Posts by Neil Daniels

Best Buy leaked memo spills Windows 7 upgrade details

Prices

$49 and $99 eh? So that'll be £99 and £149 when it gets over here then.

Netgear EVA9150 Digital Entertainer Elite

Getting there.

Well it sounds very nice - anything that can handle MKVs immediately gets a gold star from me. Unfortunately it's still up around the price tag for a complete HTPC which would be able to play back disc media as well.

Asus Eee Box B206

A title is required.

Stick an nVidia 8 series or later chip in there - Nvidia CUDA is much more accommodating than DXVA for hardware h264 decoding. Only downside is you need CoreAVC to access it which isn't free (but it is cheap and very good). In a box this small you need every bit of processing power you can squeeze out, which with DXVA sadly isn't very much.

Virgin Media pilots 200Mbit service

Down is not the issue.

How about instead of working on 200 meg DL connections you give us a 2 meg down and 2 meg up connection?

Toshiba Regza DV556DB

TV station bug

Comments from around the web seem to indicate the bug is slightly more serious, resulting in the digital tuner completely dying, meaning a replacement set. However I still want one for the parents so I can finally be rid of VHS.

AMD ATI Radeon HD 4890

<title>

Why does the GTX280 score almost 4x as much on the CPU score?

Blu-ray Disc sales to hit 100m by Xmas

@David Wiernicki

Get the right upscaler and the results can be amazing - thus a PC will outperform almost any standalone. PureVideo and a 1080p telly via HDMI = unbelievably good DVD playback.

As for BD itself, until it's as easy to play any and all BDs regardless of region as it is with DVDs I'll probably hold on to my cash.

Windows 7 public beta end date named

@Nick

Two drives, at exactly the same time?

Hazardous

I liked the beta - much more polished than the pre-betas (obviously)... but then it trashed two of my hard drives (apparently). Anyone else had random spin-downs using Maxtor SATA drives?

Other than that (admittedly rather major) issue, I really like Win7. The description "Vista pretty but without all the crap" seems quite apt.

BT price rises go down well

@Dave

Fair enough, I'm not a network engineer after all. So what exactly is coming down my coax line from the street box?

Paris because apparently we know the same amount.

Re: Re: Sigh

Coax is a damn sight faster than phone cable. Unless I'm mistaken (and I very well may be - anyone in the know care to correct me/concur?) about it carrying ~200 channels at 2-15 Mbps per channel, plus my internet traffic. The fibre backbone is probably orders of magnitude faster, but that makes sense as by that point you have everyone's internet traffic to contend with.

EU says Microsoft violated law with IE on Windows

Title is required

And no-one complains that Safari is included as default with Mac OS? Or are they not important enough?

Deception of 'up to' broadband speeds exposed

@ Ash and Kev

I too get exactly as advertised - 2mb for the first GB (during peak times, then 1mb for the next 5 hours), otherwise full speed. Customer service is crap but at least the line is pretty damn stable. It's gone down I think once in the past 6 months, and that was at their end (evidenced by flashing "sync" and "ready" lights on the modem).

Western Digital WD TV HDD-to-HDTV adaptor

Just out of interest...

How many of this type of unit *do* support MKV and h264? It seems to be the one thing that is almost non-existent - if this does indeed support everything it may just be awesome. Network port would be even better however. HTPC for £100? Yes please.

(although I do like having a full HTPC and WMC)

Rail companies roll out barcode ticket standard

Network-wide Oyster card

and be quick about it.

La Cie's quiet fans

The "notches in different places" idea...

Sounds a bit iffy with regards to keeping the blades balanced.

Microsoft preps IE 8 for the web-challenged

Oh for crying out loud.

They can't fix their browser so they want the internet to be fixed instead?

Brits decline to 'think outside the box'

@Matthew Ellen

Ah yes, methodology. I believe the only correct place for that term is as a heading for the section of your work where you describe and discuss the methods available to you for whatever it is you are doing. The method is what you actually do.

Main article:

"Brainstorming"? That's hardly new.

"At the end of the day"? I find it useful for "what will/should happen regardless of the method you employ" or "what it turns out like regardless of how you think it should happen".

LG GP08NU10 slimline portable DVD writer

MacBook Air...

...has only one USB port though...

Windows 7: One compatibility label, no confusion

@TheBigYin

VideoReDo is your friend - will take in any form of mpeg2 stream including .dvr-ms and spits out a bog standard .mpg

House key copied from photo

Required, a title is.

I want one of those fancy ruby prism keys from Da Vinci Code

Eee PC series to get Windows 7 but not Vista, says CEO

@ AC 13:22

XP with an Aero interface? Perfect.

Apple MacBook Air stays skinny, gains beefier specs

Displayport?

Does anyone or anything actually use that?

Paris, because she displays... yeah.

'First production-line energy weapon' now shipping

Good to see...

..the El Reg hive mind in full swing.

Postman Pat goes postal

Re: Cumbria?

Fireman Sam was in Wales, Postman Pat was clearly up north somewhere.

Gemalto glues DVD onto a SIM

Title is required

I think an old-fashioned "large" sim shares the same form factor as a chip-and-pin smartcard, which would explain why they keep the superfluous plastic - easier to stick in a reader/writer

OMFG, what have you done?

Firefox 3...

...makes light work of the site not filling the screen - "Zoom" insted of "Text Size" for the win!

I'll live with it.

It's quite nice, clean look etc. Put the old comment icons back and you'll hear no quarrel from me.

One more thing...

You might want to add "overflow-y : scroll" to your CSS to stop it jumping around when the page isn't long enough to warrant a scrollbar, too.

'World's largest TV' sports super HD resolution

@Cameron Colley

Theatre != Cinema

Hasbro kills Colonel Mustard in the corporate office with the marketing ploy

Revolver or pistol

The picture on the Revolver card in my box is definitely of a semi-automatic pistol, and ditto for the actual playing piece itself.

Paris, just because.

Cardiff 'copter coppers give chase to UFO

RIght then...

...get Torchwood on it.

Google-Yahoo! collects some strange enemies

Google-Yahoo

Hasn't this all happened before?

Paris just because...

'Mad Scientist' developing powered suits for US military

@ Odin

To make it three times faster, natch?

BOFH: Impatience

@Scott

Too right, I suspect a plot by the boss to have past episodes float by unnoticed...

Virgin Media in premium rate U-turn

No need to ring the 08 number

Look up VM's numbers on saynoto0870.com and you should be able to find a geographical number for customer service. They have been blocking them off one by one but if you can find one it's well worth it (especially if you get free minutes on your mobile)

Why I downgraded from Vista to XP

Downgrading

I thought if your machine came preinstalled with Vista you had the right to "downgrade" to XP for no cost?

So, what's the velocity of a sheep in a vacuum?

2 Olympic swimming pools...

"...Bill Gates' wealth in _$1m_ dollar bills..."

Methinks that wouldn't be too huge of a pile...

How to watch TV on your PC

Cable

Unless Virgin changed their T&Cs recently, they won't let you plug anything into their cable that isn't one of their supplied set-top boxes or cable modems. A shame really as the hardware to make use of cable - including the smart card - is out there for very reasonable rates.