Posts by megastream

MP resigns as security committee chair amid 'cash-for-access' claims

Much Ado

I remember bootstrapping a PDP8 from the front panel switches, and building one of the first Altairs in Europe - so that should fix me as a correspondent of mature years.

I'll start by repeating a previous responder - all parliamentary outside work is listed in the members interests register - i.e. it is not hidden behind closed doors.

An MP's salary is less that a school headmaster and substantially less than a GP or Dentist.

How on earth do you expect professional people to become MPs, while forbidding them to take on additional external work - particularly if they have served their country in one of the highest offices, and were paid at rate which would make even a junior banker sneer.

I certainly would not consider it.

Slideshow: A History of Intel x86 in 20 CPUs

Re: Id be interested to see...

I started with the 8008 on a board assembled by DEC. I remember developing cross assemblers on a PDP11 using the DEC Macro Assembler. Then it was on to the 8080 - building one of the first Altairs in Europe. I recollect that we had problems getting our first floppy drive working, until we realised that there were different types of hardware and software formatted floppies. Then we started on developing a very crude disk operating system, but later switched over to the excellent CPM from Gary Kildall. For a while after we moved onto x86 processors we continued to run CPM86, but eventually DOS dominated. A weakness in the 8 bit processors, and in the early x86 processors was the lack of hardware floating point hardware. I recollect that Intel did produce a biploar logic board which carried out floating point operations, and consumed lots of amps and went through many revisions. Eventullay there was a chip for the 8085 family, but this was outclassed by the 8087 co-processor for the x86 family, when it eventually became available. This was a great leap forward in real time controllers which were solving differential equations - no need to try and improve speed by scaling everything to work in integers. Back in the bad old days, I remember an 8080 Fortran compiler making a wrong decision on a comparison of two integers - because the difference in the integers was out of integer range. The un-controlled machine was halted with the panic button.

Happy days!

Femto fail: Vodafone's Sure Signal gets a bit shaky again

And the Sure Signal failure fiasco continues.

Customer Relations are now phoning users, and telling them that the problem has just been fixed - so go through the reset procedure again, and wait for a few hours. And of course - nothing happens, and the promised call back to check that it is working doesn't happen either.

Re: Happy user for many years here

"It is briliant..."

when it works - but for many of us it hasn't worked since Friday, and the only response from Vodafone is "Keep Trying the Reset Procedure" - apparently for some users this sometimes works. For the rest of us - no other solution is offered.

I'm Affected

I seem to be in the minority - my Sure Signal has been dead since Friday. The Vodafone help eforum is next to useless. It keeps telling us to reboot - to no avail. And they refuse to answer the simple question "Do Vodafone know what the problem is?" Rumour has it that they have been carrying out a software upgrade.

I have finally escalated the problem to the CEO's Office. Interestingly their email feedback form insisted on knowing my mobile number, and they promised a call-back! Maybe CEOs can fix Sure Signal Boxes