Posts by Craig Chambers

US judge tells Levi's to take its Euro problems to Europe

Levis jeans are good quality, but too expensive in Europe

As someone who is on the larger side, I would always go for a pair of Levi jeans as they are always (in my experience) well made and resilient. Getting them at a good price and in my size is something that American stockists do, but UK ones don't.

Last time I tried to get some, I put in an order at JC Penney (something I had successfully done 2 years before) only to receive an email telling me that they are not allowed to export to Europe. So I'm back to the lesser quality stuff I can get in Debenhams (for about the same price as imported Levi's) that wear through in areas of contact in about 1/3 of the time.

HP's UK PC boss: We're going nowhere

Not compatible with Marketplace

As these cheapo tab manufacturers are I will hazard a guess not paying Google for their upsells, but simply using the free version of Android, they will not have Android Marketplace (nor Google Maps, GMail etc.) so your assertion is more than likely incorrect.

Sony preps Luke Skywalker-style digital binoculars

Must get my eyes tested

Initially read that as "Imperial wankers"

DARPA drops another HTV-2

Umm, isn't research all about predictions?

I don't know about hardware engineering, but in the basis of scientific research *is* prediction. If your experiment is that unpredictable, then it's probably not very good science. Science generally deals in very small, but very accurate increments in the amount of knowledge that we have. There are very few paradigm shifts, or giant leaps.

Admittedly in some cases the extrapolations used to make the prediction are wildly wrong, and some experiments suffer from lots of unknown variables, but this does not change the fact that scientific research relies on proving or disproving a prediction made with as much prior information as possible.

I'm not saying that this DARPA experiment is bad science either, just refuting the idea that research deals with the unpredictable.

Google left out of $4.5bn Nortel patent deal

Shame about Modu

It's a shame to see an inoovative company like Modu go under. I saw their products at the GSMA in 2008 (back when Android was nothing but whispers), and theirs were in my opinion the most innovative concepts for mobile phones at the conference.

Granted I have no idea about how well executed the final products were/would have been, but they seemed to be trying to create something genuinely new, which was a bit of a breath of fresh air.

Has UK gov lost the census to Lulzsec?

Your critique of their English seems a bit harsh

Other than an extra comma in the first sentence that imposes a pause after "Bravo" and renders the word "chaps" as a little orphan it doesn't look too bad to me.

Creationists are infiltrating US geology circles

Error in calculation

You seem to have missed that there were actually seven of some animals (according to Genesis). Obviously this is enough to balance the equation ;-)

Nokia betas some DLNA love

DLNA org say it's not their fault... because they are powerless fools

It really is as shit as all that. My experience is as stated above, DLNA renderers simply reject outright anything that is even slightly at variance from a very limited spec. Implementations of other formats than MPEG2, MP3, LPCM, and JPG are riddled with non-standard DLNA-PNs that cause the server vendors to have to handle every client differently.

I *DO* have TBs of MPEG2 on my home server (rips of all my hundreds of DVDs), and it is all served to my DLNA rendering TV, and it works (very well thank you very much). I do appreciate that I am a lone voice crying out of the wilderness on this one. One of the few with an entire library of DLNA compliant media. The reason for this? I am geeky enough to have got in on DLNA early and in the days before transcoding servers. I also didn't really have any downloaded videos (except Red vs Blue series 1-4 in avi), so I could build my library from scratch.

What the manufacturers behind DLNA and the DLNA.org seem to fail to appreciate is that mandating only MPEG2 video to get a compliance sticker is simply not going to wash with the general public. The majority out there want to see the mp4s that their phones have recorded and any number of other formats that they have created or acquired over the years, and they shouldn't have to jump through hoops because the device (which someone stated above can play the files locally) won't play that media type via DLNA.

One solution is to use a transcoding server, but this is only possible on servers that have some grunt available to them, i.e. a desktop PC. It is not possible on an always-on, low-power DLNA server on a NAS, i.e. the sort of device likely to be on when you want to watch your videos in bed.

Digital Stream DPS-1000 BBC iPlayer set-top box

H264 is supported

I'm pretty certain from posts on the miniDLNA Sourceforge forums that the BDP-S370 does support h264 in 1080p. However, it only supports it in an MPEG2 transport stream (i.e. m2ts) along with an AC3 (AKA Dolby Digital) or MP2 audio track. I suggest that you try using PS3MediaServer to try viewing the files as this should be able to remux them into an appropriate container on the fly. Your other option is to manually remux them using something like TSMuxer.

Your irritation is founded, but its cause is more the pathetic DLNA certification process which only mandates a very limited subset of formats to gain certification. Anything above and beyond these formats is entirely a the manufacturer's discretion, and is generally implemented in one or another way that is different from how any other manufacturers handle that file type.

/craig

See my earlier reply about m2ts

See above

Sony Bravia KDL-EX524 40in LED TV

Locked to this TV only

"in the process locking any content it records to the host TV." means what, exactly?

It means that anything you record onto the USB drive can only be played back by this TV. You can't plug the drive into another TV, or PC and view it.

IIRC this is a requirement for any device that can directly record HD channels from Freesat HD that wants to display the logo (though my understanding is that the encryption strictly only applies to HD content and not SD) - I'm going to extrapolate that either it also applies to Freeview HD, or that Sony decided to do it this way to use identical functionality when they release the Freesat versions of these TVs.

XMB - not on PS3 first

Point of order - The XMB first appeared on the PSP, about 2 years before the PS3 was released.

Apple to support reps: Don't confirm Mac infections

Replacement policy

I have an iPod photo that went in to the Genius bar 3 times in my year's warranty period. It never got abused, but periodically the hard disk would make lots of spinning noises, then it would display the take me back to the shop sad face picture. Every time it was immediately replaced.

When it did it again after the warranty expired I took it back and was told by someone who to me did not look like they knew what they were doing that the hard disk needed replacing and it would cost me £100. I balked at this and decided to source one online. In the meantime, I disconnected the battery and disk drive. Out of curiosity a couple of days later, I reassembled it, and it worked again! Now, ever 4 months or so (when sad face shows up), I have to go through this process again.

Easy replacement under warranty aside, I've been reluctant to buy another Apple product since this as I feel the crapware will die soon after warranty and I may be left with a pretty brick.

Supposed Anonymous hack 'unmasks members'

Hit the North

Damn, I was certain he was referring to Mark E Smith et al.

Five amazing computers for under £100

Psion.net

I had a psion.net dialup account. It was just a rebadged Lineone dial-up account. Ultimately the psion.net domain stopped working, but the address still worked with lineone.net appended. I still use it as one of my main email accounts even though it's now been bumped along via acquisitions and mergers through Tiscali to ultimately reside with Talk Talk.

Sony Ericsson posts Android bootloader unlock code

How many times? Sony Ericsson are NOT Sony!

All the clever jibes about Sony's lawyers, and Sony's policies are referring to a parent company with only a 50% stake. I'm not saying SE are perfect, or that they don't have their own ridiculous lawyers.

Ten... 40-42in net connected HD TVs

reviewer error

The reviewer either ran out of time, or did not have many media types.

Sony TVs support MPEG2 as well as AVCHD videos. Not exactly a stunning range of formats, but certainly better than just the (relatively) obscure AVCHD format.

I use both formats via DLNA on my 37EX403 (essentially the same TV as the 40EX43B, only slightly smaller display and minus the Blu-ray player).

CPS: We won't prosecute over BT/Phorm secret trials

The first rule of apostrophe club is...

Possessive apostrophes for singular nouns go between the noun and the "s"

Liked the quote though :-)

Nintendo game roll-out pace plunges

Umm

That was exactly my point. I never suggested that my TV scaling the image was HD gaming, and neither would playing a Wii game on a Wii 2 be HD gaming, in exactly the same way that PS One games look crap on my PS3.

Upscaled them?

Not sure what magic you're expecting from your Wii 2, but your TV already upscales the current Wii image to fit the screen. Quite what a Wii 2 would do that's any different without a ton of dev work for each individual game I have no idea.

Sony Ericsson preps Gingerbread for Xperia X10

Sony Ericsson is not Sony.

It's a 50/50 joint venture that depending on location of the office has a greater or lesser affiliation with either of the parent companies e.g. people in Lund are much more affiliated with Ericsson, ditto people in Tokyo with Sony. Ultimately though, it is its own entity independent of the parent companies.

All I can say about your actual comment is that DRM is best avoided if you know how to sort out your own media, then you can't end up in the situation you describe.

Because it's a stock photo?

Looks like a stock marketing photo to me. As an ex-SE employee, I'm only surprised that one of the contacts is not Ricardo Montoya.

Seriously though, not everyone wants to pay £50 for bluetooth headphones when they may have already invested in some decent wired ones from a company with pedigree that work with any CE audio device.

Personally, I'm very pleased to hear this news. Here I thought I'd be stuck with an out of date phone for the last year of my 2 year contract.

RealNetworks unhooks 130 employees in jobs cull

Real exist in enterprise

Despite the irrelevance of their client software on the desktop, they are (or were 2 years ago, when I last had anything to do with them) big players in the enterprise server space, and also in the client side of mobile phones.

Their Helix Mobile server is capable of some pretty funky things such as constant stream negotiation (over RTCP) with the client to present an uninterrupted stream to a mobile device that has variable bandwidth over the course of a streaming session. Particularly useful for content providers to stream 3gp video to low end devices that do not support flash etc.

Jackson's Hobbit movies back on track

That's not a bad feeling for me

The Clone Wars plots/stories aren't bad. I like the cartoons better than a lot of the content of the prequel films.

Consumers urged to step up wireless security

Really?

"Sky router admin"

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=sky+router+admin

Top result...

Sky Router Setup/Configuration

10 posts - 6 authors - Last post: 26 Sep 2006

You will be prompted for a username and password (they are admin - sky) : Once you login the default page is the Router Status page, ...

www.skyuser.co.uk › ... › Sky Broadband help › Sky Router - Cached - Similar

SourceForge applies global password reset after hack attack

Problem is with a broken feature of the form

As I said, the form is broken. The I'm referring to is supposed to be for those who can't remember what email address they used. The field it validates is one that gets hidden and /should/ be empty. If it is empty, then sending the reset details fails.

I freely admit that I should have updated my email address before this happened, but that doesn't change the issue of the very functionality designed for idiots such as myself being broken.

@TeeCee

Yup, my bad. Obviously I didn't receive any emails reminding me to keep up to date, but it's an oversight on my part anyway.

The web form to ask for reset is broken

I understand the rationale, but the reset process is a little broken.

I can't reset my password as it seems to be linked to the email address from my previous employer. I do not have access to this mailbox as they saw fit to close our office and make us all redundant in August 2009.

Unfortunately the form that deals with this kind of problem seems to be broken and keeps validating the email address field that it has hidden instead of the boxes to give relevant info to assist you. i.e. if you fill in the email before choosing the option to recover your account, it sends a password reset to that email address anyway, if you don't fill it in, it complains that you haven't done so :-(

I've emailed them, so hopefully it's something that they can fix easily as I'm sure I won't be the only person in this situation.

Cable vendor slapped for unproven claims

Trading standards next?

If they are making claims that cannot be backed up with evidence, are they not also open to investigation by trading standards?

Sony sues PlayStation 3 'hackers'

Currant games?

Also the raisin and sultana based games for PS3 won't work.

Ubuntu Wayland: Shuttleworth's post-Mac makeover

Missus hated 10.10 netbook remix

Subjective and minus the technical discussion on the merits of X and Unity, but I had to switch the Maverick install on the missus netbook back to a default Gnome desktop because she hated it so much. She actually quite liked the UI in the lucid (10.04) netbook remix, but the 10.10 one was a step too far.

I presume that she is target demographic for UNR as she knows nothing of the underlying system - other than its name, but if her reaction is anything to go by following the upgrade then Unity is not ready for the likes of her.

Sony streams music subscriptions to TVs, Blu-ray boxes

So for £4 you get to play music but can't search for it?

I assume that all you can do is follow links to try and find the music you want for £4?

Finding that one track in 6 million may be a bit of a chore on the cheaper tariff, but I guess that's the point.

David Attenborough dino doc shows limits of 3D TV

Pterosaurs != Dinosaurs

Just a quick point of order. The article states that Pterosaurs were a type of flying dinosaur, but this is not the case. Although contemporaneous with dinosaurs and sharing a common ancestor, pterosaurs (and also other diverse reptiles such as ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs) are on a different branch of the reptilian tree.

The year's best... HD TVs

Then be very surprised

Your assumption is perhaps understandable, but it is false. As you state the above mentions USB, not DLNA which *is* restricted as I mentioned above.

From the same page that you posted:

DLNA Renderer: Photo (jpeg)/Music(LPCM/MP3)/Video(MPEG2/AVCHD)

I could go further and link to the the DLNA certificate, but I think that I made my point. I have one of this series of TVs and the DLNA and USB support do not match.

Sony sets and XViD/DiVX

The article states that the Sony sets support XViD and DiVX via DLNA (over ethernet). This is not correct. MPEG2 and AVCHD are the only natively supported video formats. If you were watching either XViD or DiVX video, then your server was transcoding it.

Mass mind control artist condemns El Reg to obscurity

Yanks?

'We' call 'you' Yanks about as often as 'you' call 'us' Limeys... i.e. not very often, and then mostly said by idiots.

It was the pax. The G-23 Paxilon Hydrochlorate

Careful with that drug supply in the water. If Hollywood has taught me anything, then it's that a small proportion of the population go mad and kill everyone.

US politician: 'homosexual agenda' behind TSA groin grope

Sexual detatchment in the workplace

As an ex-nurse I can confidently say that I never once felt sexual arousal in dealing with any patient of any age. I dealt with people of all ages in various states of undress, and often had to administer treatments to the private regions of naked attractive people. I always offered women the option of a female nurse, but I never offered the same choice to men, though men were never offered (to my knowledge) an opposite choice by female colleagues.

In any case, invariably, women were not at all bothered as what I was doing was my job, not copping a feel. Do you honestly think that people get sexual kicks out of this sort of thing?

Masochists add Jimbo Wales to every webpage

Thanks - that one does work :-)

Cheers fella

It seems that they wised up to this

The ad-block snippet doesn't work for me, I guess they changed the way it's presented.

Filthy PCs: The X-rated circus of horrors

That bad huh?

In the absence of antibiotics MRSA is reproductively out-competed by regular staph aureus, like any organism with a superfluous more costly biology. Of course, the key point there is 'in the absence of' but I can only hope that antibiotics are not freely floating in the dust of our hospitals.

While MRSA is a menace in hospitals, if doctors could just stop over-prescribing antibiotics (i.e. for non bacterial illnesses) we'd have a much smaller problem.

Why Microsoft is Acorn and Symbian is the new CP/M

Ello tosh, got a Toshiba?

I remember the Tosh advert well, but recall the advert line slightly differently as:

"What *happens* next year when it's out of date? No *chance* Dad, this is MSX mate!".

Regardless of the actual words, I remember thinking at the time how incredibly ironic that was likely to be in the UK with the C64 and Speccy so firmly entrenched.

Tosh -iba, Tosh-iba, Tosh-iba...

Top Ten Arcade Classics

After Burner?

Are you referring to After Burner? Came in several varieties,the biggest hydraulic version of which I was told could do a 360 roll (though I never saw this version).

Good list - others I remember...

Phoenix, Galaxian and the above-mentioned Gorf were early modifications on Space Invaders and all swallowed significant money from me. Later excellent shooters included Nemesis(AKA Gradius)

Lots of money in my late teenage years was spent on two player games such as the excellent Midnight Resistance and Ikari Warriors (both games had rotating gun directional control on the joystick), Aliens, Punisher and Final Fight as well as multiplayer fun in the form of Ironman Stewart's Super Off Road and teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Linux life savers for paranoid penguins

Reading for comprehension

The OP said CDs *and* DVDs. I also backup my DVDs to my server, for exactly the same reason that people rip CDs to MP3 - ease of access. My DVDs remain in MPEG2 format and average about 4.5 GB per film, or 6 GB per disk of a series. Hence it's very easy to hit 4TB with a mix of DVDs and CDs. If you add in Blu-Ray rips at approx 30 GB per film, your disk space is rapidly consumed.

Top Ten Retro PC Games

That's Gauntlet 2

If you remember "Green Wizard shot the food" then you remember Gauntlet 2, which allowed all players to choose a character. Gauntlet had the simpler "Wizard shot the food"

Software engineer blogs own Starbucks wiretap

WPA != WPA-PSK

As stated above WPA (2) does not leave the users inside a network open to sidejacking, but you also mistook WPA2-preshared-key (WPA2-PSK) for WPA2. The difference being that WPA (1 or 2) requires a RADIUS server and uses certificate based encryption, where the preshared key versions used on home wireless routers don't.

WTF is... DLNA?

Just Serviio?

Hmm, I think perhaps your experience is limited, but then how much time do any of us have?

miniDLNA is open source, and definitely non-commercial and it works with Sony Blu-ray players.

Some misinformation there

Wow, that's a whole lot of misinformation in just one post!

1) DLNA certification *does* require minimum format support

-- I'm not for a minute stating that DLNA certification works as it should, but your statement is wrong.

2) Sony TVs do not only support their own formats.

I own two Sony TVs, both of which support over DLNA...

PCM - also known as WAV - not owned by Sony

MP3 - Not owned by Sony

JPEG - Not owned by Sony

MPEG2 - not owned by Sony

AVCHD* - specified by, but not (AFAIK) owned by Sony

* - AVCHD == MPEG2-TS container (not owned by Sony); H264 video (not owned by Sony); AC3 audio (not owned by Sony)

-- And here I will state that the formats that they support over DLNA are the ones that their other devices use, but they are *not* Sony's own formats. I think it can be agreed that the above list is more than the minimal number of formats needed to get DLNA certification.

The information is available on their website:

http://support.sony-europe.com/tutorials/tvhc/dlna/dlna.aspx?site=odw_en_GB&m=KDL-37ex403

I hasten to add that I do not work for Sony, I think that DLNA is in a mess as far as end users are concerned and I agree that Sony's support for formats over DLNA could be a lot better - especially as I have previously mentioned given that they support formats via USB that they do not support via DLNA.

miniDLNA?

If you can manage without transcoding then miniDLNA is worth a shot. It's available from Sourceforge either as source or precompiled binaries. I'm not sure on the 360 support though.