Posts by StripeyMiata

Re: "Patch Tuesday" vs "Reboot one of the 6800s?: WTF!"

My record was a OpenVMS VaxCluster at 900 days.

Re: mulii-core killed Itanic

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 know someone who paid £60 for an upgrade disk/license to upgrade their Win98 PC to WinMe.

Re: I worked at Icera

Think I had one of the chipsets in a phone I once owned, a BlackPhone BP1. From what I remember they didn't really do many other models apart from that one and a clone that ran standard Android.

Re: Clarity needed here

The plastic cover that covers the rear towing eye on my 2015 Ford Fiesta fell off recently. Ford wanted £38.99 for a bit of plastic.

Bought a copy off eBay for £2.99 delivered.

Re: Exactly!

VIA Processors aren't affected by Spectre and run Windows 7, they are hard to find though. I had to build my own desktop one a few years ago.

https://www.viatech.com/en/silicon/processors/

Re: I know it's unlikely

Back in the days when wireless mice were rare we stuck a USB receiver in the back of our bosses laptop and every now and again would move his mouse pointer around the screen.

We got away with it for about 6 months.

Re: Sometimes way too many stores

There are three in Belfast City Centre, all within 5 minutes walk from each other.

HTC First - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_First

Was a massive flop for what it's worth.

Re: Z10 Became Quite Good

Can confirm, my wife got a Z10 about a year after launch and she used it as her only phone for 3 years, just needed a new battery after year 2. Then got a Z30 which was even better.

But now like 1/2 the world is now using an iPhone.

Re: Maybe it's just not worth upgrading anymore

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.

Re: Virgin Media Tivo

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.

Re: Hard to believe

No movie, but I can recommend this book - http://amzn.to/2vm3Xns

And there is a good one about BlackBerry as well - http://amzn.to/2vlRznr

Re: Good tip

Undertakers still use them in my experience.

Re: Just can't make it work?

My wife has a Z10, and I use the BBM app on my iPhone to keep in touch, including voice calls, it works great.

FireFoxOS is all HTML

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

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 think build quality must have suffered during the Compaq days, we had one of these and it was a dog reliability wise compared to the Vaxen - http://www.compaq.com/info/CU9803/CU9803HM.HTM

Re: The cynic yahoo bashing gets old

I'm still daily use my Rocketmail address from 1997, it's not glamorous but "just works". Can't remember the last time it went down.

Gmail/Outlook.com Contacts and Calendar are better though I have to admit.

Re: if any of them actually provided a decent service

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.

Re: Clarification needed (for me!)

I have this in my Ford Fiesta, only works if I have a phone linked to the car's Ford SYNC system via Bluetooth.

I assume however if I have a £10 Nokia without GPS it can only make a phone call.

Re: A major omission...

There used to be a 911 Turbo that did the school run near where I live, I was secretly rather impressed. Then one day she turned up in a Cayenne instead :(

Re: Dual SIM

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).

Re: Not any more. They fixed the performance around the time of going 64 bit

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.

I suspect it how he got to that is that I assume the major UK ISPs control 80% of the market, so that causes an 80% drop with the block.

Total bollocks if that's how he worked it out.

Re: Glad I Jumped...

@ 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.

Re: Didn't Sony do this a few years ago?

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.

Re: BT

My HomeHub5 used to prompt me everytime I connected a new device until I replaced it with a Cisco one. The MyBT site prompted me for the first time a few days ago, ironically because I was getting my account details to get a MAC code to leave them.