COMPUTERS, THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY

[PanBiker]

I concur there Kev, I think the rule here is still what I used to tell my customers when I was system building. "If it aint broke don't fix it". Sledgehammer to crack a nut also comes to mind. The speed of development now ensures that virtually all core components are obsolete as soon as they come to market.

[Stanley]

Ah well, there you are.... However, I suspect you look at things differently than I do. I love the speed with which this machine does big tasks like image searches or loading programmes. (I seem to remember being told the same thing three years ago when I got the FMII but I have never regretted it.) So I shall refine the spec and get some quotes and when I've done it the FMII will be for sale at a reasonable price loaded with Ubuntu 10.4 64bit. If anyone is interested in it, just let me know. Still a brilliantly fast box. Call it an Old Fart's fancy, it will cost me less than a weekend away in a hotel....

[hartley353]

There are not many things I regret in my life, with the exception of the 1200 hrs of study I spent on studying computer maintenance I made a big mistake in being pursuaded this was the future and got out of it as fast as i got in. The computer is a tool not a life style.

[Tizer]

Stanley, plenty of RAM will deal with your searches and loading programmes fast - the rest can be standard unless you're taking up gaming as a new hobby!

[Whyperion]

Tripps , ya_oo are asking for mobile or contact number , but it comes up on a page that appears immediately after you have logged in and has the option to skip/remind later.

On Emails ( I only use the browser version ) you can right ? left ( cannot remember ) mouse hover over link name to see actual link , you will probably find the actual click link is not to any recognised location but some dubious source, ya_00 mail was recently hacked apparently and assorted email addresses have been spammed to and from etc.

You can also select the option to view headers which shows the (nearly) true originations and routing paths of the email , which can be useful to know.

The odd work-related laptop in Barnoldswick I use opera on as browser and it was confusing ya_oo ( unless was the work set-up adsl box ), so could not easily reply to emails and for sending new it wanted captcha codes completed and stating me email had suspicious activity linked with it , come back down to London and on FF no probs with that system at all, other than re-adjusting to a proper located keyboard again after a long weekend of one that is shifted to the right comparitaviley.

[Stanley]

Tiz, FMIII will have 16gb of DDR3 so I think it will be adequate! Pluggy came back with a revised spec that has a non-overclocked quad core chip and a less 'gamy' motherboard. Includes card reader for flash cards etc. I've taken his advice and told him to go ahead, no point mucking about and I haven't bothered to check 3M's price, it will be about the same and Pluggy gives a package. I'll always support a local business!!
Thinking about 'using a sledgehammer to crack a nut' syndrome yesterday I remembered a day over 40 years ago when we had a visit at Hey Farm from one of my dad's old mates, Reg Lawley (He was about 75 years old...). He had always been into cars and he climbed out of the new black XK140 coupé dressed in a fitted black overcoat with velvet faced collar. My Dad asked him why the XK and he said I got it because I like driving it.

[Tripps]

"The computer is a tool not a life style." I think this a very wise statement, and certainly true for me. I've always considered that what you do when you get there is much more important than what type of car you travelled in.

LInux has been suggested by many, and I will give it another try. I have sent for a disk which I will try to install on my little netbook computer. Wish me luck. I remain concerned about the internet in general. However, I don't think Linux will prevent my Yahoo account being tapped into by someone abroad?

I get an email every two days from facebook - which I joined a while ago out of curiosity, but am not active on, asking me to be "friends" with Richard Starkie. I don't know this gentleman, but I seem to remember his name from this site some time ago. How can Facebook connect him to me? I did not allow facebook access to my email address book, but somehow they have made the connection. It's all a bit sinister.

[Big Kev]

"The computer is a tool not a life style." I think this a very wise statement, and certainly true for me. I've always considered that what you do when you get there is much more important than what type of car you travelled in.

LInux has been suggested by many, and I will give it another try. I have sent for a disk which I will try to install on my little netbook computer. Wish me luck. I remain concerned about the internet in general. However, I don't think Linux will prevent my Yahoo account being tapped into by someone abroad?

I get an email every two days from facebook - which I joined a while ago out of curiosity, but am not active on, asking me to be "friends" with Richard Starkie. I don't know this gentleman, but I seem to remember his name from this site some time ago. How can Facebook connect him to me? I did not allow facebook access to my email address book, but somehow they have made the connection. It's all a bit sinister.

Richard Starkie is Ringo, not seen him on here for a while.

[Pluggy]

I wouldn't worry about Facebook finding people you don't know. I get spam everyday asking if I know people I've never heard of. On-line 'friends' and real world friends are two entirely unrelated entities. My daughter has literally hundreds of friends on Facebook, she doesn't know most of them when I ask.....

[hartley353]

"The computer is a tool not a life style." I think this a very wise statement, and certainly true for me. I've always considered that what you do when you get there is much more important than what type of car you travelled in.

LInux has been suggested by many, and I will give it another try. I have sent for a disk which I will try to install on my little netbook computer. Wish me luck. I remain concerned about the internet in general. However, I don't think Linux will prevent my Yahoo account being tapped into by someone abroad?

I get an email every two days from facebook - which I joined a while ago out of curiosity, but am not active on, asking me to be "friends" with Richard Starkie. I don't know this gentleman, but I seem to remember his name from this site some time ago. How can Facebook connect him to me? I did not allow facebook access to my email address book, but somehow they have made the connection. It's all a bit sinister.

Richard Starkie is Ringo, not seen him on here for a while.

Recently I tried to contact a friend in Canada, I knew his wife worked for safeway Canada. A site called Linkedin had all her details,and offered to pass on my message for a small fee. One of the first things this site did was to copy my address book, luckily I had it protected. So I went back to the old ways and sent an airmail letter.

[Tripps]

"I wouldn't worry about Facebook finding people you don't know

It's not people I don't know that concerns me, it's people with whom I have a very tenuous link such as Ringo. I don't recall communicating directly with him, but I may have. The only thing we can have in common is use of this site. I don't see that Facebook should make this connection, and without making a mountain out of a molehill, think it's an intrusion into my privacy.

I read recently that the IT man's dream is that on entering a shop, your face would be scanned, recognised from a database, then personalised adverts would be sent to your mobile phone in an instant. Nightmare - not dream.

PS - nothing personal Ringo - they also are pushing my son's father in law. Goodness knows how they got to him, I've only met him about a dozen times, he's not on this site, and I've and never communicated electronically with him.

PS - Later that evening.
Getting spooky now - tonight's email has dropped the usual suspects, and now wants me to meet ten total strangers. Do you think they've read this post?

[Tizer]

Tripps, do you have the facility to add email addresses to a spam blacklist on your computer? If so, you could put the Facebook email address in the list, as long as you don't want any messages from them at all. If you can't do it on your PC you can go to your Plusnet account and put it on a blacklist there - together with any other email addresses you want to block. In the same way you can add `good' (wanted) email addresses to the white list to ensure they are never filtered out as spam.

[Stanley]

I hate those networking sites. I'm probably a member of one or two since the very early days but never get contacted. My recent change of email address might have helped as well;.
Computers are evidently a life style for some people because the only component Pluggy is waiting for is the conservative black tower case. Plenty of big cases with multiple LEDs and fans that look like arcade machines. No rush.

[hartley353]

i have seen some very fast,liquid cooled machines in my time,but I have never seen one where the output is for human consumption, that needed to be fast. Processing done in nano seconds,then sat around for weeks till some one looked at it,if ever. fast home computing offers no benefits,most folks spend time on the computer to pass time, so where's the rush. What will you do with the time saved, spend it on the computer sounds like a dog chasing its tail. Theres a whole world out there why look at it through a wire.

[Tizer]

Tripps, having only recently read and replied to your message about spam and Facebook etc, this morning I received a bunch of emails from a web site called Skill Pages all trying to get me to join. They all say something like "Joe Bloggs has invited you to join..." and the names are of people I have known as colleagues in my career. It's obvious that someone who shared the same group of colleagues has joined and put in a lot of email addresses of those colleagues, probably thinking he/she was doing us all a favour. The emails all come from no-reply@skillpagesmail.com so I've gone into my Plusnet ISP account, to `Email settings', `Manage My account', click the `Spam' tab, check that my main email domain name is showing in the dropdown menu where it says `Choose my domain', and tick the box under it saying `Apply these settings to all my domains'. Then scroll down to the bottom of the page where it says `White/Blacklist Filtering' and I added no-reply@skillpagesmail.com to the `Blocked Addresses' list. You can add any `wanted' (safe) addresses to the `Approved' list at the same time to ensure they never get filtered out. I updated my list of approved address, so thanks for prompting me with your post!

[Stanley]

Hartley, thanks for your valuable opinion. However, you are totally wrong about fast computers in the home. It took me three year's concentrated effort to scan the LTP transcripts using OCR on the old IBM with a 75mhz chip and 500mb of Ram and If I had been running the FMI never mind the later ones, I'd have saved two years, most of the time was spent waiting for the output to process. I've written over twenty books and you have evidently never tried to work with a 200mb file containing hundreds of images. In Word2k it's impossible, the programme crashes, with Open Office and a fast computer they load instantly. Have you ever made a film with Adobe Premier? I've made several and I can tell you that it demands very high process speeds and memory. Searching large data bases and pulling images out can be a pain, with this machine I can search 25,000 images and have them up on the screen instantly. Do not spend any time worrying about what I do with the time I save, in case you haven't noticed apart from my reading I have a pretty impressive output of articles and I can assure you the correspondence is even greater. So, in short, you run your life and I'll run mine, one thing is certain, I shan't be sat watching the blue blocks creeping slowly across the completion bar!
By the way, others share my opinion, the FMII is spoken for and will go to a good home at a reasonable price. Some people actually need speed to do ever more complicated tasks on the kitchen table.
(And apart from anything else I love being out on the edge with a fast machine. Bit like Reg driving his XK140....)
Pluggy has found a nice unobtrusive case with no bling so we are both happy bunnies. I'll bet he's looking forward to testing it because he likes fast machines as well.

[hartley353]

Sorry stanley if you took this personally. But i stand by what i say. Millions of books have been written prior to the computer,even prior to the typewriter, and illustrated the time it takes is immaterial. Writing is not a race once written it may be a hundred years before it is read, your own choice of reading proves this. The best selling book ever was never truly appreciated for 1700 years.

[Pluggy]

Pluggy has found a nice unobtrusive case with no bling so we are both happy bunnies. I'll bet he's looking forward to testing it because he likes fast machines as well.

This is it running BBC IPlayer, the little lump in the CPU graph at the end is the screen grab.

8 cores, drool....

I want one.

[Whyperion]

What would save some time ( with cloud computing ) , would be Google ( or other search engines ) to do a few extra tasks - like omit duplicate entries if requested - had a lot come up of same thing which were re-tweets or re-blogs where the web address differed but the content was essentially the same, another to search for similar images if an image file uploaded to compare.

[Tripps]

Well - I've successfully installed Precise Pangolin on my little netbook, thinking that's where it could do least damage.
It went on like a dream with no problems at all. Should have quit whilst I was winning. Tried to put it on my big laptop, but am failing up to now. Says "panic detected returning to something....." then hard drive quietly hums away for a couple of hours till I get bored and switch it off. One had XP, and the other had Vista. Maybe that's the problem. Onwards and upwards.
At least windows still works.

[Pluggy]

Most of the problems revolving around installing Ubuntu are usually the CD drive not liking the CD. Sometimes a machine with faulty memory will work on Windows and not on Linux (or vice versa) because they load themselves into opposite ends of the memory map and utilise memory in entirely different ways. You do get odd machines (very few) that linux doesn't have drivers for and fail because some part of the hardware won't start.

[Tripps]

Tried again, and it seems to have gone in OK this time. Late now will try it out later......

[Stanley]

Sounds as though we have hit the spot Pluggy! (He sent me a fuller report and I think we have a fast machine). Bit of a hold up because they sent the wrong card reader for the case but no sweat. Guess what Plugs will be doing today while the snow falls.... They call it 'burning in' but I suspect he'll just be trying to find what it's limit is!
I was telling Doc about my favourite way of estimating the speed of a computer in the W98 days. If you successfully completed Solitaire the cards fell over gracefully in a flowing motion. The faster the machine, the faster they fell!
By the way, the FMI is in a new case and is now the main navigational computer on Doc's yacht That's the machine he and I built which revolutionised my thinking about fast machines.... The FMII will have a new home as soon as the FMIII is installed. Good result all round and three Happy Bunnies.....

[Tizer]

Dabs/BT have let him down on my order too - duff hard drive and duff power unit. I remember when they sent me a duff motherboard. Dabs used to be considered the best but you begin to wonder if it's a case of resting on laurels. Small businesses like Pluggy don't need the extra burden of unreliable suppliers. At least Pluggy says your machine is going together fine.

[Pluggy]

I don't think its a fast machine, I know its fast machine. I see too many underpowered machines struggling under the load of Windo$e spyware and general cr*p. This is the opposite end of the spectrum. It does anything I throw at it without getting much above tickover. The case is nice too....

I would have liked them to provide a bigger sticker with the processor, its the same size as provided with Intel's lesser processors. When you've got a machine to kick sand in the face of practically every other PC on the planet, just a hint of 'showing off' would be nice. It doesn't consume an excess of electric either, its sat here at idle at 56 watts, it gets up to about 3 times that figure when booting. Full screen iPlayer pushes it up to 60-64 watts.

I'll have to start saving my pennies....

BTBD's attitude to returns makes me sick. Its not great having the bulk of Tizers machine sat here in bits. BTBD/Dabs are too big and too arrogant. I'm going to find another supplier.