Yeah, yeah Matt - get some things right from the start

The number of versions of WP that gave the initial account the default username of 'Admin' is disgracefully high.

It is even worse how the basic WP install does not do 'fail to get the password in n (for low n) attempts and your IP is banned for m hours (for high m)', and you have to rely on a plugin to do it for you. Limit Login Attempts is my recommendation, as it just does this, without the messing around with everything it can find of the one mentioned above.

Graph shock shock shock

I am amazed that I am the first person to point out that the first graph shows that the final market share of every OS is nil.

I will probably run one PC with XP for years after the end of support. It will be for playing games and it won't be allowed near the internet.

A quick reminder that the recipe for Coca-Cola is published

It's in a book on the history of the company and led to a rash of 'American Cola' drinks from everyone from Sainsbury's to Virgin.

Coca-Cola reckon that it doesn't matter if anyone else makes an identical drink - they have better marketing than anyone else, in the same way that there are people who will pay a premium for an Apple logo on kit.

I probably bought 1% of those sold

I got a 48k one when they came out. The keyboard was vastly better than the one on the Spectrum I had and about as good as a friend's Beeb. Somewhat to my surprise, and his annoyance, some of the then popular PCW benchmarks for BASIC ran faster on the Lynx too. Provided you were prepared to wait and didn't expect anything to move, you could do some nice displays on the screen.

But Camputers were soon forced to sticker over the 'RS-232' bit on the box, because it wasn't actually completely RS-232 compatible. If you used a TV, getting a stable picture was problematic because of how much resolution they tried to put on the screen. And the graphics speed was painfully slow: as everything was done as three giant (for the time) bit maps, this meant anything involving the screen involved manipulating three different sets of bits. It's a sign of how bad it was that a software scroll was technically possible, but would have been so embarrassingly slow, they didn't bother. You could type a command - 'TEXT', I think, and memory is telling me it was undocumented in the manual - which just used the green bit map, but the lack of a proper text mode meant it was unusable for writing on compared to the Beeb.

I got rid of the 48k when I got an Atari 800 - a superb bit of kit - but, argh, there were things I missed from the Lynx (the Atari had then unparalleled power for animated displays, but the Lynx's static graphics were better). When Camputers went under, the 96ks had a big price drop. Even so, I still remember the look of disbelief on the shop assistant's face when I asked for one, a Lynx junkie returning for a fix.

Some of the ROM issues had been fixed - although I think the serial port was still pointedly not labelled RS-232 - and it was a nice bit of kit, but... there really is no point in being the only kid on your block with one and when the Amstrad CPC6128 came out, I pounced. Adding a 5 1/4" drive was trivial and I had the machine that the Lynx wanted to be. It got bank switching right, it had a proper CP/M, and you could get a 80 column monitor.

I sold the Lynx on eBay a few years ago for about what I paid for it, albeit losing a big chunk because of inflation.

Had Camputers been properly capitalised, they could have used a ULA to cut the manufacturing cost (as someone else said, the insides were standard 74LS series chips) and competed better on price. But what killed it was the single slow bitmap graphics mode, because that doomed it in the critical games market.

Is it just me

Or does the view on the left look better than the one on the right?

Yes, if you want to see something that's under a cloud, it's not very useful, but which would you rather have on your screen or wall?

How do I get a job

Talking crap about stuff I know very little about, like some of those speakers?

(Obviously there will be stiff competition from many people here, but still...)

Paris, because being paid to be braindead is what she does.

"dropped 40 per cent in five years, from around $40 per share in 2008 to about $15 today"

Erm, that's more than 50%.

Ignoring the IT aspect for a second

This is going to be a disaster, if implemented as Gove wants.

Seventy something years ago, my mother did her General Certificate. That consisted of about eight papers, including arithmetic ('The Atlantic Ocean is a miles, b furlongs, c poles, d feet and e links wide. The Queen Mary crosses it in m days, n hours, o minutes and p seconds. What is her average speed?'), English, French and several others, fixed by the exam board. If she had failed a single paper, she would have failed her Certificate. Fortunately, she didn't and ended up as a teacher.

I did O-Levels, where the papers were more or less the same standard but I could fail French (so badly, it doesn't appear on my certificates) and still have an academic life thanks to A grade passes in everything else. I could choose, within the limits of the school's ability to find the teaching time, any subjects I wanted to do. Result: happiness... for everyone not stuck at a Secondary Modern doing CSEs.

With the ending of the 11+ in most counties, a single age 16 exam was clearly necessary. I understand and applaud the basic principle behind GCSE: if you can prove you know something, you get the exam points for it. It is not, as O-Levels were, a 'find the top x% of children in this subject' exam. So given increasing years of experience, it is not surprising that results increasingly improved.

It is also not surprising that Gove doesn't like them. But rather than - as he claims - going back to O-Levels (something he probably did not take himself, being educated in Scotland) he's actually going back to the General Certificate: fail one - because you thought Newton developed the laws of Thermodynamics, say - and you fail your Bacc.

Suggested questions for a new multi-subject exam:

Put the following into an ordered 'List of Death': Cameron, Hague, Osborne, May, Duncan Smith, Grayling, Gove, Pickles, Hunt, Warsi. Give reasons. (Two hours 59 minutes, extra paper is available.)

Eric Pickles ensured that councils which want to raise Council Tax by 2% have to call a referendum, and was surprised that several chose to raise it by 1.99%. Just how stupid can you be and still be a Cabinet Minister? (1 minute.)