七十年代的香港 (2)

這是一九七零年代與二零零六年的中環皇后像廣場對出的一段干諾道之比較。以往的海邊，現已變成陸地，維港變得狹窄。照片的對比讓我們發現，新世紀的香港失去了藍天。小時候，常見藍天，卻不懂珍惜。到今天，藍天通常要借助Photoshop ，真可悲！


你可知道五、六十年代的香港是怎樣的？請欣賞……

七十年代的香港 (1)

這是一九七零年代與二零零六年的中環干諾道文華酒店以西一段之比較。最搶眼的分別，是七十年代的巴士現在全都由冷氣巴士取代，代價是街道上的氣溫上升、廢氣增加。背景的文華酒店，在二零零六年全新裝修，但外貌分別不大，是建築物現代化的典範。真不明白為何其他的建築物總要拆毀後再重建，由典雅變成平凡的建築。難道政府沒有辦法解決地積比率 (plot ratio) 的問題嗎？

繼續閱讀……

Beethoven's 9th Symphony and Compact Disc (CD)

This is a very informative site where you can find a historical account of the invention of CD. Although it is compiled by Philips, the information is reasonably objective. Philips' commercial failure in developing the vedio disc, the predecessor of the CD, is gracefully admitted.

There were all sorts of stories about the original target storage capacity for a CD being one hour of audio content, but Sony's vice-president Norio Ohga having suggested extending the capacity to accommodate a complete performance of Beethoven's 9th Symphony on a single disk.

According to Philips' official account published on the site, the story is true. Philips engineers accepted Sony's proposal. They found that the performance by the Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Herbert von Karajan, lasted for 66 minutes. Just to be abbsolutely sure, a check was made with Philips' subsidiary, PolyGram, to ascertain what other recordings there were. The longest known performance lasted 74 minutes, which was made during the Bayreuther Festspiele in 1951 and conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler. That became the playing time of a CD, and the engineers extended the diameter of a CD to 12 centimeters to accommodate the extra 14 minutes of data.

However, Kees Immink, research fellow of Philips Research Laboratories refutes the story in his article "The Compact Disc Story".