Posts by Greg 648 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Apr 2007
"Think about it logically, are you really likely to take a call and maintain an IM session at the same time?"
Yes. I've done this many a time. I'll be chatting to the office on Skype IM, a phone call will come in, I'll take the call, and then GO BACK to my IM conversation without missing anything.
This is why Windows Mobile is still superior, in my opinion. Bang on about the interface as much as you like, it still works. And you're not restricted in the kind of apps you can have, where you can get them or when you're allowed to bloody run them. If I want to open a web browser, IM session and a Word document (not that I like to use Word - OOo haven't made it to mobile yet), and then take a phone call, I ruddy well can. No worries, no bother, no fuss.
Windows Mobile might not have the most inspired interface, but people bang on and on and on about it, when in fact the only real thing they've got against it is that it's a plain old boring start menu, and it's not shiny, flash, or animated. Know what? I just don't care. I really don't. The start menu works on XP Pro for me, it works under KDE on Debian/Kubuntu for me, and it works on my mobile too.
Given the choice between shiny and useful, I'll take useful every time.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to tune my sax/guitar using the app I installed on my Athena.
AOL has needed to die for years. Perhaps now it finally will, in the way it deserves - a long, drawn out, lingering, painful death. I hope it gets bought out just to save the number of jobs involved, but then I also hope that once the customer base has been integrated, AOL itself is obliterated.
A gravestone for Connie? Let's build her a pyre.
Eh? I'm running XP64 and it's the most stable, useful Windows system I've ever gotten my hands on. Admittedly, I'm not running the original release, as I'm betting you were, when drivers were non-existant, but I got it a year and a bit ago and it's fine. My disc came with SP1 on it, and after a quick nLite to get rid of the guff it's been brilliant ever since (compared to other Windows releases). Recently reinstalled with a newly slipstreamed SP2 disc* and that's not been a problem either.
I'd give it another shot. I reckon you'll find it's massively improved.
*Note to 32-bit users. SP1 and SP2 for x64 are different to the ones for x32. SP1 on x64 gives the same functionality as SP2 on x32. x64 SP2 was essentially a security round-up.
AARRGGHH!! The only thing I hate more than the video is when people call it "Numa Numa!" A bunch of stupid, retarded American teenagers called it that because that's the closest they could get to understanding a foreign language. They probably thought he was speaking in tongues or something. But this side of the pond we should know better. It's called "Dragostea Din Tei," it's by Ozone, and it's a rubbish, but the video is a laugh.
Interestingly enough for fans of Internet memes, the words "nu ma" from Romanian appear, as far as I can tell, to translate to "don't want." Or "DO NOT WANT," if you prefer.
"Also, I know I am not the only person thinking this, but I do seem to remember the BBC saying they haven't catered for Linux yet because they are a minority market. I suspect there are a lot more Linux users out there than there are bloody iPhone users, so why the Apple Love?"
C'mon, dude. The BBC fellate Apple at every opportunity. I thought it was just the person that ran BBC news but it seems to extend throughout the whole organisation. Whenever an Apple product comes out, it appears on BBC headline news. No other products I can think of get that free publicity simply for being from Apple. Whenever they offer a download, they call it a podcast, refer to the player as an iPod rather than a DAP, and keep the iPod elevated above the others - "download this to your iPod or MP3 player." They spend vast amounts of money putting the iPlayer onto the iPhone *before* they put it on platforms that are much more widely used. Why? It's from Apple! Simple as.
""PC guys" are the jokers who post a dozen different drivers on their website for the same product, all with cryptic 8.3 character filenames and pigeon English descriptions that are of no use when trying to work out which one you actually want."
Smegging hell, mate. When was the last time you used a PC? 8.3 filenames? I don't think I've donwloaded anything with an 8.3 filename since....since....damn, when was I last on dialup...?
So you can finally use the Apple smartphone as a smartphone, eh? But only if you pay more than other people do, and you use only the apps that Daddy Apple lets you? How long until the iPhone hackers find a way to install without going through Apple's mechanism?
Personally, I'll stick to my Windows Mobile device, where freeware isn't illegal.
Finally, we're at a point where all the big companies are forming up behind one format. It won't be long before economies of scale kick in. Excellent. MS and Apple are deluding themselves with digital downloads - it's a nice nirvana, but it won't happen for a while yet. In the meantime, roll on the Blu-Ray!
Regarding the number of drive bays, remember that this is also known as the Stacker. It's a modular, toolless case that accepts EATX and BTX, has gobs of cooling, the lot. You can buy more HDD bay conversion modules from CM. C'mon, it's a server/extreme workstation case. I've got the black 830 version, and I think it's bloody marvellous.
I was really surprised when you said it was quiet though! I've got two 200 series Opterons and two 7900GTXs with a SCSI rack in mine, so as you can imagine it needs cooling. I filled the side fan array, got huge heatsinks, fitted fans to them, fitted a fan to the drive bay, one to the dorsal vent and two exhausts, and it sounds like a ruddy jet taking off. Worth every penny though. I just love hearing the drives spin up and down from 0 to 15000rpm and back. Bloody eats most apps for breakfast. ;-)
*Hugs machine*
"I for one am not worried in the slightest about terrorism but sadly i can see the day when it becomes so hyped that the lovely government build a Gaza style wall with checkpoints right around London to keep out the supposed waves of suicide jacketed nutters"
FILL IT UP WITH WATER!
London's a fucking blight anyway.
P.S.
To all rabid coppers and trigger-happy idiots of the Met - that wasn't a serious suggestion. I'd at least let anyone who wasn't a civil servant, Met officer, MP, government official or part of the cast of Eastenders leave first.
BE AFRAID! TEH TERRORISTS ARE GOING TO KILL J00!
I'm sure I've heard of a system like this before. Where was it, now... Oh yeah, that's right. Germany. You can guess when. If you weren't fond of your neighbour, you could phone up the state, accuse them of anything you liked, and your neighbour wouldn't be a problem any more. I wonder how long it will be before that happens here.
And given the public's well known abilities when it comes to spotting "terrorists" (ie, men daring to talk in their own language on a plane in Manchester, man with MP3 player, etc), I imagine it'll be sooner rather than later.
</sarcasm>
Yep, as an avid skier, I can tell you that bouncing your arse up and down, frantically digging at the ground with your poles and wiggling your hips side to side is exactly how you ski.
I would love to take some of the veterans of this game up a mountain. It would be frickin' hilarious.
You guys have missed something wonderful, something marvellous, something that has made my day brighter. Think about it.
IE8 may well work with W3C standards by default.
IE8 is Vista only.
If IE8 works with standards, I won't have to buy Vista to see how things look in IE8!
One less reason to buy that shitty OS! :-)
Whenever anyone says "server grade," I immediately think SCSI, to be honest. Despite the fact that my home server runs 2x500GB SATA-II drives, and my desktop runs 2x140GB 15krpm SCSI-320 drives... But that was down to capacity for the server and speeeeeed for the desktop.
Apple can't just go waving around phrases like "server grade hard drive" and not expect people to pull them up on it. "Server grade" doesn't refer to home servers, or hobby boxes - that's a phrase you use when talking about big, fat, SCSI/SAS/FC-powered bad boys. And as the Time Capsule is a home box, they should just say it's got a reliable hard drive.
I really like the idea behind this attachment. Love them or hate them, Sony have thought about the PS3 as more than a gaming machine. It freely gives you the option to install other operating systems, it integrates with the PSP nicely, it'll play media from lots of different sources, and now it'll record TV too. The capability benefits over the 360 are really mounting up.
However, I won't be getting this attachment. I do want a HTPC, and adding that capability to the PS3 rather than building a box of my own is a cracking idea...right up to the RAID considerations. If I'm going to have huge hard drives packed full of media that I can't easily back up, I want them to be RAIDed, and the PS3 can't do that.
Or can it....
http://www.newlaunches.com/archives/sony_playstation_3_with_750_gb_of_storage_in_raid.php
Hmmmm, interesting. I already have the system core for my HTPC, but I'm in need of another server, so I could just as easily convert it for that. So, which is better/cheaper? A PS3 with an external drive and a DVR attachment, or my own box?
Probably my own box, to be honest. ;-) It's a nice idea, though.
I appear to be waffling. I'll stop.
It's funny you should mention that. I'm about to graduate from University. I've been a LAMP user since my teen years, and did indeed grin at your acronym. And you could be at least partially right on the old Java front. I've recently improved my existing Java skills, and the number of jobs I can now apply for with higher wages is surprising. That said, LAMP has its place - PHP apps are often faster and less complex than their Java equivalents, and I can knock together something in PHP much faster than in Java, all other considerations aside.
(This is not an endorsement of speed over quality, however - Python still sucks ass.)
Fortunately, I've been offered a job where I get to use both Java *and* PHP, on Linux/MySQL/Postgres/Oracle boxes. That'll do me nicely. ;-)
I was going to upgrade to the PSP slim for the sole purpose of playing Chains of Olympus on my TV through the video out. I think I'm going to put that upgrade off for a while. I *must* have that Kratos PSP. It will sit nicely next to my Final Fantasy III DS.
Yes, I am a sucker for collectibility. No, I don't care.
$54.95 is a slight piss-take for a controller, though! I bought bloody Steel Battalion for £90!
I've always sung eBay's praises, but recently it seems they're losing the plot. They don't want to be seen as a place where little fiddly items are sold by private sellers, but that's precisely the thing that makes eBay so brilliant. It's also the principle they based their own TV adverts on!
I don't go on eBay to pay nearly-high-street prices for Chinese imports and Hong Kong knock-offs. I go on eBay to find the stuff I can't find anywhere else. Collectible games, old out-of-print stuff, little rarities, that sort of thing. And I know I'm not alone. But this kind of shopper/seller is being pushed off eBay, because the people in charge have decided that their image (of themselves, as far as I can tell) is more important than their popularity or their massive profitability. It really depresses me when I search for a game these days, and instead of getting 200 small auctions by private sellers I get 200 Buy-It-Now auctions from 3 power sellers, all at just below high street price.
I'm reluctant to sell on eBay these days, too. I put a certain games console on eBay right before Christmas, and I was shocked at the amount eBay wanted in fees (and then again through PayPal). To see those fees increase is ridiculous, and coupled with the new rules I'm not sure I'd sell there again. Still buying almost everything I own there, naturally. ;-)
I get the feeling that if someone were to reinvent Ebay: Original Flavour, they'd get more than a few customers. I know I'd pop along.
They're Americanizing (with a "Z") it already, are they? Why can't people (the Yanks) leave awesome things alone and think of something new, rather than ruining them? We've already had the Die Hard series wrecked, along with Transformers, The Terminator, Spiderman, etc, etc. Grrrrr.
But on the side note of amusing error messages, I develop a commercial plugin for a well known open source system, and was telephoned by a customer not so long ago to ask why, when he tried to send a message through the system, he received the reply:
"Message failed. This wouldn't happen if you weren't an idiot."
This was a hidden message that was only supposed to appear in debug mode, when I would deliberately screw up the system to cut out a linked application and save myself a lot of trouble. Obviously, I'd made a slight coding mistake somewhere along the line, and when a user managed to misconfigure their system in a certain way, it appeared on their screen. Whoops!
I comforted myself with the knowledge that he hadn't downloaded the previous version, in which the message read something along the lines of:
"Message failed! Dear God, you're a fucking useless programmer, aren't you? Get off me, you wanker!"
Close call!
Function over form, technical excellence over looks and marketing. Apple, Creative, Sony and others could learn some lessons from our Korean friends.
By the way, I've seen the freeview player in action. The GUI has a tendency to glitch for a few seconds when it first loads, but after that it's ace.
If this really is the end, THANK GOD! Format wars are always a pain. Perhaps now we can get on with committing to one format, prices for it will come down, and I can engage smug mode for having chosen the right one.
What's nice about this format war is that the technically superior format won for once. If you take away the "OMFGZ0R EV1L S0NY!!!11!1!" argument and look at it rationally, I'd take Blu-Ray every time.
Oh, absolutely, the Athena is flawed. The hard drive is indeed a pointless addition, as you said, and the OS lags like a bitch. However, it is gobsmackingly portable, and the battery life is fine for me.
I do all my Uni notes on the Athena. I'm in a lecture right now, in fact! Naughty me. I'm hoping to put Project Black on my device soon, which is apparently a lot slicker.
It's not perfect by any means, but it certainly was the best for me at the time, and to be honest I still think it is. A bigger machine wouldn't fit in my jacket pocket, would still need a headset, etc. The Athena's a great little device that does just enough for what I need while on the go, and hopefully Project Black will take away its annoying tendency to lag. I personally woudn't pay more for this Vista based device, because it only really serves the same purpose as the Athena, but it's bulkier, and I'll bet with Vista on it lags just as much.
"The HTC Shift is not just a UMPC. It's called "shift" partly because it's part UMPC, part SmartPhone."
So it's an upgraded, overpriced version of my Athena? Yeah, I can see that happening, actually. The Athena's an excellent device, but it's not nearly flashy enough to appeal to Joe Public.
If I wanted one of these, I'd get the Eee. Costs less than my Athena did (and that was on contract!), and is more than capable for on-the-go stuff.
There's a 32GB Touch, eh? Hmmm. I'm normally very sceptical of Apple products, but an all-Flash player with a really nice interface would be tempting when my uber-brilliant but sadly unsucceeded iAudio X5L finally dies.
That said, i still hate iTunes, I love OGGs, and I'm willing to bet I can get higher quality audio out of my player. Let's hope a rival makes one that's cheaper, appears as a flash drive without software, and plays OGGs. I'd buy one in roughly 0.0006 nanoseconds.
I was very seriously put off America the last time I was there. Being snapped, scanned and fingerprinted on the way in was infuriating enough, but then being constantly treated like a terrorist because I had an unusual accent made me livid. Americans don't believe my accent is English because I don't sound like the "British" people on Will and Grace. Funnily enough - no Englishman I've met does...
Am I Scottish? Welsh? Middle Eastern? (Yes, someone thought I was from the Middle East, though I'm sure they had no idea where the Middle East was.) Perhaps I'm Australian? Nope, I'm from Leeds.
Hearing that they've lost the plot even further has only reinforced my desire to never go there again. Ever. For any reason.
As an aside, when I was waiting in line at the airport to be scanned in as a criminal, I decided to get a little inventive. I quickly dismantled the back of my phone in order to find something sharp (Naughty me, having sharp battery contacts on a plane. Terrorists, take note!), and then scratched the words "fuck" and "you" into the two fingers they would be scanning. That should be amusing if they ever come to look me up on the system. :-)
"well my advice is do not switch to virgin media!!"
Why not? From what I see/hear, Sky are so obsessed with being cheaper than Virgin that their service sucks. Friends on Sky tell me stories of dropped connections, crap customer service, and long fix times.
Virgin may have brought back the caps that NTL took away, but my connection is as reliable as ever (I honestly don't know how long it would take them to fix it, because it's never broken down). I'm now paying half what I was previously, I've only been throttled once, and even throttled, it's still fine for gaming/web surfing.
I mean, it's not the oddly slutty clothes you dress your kids in, or the lack of supervision, or the poor sex education, or the exposure to a sex/celebrity obsessed culture - nope, it's the name of a bed that'll really fuck kids up.
Jesus H Christ, some people need to untwist their knickers. IKEA used to (may still) sell a desk chair called a Fartfull and a doormat called a Kolon. Oh noes! Our kids will start shitting by the door!
Get a life.
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