jinnantonnixx

Happy to oblige. Though time spent on a Spectrum is never wasted. Chuckie Egg is empirical evidence of this.

I immediately scrolled down to 1982/3 and played my favourites: Jetpac, Horace Goes Skiing and Scuba Dive. Go on - you know you want to. ZX SPECTRUM

D'you know, even today ZX Basic has the best string handling functions in any language e.g. LET a$="abcdefgh" PRINT a$ (2 TO 5) gives bcde PRINT a$( TO 5) gives abcde PRINT a$(2 TO) gives bcdefgh None of your left, mid and right rubbish. "TO" is all you need.

The Archis were years ahead of their time - YEARS ahead. And we threw loads out, so that'll cheer up @gshaw.

White elephant? Hmmm not sure. It was a LOT easier than cracking open the cases to change jumpers, and by and large most things worked on MCA. It was a good idea, on balance.

MCA bus. Configured with reference disks. As techies, we used to add the reference files for each model to a single disk, so with one disk we could configure anything. DXMAID to configure networking was sheer purgatory courtesy of IBM, trying to get 'X' on PS/2s to talk to unix RS/6000 over 16/4 token ring. ***Shudder***

That's right. Though I think it was Foxpro, not dBase - the compound indexes had a different structure to dBase.

I bought a C&VG magazine in December 1982, just before Christmas. I poured over the 'listings' (as they were called) ready to type in the wonderful games that appear from the mysterious code on the magazine's pages. Christmas day in 1982 was entirely spent trying to get the blasted cassette recorder to play the Psion 'Horizons' tape. Oh the joy of 'bat and ball' (a copy of Breakout) made it all worthwhile. Try telling that to the kids these days - they just won't believe you.

When tech improved, you could still get the park utils, even though the drives didn't need them. Psychosomatic software.

That takes me back. I worked on the mainframe versions of IBM AS/400s (B & E series) and occasionally loaded up the reels. I think the E series loader had vacuum pots, but you had to manually spool the tape on the B series. Oh and co-ax concentrators feeding into rack mounted boards. Them was the days. Spectrum>QL>PC (IBM AT/XT/PS/2 Model 50 anyone?)>DEC Vax VMS>IBM AS 400> OS/2/Warp/ > Unix Balance Transputers (what became of them?)> Sun Sparcs>RS/6000>and back to flamin' PCs.

You'll find it in the most unlikely of places. Futurama theme tune, for instance.

I'm in a musical mood tonight. Here's a video narrating the history and use of the "world's most important 6-sec drum loop". Even the Economist has something to say about those 6 seconds of drumming. http://www.economist.com/node/21541707

Stephen Fry's "Saturday Night Fry" series from the '80s is the best thing in the world (it's been proved by scientists). Stars SF, Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson and others. 6 episodes, each 30 mins. The "You Can Speak Strom" sketch is a masterpiece. Hard to get, but ...

This is probably the best article I've read about Win8. Windows 8's desktop mode: Microsoft's 'Classic'

If you have physical access to the server, all security is out of the window. Pause at the Grub loader (or Lilo) Select the boot kernel and 'e' to edit the boot command line. Add init=/bin/bash to the end of the line Boot (press 'b') Enter the command passwd to change root password. That said, it's probably easier to connect it up to a network (or USB disk), pop in a modern Linux live CD (Ubuntu or Knoppix are good choices) and connect to your Windows network (or a USB disk) and copy whatever you want.

If you find Metro a bit too Chad Valley for you, I found this post: Disable Metro UI & Start Menu in Windows 8 - Windows 8 Review The post was made in November last year, so it's been knocking about for a while. I'm not sure if it works for the current release of Win8.

We use attendance a lot; I'll ask our SIMS team if they come across this error. By the way, are the error messages from SIMS, or a .net exception?

The stubbornness regarding Metro UI smells like the whole idea came from a management level, rather than an engineering level. "I like flicky tiles. Make them work on this thing." You know the sort of thing.

This made me smile. The "Invent with Python" Blog — Nobody Wants to Learn How to Program

Going to watch it; might be OK. I missed the earlier show (pilot?) so I can't comment on that. I thoroughly enjoyed the audio book (Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency) read by Douglas Adams himself.

I'd say more like ME withBob front-end. http://www.pcworld.com/article/193006/the_bob_chronicles.html Perhaps that's unfair. They couldn't possibly release it as it stands. The disparate interfaces jar and jostle with each other and serve up an inconsistent and confusing experience.

For instance, this will copy files that haven't been accessed within 180 days. In effect, it will copy all files in finds that are older than 6 months from location \\Server1\Someshare to location \\Server1\Archive. The " /S " means it will traverse down through the folder structure, copying the sub-folder structure as necessary to the target. ROBOCOPY \\Server1\Someshare \\Server1\Archive * /S /MINLAD:180 When you are sure it does what you need, you can add " /MOVE " to the command to move the files, thus deleting them from the source. If you're not too happy with the command line, don't proceed as you can do an awful lot of damage if you get something like this wrong.

Robocopy has some cool options built in: Used with a /MOVE option, Robocopy with the /MINLAD option allows you to move 'old' files (you specify how 'old' the files have to be) Robocopy

They're talking about Windows on Arm devices (the headline misses that important bit). So there's no compelling reason to get a W8 arm tablet above an Android or iPad, as you will not have domain control over the devices. Hmmm.

That's a scathing review. But that's what you get when you look behind the curtain, eh Toto?