threegee

Nice short simple explanation of i7 here: http://computershopper.com/feature/what-is-the-core-i7 I like the idea of unused cores going to seep to save juice. But I'm really a flea power computing person who's happy with the new Atom desktop machines. Still, would like a genuine dual core Atom machine sometime though.

Cue to reveal that Bedlington.co.uk has some full colour footage of a late 1950's Miner's Picnic that's never been seen in public. This from the days when most stuff - if it exists at all - was in B&W. Getting it off Standard 8 onto the web, at best quality, and without damaging it, may take a little while though.

It's not instead of it's in addition to! OK then, place a value on what would be reasonable to pay for "this convenience" of an ID card? Civil liberties issues aside, let's decide if the amount the government is mooting charging us is really a tax by another name, or a service that is worth paying for.

And now MFI is in the hands of liquidators! Who next?

ID cards are now being issued to foreign nationals. As the Lib Dems say: These people already have passports with visas on them, so, if taken at face value, there is absolutely no point in this exercise. That's unless there is a hidden agenda at work!

A fall in VAT to 15%, offset by rises in fuel, alcohol, tobacco duties etc. Only to be revoked in December 2009. Who is to say it won't be restored at a nice round-figure 20%, purely "in the national interest" of course! Yeah... well... because of this I'm going out to max my credit cards on Chinese goods, just to help the manufacturing base you've had a hand in destroying Mr Darling. Or, maybe, like any genuinely prudent person (and the Banks) I will take any meager and very temporary relief to try to help rebuild my own balance sheet. Rises in National Insurance for all concerned - no doubt to encourage employment during the recession? A 45p tax band on the "super-rich", just to keep the few remaining deluded dinosaurs in the Labour party happy. On best estimates the latter will raise a paltry £700m, on worst estimates it will be counterproductive and cost jobs (unless you work in the booming tax avoidance industry). At this point the phrase rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic comes to mind. Two simple facts: 1) You can't borrow your way out of debt. 2) There is no easy recovery mechanism - Keynesian economics don't now apply! That's because all this so-called fiscal stimulus will do is suck in a few more imports, and keep a few burger flippers in employment for just a few months longer. Ordering another round of drinks only defers the bill. We pinned our flag to the mast of "financial products" and destroyed our real wealth-creating base. We spent everything and more during the good times. The workers from eastern Europe are going home where the prospects are brighter; and who can blame them. But the biggest home truth is that it isn't an International crisis, as you are spinning whilst you jet around the world telling others how to fix their un-broken economies. It's a crisis that YOU - Mr Brown and Mr Darling - have had a very big hand in creating. Dr Death and nurse Darling are visibly busy administering the cure for their own poisoning. So, why should we be worried? ____________________ P.S. to Malc: I wouldn't extrapolate anything from Italy. It's not an economy in the real sense; just tens of millions of micro-economies riding around in exceptionally well-dressed and well-nourished people's back pockets. And, the Italians wouldn't have it any other way!

I don't mind all the banks going bust, or the B.Socs folding, but when Woolies is going down the pan - well - that's the end of civilisation as we know it! Election now I say, whilst there's still something left to save from Gordo's "prudence"!

'ees not a celeb, 'ees just a very naughty boy! Is the last one Chiang Kai-Shrek?

My first "on-line experience" was browsing round the Zenith "Heathkit" store on the North side of Dallas in February 1982. I heard relays clicking in a quiet corner of the mostly deserted place, and when I walked over to investigate discovered they'd lashed up an electronic bulletin board. You could see the messages coming in on a dumb terminal. There was probably only one or two lines and of course on POTS (Plain Old Telephone System) no way to share access - you just had to wait for a free line to read the board and post a reply. However the idea instantly appealed to me and I just had to do something back in the UK. I'd actually gone there to buy one of their terminals, and amongst other items brought back a kit of parts (including the green phosphor CRT) in the overhead luggage rack of a Braniff 747! Back in the UK I imported an early 300 baud free-standing modem. There never was very much to connect to in the UK, and it was excruciatingly expensive to access US services. Just getting a bit of text dribbling back was an achievement. But... one day !!!

That's pathetic; no commitment to anything in our town! Couldn't even organise a good putsch on the WDC on a wet weekend with that! How do I get a membership form?

Our first Internet connection was £45 a month at a heady 14,400 bits/second! Mind you that was a theoretical maximum, you never got that sort of speed in practice. Oh yes, and you had to pay for the phone call at BT rip-off rates on top of that! We had a four figure phone bill one month. There was also a download limit - yes, seriously! I guess even AOL is better than that.

http://www.peopleconnectionblog.com/2008/1...s-been-shutdown ...please put out the light!

threegee's first law of computer problems: If no one thing fixes it then that's because you have more than one problem! Divide and conquer! Are you using a wireless mouse and or keyboard? Is there a Bluetooth device somewhere close? As advised disable any flossy lighting fittings (includes LE lamps). Are there any CB'ers/radio hams in the area? I'd change channel again too.

Looks like the spin doctors at The Department of Squaring Circles and National Delusion are hours ahead of you on this one Malc! But surely... rather than erect and dismantle twenty uneccessary large and expensive buildings it's more green to erect and dismantle the same unecessary large and expensive building twenty times? The end result will be the same (B.A.), and it will create just as many hours of employment. Also it will be simpler to manage (those pesky cost over-runs) , create a more "on-going work experience", leave only one "brown field" site, and save the tax payer a bundle in material costs. With the resultant savings you might even be able to erect it and dismantle it a few more times, thus delivering even more benefit to the economy? A lack of imagination and business skills from those holding the public purse strings I think!

That was in an honest moment this week in front of an audience of fourty or so business chiefs, and not intended for public consumption. Well Ms. Jowell... lots of people told you so and you refused to listen! That's the only reason you didn't know then what you know now. Quite a few bright people are now telling you how to make the best of a bad job, but will you listen this time either? It seems not! This is the current politico tactic when they seriously mess up: "we've made a mistake but we will learn from it". Really! I see no evidence that any politician ever learned anything from anything other than a big No More! from their electorate. Unfortunately saying No More! takes an age in our archaic system!

Why not phone the other Goldings and ask them?

You completely miss the point! It's not in any way competing with high end PC's. But it is as much PC as the vast majority of people need, and at only 200 notes (including keyboard and mouse). At only 20 watts it's extremely green too. On computing power per watt Atom CPUs are an order of magnitude better than anything that has gone before. Will pay for itself here in the amount of power it saves over a couple of years. Also I can get a browser or Skype up in about 15 seconds from cold; how long does your power chomping monster take? Horses for courses - there's no single best computer. Not remotely a Mac, it's a proper PC. No problems burning/transferring files either - it's called a home network! Wait for the full review before you do your negative thing, you just might learn something. Else borrow one and do your own in-depth review. We're waiting!

Wireless now working - wooo hooo! I did it my way - refused to get off my backside to hardwire the RJ45 - lazy or what? Easy instructions around chicken 'n' egg problem of needing Internet to get WiFi working real soon. Hey Monsta am I imagining the 1.6 Terrabytes of storage showing available on this wee thing just at this moment? And don't use dirty words like Mac around here p-l-e-a-s-e!

Interesting that the stocks of the old PC900 are dwindling fast now. So my bet is the PC900a will go on sale this coming week - this time for real. Lots of frustrated buyers when they realise that they could have had an Atom machine for the same price or less! But not the first time this has happened in the computer biz - or the last! The price of the Eee PC901 seems to have been trimmed about a tenner more too. Probably because the Netbook competition is heating up. All bodes well for the consumer, despite the plummeting pound!

Fry a Fox of course! Where do I vote? Maybe I already did?

This is mainly for anyone contemplating installing Ubuntu Linux on an Eee Box. Was a bit worried about all the install problems for this relatively new machine I've come across on the net. Anyway I resolved to do it the hard way and ignore the Eee tailored Ubuntu editions out there. I used the latest 8.10 release and aimed for a dual boot Ubuntu/XP machine. Burned the CD image on my laptop, transferred the USB cable to the Eee, booted off the live CD - no need to make any changes in the BIOS a USB CD/DVD drive is already the second boot device (after a USB stick). Ubuntu Live loaded with everything but the WiFi working, and at a full 1600x1200! I then used the partition manager straight off the live CD to steal space from the two NTFS partitions. One for the root partition (/) formatted ext3 and the other for the /swap partition. There was no need to allocate a /boot partition or anything like that. This was the manual partitioning route. The automatic would have robbed most of the space from Windows XP, or wiped it out! Therefore - although I could sympathise with that strategy - I didn't quite like the look of what it was proposing. The mistake I made was to make the /swap partition vastly too big. Forgot that the rule of thumb is to make the swap double the RAM size (so 2GiB then!) - will return and correct that later. You can then run the install program straight away (without rebooting) from the install icon. Answered the seven install questions (Microsoft please note how simple this is, and it' a fully international too). Rebooted - it even prompted and ejected the live CD automatically, and after the Express Gate screen Grub allows a dual boot (well actually five boot options, but that's another story!). Writing this now on the Eee Box. I'm using Windows because I haven't figured the WiFi driver for Ubuntu yet. Full instructions on this when I do. But I've played for hours with Ubuntu at 1600x1200 with dual desktop, (which is the default configuration) and see nothing I want to change. I note from the task manager that its even running Python 2.5 as a background process - so naturally I had to do a "Hello, Python World!\n" script to test this! I will be writing a full review on the Eee Box when it has been fully shaken down and suitably hacked. But for £200 or less it's fair to say it's looking like just about the best buy ever. All the computer most (non-gaming) people need, and more, in a tiny box. A friend of a friend who called in yesterday rushed off to buy one from the nearest shop, and that was before I'd installed and shown him a decent O/S!

NVidia inside is much more likely to persuade me to buy a machine. No very recent experiences, but over the years I've had far less hassle with NVidia than ATI. The latter and their dicky drivers have stolen days in my life! Now that ATI is part of AMD things might be changing, but I still look for NVidia. Not being a gamer I'm pretty happy with the chipset built-in Intel graphics engines these days. By old-time standards they are pretty nippy, even for video at 1680x1200, and there's no fuss installing drivers (usually!).

How many security meters do a dictionary word lookup? The ones that do will probably just do a plain one. Any pattern in a password is fatal, a good p/w needs to be randomised as much as possible. This is why multiple passwords using a similar "system" are far less secure. Crack one and you've a key to them all. Hence my point about one good safe being better than lots of lightweight ones. But, we are still not told if there's another reason behind multiple passwords here. You can never give definitive general answers about security. Amongst other things you need to know what you are protecting and the third-party value of that information. If there are lots of computers involved here it would probably be better to carry the encryption utility on the USB key itself. This is the sort of thing U3 is designed for.

A misunderstanding here: If you are removing the data from the machine it will have to be encrypted *somehow* else someone else will be able to get at it. Password protecting access to a machine or access to a file system subdirectory doesn't automatically protect the data the in files. i.e. In this context password protection = encryption. If you are remembering these passwords they must have a simple scheme that won't be very secure. Hope these files aren't your bank account details! One of the principals of security is that you build the biggest strongest safe for everything, and not hide things in lots of lightweight safes. It's a more effective use of available resources.

It would be useful to know why you want to do this as there could be a better way. It's nearly always useful to know what operating system you are using. Are you expecting the OS to do this or using (or intending to use) an encryption utility? Do you intend the files to be decrypted on the same or on different machines? If answer to last question is different machines are these machines on the same private network? On a pratical note: How do you propose to remember all these passwords? And.. any question touching on security needs to consider how strong that security is expected, or needs, to be. P.S. I'd like to place money on the moderator moving this thread into the Computer Answers forum.