Ah yes, the BBC Micro. The first computer I ever bought, learnt to program on and - most importantly - how to play Elite.
Sigh...
45 posts • joined 19 Jan 2012
Agree. Anything but Softbank.
I worked for a company that was bought by Softbank. Masoyoshi Son was full of - shall we say politely - unfeasibly high expectations, boasts and claims, none of which clearly had the remotest chance of coming true. He eventually sold the company, having sucked the profit out of it by loading the purchase borrowing onto the bottom line.
Result: nothing new got done, shareholders got a lot richer. Us grunts on the ground just got frustrated and a lot of good people departed. I don't think that fundamental biz model has changed much.
So what if the minority parties did end up kingmakers? The point of PR is to enfranchise those who don't get represented because of the binary nature of FPTP. The world isn't that binary any more, old tribal loyalties have melted. So with PR, at least some of those whose views are not represented at all - and because of 'safe seats' aren't likely ever in their lifetimes to be so - will have some of their views turned into policy. That's a win for me.
He might need it because most services are still ridiculously asymmetrical.
Take Virgin (please). I got mildly excited when they started laying cables around the periphery of my home town but as soon as you burrow deep into the Ts&Cs to find the actual bandwidth promised, it may be 300Mbps downsteam but upstream it's a niggardly 20Mbps. All for a not-so-niggardly £50+ / month.
All moot since they gave up digging up pavements and roads before they got to my house...
The Navy Lark, Beyond Our Ken, Round the Horne, The Clitheroe Kid and other Sunday lunchtome programmes I listened to (yes, I'm that old) as my parents near chain-smoked and the living room filled with blue smoke. Ah, those were the days - no such thing as secondary smoking then. <cough>
Many's the time I've watched users painfully mouse their way around the screen (using crappy laptops left in the default Windows configuration, which doesn't help it must be said) to select a menu option or minimise a window, when one or two keyboard shortcuts would do it in a fraction of the time. I gave up suggesting Ctrl-O or Ctrl-S and Alt-F4 (let along Alt-Space-N or Alt-Space-R) after being being told for the third time that they don't have time to learn that.
So painful! Now every time they waste 30 seconds or more finding the right menu option whne a half-second prod of the keyboard would do it, I have to look away...
You did better than I did.
As part of a regular networking column I was writing for Practical Computing (we're talking 1987 here), I got an IBM shop to install a TR network in the editorial office. Everyone was very pleased - until we fired up the PCs and found that there was only just room in 640k to run the network stack - but not to run anything useful, like WordPerfect.
Out went the network on everyone's PC apart from muggins here, who had to write about it every month. I had two config.sys files, and rebooted to write, then rebooted to connect as this was before EMS. Those weren't the days...
Same here: the horror stories around R-M have made me very wary.
On the other hand, I once gaily installed an experimental data compression NLM on my NetWare server, as the 20MB full height Seagate was filling up, and I couldn't afford the the squillions it would have cost to buy a bigger one.
Guess what? It was very good at compression, decompression, not at all. Lost everything before 1991. I still have an ARC file somewhere that nothing has ever been able to decompress...
And then there's the not unlikely possibility tht a cloud vendor decides to change its business model or gets bought, in which case all bets are off: your sub suddenly goes up by 500%, or you lose all your data, or they get hacked... All of which have happened.
Occasionally still see it on browser password fields, believe it or not. Keepass (my preferred password manager) types in passwords as fast as it can normally, but for one or two sites, I haveto insert a delay between characters or the (presumably) validaiton routine throws a wobbly. In this day n age too...
Hate to sound like a Luddite - but the alternative is not to fill your house with shtuff that not only steals your data and listens to you all the time so as to fill your head with advertising, but also costs money, needs managing, and becomes deliberately obsolete within three years.
Who needs that level of tech management at home?
Actually, itis a left/right issue.
The question is whether it's right for one hyper-rich guy to decide where to spend his billions, or whether some of that money, which was generated by a business that's subsidised by the rest of us in the form of transportation, environmental management, education, defence, and all other other public services that enable his business to continue operating, should be spent in a manner determined collectively, so that its benefits can be distbuted to those who need it most.
The whole point of a GUI is that programs look alike and so are easier to use. Mozilla forgot this a few iterations ago and made Firefox almost unusable. And now the same bastardisation is about to be visited on TB which, although a bit creaky in places, has been a fine, rich email client for years.
I despair.
VM are building a network in my town and I have to say that, on researching it more thoroughly, I'm just not that impressed with the offering.
It's mostly gazillions of channels full of crap I wouldn't want to watch anyway, plus the much-vaunted 300Mbps broadband speed with the top bundle. I'm now on VDSL over FTTC which gets me 70Mbps and that's fine for high-res video streaming and the odd download. As for content, Freesat delivers most of the stuff I watch anyway (er) free, and the odd bit of content I do want really isn't worth the £100 a month that VM is asking.
What's not OK about the VM offer is the upload speed, which is pegged (if you look hard enough for the details) at 20Mbps - which the same as I have now. Were VM offering a more symmetrical service, that would make it more attractive. But at £40 a month and up, this offering doesn't cut it for me.
As a user of rclone for automated server-side off-site backup onto Amazon Cloud Drive, it seemed too good to be true that I could upload terabytes for just 55 quid a year. I should have known better.
My guess is that the bandwidth of thousands of people uploading massive datasets didn't help to make it an economic proposition for Amazon.
I was a few metres away at the time - it was quite a crash. The junction is on a road that leads directly off the freeway, and I'm told it's quite common for cars to speed across that junction at near-freeway speeds. So I'm not surprised that the an accident has happened there; maybe if the G car had stepped off the lights smartly, the van might have gone behind it.
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