sutton050

Over the next few weeks I'm going to be musing about the connections between the humble concept of the PC, where it started for myself, which processors and upgrade options I've taken, which dead-ends I've been down and where that took my gaming experience. And where I hope to take my gaming experience in the future. Today of course I'm running a quite nice Intel i7 processor and an EVGA GeForce 1080 GTX graphics card, however, that rig is nearing end of life for me, only the graphics card is a recent edition, and so as a high-performance low budget kind of chap I will be looking at my options, including the latest offerings from both Intel and AMD and the modern differences in nVidia versus AMD graphics offerings. The secondary thread from this will be a little retro-grade gaming, this is not going to be full on retro - though I am in the mood for some Carrier Command on my Atari ST - we're going to be looking at retro post 2000 stuff.... Watch this space. So why d...

Lets take a moment to read this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/41510170/both-sexes-should-be-taught-about-periods-together-at-school---charity And realise that this is 2017...  I'm not saying this to say, "OMG they're not teaching boys about this", but in 1989/1990... When I were at secondary school, we were taught about sex, and periods, and masturbation... Yes, we were.  I admit there was an awkward moment with Mr Simpson (the Physics teacher - who used to yell - and smell) but he showed us a video and gave us the basics. Then, in the lower school, there was a personal health conversation with Mrs Salisbury, where she talked to everyone, and explained how periods happen, they're natural, how much menstrual blood (on average etc) ladies deal with and all-sorts of things like that. I was eleven, I remember it... So why in 2017 are kids not being taught?... If I had to endure these jaw clenching moments, wondering my eyes around trying to not admit I was he...

So, in a prior post I made you aware of the situation with myself and Virgin for my services, well... Whilst talking to them they wanted me to give them the "First and Fifth" letter of my security password... I apparently got this wrong.... "Give me the fourth and the eight".... I apparently got this wrong.... "Just give me the password...." No. This is terrible security, and I said this to them, I asked if they can see my password "yes".  So their system stores my password, in plain text. I said to the chap "This should be stored as the salted hash of the password, not the actual password, and you should not use it as part of my accessing the account over the phone".  This is the password to access your account, your VirginMedia e-mail, basically everything. Now, I don't know if this guy was fishing for my whole password bit by bit, or whether he was genuinely looking at the whole thing and just asking for letters, of if he just h...

I've had my broadband with only two companies in twenty years, NTL and then Virgin whom bought NTL.  I've had them at three addresses and never had cause to really complain, sure for a while I had a junction box which would fill with water whenever it rained, so cutting me off, but they sorted that quickly enough. However, for the last year I've paid for 200mbit speed, super speed, being who I am I immediately started to monitor the speed, and initially I did get around 198mbit download speeds with a constant 12mbit up. Unfortunately over the last four months that speed has dropped off and off, so much so that my automated server started to report 4mbit.  I tweeted VM about this, of course I received the standard line that this was my equipment.  I called them about it and was told that "over wifi you get much less download speed than you pay for", except I'm using Cat 6 over a gigabit LAN... "Cat what?" the operator asked, as I was simply no longer ...