Re: "Patch Tuesday" vs "Reboot one of the 6800s?: WTF!"
My record was a OpenVMS VaxCluster at 900 days.
69 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Jun 2012
We got a brand new, recently launched Compaq AlphaServer ES40 at work to replace a VaxCluster 4000. As planning/doing the migration would take a few weeks, it was sitting doing nothing so as an experiment I ran Seti@Home for OpenVMS on it for benchmarking. It was the 7 fastest computer in the world at that time.
I used to own a LG Fx0 - https://gadgets.ndtv.com/lg-fx0-2233
It was see-through gold and one of the only few phones in the last few years I have owned that had people regularly ask "what is that". The other one is a Amazon Fire Phone.
The phone was lovely, but FireFox back then even though I was on 2.2 still felt slow and buggy. Ironically the Firefox browser itself was one of the worse things about it.
Apple prices do drop but not by much, probably £50 a handset. What you are saying makes sense but we just have a 2 year handset refresh policy (mostly because of support/warrenty) shich just happens to fall late spring, just mopping up the last now. If it was October every two years would probably be better as Apple refresh usually in September.
I'm currently doing a refresh cycle in work, upgrading iPhone 6 devices to 7 and Galaxy S5 to Galaxy S7 for my clients. I just can't see if it was my money any killer feature to justify me getting into a £40 a month contract again for 2 years if I had a iPhone 6 or S5 that was due an upgrade. Currently I'm using a B&Q Aquaris Ubuntu Edition E4.5 on a rolling £5 a month sim and it does everything I need.
Now it doesn't do Snapchat or Instagram, but to be honest now I'm not using I'm realising I'm not actually missing that much.
I have a Virgin V6 box if that's what you are referring to? It doesn't have a modem in it, you connect to the Superhub via Ethernet or Wireless. Or a 3rd party router if you put the Superhub into modem mode.
It's a slow buggy piece of crap by the way, while no fan of Murdock's Sky, having spend the weekend with my wife's family and using their Sky Q box, the Sky Q is far, far, far superior.
There is a trend towards small turbocharged petrol engines that do 65MPG+ according to the makers, Ford's EcoBoost and Peugeot's Puretech being two of the most well known ones.
While quite impressive tech (125BHP out of a 3cyl 1 litre engine that will fit on A4 paper) the 65MPG figure is complete bollocks, most owners struggle to get just over 1/2 that.
My wife and I got out of the "upgrade every 2 years" mindset a several years ago and looking back considering we both used to be on £30 a month contracts we have saved probably near to 2 grand.
She currently uses a BlackBerry Z10 on GiffGaff at £5pm and I use a Phone Co-Op sim that usually costs me around £6pm. I recently bought a Silent Circle BlackPhone brand new unlocked from eBay for £49, they were £600 at launch but a bit of a flop.
I have a FireFoxOS phone, assuming the TV's work the same way most of the apps are not apps as such, they are just API files that interact with a HTML website. So if they can't talk to the website, you are screwed.
Most of my games on the phone are shortcuts to github for example.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox_OS/Firefox_OS_apps/Building_apps_for_Firefox_OS
You could argue that Microsoft already had a Microsoft friendly Android platform with the Nokia X - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_X
By default it had Skype, Microsoft Office including the Outlook App, Here Maps and its own Nokia android store. Bizarrely it also had BBM as standard, which I didn't mind as my wife uses a BlackBerry Z10.
I bought and ran one last year, apart from the shockingly bad camera it wasn't a bad phone at the £49 unlocked it cost to purchase. I gave it to my Mum who's Asha phone finally gave up the ghost and she loves it.
I now run a Firefox OS phone, I seem to have a habit of picking dying OSs......
I've been with them since August last year, they actually resell Plusnet if you live outside Sheffield, I think they have their own Fibre in Sheffield city but none outside. So I'm with Plusnet but pay slightly less.
Had a few hours downtime during this problem - http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/sep/10/plusnet-users-suffer-outages-dns-problems
But apart from that been solid and fast enough.
I have a LG Fx0 that I got cheap from eBay - https://www.instagram.com/p/_pYdbWmCHp/?taken-by=stripeymiata
Hardware is pretty cool, it's the only phone I have had since the very first iPhone I got on launch day that people have asked me about.
The OS at first glance is nice to use and fast, but the Marketplace is an empty shell. Hardly any official apps, there are 3rd party ones for WhatsApp and Instagram that get me by. It doesn't have cut and paste which is a glaring omission for 2016. And the camera has hardly any options and is buggy if using flash in bad lighting it can take up to 20 seconds to take a picture. When it does take a picture the quality isn't that great. I am stuck on 2.1 though, 2.6 might fix some of those issues but it isn't 100% ready yet for this device.
I have been using it as a daily driver and the call quality is excellent, however there is no turn by turn navigation, not a problem now but will be in the summer so will probably sell it on then.
We had a VaxCluster at work that ran from around 1995 to 2011 so that's 16 years, was only turned off about 2 or 3 days during that time for power supply work - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAX_4000
In it's glory days it supported about 1000 users, in it's last days was just used for legacy COBOL print jobs to a huge old Digital printer - http://www.purplewave.com/cgi-bin/mnlist.cgi?130409/W9416
When I moved from BT Infinity to AAISP my speed went from 27Mbps to 29Mbps.
Browsing wise I havn't noticed any difference, but Torrents hit a lot higher speeds now.
Although people slag off the BT Homehub, I'm convinced it had better wireless connection that the Thompson TG585 that AAISP give you. But it works good enough so haven't changed it.
Just a couple of things if you are thinking of buying a Focus.
1) They do a 1.0 Ecoboost model. It's an amazing wee engine, they managed to get 125BHP out of a 1.0 Three Cylinder unit. It's a hoot to drive. But it's meant to average 65MPG, you have no chance of getting anything near that, you'll average just over 40MPG if you are lucky.
2) You'll get the hard sale from the dealer for paint protection at about £400, if Trustford it will be Diamondbrite. The kit costs them around £72 ex VAT so it's almost all profit, plus it's an average product that a proper valuetter would never use. It also only lasts an average of a few months if you don't use PH neutral shampoo when washing the car. To be fair to Ford all dealers are at it now as it's such a moneymaker. Apparently Aston Martin charge £2000 for the same £72 kit.
Was with BT, they mischarged me £50 and their shitty Indian Call Centre spent a year promising to refund it and never did. Finally got in contact with a UK bod and got it refunded within 1 day. Now with A&A for Broadband, and Co-Op for Landline. While I knew I could get landline with A&A for £10, I could get the same deal with the Co-Op and still be able to ring out.
I have a dual sim phone, funnily enough a Nokia but a Nokia that runs Android, it's a Nokia X.
I got it for 2 reasons, the main one is that I live in Northern Ireland and cross the border into Ireland quite often, data roaming is expensive so I pop an Irish PAYG sim into slot 2 and it takes over once I cross the border. I use Waze as my Sat Nav so need a data connection.
Second reason is that I am on call on 1 weekend a month, so I can just pop my work sim into it so I don't have to lug two phones around over the weekend. Don't mind carrying two phones during the week as I wear a suit, but at weekends in jeans and t-shirt (depending on season).
The previous 32-Bit ones were a dog though, I built a cheap one (brand new motherboard with soldiered in processor £7 from eBay :) ) for a friend who needed a cheap PC for his son's homework, it couldn't run Ubuntu but that was actually Unity killing the GPU, ran fine with Debian.
But out of curiosity I installed a 3 day trial of WIndows 7 on it to Benchmark against my Atom Media Centre and it was nearly 1/2 the performance.
http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/326353
http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/392385
On the plus side, his son is happy with it and I ended up building it for £27 in all (£20 for a case and used old HD & memory I had lying around) and he used an old TV for a monitor.
@ justincormack
No you don't, I just have moved to AAISP myself for Fibre, but split my landline off to Co-Op, it's only £10 a month if you pay upfront, otherwise £12.50 a month. AAISP would do Landline as well for £10 a month if I recall correctly, but was incoming calls only.
Primus and Post Office both do cheap line rental, but don't have a good reputation.
By the way, my downloads jumped from 26Mps to 31Mps when I moved from BT to AAISP, YMMV.
I assume you're talking about a PlayTV? I have one, bought shortly after launch for £69.99 and still have it. I dumped Sky at the time which was £40 a month so it's paid for itself.
So basically it turns your PS3 into a PVR. You are limited by the size of your PS3's HD, with my first 80GB PS3 that meant that I could only record about 10 hours of stuff, when that failed I got one with a bigger HD and it stores more. It has some social media bits, you can live chat with people while watching the same program, post what you are watching to Facebook and recommend stuff to PSN friends to watch.
As I PVR it's fine, only drawback is it takes about 15 seconds to start. Also twice in the last few years the software got corrupted and I had to reinstall, unfortunately I lost my recordings both times. Bit of a pain and a common problem. Also it upscales the picture to HD apparently but I never really noticed the difference. Speaking of HD, you can't view/record HD channels on it, this is a hardware limitation, not software so will never be fixed.