Posts by rastansaga

Microsoft confirms Kinect SDK for business in 2012

End of the office as we know it?

Useful, as long as your business often involves shouting "Lightsaber ON!"

Council fined for randomly emailing personal data

council response prediction

Don't worry, I'm sure the council bosses will take full responsibility and more importantly, lessons have been learnt. Now, back to that golf swing...

UK.gov issues death warrant for ID cards

Let me help you out...

Get a white sticker, write the words 'ID card' on it and affix to the front of your British passport.

Congratulations! you now have an ID card and can travel freely everywhere within the EU

Job done.

DRAM makers fined €331m for euro cartel

Jail 'em

Jail terms for the CEOs and board would be a more interesting punishment

Sky punts 'truly unlimited' 20Mb/s broadband

Remembering the 90's

Those rightfully feeling restricted by a 2GB a month broadband limit might want to consider going 'retro', and returning to a 56kbit modem dialup running off an 0800 number. AOL offer this for £4.99 (for first 3 months) with absolutely no traffic shaping, limits or restrictions - and you could reasonably grab ~14GB a month if you keep it running 24/7

Sony's PS3 firmware update shows how retailers can be exposed

Re: Pathetic

And who bought a PS3 with the expectation or desire that those supposed 'new features' would be added? Absolutely nobody. Who bought a PS3 with the desire to use the advertised functionality (such as OtherOS)? Many, many, many people. They've been scammed by Sony, no argument against it.

Using your braindead logic, how about Sony decides "next firmware update will disable playing of games on none Brava TVs, but it's okay because as compensation we'll let you choose your start up sound"

As for Xbox 360, it never had the ability to batch download all titles from XBLA. You can add them in bulk to your download queue though, if you want.

Nintendo updated the photo application to play AAC instead of MP3. You are free to install and uninstall this as you desire, switching between the AAC and MP3 version. It's not even a firmware update, it's an application update.

Bioshock 2

A little bit 'meh'

First was fun, certainly graphically impressive, the 'great story' loved by so many didn't impress me - I found picking up the never ending 'recordings' frankly tedious. Good enough to play through once, but there's only so many times I want to endure playing a 'connect the pipes' mini-game.

As for the 2nd - far too much of the same - I'll admit I gave up before the end, because I just wasn't finding it any FUN, it just didn't have that GRAB factor. Oh, and the multi-player was a disaster almost on par with the last Wolfenstein whenever I tried. Don't even get me started on the downloadable content.

Let the 'franchise' rest in peace.

Twitter to auction off words

*cough* ad-block

Won't be long until ad-block type functionality in clients disposes of the annoyances

Last.fm now offers Less.fm

xbox 360 service disappointing

Personally, I find the problem with the xbox 360 service is that you have to load it as a seperate application - you can't stream 'the beats' in the background whilst playing a game. Same goes for the twitter and facebook functionality they added - all one-off applications.

Now I can understand the technical difficulties in trying to cram it all in so that this stuff is always available at a push of the guide button, but none-the-less... disappointing.

Third of XP security suites flunk tests

Jonathan Ross to blame

I still remember a DVD that came with the Sunday Times when XP came out. It had some video of Jonathan Ross 'bigging up' XP and saying something like "If this isn't the most secure operating system you'll ever use then I'll eat my..." can't remember for sure if the next word was 'hat', 'head, 'arse' or 'words' or indeed something else, but anyway - I'm still ****ing waiting for him to make good on his promise.

Tories put ID cards, Contactpoint on manifesto hit list

Re: Re: Easy to cut down on goverment waste

It's not correct that removing tax inspectors that bring in more than their wages is always a negative effect. If you use that as the sole basis for employment - and take it to its extreme - then you would end up with a huge number of inspectors, each bringing in precisely what it cost to employ themselves.

A point is reached where employing new inspectors decreases the amount raised by existing inspectors - because there are simply not enough violations for them to 'catch'. They become a case in point example of a 'non-job' - even though at first glance it looks as if they are making a positive contribution.

This is even more relevent when laws, systems and procedures are subsequenly revised to make avoidance more difficult in the first place - this should follow hand in hand with a reduction in the number of inspectors. But this never happens in the public sector - it just grows without limit.

Labour manifesto: More ID cards, less NHS IT

Bits and bytes... they're all the same

The manifesto also claims (bottom right on page 1:6) they'll give "virtually every household in the country a broadband service of at least 2 megaBYTES per second by 2012".

Oh, yeh? You might want to double check that.

England fails to make World Cup 3D screening draw

Scotland

I hear Scotland's games will be available in zero-D

Tories to cut IT to keep National Insurance down

Re: Let me get this right...

your post doesn't make much sense. the idea with efficiency savings is that you target the areas that are actually inefficient, not 'share the pain around' regardless.

i'm not saying that the 'proposed savings' aren't nonsense though.

BBC ices launch of free iPhone news app

Huh, did you get your 'facts' from The Sun?

When you said "hundreds of miles away from anywhere England are playing" did you actually mean "where England are playing their game on 18th June" ? It didn't cost anywhere near 2.5 million either.

Easy mistakes to make if you get your news from Murdoch's Sun.

iPads sold out

Same tax, different class

The lower class pay the 'must have latest Windows' tax

The middle class pay the 'must have latest Apple iDevice' tax.

The upper class use Linux

Lords: Analogue radio must die

Tech might be good, but available radios are crap

why are all DAB radios shaped like ugly bricks? I hunted high and low some years ago for a small battery powered device I could stick in my pocket and use to listen to 5live on the way to/from work, but nothing doing. In the end I got a regular AM/FM device.

My 'brick shaped' alarm clock next to my bed does have DAB - and happily autoscans for new stations - but never seems to forget discontinued services. Endless 'service not detected' when changing channels.There's no 'reset' option in any of the menus and even turning it off for a weekend did nothing.

Even more ridiculous is that the manual talks of 'no more hassle resetting the clock due to BST switches - we take the time from the DAB signal'. Great, but it doesn't do this automatically, you have to press more buttons to get it to rescan the time than you would need to nudge the hour backwards/forward manually.

BT hijacks business browsers

Coming soon...

Hi you've dailed 999, but before we put you through would you be interested in a great offer on our broadband packages? If you're interested in hearing about great broadband packages, press... 1. If you'd like us to ring you back at a more convenient time to hear about our great broadband packages, press... 2...

Dell bars Win 7 refunds from Linux lovers

win free PCs in UK

It's not remotely difficult to buy a windows-free PC in the UK. I've bought netbooks, laptops and desktop systems. Two suppliers that spring to mind are thelinuxemporium and novatech. Ever since Linux/Ubunutu got to the stage where wireless tends to work 'out of the box' I've been completely windows-tax free.