Posts by hamiltoneuk

I can't remember whch Android version update it was but one year when the Android version changed it took Barclays a week or two to update their Online Banking app so that it would function with the new Android. Anybody else remember that one?

When Tavis Ormandy speaks I listen. I may not understand much of it but I take action ASAP!

25 beer tokens per hour median - that's barely worth getting out of bed for these days is it? I suppose if you're over 50 things like morgage payments will be less of a problem and hopefully you're less likely to be paying rent. When I went down the local tech college in good old 1984 to get an HNC at the tender age of 28 we were all looking to boost our qualifications a wee bit to get the magic 5 figure salary. With that sort of money a mortgage on a terraced house was possible even with sky high interest rates. What's the situation in 2022? Please tell.

Interesting article. In the UK now we have Ms. Hecate Hardbroom in charge will public spending be slashed? I hate having to wait and see...

Thanks!

Thank you for turning me on to MJ Hibbett and the Validators maaan!

Never used email or the internet

Wonderfully Sinclair never used email or the internet and he never owned a computer, he just sold them!

I hope they show the BCC Micro Men film again in his honour. I thought it captured the spirit of the age well, I had great fun building and breaking a couple Sinclair match box size radios when I was a kid. When is got my Garrard SP25 MKII turntable it was connected into my homemade Baxendale pre-amp which powered 2 Sinclair amplifier boards and Sinclair bookshelf speakers which looked classy. The amplifiers would blow up if the outputs were shorted for a millisecond or so but they were fun.When the reverse polish calculators came out they looked too complex for me so I avoided them but I am sure they were fun too. When Sinclairs Z80 based computers arrived I didn't swallow the stuff about running as nuclear power station with them. I went for strange things like Tangerine and Oric and the BBC Micro and I realised that i did not understand them much but they were interesting. I remember a girl saying "I thought computers were supposed to make things fast" after her boyfriend and I spent an age labouriously typing in a Basic listing from a magazine. Soon after a Sinclair C5 was seen parked outside the pub down the road. It was all cutting edge and great.

I'm trying to fix a 30 year old HP Vectra 486U PC at the moment. When new it was top of the range with EISA slots on a big motherboard with white footprints screened on the the PCB price tag about $4,000. Anyone out there know how to fix em?

Greenwich Station and the area are indeed a delight. Good old XP thrown in too. Happy days. Computers were less boring then.

Intelligent article and interesting comments. From my semi-layperson's viewpoint are we seeing an illustration of Andy Grove's book title Only The Paranoid Survive?

We have to be gently with them. THe .xlsx format was only introduced a mere 13 years ago. We have to allow a bit of time for them to catch up. Poor things.

It's very sad but you have to sell a lot of apples to make a bean.

The fat lady must have sung. I went a couple of times in the 90s before internet had really taken off. I remember sitting next to a veternan on the plane going out there. He was fairly dismissive of the thing even back them. It was amazing to see the vast number of vendors and the sheer size of the event. Many of those exhibiting back then have bitten the dust. New vendors have risen up but is there the buzz about the industry that there was back then? Not really. It will take some utterly new marvels to stir up the interest again.

Baron Bragg is cool. If I have 1/2 a brain cell left should I reach his age I'll count myself lucky. Was his screenplay for Michael Caine's Play Dirty film in 1969 any good though?

Chromebook: updates in under 5 minutes, Excellent value and generally still a joy to use 5 years after purchase.

I have installed KB4056892 on 2 Windows 10 PCs, a Core i3 2nd Gen and a 4th Gen. Both show about a 20% slowdown running Octane 2.0. Is this a last ditch attempt by Intel to sell us all a new CPU :)

Well done Mr. Krzanich. He is setting a very good example.

Ah yes Basware Holdings Ltd. (formerly Procserve Services Ltd.and some thing to do with the PA Consultancy) run this portal for bits and bobs of government purchasing to give the appearance of opening up the process to smaller resellers and maybe saving the taxpayer a few quid. It is a bit daft really.

Installed Creators Update here using Windows 10 Upgrade Assistant on to a 4th Gen and a 2nd Gen Core i3 desktop plus a 1st gen Core i-3 lappy and they all work very nicely. Compared with the bad old days when every Windows upgrade was a guaranteed waste of time it's a whole lot better now!

Apart from the software most of the stuff Ingram sell is made in China anyway.

Change at VM Long Overdue

If ever there was a company that had an over inflated opinion of itself it was VM. Sorry the service was not good enough for me on their unreliable fibre optic broadband. In this area you often see aged Telco street cabinets with doors flapping in the breeze. Invariably they are VM's. After they have been told about 6 times they fix them. Trouble is VM's funny old co-ax to the premises is just as flakey as BT's copper wire.

For those that care Cyanogenmod is still good for security updates, even for Kitkat on an ancient 1st generation Galaxy Tab - if you don't mind slow and heavy!

Ghastly Mess

What I ghastly mess. I hope those who voted to leave realise soon that they made the WRONG choice.

NEC's Rival

Reminds me NEC had a similar machine back then. The NEC did not have the floppy drive (pricey item back then). It ran CP/M not the trendy MS-DOS (CP/M with floppy was a nightmare, people made a living transferring CP/M data from one manufacturer's floppy drive format to another and there were loads of them!). With the NEC you just squirted the data down the serial port. NEC used a smaller screen I think. The NEC keyboard was nice but not quiet so not good in meetings. It was a sought after bargain laptop at Morgan Computer in the wild west end :)

Good To See So Many Comments...

...the modern gear has no mystique, if that's the right word.

Dave

Fixed

They've fixed it. Some card (not me) tweeted: have they tried switching the system off and then on again?? :)

Flakey

IT: flakey, always has been...

I have the big Win 10 Pro upgrade invite plastered on the Windows 7 Update thing for the past week. I tried it on 2 machines and it did not work very well. This morning the invite is not there when I go to Windows Update. Interesting.

Plusnet have done this before, 6th May 2009 to be precise. When I spoke to their tech people that was the 1st time I heard the term flapping DNS. They advised me to use OpenDNS which I have found to be very good.

The hosting firm that I use uses C4L. I was not aware of them until it went wrong. Never heard of a NOC in my life. I still have no idea what BFD/100G issues are. What a clever world we live in.

We observed Kelly. George Osborne's lips are waffer thin.

2 reboots for Win7 yes. And did anyone else get these important security updates failing: KB2676562, KB2871997, KB2872339, KB3011780, KB3004375, KB3031432 and this recommended security update KB2882822, all with error code 80090017 sad day?

Did You Expect Anything Else?

Well done. Keep experimenting. live adventurously. Tech is so BLOODY BORING now something has to be done!!!!

Fall In Rate Of Insolvencies

Another reason for the drop in insolvencies is that interest rates have been at historic low rates for many years. How much longer? Who knows but one day rates will rise and everyone who has debts will wish they had paid them off.

VM have never been able to run a reliable ISP business. One obvious indication of the amount of effort they put in is the number of kerbside cabinets of theirs that have the front panel hanging off with the wiring exposed. Been like that for years and year.

Jimmy Page's interesting house in Kensington next to where the late Michael Winner lived (anybody remember the amusing Stella Street show on telly?) is clearly visible at a discrete distance on streetview. However streetview does whizz us past the front now. Lovely house. Maybe when it changes hands we will be able take a closer look again.

Barclays

Barclays Bank in the UK still runs Win XP

What's wrong with WS2012E

I'm interested. What is wrong with WS2012E as a replacement for SBS? I ditched SBS2003 R2 anticipating the end of support some time and replaced it with WS2012E and it seems fine. I don't do anything fancy with it and avoid cloud like the plague. WS2012E seems fine to me. Am I missing something?