Posts by Simon Taylor 6 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Sep 2008
The EchoStar box will just be hacked anyway eventually. I don't really know exactly how the TV systems work in the US, but this DVR box sounds very similar to the way Sky+ works in the UK.
What exactly is the patent for that Tivo has anyway? It seems to be the same as every other generic PVR/DVR box - I have a JVC DR-MX1 DVD/VHS/HDD PVR combo for example.
Jeremy / Anonymous Coward:
It's physically impossible to manufacture a battery that will last an unlimited number of charge/discharge cycles, be it a laptop battery or rechargable battery for anything else.
Any battery will eventually loose some or all it's original capacity - so you can't blame Apple or any other electronics company for shipping timebombs.
I have a Toshiba Satellite Pro M30 laptop thats about 4 years old now and still working OK - screen not cracked, keys not broken, etc... Ive carefully looked after it.
When ever I'm going to use it for a long period without access to mains AC (e.g. watching a film on train journey), I charge it over night and also take a fully charged 12V 7.2Ah sealed Lead Acid with me, which I connect to the PSU DC jack. Since the PSU outputs 15V, I can get away with it for about 3 hours if I put the screen brightness on lowest and I don't use the optical drive.
Its a lot cheaper this way than buying a new Li-ion battery for the laptop.
But Norton AV software is not excellent!
I haven't used Norton for years, instead I use Sophos Anti-Virus, which automatically downloads updates from the university I used to be at. They gave all students a free copy and I kept the setup files after I left.
Oh yeah, I use Firefox 3 with Noscript and also have Lavasoft Ad-Aware 2008 and Spybot S&D installed. I removed all copies of iexplore.exe
Im not sure if its exactly true, but surely todays processor technology currently exceeds moores law, it doesn't take as long as 18 months for new chips to double in capacity/power.
Maybe it did in the 90s when most computers used Pentiums/Celerons or AMD K6 processors.
Then around the time the Pentium 4s / Socket A Athlons came out, computers started to get ever increasingly more powerful/faster to this day.
As someone else commented above, Carling tastes like p*ss, is horrible and just made from chemicals. In the UK, cheap beer like this is what causes violence outside pubs at closing time.
If the UK copied the german purity laws, im sure there would be less trouble ...but that's never gonna happen.
I agree, the UK is the only country in the world with proper electricity safety laws!
...such as the requirement for a fuse in every plug.
When ive been on holiday in Europe before, I've sometimes come across live sockets in hotel rooms that are falling off the wall cos they're just clipped on without screws.
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