Posts by jason 7
1150 posts • joined Thursday 11th June 2009 11:27 GMT
Dave
Used to watch this all the time however, I have now seen everything on it 8 times at least so I dont anymore.
Hmm not sure...
..did he do that 'housey housey' music the kids liked in the 80s?
Posted in BBC bigs up iPlayer for TVs and consoles
Cmon Microsoft.....
...stop being such a killjoy and let everyone in the UK with a 360 enjoy the iPlayer/4OD goodness.
We've paid for it already so why not?
Ditch the Sky Player too...oh and maybe the expensive Zune movie thing too and let us access LoveFilm....
You know, broaden the appeal a bit.
Posted in No PS4 or Xbox 720 before 2014
Morrowind/Oblivion turd feature legacy
No the game series has to keep the tradition of one really annoying feature in each game. As you say the lockpick thing is one (I'd also include the bizzare and pointless charm/pursuade/threaten thing too) and the sodding constant blood vultures was the other.
As for new consoles, sooner the better. The 360 is the only bit of tech laying around that I have from 2006, like having a mangle in the living room its so old.
Xmas 2012 for sure.
Posted in Nokia's cheapies strategy bombs
Yep same here.
I've been hunting around for a few of Nokia's phones but cant get them in any of the shops. In terms of phones I like to hold one and have a use before I pay for it.
Oh sure I can play with iPhones, Blackberrys, Galaxy IIs etc. but Nokias are like hens teeth.
Sorry.
Mayself and many of us just dont have £400 to plonk down on the latest Smarphone that will be replaced in 6 months and will be lucky to last a year.
I have increasingly expensive food and shelter to think of first.
Posted in PC mountain accumulates in Blighty
You do have to wonder at Acer etc. sense of 'style'
You look at some of the kit these manufacturers put out and you wonder how they even dress.
Dreadful colour choices. Shiny greasy plastics, lumpy looking sides due to port mouldings, glossy 16:9 screens that make the 1200x800s we all moaned about 5 years ago look amazing, fussy looking on/off/media buttons, chrome look plastic anywhere. The list goes on.
Less is more folks.
Seems I'm not the only one.....
that could be accused of making wild assumptions.
I've seen it often.
Whenever I've seen the Environmentalists campaign against new nuclear or coal power stations. When the question gets asked - "Ok fair enough but what do you suggest as a viable alternative to help sustain all our growing energy needs over the next 100 years?"
It all goes very quiet then.
After all if the tax payers were not subsidising the windfarms they would all be shutdown for scrap within a week.
They dont build them to save the planet you know.
It's a moot point however. As we all know when folks find they cant charge up their iPads or play their Xbox360 they will be hammering on their MPs door demanding a nuclear powerstation yesterday. Environment be damned. Just a shame we'll have to wait till the last minute before it gets resolved.
Well then....
lets just sit back and watch things develop over the next 40 years as two billion more folks (read consumers) come into the world all wanting the same as we have from an ever dwindling pool of resources.
Then we'll see who had the right idea. It's not going to get better is it?
Or are people expecting that if we just "give it time" we'll somehow end up in a wonderful StarTrek TNG type world where everyone is housed and fed and wants for nothing?
Sorry but thats fiction. The likely scenario is a major war as corporations and superpowers start cutting up and cutting off valuable resources. Its happening already if you havent noticed. Maybe that will sort out the 3 billion. If so I'll take my chances with the rest.
Ok I can take a bullet but on the flip side are you prepared to cut back your lifestyle by 75% so everyone else can have a share?
No? Didnt think so, so what are we going to do?
People still buy this stuff?
I've dumped most of my DVD collection as only about 15 of them had been watched more than once. Just not worth it. No BDs for me either.
Dump your unwatched collection into the charity shop, freeing up space for some other crap, then rent the DVD/BD from the local library for £2.
Job done.
You know there is only one way we can save this planet.
We need to eliminate around 3 billion humans from the face of the earth.
Think about it. Its a far easier option than getting nearly 7 billion to change their minds and lifestyles.
Noooo not a longer Return of the King????
The cinema version was 30 minutes too long. The perfect ending for that movie with all the build up would have been at the ceremony where he says "no my friends you bow to no man!"
They all bow the camera pans back aaannnndddddddd CUT!
Perfect.
But no we get another 30 mins of seat jiffle inducing crap that just kills the ending dead.
Global Warming is the wrong poster child for the environment
Global warming is too devisive. You show me a chart showing an increase I bet I can find a chart showing the opposite from just as reliable a source.
The Eco crowd should drop it and go back to basics. Why not go under the banner of "Pollution"?
Folks can get to grips with that as a concept. We can see polluted rivers. We can see mounds of rubbish and smoke. We can all agree its not good. If we then set about dealing with and cleaning up "Pollution" then chances are we will also indirectly/directly also deal with the factors that may or may not be causing global warming.
Global warming is just an uphill struggle. Deal with stuff folks can actually see.
I had a laugh the other week
I went to a closed forum where the UEA was having a days long discussion with select members of the public about eco factors and climate change.
They were asking folks about the environment etc.and all looking quite smug. It was all warm and cosy..until I stepped up.
The question was where do you get your information on the environment from and how it shapes your opinion. Most folks it seems get theirs from the backs of fag packets. I said I was skeptical. Why? they asked.
I replied "ohhh I dunno maybe the whole UEA sexed up climate change documents scandal from 18 months ago? You know the one, if the data doesnt fit your opinion make it fit!"
Christ you could have heard a pin drop. It felt so good.
Posted in X-COM UFO: Enemy Unknown
Never played this....
....but loved Syndicate from Bullfrog. Lost the disks years ago.
I do however, still play the classic Master of Orion 2. I love that game dearly.
Thats the big problem.....
...the poly counts and textures increase but the game stays the same old same old.
Indeed!
The GPU in the next Xbox will be whatever they can get from AMD for $10 a unit.
I'm guessing a 5770 or lower spec, say 5750 with a few custom tweaks.
After all it only has to handle the increasingly dissapointing and limiting 1080p standard.
Posted in Sony KDL-40CX523 LCD TV
Yayyyyyyy!
Yet another neither one thing nor the other 80% review.
We all live in a 80% world it seems.
Posted in Ten... wireless speakers
All these constant 80% reviews......
.....dont really help.
Are we just surrounded with lots of average products?
Posted in Bug-Byte Manic Miner
How about remembering some of those games that really dissapointed?
I'll start -
Valhalla (remember paying a staggeringly massive £14.95 for that in 1994 iirc).
War of The Worlds (came late in the Spectrums life but bizzarely was written in BASIC, the packaging was better then the game)
The Great Space Race ( Thank god I didnt buy that one, learnt my lesson with that firm)
Shadowfire 2 (not a bad game but didnt push the boundaries like the original did)
Posted in Sony to can MiniDisc Walkman
A good format for the time.
Fantastic for in the car and on the move with its protected discs. It was pretty cheap and reliable too.
I still miss my Ford Puma with the Sony 6 MD changer in the glovebox.
The main trick Sony missed was not pushing it as a data format. They just made a few units and forgot about it.
Sony had a solid and reliable re-writeable data format (fairly cheap media too) a few good years before affordable and reliable CD burners and CD-RW came along. I would have killed for a 150MB disk format in 1993 for my PC. It could have killed floppies. I could have backed up my entire 1993 PC to one MD!
Zipdrives certainly wouldnt have flourished.
Trouble is.....
budget Intel boards are not as well equipped in most cases as AMD based ones.
A lot of them still have serial and parallel ports on them. To get the modern ports you have to spend £15+ or more to get them.
On a budget box thats eating into my profit for no benefit whatsoever.
Thats always the odd thing.
AMD moans about Intel but Intel does one thing that AMD never does...Advertise.
So whan folks go to buy a PC they get a choice of Intel or AMD.
Well they've never heard of AMD but they get to hear the Intel jingle at least three times a day on TV so they buy from the one brand they have heard of.
Simple.
AMD needs to sack their marketing team, get a new one and start spending on some jingles etc. after all there is only one other company doing it in their field so how hard can it be?
Even Acer has adverts in the UK.
As for no-one wanting AMD, I build my budget PC boxes with AMD CPUs in them. Why? The saving of using AMD enables me to put a 60GB SSD in the box. Customers dont notice the difference between an Athlon II or a i5 but they notice the SSD. They also get USB3.0/HDMI/usable integrated graphics, which they dont get on the budget Intel motherboards.
Their own fault.
All the main drama/tv shows we watch are all recorded so we rarely ever watch the adverts however, we do use the "Sponsored by" bits as markers for when to press play or if we've shuffled too far.
The "SPONSORED BYYY RAGGGEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!" adverts during The Walking Dead were stupidly loud.
I dont get the point of a lot of the advertising today.
I dont like Poker, I dont like Bingo, I dont want to sell my old phone and I dont care what Jordan gets up to.
Someone clicked the wrong email server option at Apple
You know the super secret option that the Govt. (read shady corporate overlords) states they all have to have that instantly filters and censors content in times of major civil unrest/martial law/state of emergency etc.
You know I'm right.
Posted in Do we really want 100Gig Ethernet?
Ahem.......
....can they get the 10/100 and 1GB standards working first?
Posted in Ten... pocket compact cameras
As I've said before...
...I think we can give up on the phone makers ever giving decent lenses across the board so the hardware will always have a limit.
However, there is one improvement they could make in the software and thats lower the compression applied to the shots. I dont need a phone that can take 700 blurry pics but I would like to be able to take maybe 50 nice ones. Let us set the compression setting maybe?
I often wonder if manufacturers just use the firmware to differenciate between their range. The hardware internally stays the same across the range.
The cheapest cam gets 60% compression and a little noise applied, the next gets 50%...40%
Yeah I dont get it either.
Seems folks are happy to accept shoddy standards and electronics to make sure they have the latest and (well in BD's case no so great) greatest.
When I read about this lag time about 5 years ago I thought it was just 1st generation drives would have this. Seems its a feature then?
Posted in Pentax Q takes mini system camera crown
So lets get to the real important issue.....
Whats the default Auto setting that it will be set in for most cases like?
Yeah, looks like too many steps involved.
I reckon this was thought up by folks under the age of 30 who wouldnt listen.
Am I right or am I right? You know what I'm talkin' about.
I've written this mission off already.
Anyone for Harriet Klausner?
Amazing woman, apparently speed reads about 12 books a day and post up reviews on Amazon at the same ratio each day.
Except all the books get 5 star reviews and often the review has nothing to do with the actual book.
Yet Amazon has allowed this for years and years.
Total bollocks.
Posted in Cloud no cure for IT department haters
Doesnt have to be like that.
I left a large firm a few years back after being an IT Manager for several of them. I was known for getting stuff sorted, reducing noise and generally having a good relationship with my customers.
Working with them was far more fun than against and actually meeting them and seeing how they worked payed major dividends. I rarely got any hassle and work was really smooth. I hated the IT bunker mentality and avoided it at all costs. Let them know you are a decent bloke rather than an arsehole essentially.
I then tried to get a similar role in other companies. Same story over and over. I would tell the grey little middle aged senior IT director how I worked (i.e. with the customer rather than against) and how well it worked. But I could tell it terrified them as thats how they should be working and he couldnt have me putting the wind up his lazy bunch of IT managers.
Suffice to say I'm now self-employed.
Why did I leave my long terms role? I was told that as there was no IT budget left I would have to sit and say "No!" to all the folks I looked after. No fun I thought and I fancied taking a risk.
When I go back to the job hunting lark I'll just try to appear an average arsehole that doesnt appear to be a threat to anyone and happy to let others take credit. Seems thats what firms like these days.
Posted in Nokia E6 smartphone
Happens with HTC/WinMo too
Had many a time I pressed the green answer button only to have the call cut off instantly.
Feeling the pain......
...from the Fiat 500 much guys?
Why would you buy a Mini? Everyone I know thats bought one over the years has gotten rid of it within 18 months.
In that time the novelty wears off in terms of crap bootspace or staggeringly high parts and servicing.
The Mini - Filed under "seemed a good idea at the time"
Posted in Cloud: Do Reg readers care?
Cloud?
A customer of mine has just managed to upload 250Gb of his data 'to the cloud'.
Only taken three months.
Just doesnt work for many cases.
Its like other bullshit hype words, Web2.0 etc. etc.
Dont see the issue here.
All the folks I know that get these smart phones change them every 6 months or so so wouldnt they be getting rid of their Desires by now?
Still too much compression on the pics
When will Smartphone makers allow us to set the amount of jpeg compression applied?
It's not like space is much of a problem these days.
Well you'd think.....
...that filling a BD to capacity to get the best video with the least compression would be the trick but it isnt.
For some reason Hollywood etc. rarely if ever fill a disc to the max. Even back in DVDs peak you rarely found a DVD that got anywhere near 7GB on a 9GB DVD. Around 6GB was the norm (even Superbits rarely filled the DVD to the max) and unfortunatley nowadays many movies on DVD now come in around 4.5GB. I guess this is either to make the gap between DVD and BD wider or just so they can release movies on single layer DVDs.
I wonder if they average most initial BD movie releases to say 66% of the BD capacity. That way the studios can release the "improved remastered version" a few years later using the same scan/master but just up the bit rate 20% and tweak the colour to whatever has replaced the current cyan/orange scheme to increase the quality.
Why spend.......
...more than £400 on a TV that isnt designed to last more then 3 years?
My journey into LCD TVs started in 2005 and so far I've had several replacement parts and three replacement TVs. Luckily they all happend while still in warranty (though it was still a trial to get it sorted). I think I spent around £700.
I wouldnt spend that much again on a LCD TV. When I see folks spending £1000+ on a TV the word 'Muppet' springs to mind.
Hmmmmm.....
...well as far as I am concerned and most of my friends and family also most of us stopped buying DVDs some time ago. As for BDs? You must be joking. We've bought most of those movies three times already (VHS/Widescreen VHS then DVD) so we really cant be bothered to buy them again.
Since Hollywood is just about shoddy remakes and yet more failed Jennifer Anniston romcoms (she really must have some dirt on the Hollywood elite) whats the point in buying their product? Whether SD or HD its still shit.
Instead of paying £15+ for this crap go to your local library and rent it for £2 instead. After all 90% of your precious DVD/BD collection has only been watched once anyway (yes it has, dont lie).
So what this is saying is that poorly selling obsolete format BD will gradually overtake an even more obsolete and poorly selling format next year. Sales of BD will still be a fraction of what DVD was doing say 8 years ago.
Well done! Champagne all round.
New consoles 2013 at the latest.
You read it here.
Please can we have some new ones? The current crop are feeling very arthritic right now.
Chances are Nintendos news this week will bring the release for Sony and MS a lot lot closer.
Note to MS, just dont go skimping on the heat testing this time okay!
As the great Dave Allen said when he swore on the Big Breakfast..
Johnny Vaughan apologised to any children watching for Dave swearing and Dave simply looked at him surprised and said -
"What do you mean? I learnt all those words from children!"
Top man. Greatly missed. There does appear to be a new agenda of puritanism and stamping on anything that goes against the order of things. Maybe its a secret agenda that the establishment thinks that society is very agitated at the moment and could break bringing their reign down?
Oooooooooo!
Posted in TVonics DTR-Z500HD Freeview HD DVR
Not quite.
Seems to me like it needs another couple of months development.
Possibly rushed to try to meet the Royal wedding deadline perhaps?
Lot of cash for me to spend on a 75% finished product.
I'll wait and see what else passes by. I've got till November this year before we go HD.
Posted in Arcam FMJ BDP100 Blu-ray Disc player
So inside...
.which £150 OEM BD player board/transport is installed?
I mean we are paying just for the fancy case here arent we? Thats usual with these sorts of players.
Arcam etc. cant afford to make their own gear anymore. Very few of them can.
Some never did.
Posted in Five amazing computers for under £100
Reality check on the X40 Thinkpad
Chances are as its a ex. corp issue it will have -
Ultra slow 40GB HDD
512Mb of ram
DVD rom drive only
GPU that cant play HD video plus a wimpy single core CPU.
So if you decide to upgrade that heap its -
£40 for a new HDD
£40 (if lucky) for some more ram. Remember some of these cant take more than 1GB.
£40+ for a DVD-RW maybe.
£75 for a copy of Win7 (maybe)
So by the time you are finished your £100 bargain is costing either £200 or near £300 and its still going to be a 7+ year old dog slow laptop.
If you havent ever used a computer before or at least one from the past 5 years then by all means go ahead. Otherwise you'll regret it.
For £300 you can but a brand new dual core 2GB Lenovo Thinkpad that will have many times the performance and be brand new with a years warranty.
Second hand laptops just arent worth it. Buy a new one, thrash it for 4 years and get another.
Spot on.
I see these smartphone reviews with the ever increasing MP count and I just sit annoyed seeing more and more blurry, washed out, pixelated, compressed to hell pictures.
Smartphone cameras are just getting worse, not better.
Photography in the 21st century - a fucking mess.
Same for the video. I see all these 720p test clips from smartphones and none of the are as good as the VGA SD I get from my 5 year old Sanyo X-acti. No point having 720p video if you lock the compression to maximum and just ruin it.
User adjustable compression settings would be a start.
As you say I'd take a decent low compression VGA video cam and a really good 3.2MP camera than these crappy pseudo 8MP+ kiddy cams.
Do it properly or dont bother.
Posted in WTF is... 4K x 2K?
Thanks...
......for totally not getting my post.
I was complaining that settling on a resolution for HD material that isnt particularly deep or that well suited to actual computer use is holding us back.
The gist is 1080p isnt enough if its to be forced wholesale on PC users who have other things to do than just watch movies all day.
Now a 1440p monitor might just have been more useful.
1080p as a standard just isnt good enough for the range of applications its being pushed at. It's allowed lazy manufacturers to be...well...lazy.
