* Posts by gw0udm

26 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Aug 2012

Sweet 16 and making mistakes: More of the computing industry's biggest fails

gw0udm

The QL has a TV modulator and RF output. Quite a strange choice for a business machine, although it does have an RGB port too

Where the computer industry went wrong – the early hits

gw0udm

Yes the PCW shipped with CP/M and a whole stack of DR tools including the GSX libraries and even demo software written in Mallard Basic which was also a pretty good dialect. You also got the MAC / RMAC assembler, SID debuggers and other toys. The problem was that there was almost nothing in the way of documentation shipped with the machine to tell you what they were or how to use them so I think most owners missed it completely. I got very frustrated by the line 'this utility is beyond the scope of this manual ' I think Amstrad might have had a more detailed one available ('consult your nearest dealer') but I never saw one and couldn't have afforded it anyway. Even so I had a great time with the PCW, even did a bit of assembly language but ultimately was so starved of information I had to give up.

Microsoft stumps loyal fans by making OneDrive handle Outlook attachments

gw0udm

The trouble with things like this is that they really hit the people who don't have very much knowledge or interest, and just want their email to work. I provide 'tech support' to various elderly family and friends, and at least one of them has been hit by this. She was completely bewildered and it took me a while to unpick exactly what had happened. She had chosen to use an MS account because it seemed a safe bet, and I'd left some backups on her Onedrive years ago when setting her computer up. Everything was well within the limits at the time. I had great difficulty trying to explain to her what had happened and quite reasonably she couldn't understand the connection between emails and some files on the computer. I'm afraid now that she will purge loads of old emails - even those she wants to keep - out of fear of something going wrong. Not wishing to stereotype but in my experience older people who rely heavily on email etc get very frightened about 'losing contact' and it's very upsetting for them when things like this happen.

I've sorted it out for now, but it does seem very mean spirited on Microsoft's part and will disadvantage those least able to adjust to it. Next time round I'll tell people to use Gmail instead.

Tavis Ormandy ports WordPerfect for UNIX to Linux

gw0udm

Wordpefect = the year of Linux on the desktop... or maybe not

I remember thinking that the key thing that was needed for me to use Linux exclusively on the desktop was a really good word processor which I didn't think existed back in the day. I was dead excited about Wordperfect for Linux... rushed home with it from the University computer cluster with the archive spread across a few floppies... but it was a disappointment. Blocky text, generally clunky feel... and straight to Word Pro on Windows for me.

CP/M's open-source status clarified after 21 years

gw0udm

Re: Amstrad PCW

I could definitely help you with this if you wanted, the originaly drive can be resurrected by replacing the drive belt or else I have the ability to get files off old disks too.

ZX Spectrum, the 8-bit home computer that turned Europe on to PCs, is 40

gw0udm

No rampack

There was no rampack or wobble for the 16k Speccy, that was the ZX81. There are stern warnings in the manual not to try using the ZX81 rampack too. The only way to upgrade was to add the ram chips to the motherboard

Happy birthday, Windows Vista: Troubled teen hits 15

gw0udm

I remember paying extra for the 'Ultimate edition' and being promised all these 'Ultimate extras' which would be exclusively released. In the end there were hardly any of these, a screensaver I think and a little robot arcade game. So that was a let down. However, I always liked the actual system - I had a decent spec PC and the experience was definitely more polished than before. Although I did love Windows XP, Vista did feel a bit more polished in places and a nicer experience. Not perfect by any means, but the driver changes felt welcome and whilst UAC was annoying you could see what they were triyng to do... and I seen plenty of havoc wrought by applications abusing their privileges in the hands of friends and family. So I think looking back it was a lot better than its reputation might suggest.

Back to school for Microsoft as it prises apart the repairable Surface Laptop SE

gw0udm

I do miss the old days... I have always bought ThinkPads, usually second hand ex-corp. I've not looked lately, but on the the old T61s and T500s you could download the service manual and strip the whole thing down to its component parts, almost every screw was itemised with a part / FRU number. Going even further back I remember upgrading the CPU in my old Thinkpad R50 (one of the last of the official IBM ones I think) several times, adding 'Centrino' (remember that?) branding among other things. I now have a 5th gen X1 Carbon and you can repair some bits but most of it is on the main board now and hard to get at or change.

A fifth of England's NHS trusts are mostly paper-based as they grapple with COVID backlog, warn MPs

gw0udm

Re: "improve productivity in an organisation severely short of staff"

Sadly this is no longer true. The GP system market is basically a duopoly, and the systems are old, clumsy and monolithic. They are also built from a small business mindset and do not scale. The market is stagnant and there is very little innovation. It is what happens when there is a lack of competition snd investment and suppliers rest on their laurels.

Beware the trainee with time on his hands and an Acorn manual on his desk

gw0udm

Re: A blast from the past!

Well he'd obviously been watching 'Wargames', I always made a point of typing 'lets play global thermonuclear war' into any computer I got my hands on.

Begone, Demon Internet: Vodafone to shutter old-school pioneer ISP

gw0udm

Re: And another old name is discarded...

I found a loophole in that Orange allowed free calls to 0800 numbers at that time including data. So I signed up with one of these services which you accessed via 0800 and got effectively free mobile internet over an infrared link to my phone.

Sadly Orange closed this without my noticing eventually and I got a huge bill... £150 in 2002 was a lot of money for me at the time!

College PRIMOS prankster wreaks havoc with sysadmin manuals

gw0udm

@David 132

Well we obviously learned something from those BBCs. Yes there was a Tube but not a Teletext adapter. There was a print server, and my favourite station (number 6, batch) which had an upgraded keyboard and was beautiful to type on.

Plus an ancient hard disk pack from a mainframe and a weird thing covered in switches which belonged to my friends Dad.

Yes I enjoyed my time there too but changed beyond recognition... They even let girls in, tsk tsk.

+1 for shivering in the cathedral too

gw0udm

Haha, well you and me were clearly both at the same school, no doubt we shared the room at some point! I remember the Gremlin, I always wanted it but never knew anyone cool enough to give it to me :-(

Poor old Mr Higgins could not cope, I still remember the fateful day when he kicked us all out because of "one of those wretched virus programs" and locked the door behind us, for it never to open again...

I did score a reasonable amount of quite nice BBC kit when they cleared the room out a few years later, although sadly not the fabled 6502 second processor. Still more sadly I later got rid of most of it but still have a couple of disk drives including a 3" model which I have never seen before or since on anything except an Amstrad.

gw0udm

Hmmm

Surely this is just an example of a poorly configured system? Almost by definition you'd think 'administrator' commands should only be available to administrators?

This reminds me of experiences in our school computer room in the late 1980s. We had a reasonably number of BBC Bs on a Econet network. Whilst there were various admin commands these were locked down, but a few clever kids in the school wrote various so-called 'crash programs' which could wreak all sorts of havoc. The simple versions simply dropped text (usually abusive) into the keyboard buffer, but the more advanced ones would scramble screens, lock up buffers, play sounds etc.

There was even a virus version which could be released and then silently spread itself from one computer to another causing random crashes. These so enraged the teacher in charge that he permanently closed the computer room - depriving us of BBC related goodies in the mid-1990s.

More constructive versions 'pushed' complete files across the network, and I do remember a synchronised rendition of 'Bones' which was great fun:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bd0WhebWTnk

NHS trusts splashed £260m on PCs in last four years

gw0udm

This stuff about hospital consultants is complete rubbish

Medical consultants are employees of the NHS Trust - so they are not contractors. GPs work in small businesses and are self-employed, but hospital consultants are straightforward employees and so are a normal part of the corporate machine.

'Real power' like in most businesses sits with the board and the executives. Consultants are an important groups of employees but they are not able to wield power any more than any other staff group.

NHS reply-all meltdown swamped system with half a billion emails

gw0udm

Re: Not Accenture

The issue here was that it was not obvious what had happened and definitely not obvious that it had gone to the whole NHS. All you saw when you received it was a handful of addresses, maybe 7 or 8. So if you did Reply All to that group you would not have expected the maelstrom that followed!

It was only after a couple of hours that the true extent of what had happened became apparent, by which time it was much too late.

NHS IT bod sends test email to 850k users – and then responses are sent 'reply all'

gw0udm

Re: Wasn't clear to begin with

Yeah... and now I'm kicking myself.

I thought it might just dissuade people but had I known the scale I would have kept it to myself. As above thought it was just a few people to start with.

Lesson learned!

gw0udm

Wasn't clear to begin with

I saw this starting early this morning but it was already too late to do anything about it.

I think some of the early repliers could be forgiven, as it was not at all clear from looking at the original test email what had happened. It was from 'R' and simply contained the innocous 'CroydonPractices' in the cc field, and so one might easily have assumed you had be included by mistake. Given the size of the NHS address book this is pretty common, as most of us have namesakes around the NHS somewhere with very similar addressess (eg I have an alter ego who is a radiographer, and I used to get emails about scout group meetings and all sorts of things intended for someone else with the same name).

It was only after an hour or so that it became clear what had happened, when the number of puzzled replies began to ramp up. I did send a 'please do not reply all to this email' early on so I have probably ultimately not helped, but at that point it was not clear how widely it had gone.

Really one should not be able to include so many addresses in a mailing list, and no doubt we will see such a measure coming in now. This is one of the perils of such a large internal email system with a single address book which has probably not received sufficient attention up to now.

Marketing... or how I lost my soul to Lagos

gw0udm

The basic idea of the project is good but the trouble is it has already been done better by others.

eg the EQ-3 MAX / HomeMatic range has a mature range of devices which work well and can easily be interfaced with computer control systems.

Also if you want something a bit more professional the Honeywell EvoHome does a similar job.

This would have been interesting five or six years ago but it's hard to see any real future in it sadly

When asked 'What's a .CNT file?' there's a polite way to answer

gw0udm

Re: I love these stories, it shows what a nasty, immature disfunctional bunch we are.

It was put to me once that you shouldn't do this, because the only people who really call you 'sir' are police officers and it means that you are in trouble. So bad associations.

Similarly, the only people one calls 'madam' are brothel keepers!

How long does it take an NHS doctor to turn on a computer?

gw0udm

Re: And your point is?

Err... they do need batteries! Or at least mine does.

Or do car keyfobs also work by magic?

Cambridge University Hospitals rated 'inadequate' due to £200m IT fail

gw0udm

Re: how many times...

Also there is no such thing as an 'off the shelf' system. Addenbrookes is using Epic, but any system you buy needs a huge amount of configuration to suit the individal site. This is true for any large scale system implementation I would think.

gw0udm

Re: Diktat

Unfortunately they weren't telling you the whole truth.

For as long as I can remember in hospitals nurses have always done this. It seems to almost an ingrained part of the culture and I've never seen a nurse write anything in a notebook. However I have seen very many paper towels used for noting down obs. Probably because they are always to hand and they don't need to be ordered separately.

It's not unsafe as such. Even if the system was working entirely properly they will probbaly still do this!

gw0udm

Re: Am I the only one

Funnily enough they certainly did not pay peanuts

At £50m initial cost with a total of £200m over 10 years it is one of the most expensive hospital IT projects we've seen in the UK.

Epic is a large American company and their way of working is entirely different and on a much grander scale than we are used to here.

IoT baby monitors STILL revealing live streams of sleeping kids

gw0udm

Re: Why do you need one?

We never used ours. I took the view that if you couldn't hear them crying then it couldn't be that bad... They usually stop if you leave them long enough anyway!

I can't believe the amount of paranoia that people have with video monitors, pressure pads, heart rate monitors etc. The human race has survived thousands of years without such things.

Ghostbusters

gw0udm

ZX Spectrum

This article relates to the Spectrum version of the game. The endgame on this platform did indeed consist merely of trying to get past Stay-Puft and that was it. I did download a snapshot of the end sequence once as although I did reach it once I didn't get past it. It was very disappointing... just a brief message.

I believe that other 8-bit platforms had a longer and more elaborate ending... but I've never seen those either

As always the best thing (especially the 128k version) was the music!