Ray Mears

"neil faulkner" <[email hidden]> wrote in message
news:[email hidden]...

Quoted message said:

Do you play Quake 3?

Nope, and I link to the discussion on Paul Hogan completely escaped me.

Have fun,
Paul

Phil Cook <[email hidden]> wrote

Quoted message said:

Gordon said:

I don't usually watch him, he's too Ozzie and too frenetic for me,

Strange that, Ray's English or a least he was brought up in England.

I've sussed out why I called him an Ozzie!

I got him confused with Steve Irwin, the nutter who messes around with
crocodiles and deadly snakes!
He also has a croc farm, of course.

He's on at 14:55 on Saturday (ITV).
--
Gordon

Gordon said:

Phil Cook <[email hidden]> wrote

Quoted message said:

Gordon said:

I don't usually watch him, he's too Ozzie and too frenetic for me,

Strange that, Ray's English or a least he was brought up in England.

I've sussed out why I called him an Ozzie!

I got him confused with Steve Irwin, the nutter who messes around with
crocodiles and deadly snakes!

Also a bit on the lardy side, easy mistake. :-)

Quoted message said:

He also has a croc farm, of course.

Been there seen that.
--
Phil Cook looking north over the park to the "Westminster Gasworks"

Watched him last night and noted that he was using Lock and Lock plastic
box(es). There were three clips showing one of these boxes. One contained
drinking chocolate powder. It is IMO very sensible to use them for keeping
powders absolutely dry during an African rainy season.

These are available from Lakeland I am told Waitrose also other places
http://www.lakelandlimited.co.uk ref numbers 5489_5437_5441_5443
2475_2474_2483_2378_3345 2355_3346_2379_2597_2377 9258_9259

These boxes are taking over our house because they are watertight and
airtight. A rubber seal is compressed by four hinged clips. They are
also strong and never open accidentally in use. They are great for liquids
because they do not leak.

I use them for food while walking, but the "worry about every gram" brigade
may find them too heavy.

--
Dave F

a person known to the world as 'Dave Fawthrop said:

Watched him last night and noted that he was using Lock and Lock plastic
box(es). There were three clips showing one of these boxes. One contained
drinking chocolate powder. It is IMO very sensible to use them for keeping
powders absolutely dry during an African rainy season.

My partner has a kitchen shop that sells these. I commented last night that
she needs a "As used by Ray Mears" sign!

Ian Walker
--
My email address is invalid to prevent spam. Real contact details are on my
website at www.drianwalker.com

Ian Walker said:

Quoted message said:

Watched him last night and noted that he was using Lock and Lock plastic
box(es).

My partner has a kitchen shop that sells these. I commented last night that
she needs a "As used by Ray Mears" sign!

any chance of u.r.w. discount?? ;-)

SteveO

NE Climbers & walkers chat forum;
http://www.thenmc.org.uk/phpBB2/index.php

NMC website: http://www.thenmc.org.uk

Phil Cook said:

There are alternatives to Real Player. Like this one,

http://www.free-codecs.com/download/Real_Alternative.htm

Thanks Phil, I'll try that.

Paul
--
http://www.wilderness-wales.co.uk
http://www.wildwales.fsnet.co.uk

On 1/10/04 8:53 am, in article [email hidden], "Ian

Walker said:

My partner has a kitchen shop that sells these. I commented last night that
she needs a "As used by Ray Mears" sign!

Along with everything else he takes. I enjoyed the programme last night.
But it is hilarious the way he is always finding something else that is
indispensable - last night a nail brush. I wonder how heavy his pack can
get?

--
Andy Howell
Birmingham, UK

Quoted message said:

Given that a Brit invented the computer [1] and later the first
electronic one was built in Britain [2] I think we can say that they
are indigenous to our culture.

[1] Thomas Babbage.
[2] Used at Bletchley Park to break the German "Enigma" code.

[1] No, he created a very large calculating machine (The Difference
Engine), and planned a computer (The Analytical Engine), however it was
never built until a facsimile was created at The Science Museum, London
about 10 years ago. More importantly, his ideas were forgotten so never
influenced the history of computing.

[2] First electronic computer (stored program, etc) is now officially
credited to Konrad Zuse, Germany in the 1930's. The British invented a
way that was commercially worthless after the war as some-one else had
created a better and more efficient way of doing it (same thing happened
with jet engines).

And don't get me started on who invented television . . .

--
Martin @ Strawberry Hill

Quoted message said:

And don't get me started on who invented television . . .

Sometimes I feel that I would like tyo get started with the
)&&😉"😉£&***! that invented television.

Richard Webb

RJ Webb said:

Quoted message said:

And don't get me started on who invented television . . .

A Scotsman, right? Baird?

Katherine

Katherine said:

RJ Webb said:

Quoted message said:

And don't get me started on who invented television . . .

A Scotsman, right? Baird?

Yes and no. He invented television but not the method in use today.

http://www.physlink.com/Education/AskExperts/ae408.cfm
--
Phil Cook looking north over the park to the "Westminster Gasworks"

Usenet said:

Quoted message said:

Given that a Brit invented the computer [1] and later the first
electronic one was built in Britain [2] I think we can say that they
are indigenous to our culture.

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

[1] Thomas Babbage.
[2] Used at Bletchley Park to break the German "Enigma" code.

Quoted message said:

[1] No, he created a very large calculating machine (The Difference
Engine), and planned a computer (The Analytical Engine), however it was
never built until a facsimile was created at The Science Museum, London
about 10 years ago. More importantly, his ideas were forgotten so never
influenced the history of computing.

I think that is too strong a statement. The history of scientific
influence is largely a history of intellectual debts acknowledged in
writing. That record sometimes has omissions. It also can't help
omitting contributions which contribute to the intellectual culture of
the time, and affect people not by reading published and therefore
acknowledgeable work, but stimulate lots of coffee-shop and
dinner-table discussions.

The British Govt put a huge amount of funding into Babbage's machines,
for decades. This caused a lot of people to discuss the possibilities
of computers, discussions which were influenced by the ideas of
Babbage, and the publications of Lovelace, whether or not this was
realised.

For example, very few people realise that when they say "if it walks
like a duck, quacks like duck..." that they are echoing, and to some
extent influenced by, the lively intellectual debates about the kind
of reality possessed and possessible by simulacra which were
stimulated by de Vaucanson's much marvelled at mechanical duck first
exhibited in 1738, which was at the time considered a huge
breakthrough of the now over-familiar "my God, just imagine what they
might be able to build in 50 years time!" type.

And in tracing the history of the IBM punched card, which most
histories trace back to the punched cards of Jacquard's programmable
weaving loom, few go further to point out that Jacquard was improving
an earlier design by de Vaucanson.

In sum, I suspect that the indirect contributions of Babbage to the
intellectual climate of ideas with respect to the possibilities and
architecture of computers must have been considerable, an intellectual
climate which later gave birth to the modern computer industry.

Quoted message said:

[2] First electronic computer (stored program, etc) is now officially
credited to Konrad Zuse, Germany in the 1930's.

This does really depend on what you mean by a computer. Zuse's patent
of 1936 mentions the idea of a stored program, but it is clear that he
didn't fully appreciate its theoretical importance or utility to the
degree that Turing did, who published the idea in his famous 1937
paper which gave us the concept of the "Turing machine" which still
features in modern theoretical computer science. For example, Zuse
long doubted (for at least a decade after 1936) the utility of the
conditional branch instruction. Zuse only actually completed building
his first stored program computer in 1957, a design which was later
developed into the foundation of the Siemens range.

You're also mistaken about "electronic". Zuse's early machines, while
more sophisticated in design than anything else which had been built
at the time, used an ingenious kind of mechanical memory based on thin
slotted metal sheets and pins which was at the time more reliable and
more compact that any of the forms of electronic memory then
available.

The early machines built by Zuse, Eckert & Mauchly, and the Bletchley
Park gang, were all versions of Babbage machines, i.e., *not* stored
program computers in the modern sense, but configurable calculators.
But the Bletchley Park gang had a sounder theoretical understanding
than Zuse or E&M where the technology could and should go, partly
because they had folk such as Turing involved, whereas E&M needed von
Neumann to point out the defects of the ENIAC architecture to them.

In fact Zuse's original computer architectural ideas were less
comprehensive than those of Babbage. IMHO the first occurrence of the
stored-program idea in a context which recognises its importance is in
Turing's 1937 paper, in which it occurs strongly but implicitly. Its
first explicit published mention as a crucially important component of
computer architecture in in von Neumann's EDVAC report of 1945, a
critical report on the deficiencies of the ENIAC, one of the most
important ones being the lack of the stored program idea. Von Neumann
didn't mention Turing's work in that report, but, unlike Eckert &
Mauchly, he was familiar with Turing's work and had met him.

Quoted message said:

The British invented a
way that was commercially worthless after the war as some-one else had
created a better and more efficient way of doing it (same thing happened
with jet engines).

Not sure what this is a reference to. The major reason for the slow
British commercial utilisation of the technical results of the wartime
Colossus work was their being forced to shut Turing out of computer
development because the US feared he was a security risk (and which
led to his suicide), plus making much of the British work top secret
in order that we could sell Enigma machines (which we acquired as
spoils of war). We sold these these famous "uncrackable" German coding
machines to foreign powers for their most top secret communications,
while keeping top secret that we had the technology to crack it (and
so read their most secret traffic). That may have a triumph of
diplomacy and intelligence, but it cost Britain dearly in academic and
commercial development.

Even so, IMHO the British computers of the 1950s and 60s were
technically and architecturally more advanced that the US ones. But
the costs of computer technological development, then and now, have
always been too close to the edge of what a small country with a small
internal market can easily host. As the old ads used to say "Nobody
ever got fired for recommending IBM".

Whereas in contrast to the hobbling effects of the British post-war
secrecy, the US were very lucky in von Neumann to have someone who
recognised that computers were far too important and difficult to have
their development impeded by patents, trade secrets, etc., and
deliberately published everything for free access by the entire
academic and commercial communtities. In fact access to von Neumann's
freely accessible publications helped British post-war progress to
overcome some of the hobbling due to the British security restrictions
on the Bletchley Park work.

See "Who made the first computer?" at

http://www.dai.ed.ac.uk/homes/cam/fcomp.shtml
--
Chris Malcolm [email hidden] +44 (0)131 651 3445 DoD #205
IPAB, Informatics, JCMB, King's Buildings, Edinburgh, EH9 3JZ, UK
[http://www.dai.ed.ac.uk/homes/cam/]

In message <[email hidden]>, Phil Cook
<[email hidden]> writes

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

>And don't get me started on who invented television . . .
>

A Scotsman, right? Baird?

Yes and no. He invented television but not the method in use today.

. . and he's the 'British inventor'. France has one, Russia, Germany &
the US have theirs - it was an idea that was in development at the same
time by a lot of different teams, all around the world.
National pride plays a large part in the Histories of Technology.

--
Martin @ Strawberry Hill

<Apologies for snipping>

In message <[email hidden]>, Chris Malcolm
<[email hidden]> writes

Quoted message said:

I think that is too strong a statement. The history of scientific
influence is largely a history of intellectual debts acknowledged in
writing.

<snipped>

Quoted message said:

In sum, I suspect that the indirect contributions of Babbage to the
intellectual climate of ideas with respect to the possibilities and
architecture of computers must have been considerable, an intellectual
climate which later gave birth to the modern computer industry.

It's certainly the current view, partially based on national pride of
having the computer inventor (and 'programmer', if you believe all that
rubbish spouted about Ada Lovelace - she really isn't that important),
and a desire by IBM to create a history diminishing Hollerith's (then a
competitor) re-discovery of punched cards.

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

[2] First electronic computer (stored program, etc) is now officially
credited to Konrad Zuse, Germany in the 1930's.

This does really depend on what you mean by a computer.

I'm only citing current practice: there may well still be a debate about
defining the first computer, but Zuse is now credited with inventing it.
I defer to your knowledge and leave you to contact the reference books
(blimey, they've only just changed it from the US > Germany!).

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

The British invented a
way that was commercially worthless after the war as some-one else had
created a better and more efficient way of doing it (same thing happened
with jet engines).

Not sure what this is a reference to. The major reason for the slow
British commercial utilisation of the technical results of the wartime
Colossus work was their being forced to shut Turing out of computer
development because the US feared he was a security risk (and which
led to his suicide), plus making much of the British work top secret
in order that we could sell Enigma machines (which we acquired as
spoils of war).

Er no, it was really a reference to the lack of commercial awareness
("the UK will only need three computers"😉 in designing the ACE, leaving
Joe Lyons & Co. having to go to the US to research ideas for
commercially-orientated computer.

You wrote a very good reply, which I applaud, although I am now
terminating the thread as being too OT for the newsgroup (albeit with my
getting the last word :-)

I see Charles Babbage, John Logie Baird and Frank Whittle as three of a
kind: inventors who created things that were certainly original, but who
played no part in the development of the final device, as generally
used.

--
Martin @ Strawberry Hill

The message <[email hidden]>
from Usenet <[email hidden]> contains these words:

snip

Quoted message said:

I am now
terminating the thread as being too OT for the newsgroup (albeit with my
getting the last word :-)

Exactly who appointed you moderator?

Quoted message said:

I see Charles Babbage, John Logie Baird and Frank Whittle as three of a
kind: inventors who created things that were certainly original, but who
played no part in the development of the final device, as generally
used.

Do tell who it was who invented the novel form of jet engine that
completely superceded Whittles design.

--
Roger Chapman so far this year 64 summits
New - 42 (Marilyns 12, Sweats 5, Outlying Fells 30)
Repeats - 22( Marilyns 7, Sweats 16, Wainwrights 16)

Usenet said:

In message <[email hidden]>, Chris Malcolm
<[email hidden]> writes

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

I think that is too strong a statement. The history of scientific
influence is largely a history of intellectual debts acknowledged in
writing.

<snipped>

Quoted message said:

In sum, I suspect that the indirect contributions of Babbage to the
intellectual climate of ideas with respect to the possibilities and
architecture of computers must have been considerable, an intellectual
climate which later gave birth to the modern computer industry.

Quoted message said:

It's certainly the current view, partially based on national pride of
having the computer inventor (and 'programmer', if you believe all that
rubbish spouted about Ada Lovelace - she really isn't that important),
and a desire by IBM to create a history diminishing Hollerith's (then a
competitor) re-discovery of punched cards.

IMHO punched cards are an IBM perversion. Of course it was natural for
card tabulating companies to develop into computer companies, but ICT
wasn't so silly as to go for the primacy of punched cards with all the
associated nonsense of fixed length fields and records which has led
to absurd space and time wasting in large files and databases, and all
those insanely silly Govt forms with little boxes for each letter of
your name and address.

When I trained computer programmers anyone silly enough to use fixed
length records had a rolled up punched card stuffed up a nostril and
lit.

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

[2] First electronic computer (stored program, etc) is now officially
credited to Konrad Zuse, Germany in the 1930's.

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

This does really depend on what you mean by a computer.

Quoted message said:

I'm only citing current practice: there may well still be a debate about
defining the first computer, but Zuse is now credited with inventing it.

The point is that the only people who think they know exactly what a
computer is, so they can tell which the first one was, are those
writing Ladybird introductions to computers and school textbooks. The
crucially important architectural feature which unleashed the full
power of computers was the stored program, i.e., the program stored in
the same memory and the same format as the data. That means that a
program can read and write a program, and that recursive little trick
is what enables the whole wonderful world of software tools, without
which all we have is a programmable calculator. Zuse *mentioned* it
first on paper in his patent, but not only didn't realise its
signficance at the time, he is on record on paper as doubting its
significance for some time after others had asserted it.

That's not to diminish his importance, and he *did* make the first of
the early programmable calculators which preceded the first real
computers (his designs were more advanced that that of ENIAC, for
example).

And if you want to say that not having contributed to the intellectual
history excludes Babbage, then you need to have doubts about Zuse, who
was for a long time a lone pioneer completely disconnected (by being
on the wrong side of WW2) from the threads of computing history.

Quoted message said:

I defer to your knowledge and leave you to contact the reference books
(blimey, they've only just changed it from the US > Germany!).

I was teaching folk about Zuse before the reference books were
changed. The Web from its earliest days has always been particularly
good at computing history, for some odd reason :-)

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

The British invented a
way that was commercially worthless after the war as some-one else had
created a better and more efficient way of doing it (same thing happened
with jet engines).

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

Not sure what this is a reference to. The major reason for the slow
British commercial utilisation of the technical results of the wartime
Colossus work was their being forced to shut Turing out of computer
development because the US feared he was a security risk (and which
led to his suicide), plus making much of the British work top secret
in order that we could sell Enigma machines (which we acquired as
spoils of war).

Quoted message said:

Er no, it was really a reference to the lack of commercial awareness
("the UK will only need three computers"😉 in designing the ACE, leaving
Joe Lyons & Co. having to go to the US to research ideas for
commercially-orientated computer.

Of course. In fact it was even sillier, because the original Govt
Committee set up to decide where the British National Computer should
be sited decided on Crewe. Because, dear god! of all the
well-connected railway lines <aargh!> which could be used for the
<groan!> punched cards and <whimper!> printouts. However, it was soon
realised that we would need three national computers, and that soon
got revised to five -- the five Regional Computing Centres.

We're not just talking about lack of *commercial* awareness
here. Words fail me to describe the degree of stupidity and ignorance
at Govt level which could *decide* on railway lines for computer
communications when telegraph systems had been in highly sucessful
commercial and military use for yonks. As usual, Britain actually
*did* have well known, very highly qualified intelligent experts in
all these areas. As so often happens the Govt simply ignored them in
favour of its own favoured "experts".

Quoted message said:

You wrote a very good reply, which I applaud, although I am now
terminating the thread as being too OT for the newsgroup (albeit with my
getting the last word :-)

I see you're new in these parts :-)
--
Chris Malcolm [email hidden] +44 (0)131 651 3445 DoD #205
IPAB, Informatics, JCMB, King's Buildings, Edinburgh, EH9 3JZ, UK
[http://www.dai.ed.ac.uk/homes/cam/]

Chris Malcolm <[email hidden]> wrote

Quoted message said:

IMHO punched cards are an IBM perversion. Of course it was natural for
card tabulating companies to develop into computer companies, but ICT
wasn't so silly as to go for the primacy of punched cards with all the
associated nonsense of fixed length fields and records which has led
to absurd space and time wasting in large files and databases, and all
those insanely silly Govt forms with little boxes for each letter of
your name and address.

When I trained computer programmers anyone silly enough to use fixed
length records had a rolled up punched card stuffed up a nostril and
lit.

I'm sure I remember dropping a bunch of punched cards in my early days
at ICT/Ferranti/ICL, circa 1970.
(The real delight of punched cards was sorting a mixed-up pile)!

There were even people around who could read cards visually, and who
were adept at manual punching keyboards to do mods, a skill which soon
died out.
--
Gordon

On Sun, 3 Oct 2004 19:04:08 +0100, Usenet <[email hidden]>

Quoted message said:

("the UK will only need three computers"😉 in designing the ACE, leaving
Joe Lyons & Co. having to go to the US to research ideas for

Aha! I started my computing career operating LEO's (numbers 3, 13 & 18
) and still have bits of the latter scattered around the house....

In message <[email hidden]>, Gordon
<[email hidden]> writes

Quoted message said:

Chris Malcolm <[email hidden]> wrote

Quoted message said:

IMHO punched cards are an IBM perversion. Of course it was natural for
card tabulating companies to develop into computer companies, but ICT
wasn't so silly as to go for the primacy of punched cards with all the
associated nonsense of fixed length fields and records which has led
to absurd space and time wasting in large files and databases, and all
those insanely silly Govt forms with little boxes for each letter of
your name and address.

When I trained computer programmers anyone silly enough to use fixed
length records had a rolled up punched card stuffed up a nostril and
lit.

I'm sure I remember dropping a bunch of punched cards in my early days
at ICT/Ferranti/ICL, circa 1970.
(The real delight of punched cards was sorting a mixed-up pile)!

I once got caught up in a revolving door while carrying two trays of
punched cards. I went into the building -- the cards went onto the
pavement outside.

At 2,000 cards a tray, that was some re-sorting exercise.

Quoted message said:

There were even people around who could read cards visually, and who
were adept at manual punching keyboards to do mods, a skill which soon
died out.

Of course, if you made an error (in manual punching) you could simply
fill in the holes with 'chads' (a word that dropped out of use until the
last US election) and over-punch the column again.

I've told that to many people in today's IT business.

But no-one believes me.

regards.
--
Jake