Posts by Boris Blank

Doctor Who returns to our screens next week – so, WHO is the worst Time Lord of them all?

Re: Matt Effing Smith

McGann was the only good thing about the TV movie. His performances in the early Big Finish audios are first class and, for me, cement his position as a "real" incarnation of the Doctor. Anyone wanting to dip in should seek out the early adventures from the monthly range or the stories with Sheridan Smith as companion. A TV spinoff starring Paul McGann and Sheridan Smith could be amazing with the right production team and a willingness to diverge from Nu Who's cliches.

As for the worst, it has to be Colin Baker. Regardless of any arguments about the writing, after all Tom Baker made some truly dire episodes watchable, CB's acting and delivery was always too overblown and stagey, pulling the material down rather than lifting it. Everyone I knew *hated* his performance at the time and saying he was a victim of circumstance is a rather more recent bit of revisionism.

Who killed ITV Digital? Rupert Murdoch - but not the way you think

Re: Interesting comments, decent article.

Just to be pedantic: QAM is used on cable, Freeview uses COFDM.

Darth Vader dies peacefully in hospital

The sabre fight in A New Hope did look a lethargic it has to be said. Empire's duel was breathtaking though and much better than the over-choreographed rubbish seen in the prequels. Maybe it was Prowse in the suit for ANH, with Bob taking over for the next two?

Star Wars: The Complete Saga Blu-ray disc set

Never mind character arcs

The redo of the Greedo scene just looks fake and horrible, that's my main issue with it. Han gets cut 'n' pasted over to one side, then a quick cut later and he's back in his original pose. Even if I'd never seen the film before, it would still look "wrong".

Lucas should take a leaf out of Ridley Scott's book by providing the originals alongside any changed versions, then everybody would be happy.

Sony coughs to third-gen PSP power problem

Fair trade

Given the marked improvement in contrast shown on the pictures, the lower battery life is a small price to pay. The old PSP screen was pretty damn good already, so the new one should be fantastic.

Now Hollywood is chasing UK downloaders

Still using indirect detection - wow

The linked pdf describing detection techniques is downright scary! Are people actually going to end up in court based on indirect detection? Legally it sounds like a shakey basis to do anything as you're assigning guilt based on a list held by a 3rd party, rather than proving participation.

It'll be interesting to see if studios go after downloads of first run versions of shows, i.e. not DVD rips. Those probably increase DVD sales in the UK, as folks get hooked on shows that would otherwise only be seen by the minority who pay through the nose for $ky.

Japan kicks off electric car format war

Re: 55.79MPG - More Prius envy?

Okay, in my commment above I got my US/UK gallons back to front. I therefore humbly accept a "Golden Cock" award. :-)

If Clive whatisname can really get an equivalent of 66 UK MPG out of a Prius in normal driving, I will eat my own left leg. Several people I know who own a Prius typically see a figure in the 40s.

Re: 55.79MPG - More Prius envy?

Hmmm, well Mr Prius owning bod...

It sounds like you're from the US, which means your gallon is about 1.2 x bigger than the unit we use in the UK. 55.79 MPG is actually around 46.5 MPG for comparison with UK cars.

I own a Seat Toledo mk 2 Diesel which easily does 50 MPG and can do 60+ if driven carefully. In US gallons, those figures equate to 60-72 MPG. The Toledo looks better than a Prius, goes a heck of a lot faster (0-60 in 8.6 seconds) and, it seems, consumes a great deal less fuel. Same would go for the Volkswagon Golf and other derivatives.

Apart from fuel efficiency issues, there's also the horendous impact of building the Prius in the first place. Have a read up on this - it's very scary!

Whenever I see a Prius, my only thought is "you c*ck". Envy doesn't come into the equation at any point.

Researchers release 'cold boot' attack utilities

Old Skool!

Ha, seasoned crackers used to do this back in the early 80s to lift code from protected Spectrum games. :-)

TVonics MFR-300 micro digital TV set-top box

Arcade box

A few years ago there were rumours that TVonics had licensed an embedded version of the old Sparcade emulator and were set to start putting arcade games on their boxes. A mate of mine claims to have seen a demo and said it was pretty damn spiffy.

Sounded great... what happened?

Alan Sugar leaves Amstrad

Big box stereos

The irony of Amstrads "big empty box" stereos was the missed opportunity. If the case had been designed to fit the innards, Amstrad probably would've had a huge head start in the field of micro hi-fis.

Trying to emulate everyone else rather than finding a new market. Bad decision - you're fired!

Paris, because she has a big empty space (though not a big empty box).

CPC tat? Hardly.

The CPC was quite possibly the only Amstrad product I've ever owned which wasn't tat. Build quality was pretty good and the keyboard was arguably the best of the home micros of the time. Don't forget these things also came with a fairly high quality monitor, giving a crisp RGB picture at a time when the C64 and Speccy were still spewing out nasty composite pictures.

The one big problem it had was with its design rather than quality of implementation. The nice graphics meant there was about twice as much video RAM as the CPU could reasonably be expected to chuck around and this crippled the performance of its games. A shame, because even the simplest of blitters would have helped it keep pace with the Speccy whilst providing better visuals.

Looking back over a history of tat, it's actually quite hard to believe Amstrad was responsible for the CPC at all!

Boffins invent 42GB DVD

Re: Bytes?

"Actually even if its only 5 positions, thats still signed half bytes."

5 positions gives you 5 values, not 2^5(!!)

You'd need 255 positions to represent a byte, with the 256th being "no pit".

Who will be the next Doctor?

Huge copout looming

It'll be an horrendous copout of some sort no doubt. All of RTD's season enders have involved one, so why would he change now?

My money's on the two Tennants theory with one of them going off to live happily ever after with Rose. That'll be the point where I vomit.

@ The guy who referred to "intricate" plots on par with Lost and Heroes

Are you insane or just 10 years old? That anyone could think RTD's story structures are intricate really beggars belief. If you look up intricate in the dictonary, you will not find the description "a big loud mess".

RSPCA calls for dog chipping

Chip the pooch?

If I have my dog chipped, will I be able to start using imported food?

Samsung to demo next-gen, 240Hz LCD TV tech

Great, even more motion artefacts

Given that it's impossible to perfectly interpolate video, how can this ever look anything other than horrible?

Smoother movement is easy: somebody tell the friggin TV companies to stop filmising video and at least broadcast at the 50/60Hz rates we have available.

Sky One to resurrect Blake's 7?

Chris Boucher WAS Blakes 7

Any remake absolutely must involve Chris Boucher. Terry Nation might've got things going with a good concept, but the writing was yawn-inducing until CB came onboard.

Team him up with Joss Whedon and you'd have the potential for something really special.

Hitachi ships Travelstar 7K200 encrypted hard drive

Hitachi click of death

[Sarcasm] Well at least this technology allows drives to be RMAed without giving Hitachi sensitive info. If their drives still have a propensity to suffer from "click of death", this could prove invaluable. [/Sarcasm]

Screen stars: Ten HDTVs on test

These reviews are just waffle

I found these reviews completely pointless as no real effort was made to say how well the sets performed with different types of material. For instance, how does each set cope with interlaced input when compared to a CRT (the majority of LCDs are laughably bad at this), what is the colour perfomance, how do the sets cope with shadow detail, etc?

Really, all LCD tests should also run up the set next to a decent quality CRT and comment on the differences - without exception, a CRT will wipe the floor with any current generation LCD, we just need to know how big a quality drop we're in for!