Posts by jason 126 publicly visible posts • joined 25 May 2007
....with a configurable timer to switch into low power standby would be a real boon.
Those things always run warm so they must be getting through the juice.
I always switch stuff off though. Why put money into the power corps coffers?
Only the router stays switched on 24hrs the PVR and small mini stereo get special standby dispensation.
Sorry pal but plenty of friends there. Its just that they all bought 360's.
40 folks with BD??!! Really??? I could believe that if you had said 4.
How about other folks? How many people do you know with BD gear (especially stand alone players)?
If folks can spend £20+ on a movie then we have a situation where common sense has dipped well under the bottom of the barrell.
I still dont know anyone that had a BD player and that includes PS3s.
My friends are all tech junkies and love gadgets but none of them had bought into BD even though most of them have 1080p TVs.
Reasons?
BD content is too expensive. As mentioned why buy a BD disk at £20+ when you can buy the DVD for £3 and upscale it.
How often do you re-watch a dvd? Not that often if honest and at £20 that seems silly.
Do most movies require the HD treatment? Do we need Dodgeball/Family Guy/any Will Smith movie in HD to watch it? Not really, dvd will do.
Do we want more and more disks taking up space? Not really. As mentioned earlier, as we dont watch a lot of our dvds more than once do we really need physical media anymore? Most of my friends just want the data to store on a NAS somewhere.
BD is just too late.
...but a total lack of balls when making up contracts?
In the UK you see news that a govt. contract is up for grabs you know there will be nothing on the contract but -
"We the UK Govt agree to pay *************************** as much as they want for however long it takes even if nothing actually gets delivered.
We also agree that no one will get the blame or lose their job over this!"
Why cant we start adding on penalties for bad delivery or bonuses for good delivery? I bet Wembley Stadium would have been built on time or even earlier and at far lower cost if all the staff involved would have got a good tax free bonus or the bosses were at risk of losing theirs.
At the end of the day we reward mediocrity and incompetence in the UK. If you are good at your job you are seen as a threat so never get to make the decisions. Sad.
As alluded to earlier this is a classic case of idoits having to back each other up.
One makes a cock up and the manager has to back him up because either -
a. He/she's stupid too.
b. He/she's been trained by some PC hippy that "you should always support your staff and not be negative to them!"
If I'd have been in the passenger's shoes I would have toyed with the idea of standing my ground. I would have stated "you may waste a load of my time but you may well lose your job!" Would be a case of who blinked first really. I feel that a lot of this current 'rules & regs is total BS and they just use threats to push it on us.
Would be interesting how they could make the charge of "wearing a tshirt in public" a prosecutable offence. Any judge in their right mind....oh hold on..sorry.
However, how about a group of say 20 folks went on a cheap flight to somewhere all wearing the same tshirt, also with guns draw on their trousers, then asked to remove them they have "love gun" on their underpants?
As my dad would say...."two can play silly buggers!"
They are just doing what a lot of corps do from time to time. Getting rid of their worst customers. They do this and the couple of thousand leachers/freetards that are using most of the bandwidth go elsewhere. Sorted. Plus those bad customers go to their competitors and screw them over. Win/Win.
If you are using 250Gb a month for LEGITIMATE purposes I would suggest as mentioned previously, you either look at using an enterprise/business account or go outside a bit more often.
If all you are doing is torrenting/leaching then you really havent a leg to stand on. Again get off your arse and go pay to see a movie maybe?
I would say 98% of customers would struggle to use 40Gb a month. Those of you using more than that are a minority that most ISPs would rather do without (on domestic accounts that is).
Of the three mates of mine who bought one, all of them played them like mad for a few weeks but have sold them on (mainly over xmas) and used the cash to put towards 360s. COD4 on Live was the big draw. They just got bored with the Wii.
Great idea but a bit of a fad. Casual gamers will never gain you as many sales as rabid gamers that would buy a PS3 or 360.
Anyone noticed though how quiet MS have been on the 360 front lately? I reckon they are winding it down already. Not only will we see a premature OS release but also maybe a new console too?
Its all gone very quiet, no real amazing developments or surprises.
I checked my 360 a couple of weeks ago and other then a few more movies that you didnt think it worth viewing the first time round, the cupboard was bare.
Not sure whats going on. My 360 gets used more as a DVD player at the moment.
I'm refering to UK Live btw.
Loads of folks are having trouble with MS Update on Vista either being supposedly corrupted or SP1 just fails to install. Either it fails at 12% (for some 13%) when doing the update route or it fails about 5 mins into a manual install with the fabled 80073712 error.
No one has found a solution and all the attempts by MS Tech support have failed. The one solution that appears to work is a full reinstall but I havent got the time to re-tweak Vista and let it settle down.
MS is being very quiet on this.
Yes I dont really understand why we have to spend bilions on useless kit that doesnt work or never arrives.
Who do we go into battle with the most? The Americans.
Who spends the most on weapons R&D? The Americans.
So why dont we just let them spend billions developing this junk and then we just cherry pick what we want, license it and build it in the UK if we can?
I can handle a few hundred folks being let go in Vickers/BAE etc. R&D dept if it saves me the taxpayer, 20 billion quid+ a year in wastage.
Plus if we buy US kit it might stand a chance of being compatible with our allies.
Not saying US kit is necessariliy the best but the vast majority of defense spending is wasteful anyway cos the vast majority of the real 'killer' stuff never gets used.
I got one of the original 30Gb units new for £75 and its great. I wanted the Mk1 version because I like its tough no nonsense looks and it does hold up well to abuse. The audio output is the best I've heard from a range of MP3 players and the new Zune software works really well. Battery life is good and the screen is clear and bright.
Oh and it has a radio too!
MS got about 85% there with the Mk1, 95% there with the Mk2 so the Mk3 will be something to look forward to. Competition is a good thing!
They are worth checking out and you dont have to change it every year cos its scratched to death.
"Unlike many countrys we do still have some democracy in the UK. Your vote dose count, "
No its only counts in a few marginal key seats. For 85% of the country you may as well not bother for the effect it has on the end result.
Plus what use is a vote when the choice is Idiots A, Idiots B or Idiots C?
I'm a middle class, reasonably educated, law abiding, tax paying, common sense, keep myself to myself, enviromentally sceptical, non-religious, car driving, terrorism ignoring brit.
Which of the Political parties best represent me? I'm struggling
Still waiting for something worthwhile to put in my PCIExpress version 1 slot! Same goes for all those PCI-E slots in my PC.
PCI-E is a total flop as a 'all hardware' expansion to be honest. Should have just called it AGPMAX and limited it to graphics.
Not very exciting.
DAB can disappear up its own transmitter for all I care. What I want sorting is Freeview picture quality first.
Fed up watching what looks like bad YouTube on my 32"LCD all the while. Goes to prove though that its nothing to do with choice, its all about squeezing out the bandwidth for maximum profit.
We need a campaign to get together to make folks boycott all those pointless sales channels so they can be taken down and the bitrate put up for the better entertainment channels.
I think I have my Topfield channel list edited down to just 12 channels on Freeview
Sony I dont think has ever had any sole tech other than the memory stick but as far as I know other firms make the sticks.
As for minidisc, I guess my Sharp and my brothers Aiwa MD units must have been illegal copies. They will license the tech to anyone who writes the cheque.
The only mistake Sony made with MD was not to push it bigtime as a PC data format. They had a reliable, pretty cheap, robust, re-writable, 150mb storage system ready to go in 1993, well before CDRW came along as a domestic system. Considering most HDs at that time were around the 200Mb or less size it would have been amazing. But thats for another discussion.
Johnny bankteller gets a cheque form a customer, do they then have a digital network that shows all the signatures on record just like that (kind of like the fingerprint system on CSI)? How long would that take to manually check all sigs? Even by computer would take ages with the thousands of cheques/DDs going through the system each day.
For a while I started changing the signature on all my cheques I sent out. Not one got challenged. They all got paid in.
As for finding out the details of who submitted the DD, wouldnt that be 'J Clarkson'?
Dixons/Currys are the biggest dinosaur shopping experience in town. Their range of products is unexciting, limited and the prices just ridiculous.
The knowledge of the staff is poor and their customer service is dreadful. We had a problem with Currys a few years ago. Suffice to say the store manager was always busy when my other half rang. So I called them to speak to him. I was told by 'Sharon' that he was of course busy. "Thats a shame" said I, "as I was going to give him some positive feedback!"
"Ooooo we dont get that very often!" was Sharon's excited reply.
Suffice to say the manager was on the phone within 5 seconds. He was owned!
Since then we've sworn never to buy anything more from them orther than a pack of batteries or an aerial cable in the direst of emergencies.
Once you have used online retailers such as Dabs/Ebuyer/Overclockers et al, just why would you bother with Currys?? The quicker they go the better.
I cant ever see HD coming to Freeview in any big way. I was dismayed when I finally got Freeview enabled in my flat a few months ago. I could not believe how poor the picture quality was on most of the channels. It's like watching YouTube, totally pointless on your top of the range TV. If the broadcasters are going to be that stingey with bandwidth for SD then god knows how bad any attempts at HD will be, especially from the commercial providers.
I remember back in the early 80's we were taught French at the middle school (pre high school). All we learnt was masses of vocab and conversational stuff with plenty of emphasis on accent etc.. It was good fun and the teacher was enthusiastic too. I remember quite a lot of what I learnt and I was virtually top of my class for French.
However, I then went to High school and the method was very different. All they wanted to concentrate on was the written grammar, nous, vous etc. etc. It bored the hell out of me and took all the fun out of learning the language. Suffice to say when my options came round I dropped both French and German for Electronics and Computer Studies.
As far as I am concerned all that needs to be taught up to A level standard is conversational skills in whatever language. For the first four years of our lives we learn like this and it seems pretty effective. If you can read english you can roughly translate words in most western languages so thats fine. Just have fun learning to speak it first. Then go on to learn the formal grammar stuff later. I'm sure most folks would far prefer you having a good go and maybe using le instead of la rather than waving and shouting loudly.
When are we ever going to get back to an OS that is just a single lean piece of code with a minimal UI that allows me to purely run the applications that I WANT to use on top of it.
I dont use 85% of the junk in XP let alone all the stuff in Vista.
If MS cant do this then maybe let us have a real custom install option that lets us trim out all the bloat we dont need? We used to get that with Win95!
I'm not looking forward to Vista at all.
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