This situation is far from uncommon. I work in a big UK bank and until very recently we were paying MS for NT4 support because it was a hell of a lot cheaper than migrating the NT4 based systems. We had maybe 100 systems, each of which was coming up with estimates of £1-2m each to move to a modern platform. MS wanted 3.5m to support NT4 for another year. No brainer. Then MS got fed up with that and said next year it will be 7 and the year after that 14 etc which focused people's attention.We did eventually get everything off NT4 but it was a lot of pain. The system I work on ended up costing £4-5m on it's own, no idea on the others.

Yeah, right. They never go bad. Archival grade ones kept in the dark, maybe. Most just give up after a few years.

If you disagree with this, at least say why. Don't just mod it down. I'd welcome others perspectives on this point.

Really? If give it 3 to 5 years tops. I haven't used an optical drive in 3+ years or a floppy in 5+. In fact my last 2 PCs had no floppy dive and I didn't even notice.

Most people I know of my generation (born early sixties) were computer mad and spent their teens in their bedrooms programming away on Atari's, Apple IIs, BBC Bs and later C64s. Then the Nintendo generation happened and suddenly people knew squat about computers for a decade or so. It used to amuse me no end that I knew far more about competes and tech than people 10 to 15 years my junior who used to moan about how of course computers didn't exist when they were young. Now it's better but there's this blip where people just didn't do computers for a decade or so, except the nerds.

15 years? I've had the same email address since 1992, 22 years

Yet you had to spell out ISP in the summary? WTF?

Indeed. Ever since installing BYOD for work on my tablet, it had an icon in the notification bar warning me all communications are being potentially monitored by a 3rd party.

Back in the 70's at least they had white walking sticks with echo location devices on them that allowed blind people to 'see' objects in the room. It was in a 'how it works' book I bought as a kid.

Up until Facebook got them, anyway, I had been a WhatsApp user since the early days. Almost everyone I talk to uses it as their primary chat channel and as far as I can tel, it's the defcato chat tool in Europe. Different countries seem to latch onto different apps though, people in other countries often use Viber for instance. Another plus over SMS (give that with 5,000 free texts a month, price wasn't an issue) is that I'm in a semi-rural location and often have no phone signal so being able to chat via WiFi is useful.

Why not Telegram? I've just closed my WhatsApp account and moved to telegram. Did I miss something?

Bullshit. Having choice is always good.

OK, just keep telling yourself that, you'll make the government and big business very happy. Here in the UK we've had all sorts of services turned to junk as the government privetise everything they can in order to give us the mythical choice we apparantly all want (guess they must have interviewed you for that one). Sorry but a lot of research has been done on this one and choice is not always good. it' sjust the current mantra and you've bought into it.

Choice is only good to a point. After that it works backwards and puts people off or paralyses their decision making. Supermarkets found they sell more jam if there's 4 types than 40...

you can't pay an electronic debit / transfer without having a positive balance.

Or within your overdraft limit. Pretty much everyone has an overdraft limit here. Being in credit certainly no limit to spending.

I think its a sad commentary that some of the posters on my comment have basically admitted that they have a debit card / account (that might get cleared out fraudulently) and another different (more secure) account that they keep cash in for their important payments that need to be made.

Debit and Credit cards have exactly the same security - Chip and Pin. The only difference is the account the money comes out of. If anything, the Credit card is the dodgy one if you have a big limit but generally, any fraud is not the problem of the card holder.

We have IBANs but people tend to just use the sort code/account method which means any UK bank account can pay any other account, irrespective of who it's with. We also have systems like PingIt where you can pay someone via their phone number. Using my Bank's home banking software on either PC or phone, I can pay anyone, any time and if it goes via the faster payments system, it will be in their account in seconds.