* Posts by seasider

11 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Jul 2008

UK government hands CityFibre £318M for rural broadband builds

seasider

Re: Keep some of the money back for 'repairs'.

Round our way Cityfibre's contractors managed to put a hole through a main sewer, water company spent a few days repairing sewer with road completely closed to traffic. As it was the only road that kept the whole area running (due to uncontolled development on both the other roads) the result was gridlock morning and night with thousands of cars stuck in jams each day. It seems I no longer urgently need a superfast fttp connection from Cityfibre or their ISP partners - at least not until I have fogotten about the wasted hours - supect locally I am not alone. Its great to have a choice but it's bleedin chaos when it's being cabled up.

All at sea: SAP was barely out of the port when it sank its 'social responsibility' voyage

seasider

Yacht racing is not a sport known to be easily accessible to inner-city welfare kids

At this juncture it is probably a good time to mention the amazing

https://scaramouchesailing.org.uk/ a project at the Greig City Academy (GCA) - a state school in Inner City North London - which does exactly that!

Founded in 2014 by the Outdoor Activities Teacher at GCA (Jon Holt)- he appears to have raised his head above the usual education based risk aversion and come up with the idea of taking the pupils out of their usual inner city life and going sailing, initially in small dinghies, and then later hatching the plan to do the Fastnet race with them!

If anything is deserving of SAP's cash I reckon it's this project!

So I take you point about yachting often being a world of privilege, but Greig City Academy has shown what can be achieved with truly inspirational leadership - I'd bet the kids on the project are too busy preparing the boats, learning how to maintain them, and sailing (and learning maths, engineering and teamwork skills to put it in educational language) to be out getting involved in what appears to have become traditional city yoof activities of drug dealing, stabbing each other etc.etc.

BT and Plusnet most moaned about broadband providers. Again

seasider

Plusnet customer service - watch out for Plusnet mobile's inability to port over your old number

Interestingly enough the newly launched Plusnet mobile is making an early bid to trash the already tarnished Plusnet name. If you sign up for their mobile service, they will accept a PAC number to port in, but it would appear they are unable to complete their side of the transaction. Your old sim will go dead but the number takes days to become live on the Plusnet mobile SIM. So effectively you lose your mobile number for several days . Looking at their forum this has been going on for well over a fortnight or so and it's still chaos. I can see that they are blaming O2 for providing the info in a form they cannot read, but I am porting in from 3 mobile so I suspect it means their systems cannot read the industry standard dataset. So instead of saying "wait we need to stop whilst we sort ourselves out" they are simply instructing the Cust Serv droids to fob people off with the usual guff - deliberately miss-understanding the Offcom requirement to port within 2 working days. It's 2 working days from me requesting a PAC from the old provider to Plusnet porting it over, not 2 days from the old SIM going dead. I have been holding off paying Plusnet to move me from ASDL to fibre broadband - I guess this means that I probably need to move broadband and mobile to a competent provder. Sigh!

Barclays.net Bank Holiday outage leaves firms unable to process payments

seasider

Re: Barclays.net experienced a technical issue the eSigner software

"A new Trojan virus is targeting users of Smart Cards by offering an update to the eSigner software”. - Actually that warning has been there for weeks - the bit about the failed routine upgrade is the new one.

As a previous poster said - what on earth were they doing changing something a day before the Bank Holiday, and not only that the last weekday before the end of the month - i.e. payday!

We finally managed to get our small suppliers payment run out on Friday after lots of wasted time and grief. I learnt years ago not to leave the Payroll until the last day, so that was uploaded some days ago.

I reckon the "a small number of customers have been having problems" readily translates as "anyone who tried to use our website". More Marketing bollocks - trouble is the more they do this the less credible their press releases become. If one day some bright spark at a UK bank decides to launch a decent product (unlikely I know) none of us will take a blind bit of notice.

But back to the salient point - what was going on in Barclays IT dept's brains to do an upgrade when they did? My only suggestions are - it isn't a Bank Holiday in Elbonia or whatever low wage hell-hole the website is outsourced to, or probably more likely they simply don't give a toss, and/or have a clue.

If only the competition had a better reputation - but by and large they don't.

Lloyds Group probes server crash behind ATM, cash card outage

seasider

Re: All your eggs in one basket - Strategy?

Yep - It is not really a surprise though. The upper echelons of the banking world have amply demonstrated in recent years that they would not recognise a risk if it came past and bit them on the leg. As we all know to our collective cost.

Huge PDP-11 in a lorry: How I drove computers into schools

seasider
Pint

Same here

@Kernel

I've still got the punched cards today - I learned nothing from the experience (except that computers were really disappointing - Yep I got the "Syntax error" too often as well) Luckily my old man worked for Plessey and the computing nerds there convinced him that the BBC B was the way forward - they were right ! Suddenly you could see the possibilities from these computer things. Kept me in work for 20 plus years so far.

Today I look at the homework my kids do on "how to write a letter in Word" or some other such nonsense and wonder how it is that UK education can be so clueless with IT for so long.

seasider

MS Dynamics in ERP tech land grab

seasider
Stop

Would have been better off fixing the stuff they already had!

Instead of spending money beefing up MS Dynamics AX (their high end offering) they should be fixing the bugs in the stuff they already own. The Intrastat routines in MS Dynamics GP (bread and butter offering) have been broken since V6.0 - and they are still broken in V.10 six years later! I don't think they mention this in the sales pitch however - just has a tick box that says it records Intrastat records - it omits to mention it does them badly/wrong!

Microsoft's Windows 7 price gamble opens door to Linux

seasider
Linux

@ Robert Moore 15.45

"Now I admit that if you have the latest and best hardware Linux drivers can be difficult. But if you are a cheep bastard, like me, and tend to buy last years hot products, and save a stack of cash."

Ah I think you might have just explained why Linux is the no hassle option for me - Cheap Bastard would sum it up neatly. As for LAST years hot products - that sounds a bit excessive -but anyhow if it works for you that's fine. I believe there is a Netbook remix of Pclinuxos 2009 but frankly I'm unlikely to try it until someone starts throwing out perfectly good netbooks, like they do with PC's.

And yes it browns me off that just about every update for a windows machine requires a reboot, and almost every update for the Linux box does not - kinda gives it away that the windows foundations are pillars of sand.

Seasider

seasider
Linux

Won't make a difference

I agree this won't make a blind bit of difference - the Gen Public simply will not "get" anything different to Windows.

And actually that's fine by me - like an earlier poster I can recommend PC Linux OS (pclinuxos.com). I have been using this on my home machine for some years (various versions) and it's no hassle at all. It just installs and runs reliably and fast. Other Distros might well be better - I don't know - all I know is that Pclinuxos has not caused me enough grief to even think about looking.

OK the non-technical will complain about it not being Windows but for the technically competent amongst us it's great that the scumbags that write various malware and network borne nasties have the great unwashed and their insecure crappy Windows install in their sights and not me!

I have to deal with Windows related nonsense and instability at work - it's a pain but I get paid for it!

At home the no hassle Linux option is the ideal solution for me.

Seasider

Tiscali shares suspended on titsup fears

seasider
Thumb Down

Shortage of idiots?

Difficult to feel any sympathy for the corporate entity - I used to have F2s as an ISP - it was bought by Pipex and started to fall apart - but it was striking just how fast the service went downhill once Tiscali got involved. I bailed out as Tiscali bought Pipex. I guess as Wall Street found out the world is beginning to run out of idiots to buy crap products.

Software outfit keeps Vulcan airborne

seasider
Thumb Up

All of the above

Yep all these remarks are spot on - awesome machines.

I saw the Vulcan displayed in sunny Southend quite late in it's career.

A big part of the wow factor was the way it was displayed - in Southend Airshow most of the displays take place just out over the estuary - the really fast jets are displayed really far out - and are as dull as dishwater. The Vulcans however were appeared to be flown about six foot above the lampposts on the seafront, and were thrown around the sky very slowly and very very noisily, often with the jet blast wafting over the crowd as the beast climbed vertically and deafeningly upwards after appearing to hover on it's tail just above the lampposts again and again.

Seasider