Posts by David Beck

You mean like RBS?

No they weren't

HASP queue fails with a few hundred student jobs waiting. Nothing like checking the listings taped to the inside of the computer room floor to ceiling windows showing the jobs completed and failed.

Was HASP talking to another machine? Mine was talking to the model 75 at TUCC.

Re: Meanwhile in a brand new street with brand new cable....

Why would anyone down vote this comment?

Anyone who has moved into a new build will know that this is the norm. My postcode was not known by several suppliers, energy if I remember correctly were the worst, for two years after the development was finished. BT knew the house only by the original plot number and the post office only by the assigned house number, two unrelated identifiers. Anyone know why postcodes and house numbers are not assigned when the builder's planning is approved?

Re: doughnut

KrispyKreme originals, food of the Gods.

Re: z/series assembler...

The longevity is more attributable to the quality and constraint of IBM hardware design, both the original Gene Amdahl work and the thousands of engineers who could have easily fucked it up with each iteration.

I wonder how much BAL code is still running today in major systems, not just those small routines which required BAL to get the job done? Is ACP still booking flights?

The OS's are now coded for the most part in a thin PL/1 (SPL?, too many years) and when I say now I mean since the late 1970's, but lots of bare metal code, interrupt handlers, device and channel drivers were still in BAL even after the recode.

Anyway I'm out of here,

LM 14,12,12(13)

BR 14

New Way?

I learned about "passing by reference or value" in 1967, using those words. If that's the "new way" then what was the "old way"?

New?

We can add that Chiltern already has free wifi. So what exactly is being added?

Re: Boost GDP by £260bn?

Why would having a UK Netflix account help you in Brussels? You will only have access to the Belgian library, in French and Flemish. What happened to the Common Market? A lawyer heard about it.

Re: Lies, damned lies and statistics...

Agree 100%. If you want a 4in or sub 4in screen your choice is a landfill Chinese Android or a "compact" model with no power, no memory and all the bloat of the full fat version. I'm surprised 2% found a suitable phone. I'm currently using a Moto G 4G, not for the 4G but for the smaller screen (4.5in) and SD card. If I could dump KitKat and find a version of Android 4.2 or 4.3 for it I'd almost be a happy man.

Re: Short memories

I owned a Palm Treo too and am still waiting for a calendar app as good as the one on the Treo. Mind you I just had a play with the last Palm I owned, a Centro with Palm OS, and I realised how simple the UI was and how easy it was to run with a single hand. No obscure graphics to try to remember what app lay underneath, neatly classified pages of apps, a real keyboard that I could use without looking and know when the key was pressed. All terrible stuff when now you can push around little pictures and watch magnificent "transitions" before your very eyes. Shiny, all very shiny.

EE 4G in Chipping Norton too

Can't imagine why.

Exactly

Limit the roaming to 2G services.

No network is building out 2G anyway so no fewer base stations.

Since churn is created by poor service at home where wifi is available offering 2G roaming slows churn.

The networks tell us that data is the only way they can make money, this lets them prove it by taking voice and SMS out of the picture.

Make the 2G network only a utility.

Church spires

Almost every village has one, planners and networks don't like to use them for different reasons but can be convinced by "nimby'ism" to put them there even if it does cost more.

Re: difficult to master?

It also helps if you learn the language at the point in your life that your brain is most responsive to acquiring language, prior to the age of 12 in most of the literature, but as early as 6 months for selective sounds.

Re: Why were they called Winchesters?

At least one reason was the part/model number - 3030.

The biggest problem was training ops to NOT swap a disk to another spindle if they had a problem. I saw four sets of heads gone before the op twigged it was a faulty disk.

Also working amongest the drives you could get bumped as MVT decided to open a drawer to swap disks for an upcoming job.

Re: "Lets hope this is put a stop to it before they start putting them in."

I think you'll find that "UK Govt Grant" comes out of your pocket too.

And as I understand it, the energy retailer is supplying and fitting the meter so if you change to a different retailer they may require a new (read different) meter fitted. It's as if someone said," the energy industry is pretty f**ked up, how can we f**k is up some more?"

Re: Same old - Nokia Phones

Yes, E52 in hand. Still my travel phone since the maps are on the mSD card and battery will last a week.

Re: Just refuse to discuss it

Often the CS prologue says "The call may be recorded, ...". I take that to mean I am allowed to record the call. If they mean something else they should use less ambiguous language.

Re: @milesy and others who think corporate users get to configure their kit

Is that before or after the corporate IT guy images the official config on your Mac? I don't remember doing much work on the configuration of my corporate PC/laptop over the past 24 years. In fact I distinctly remember not being allowed to makes config changes or in some cases, able to make changes.

Re: Emulation?

In the case of the Dorados this includes arithmetic. Intel=32/64 bit twos complement, Unisys 1100=36/72 bit ones complement.

The Libras have equivalent challenges with what was originally hardware word typing (I think four type bits per word) but at least the words were multiples of 8 bits and the arithmetic was twos complement.

This might explain their reluctance to describe it in detail.

Re: Speaking of remembering

@Earl Grey -

LCS, I think little old ladies with needles, threading cores.

Note that S/360 could be programmed from the panel as well, you just had to write in machine code, in hex, a bit like kick starting a PDP8.

BTW, Fred Brookes got the job managing S/360 since he did so well on a special project for a 7000 Series "super computer", the 7030, better known as Stretch. Some of the 7000's were a bit compatible with each other I think, at least used the same data format, 36-bit words, one's compliment integers, 7090 and 7094 were sort of compatible. There were all sorts of 70x0 machines that weren't though.

I spent a bad summer working on old Fortran code which ran perfectly on a 7094 and not at all on a model 50.

Re: Why

Makes you think that a number of the comment makers here are not the bill payer. And I agree if the majority turn off the filters it sends real message.

Re: Not in the UK then....

Right, the work isn't done until the reptiles stop slithering.

Here here

I am now the proud? owner of four email addresses for TomTom since I manage the family's four GPS boxes.

1. TomTom allow one account to manage one GPS

2. TomTom do not allow "+" convention in the email address

Morons^2

Re: What happens when you are outside the UK?

Replying to myself, I just found the FAQ for the service.

"Most operators will provide the option to take your ‘bundled’ minute abroad ..."

This is of course completely wrong, most UK operators do not provide this. So they are assuming the punter is too thick to know or notice. They further suggest that even without these cheap (non-existent) minutes, it's still cheaper if you are calling outside the EU. Huh? I missed the part about how you can control the routing of the call, I was busy reading the part about how you didn't have to do anything for the call to automatically route via the service.

Looks like they almost have a product if you don't look too carefully, don't travel or always use local SIMs when you do.

Re: These guys seem to get that it's *all* about being able to run that legacy software

"Given that I doubt the mainframe register sets map very well onto the x*^ architecture this is a stunning achievement."

Amen to that, for the MCP machines they are emulating a machine where each word (I think 48bits) has a descriptor of n bits describing the current state of the word, as in - uninitialized, integer, instruction part, floating point part, characters, ... but at least the basic unit is 8bits and the arithmetic twos complement.

For the OS 2200 machines they are emulating the architecture of the 1100 series, which started life as an IBM 7094 alike, not an exact copy but similar architecture, 36bit words, one's complement arithmetic (for you non-computer people that means there is both positive and negative zero and all that entails) and given the natural word is 36bits the natural "byte" is 9bits. The emulated memory map must be a real mess.

Re: AC: This wasn't a hardware flaw. This wasn't a mainframe flaw.

Google also doesn't care if you get the "complete" answer to your query. If a section of the data is "down" then you just don't see that in the results. How'd that work with your bank account?

How few is still a "load"?

"...Aren't there a load of recent Nokia customers ..."

I'd venture there's not "a load of recent Nokia customers" in any state, given there's not a "load" of recent Nokia customers.