- was unlikely to have much more plot than the original game.

But "Tetris: The Movie" takes the biscuit. I wasn't engaging in hyperbole when I said it was beyond parody- I don't think there's anything you can say about this sort of thing that makes it sound more ludicrous than simply restating the idea itself.

Enough of that. Here's a little musical relief.

Interestingly, the widely-propogated assertion that the Apple III's vent-less, fan-less case (pushed by Jobs) was to blame for its exceptionally-high failure rate has been disputed.

From the Wikipedia "Apple III" article:-

Yes, you are correct, the Wikipedia article on LEDs states that:-

I don't know how common this is though, compared to the blue-LED-based method that Mars Saxman describes.

If you came to that conclusion on your own, I'd congratulate you on (possibly) being extremely perceptive, but also surprised that you weren't aware that it's already been widely reported in the past few years that, yes, blue light is apparently very bad news from the point of view of being sleep-inhibiting:-

Example story

Blue light presumably being far more of an issue in recent years due to (a) the increase in use of electronics and (b) the blue LED fad. (*)

I've seen an alarm clock with blue numbers- presumably because blue LEDs are cool!!!!!!11111- which struck me as an absolutely horrible idea. As did a ******* blue-coloured baby nightlight (because even baby deserves to be kept awake by fashionable blue LEDs. Sheesh.)

(*) FWIW, the blue LED fad seems to have died down in the past couple of years, and white LEDs are the new hotness. Which is a good thing from an aesthetic point of view (**) but I suspect those white LEDs still contain a lot of blue. Especially the more bluish-white ones which may well just be blue ones with phosphor coating (as some "white" LEDs apparently are).

(**) Nothing against blue LEDs as a concept, it's great that they were invented. What I hate is their gratuitous use- or rather, misuse- in consumer goods, both because they're overused and the novelty wore off long ago, but also because they're far more distracting in context than red ones ever were.

What are "political woahs"? It sounds like something out of "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure in Scotland". ;-P

And as if the English are any better; go out in any crap nowhere provincial town there late on Saturday night and I'm sure you'll see as much drink-fuelled disorder as anywhere in Scotland.

What's your point? That Scotland won't be "contributing" when it remains a part of the United Kingdom, somehow?

Your comment on "city states" sounds far more reminiscent of the direction in which London is heading. It's already approaching an entity in its own right within England, increasingly unbalancing the United Kingdom and heavily influenced by tax-dodging multinational companies.

The "City of London" (a historic title which refers only to the financial "square mile" rather than the other several hundred square miles of London itself) is notoriously undemocratic, prominent way, *way* beyond its nominal area, and interferes on behalf of its corporate paymasters in the working of the UK in general:-

http://www.theguardian.com/com...

Sounds like a badly mixed metaphor to me- tall poppy syndrome- which I assume is what you had in mind- tends to have a more specific use referring to people attacked for their achievements or prominence by their peers within a particular society, and I'm not sure this is a good example of that.