You're confused, CRT based television is by definition electronic. Mechanical scanning referred to the use of a large spinning disk instead of a CRT.

The electron beam in the CRT in 1930s era televisions was bent (or more correctly deflected) so that it scanned the screen building up a picture, in one of two ways. Electrostatic deflection or Electromagnetic deflection.

Electromagnetic deflection uses an electro-magnet built around the outside of the electron gun. Passing a varying current through the electro-magnet varies the magnetic field produced which bends the electronic beam.

Electrostatic deflection used X-Y plates within the electron gun, a varying voltage (not current) applied to the plates attracts or deflects the electron beam.

Initially electrostatic deflection was used (in first gen TVs of 1936), these CRTs had small deflection angles meaning the tubes had to be very long (and thus mounted vertically and watched in a mirror - giving the name mirror lid televisions).

Efforts to increase the deflection angle of CRTs (and thus make shorter tubes) led to the switch to electro-magnetic deflection by 1938.

Again a completely Ameri-centric viewpoint. High definition television in Great Britain (as opposed to Baird's mechanical system) was developed by EMI in the early 30s, in parallel and independently of Farnsworth or RCA (i.e. Zworykin). The EMI developed Emitron camera (patented 1932) and 405 line-system was used to start the worlds first high definition television service by the BBC in November 1936 (to the London area).

The incandescent light bulb was developed in parallel and independently on both sides of the Atlantic. Edison in the US and Joseph Swan in the UK, with Swan patenting in the UK first.

> The only thing I'm not sure how well unsquashfs handles the extraction of sparse files.

If the file is stored as a sparse file in the Squashfs filesystem (normally the case), then Unsquashfs will create it as a sparse file when extracting it. It doesn't need any more filesystem space than the filled parts of the file when doing so.

I wrote the code and so I should know :-)

hiring that really bright coder 12 timezones away with good English skills ... and grabbing that talent before it fleas to a country

Unlike you then, it's flees not fleas.

Why fancy doing some research do you?

Ddywedwch means "say" not douche!

"yr hyn a ddywedwch" -> What you say

"yn debygol iawn" -> very probably

"wir" -> true

Try Squashfs which creates deduplicated and compressed filesystem archives (http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7357/ for a good journal article).

If you're using Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora Squashfs will be already built into your distro kernel, and the squashfs-tools will also already be available in your distro repository.

Oh wow, a little Englander on slashdot, I thought you'd all be at the Tory conference in Manchester.

I describe myself first as British, secondly as a (proud) European, and lastly and hardly ever as English, for all the negative connotations people like you have given it.

Britain is a European country, it has a proud history of involvement (for the better too) with the other countries in Europe, and it is a European culture.

Complete twaddle. Do you really think that these jobs are going to the hundreds of thousands of Indians surviving on less than a dollar a day? They'll be going to the rich English speaking Indian middle class who could afford to go to university. You never know, but, some of those American workers may have pulled themselves out of (American levels of) poverty by getting their IT qualifications and career. It's too easy to say America rich, India poor and therefore this always justifies outsourcing American jobs.

No, I'm not American.
 

Mark Shuttleworth is effectively the user every free software developer wants, because he puts his money where his mouth is. Vision is one thing, being prepared to pay for it is better.

Besides someone's needless continuity breakage/stability disruption is often another's necessary innovation. Often I've been begged by some users to implement something which they badly need, but then got criticised by others for yet another incompatible version. You can't please everyone all of the time.

Innovation doesn't need to be the evil twin of stability, it unfortunately often feels that way in free software IMO due to lack of resources. I, for example, as a free software developer only have the time to support the latest (and 'greatest') version, and so all users are forced to use it whether or not they want the latest features. If I made enough money from the software to pay developers, I could support the last couple of versions or when adding features I could implement a backwards compatibility option. However, I can't do this.