threegee

Yes folks - straight from the horse's mouth. Despite all appearances to the contrary, Bedlington does have some of y'er actual business enterprise. At a time when others are throwing up their hands in horror at the Brownian financial mess we're all in, we have a pearl (or two or three) growing in the mucky oyster that is Bedlington. Nothing the WDC helped with mind you, more like hinder. Nothing local politicians know anything at all about (and do they even care?). Enterprise Centre I hear you say. More local enterprise coming to our long-suffering abode? I feel it in my bones! P.S. to Journal: Just having a bit of fun. Go forth and multiply the good news; no credit necessary.

Obviously not one of the green lobby then! If you'd read the short article you'd have seen that the i7 is quadcore, and it will scale to eight cores each hyperthreading to look like a 16 core device to the OS. Also the elimination of the FSB should remove a major bottleneck. i7 will likely leave the AMD Phenom in the dust! I'm very much an AMD supporter, they've kept prices low for everyone for a long time, by giving Intel much needed competition. But, unfortunately they are struggling to keep up at both ends of the market these days. They simply don't have the R&D bucks to throw at problems like Intel does. I don't think they even have a workable 45nm process yet. Anyway, it's not what you've got it's what you do with what you've got that matters!

...well almost! Now where's that old Mac I can convert into a digital wall clock? Got to be the most useful thing anyone has ever done with one.

Full Story: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/tyne/7766969.stm

"While one passenger may have reported the man wearing a belt with wires coming out of it - the man was only guilty of being an electrician." Safety is one thing, but when the outcome is mass hysteria on behalf of the authorities resulting in summary execution (and the de Menezes case was by no means the first time this sort of hysteria has happened) then it's manifestly unsafe to install such things. The fact that they work a few times results in lazy thinking - they become a substitute for common sense. I wonder what the ratio of genuine terrorists stopped to innocent people killed currently stands at? In fact have the police ever shot a genuine terrorist in order to stop an act of terrorism? I can't recall a single case.

Seamonkey needs adding to the list. Was having a play with it the other night because it has a web editor add-in which is more than passable for editing HTML text pages, and of course a freebie. Has a very Netscape Navigator feel to it so I presume it comes from that root? Better of worse than FF? Dunno just yet. ________ P.S. to MONGO: Like the new picture. Much more subtle than the last few, and oodles more subversive.

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!