Posts by Number6

Sounds a bit like the old Microsoft tax where the customers didn't want to refuse because they were afraid that would cost them more than agreeing. At least Apple aren't demanding a fee per phone sold regardless of whether it's running iOS or not, but they seem to have found a way of squeezing the smaller competition to their advantage.

Voicemail?

It helps that I've never bothered to set up (and presumably pay for) Skype voicemail. This small fact didn't stop 68 (so far) voicemail notifications landing in my junk mail account, but at least I wasn't tempted in the slightest to open any of them. Having my own domain and using different email addresses for different organisations makes it really easy to filter the crap, most of it comes in to the wrong address and on the very faint chance that one manages to guess the correct one, the presence of all the other near-identical messages to other addresses surrounding it show it up as a fake.

If I could have an Android phone that started with a basic internet browser capable of accessing the internet and the app store for downloading apps (which could then come from places other than Google), then that would be a really good start. No unwanted apps taking up space and stealing my data. How about it, Eric? Android without needing Google at all.

The 80s

I have to agree with the steady decline in the 80s. I think Peter Davison was capable of much better than the scripts they gave him, and by the time Colin Baker came along, I was right on the edge of giving up on Dr Who. Then he picked up a gun and shot a cyberman and I decided that was it - a proper script would have had him get out of that without needing to shoot.

Did the silver lining fall out of the cloud?

My school got one sometime in 1980, and I had the chance to spend a fair amount of time on it in the sixth form, including doing a Computer Science A-level (completely self-taught, the teacher was learning from me and what I did so he could teach the following year). I remember poring through the BIOS listing (including the Lewis Carroll quotes), working out how to do floating point maths and other things. The circuit diagrams were equally instructive, and I used some of the tricks in my home-made computer that I built around then. I even remember being the person who installed the RAM upgrade because I knew how to do it. Fortunately it still worked afterwards...

Amy and Rory benefit because their stories were mostly single episodes, so they could get through a lot i a single run. Back in the classic days, they were often 4-part or 6-part stories, so you might only get three or four in a season/series.

List bigger on the inside

Of course, that's the good thing about Dr Who, just like the Tardis, a list of the ten best can contain more than ten when you look into it.

this kind of accounting goes down very badly with US authorities.

They're probably more forgiving if it's totalling up your deductions.

Better storage

I wouldn't trust my email to an SD card, since playing with Sheevaplugs and Pis, I've had several cases of corruption on SD cards, including one in the past week. However, I run my mail server on a Sheevaplug with an external hard disk for more reliable storage. That's the one where the SD card went dodgy, but a quick swap out for a new one and it's all up and running again. I need to look at the configuration a bit more closely to eliminate as many writes to the SD card as possible.

As with anything, provided you've got backups of important data, it's recoverable. The only reason cloud providers are safe (and then not always) is because they do have some redundancy in their system. at least with your own personal IMAP server, you've got full control over your own email, and if it's a small, low-powered device, it can be left on and configured so you can access it remotely from your smartphone.

Thunderbirds are Go

We need Thunderbird 2 to go chase the satellite down as it re-enters, just like it did when they thought Rick O'Shea was on board.

I assume it's down somewhere by now.

One hopes that those of us who can only afford cattle class will be spared because the ones who can afford the phone bill will all be closer to the front of the aircraft in the posher seats.

I still have my home-made Z80 machine from about 1982, and it even worked last time I powered it up. It was loosely based on the MK14, in that it had eight 7-segment displays and a hex keypad. I ripped off the single-step mechanism from the RML380Z (reset a counter that gave an NMI after a number of M1 cycles) so I could debug stuff and examine the register states. I was quite pleased with it, considering I was still at school when I did most of it. The code almost worked first time too, the display scanning was off one digit because it wasn't clear with the repetitive OUT instructions whether the B register was decremented before or after it was put on the high order address bits (I was pointing to a memory buffer, selecting the display port and using the countdown in the B register to index the digit being addressed).

It doesn't have to just be the dull weirdos, some quite entertaining ones can write code too.

Anyway, coding is the last[*] stage of a much bigger process - in order to write code, one has to have given some thought to what the finished item is supposed to do and how to do it. It's often done by breaking things into ever smaller blocks until the coding side of things becomes relatively trivial because the block complexity is low. Algorithms are the key.

Not everyone has a brain suitable for writing software. In the same way that we're not all great artists, musicians and theoretical physicists, some people find it hard to handle the mindset required for good code design. So no, it shouldn't be forced on every child, because to some it will not be relevant, but ICT should be far more than just learning how to drive MS Word, Powerpoint and Excel, which is what it seems to have become.

[*] Not strictly true, testing, debugging and verification should all come afterwards. If you get it right first time, the debugging can be skipped.

Nuclear Power

How many people have seen the level of technology in the computers controlling the old Magnox (I think there's still one running) and AGR nuclear power stations in the UK? They never upgraded, they stuck with what had been tried and tested.

I avoid it by not having a G+ account, so I have no friends so they can't advertise to me.

I'm going to need a US SIM next week, perhaps I'll call into a T-Mobile store and see what they've got to offer. The ability to call UK landlines cheaply certainly stands out, although it'll still be competing with VoIP/Skype for my business.

I wish they'd come and test them all in my house, then I wouldn't have to clean the floors.

I want an upgrade to my Aspire One in the same general form factor capable of running Linux as a standalone computer. The AA1 is five years old now and still doing fairly well, but is beginning to creak. A shame someone can't do an upgrade motherboard that would fit in the same case, with the same connectors on it, but I suspect the market would be rather small.

You are not being monitored...

So just give your subscribers a little flag that tells them all is well, and delete it if not. One is not allowed to tell people they are being monitored, but in the best traditions of US lawyers mangling the law, why not tell them they aren't being monitored until it's not possible to do so truthfully?

Note to self...

Remember to ask for a written statement that the phone I buy will work anywhere in the world with any valid SIM in it.

I'd be concerned if my microwave was leaking enough energy that it was worth collecting it.

I guess in the colder months you could cut out the middleman and stand next to it to keep warm...

Wrong Approach

Having been on the receiving end of what I consider to be LinkedIn spam caused by someone giving them access to their email contact list, I've always avoided ever letting them know anything about my contact list. I was a relatively late adopter of LinkedIn precisely because of the automatic messages it used to send me.

They should modify the approach a bit, and make it a two-stage process. The first would be to send invites to those who are already known to LinkedIn based on matching addresses to known accounts, but then there should be a positive prompt to ask which of the rest of the contacts you'd like to invite to join LinkedIn. That way you do at least knowingly spam your contact list.

Automatic Windows updates over the years should have provided a salutary lesson in why you don't let the machine do updates unsupervised. I always set systems, whatever the OS, to tell me when they've got updates available, but never, ever to install them without asking.

If it's a big production system, you don't do updates until you've tried it on your test system and demonstrated that it's going to work with your set-up.

Hardware is good

The sad thing is that Microsoft's hardware is usually of a very high standard. Think of the mice and keyboards that just worked and still work, and the game consoles. Had they not locked in the RT tablets with this secure boot nonsense, they'd probably have sold a lot more of them, even if most people removed Windows and installed Android or Linux instead.

Orientation

so don't be surprised if the whole thing goes titsup at some point.

Mount the tits on the correct part of the fuselage so that when they are up, the net result is that it's still pointing in the right direction.

The Delete key?

For a one-off I use the delete key. For more persistent irritating stuff like "your timesheet is now (over)due" I set up a mail forwarding rule to auto-delete. That's how I would have dealt with a storm like that described, although I might have gone back and laughed at some of the emails in the deleted items mailbox later.