Posts by PhilW
137 posts • joined Thursday 11th June 2009 13:06 GMT
PC sales crashing has more to do with factors like smartphones and tablets than a troublesome O/S.
Your average tech purchaser is going the way of those who eschewed SACD and DVD-A in favour of 96Khz mp3 because you could cram more dubious bits of noise into a small box despite the resulting headache.
I purchased a new PC 2 months ago and the vendor who built it (PCSPECIALIST) offered Windows-8 AND all flavours of Windows-7 as the O/S. Naturally we chose 7.
Didn't you read the article?!
It already has chips in it and is somewhat fishy ...
I'll get my coat.
"Baikonur, we've had a problem."
There. Fixed it.
Nah ... the Osprey is a twin prop tilting fixed wing. It doesn't melt anything except on the unfortunate occasions when one plummets from the sky. You're thinking of the F35.
It only took the US Airforce / Army AirCorps 20 odd years to get a safe Osprey tilt-rotor after billions of $ investment. I'm sure a cheap flying car will be just fine then ...
Or you could let someone else do the heavy lifting and like me use watches radio-controlled by the caesium clocks in Rugby and Frankfurt. Not anywhere near as accurate but significantly more accessible.
As soon as I see the word 'family' I think rubbish product.
'New' and 'Exciting' and 'Delighted' ...
I'm increasingly convinced that all managerial bullshit output is generated by the same computer program.
It's always 'exciting' (when it's clearly not!) and a delight.
Vidiots?!
Please stop insulting me.
No doubt if it is tasty it'll soon be available in a shape suitable for portability and pocket storage, a rectangular bar maybe. Probably wrapped in a plastic film to preserve it with a suitable logo on it. I've no idea what they'd call it though ...
Re: American organisation offended by breathing
But now show me a gay sex scene (or even a kiss) in a Hollywood film. Heaven forbid!:
Brokeback Mountain
A Single Man
I Love You Philip Morris
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
Many more etc etc
Maybe your vinyl collection does have an online future ... on EBay where someone who actually wants to play it can take it out of your cupboard.
Re: where's George Taylor when you need him?
Give unto Caeser what is Caeser's ...
Discovery ...
My God ... It's full of stars!
Re: So what?
That might be the case for broadcast TV but not the case for recorded media. I would very much like to see my favourite films and filmed documentary footage (eg the NASA archive) at that resolution and and then we keep going until we actually replicate a projected 35mm frame (and beyond). Or would you still prefer VHS?
WD TV Live Hub
The have a nifty product in the WD TV Live Hub media device, a built in 1Tb drive, plays just about anything including (for my purposes) Flac encoded audio but they then chose to install a small mobile phone cpu in it and it runs like a hobbled drunk slug. Any competent manufacturer would have spotted that it sells quite well and improved the hardware by now. I'd buy another one if they made it faster!
Re: Small car please
Because at 65mph it's still got massive acceleration to get you out of trouble or safely overtake and isn't thrashing the engine to death to do it resulting in a quiet reliable machine unlike a noddy shopping trolley. It's potential terminal velocity is more an indication of other benefits.
flac ... ETC
Why do they think that anyone buying a CD these days will want an MP3 encoded copy? Anyone old enough to want a CD is probably ripping it to a lossless format like flac.
What Amazon is actually attempting is to seduce the diehard CD buyers away from the format by showing them the "joy & convenience" of pure digital files ... As usual they've failed to spot that the reason people still buy CD is not just because they want a shiny disc but because they want the biterate that Amazon won't provide via mp3!
Re: D'oh, for cripes' sake...
Argh wrote: "Does it matter? You still get the CD, and they give you the download for free?"
YES! It does matter. Because Amazon is a business and it costs them money to run this service that could otherwise be devoted to things actually useful to me like decent packaging for my items and better wages for the warehouse staff.
Re: Only one real point
Because I like the artwork and liner notes having grown up on the scale of vinyl albums that weren't just music but also an artistic production.
Because I get the tracks in the order the artist intended.
Because the quality is far superior (usually) to mp3 and I can rip the discs to FLAC myself.
Because I have an easily stored hard backup of my data for the same price as not having one!
Because they play in my car.
etc
discuss
Ironically ...
I fell off a Segway in Rome recently (true) and it fair old knocked the shit out of me ... Just saying.
FAB?
Thunderbird 3 had this nailed ... but sadly with Gerry now deceased ... Oh well, they can keep trying.
Re: It was a feature
I did it with a ZX-80 in 1981 before buying a ZX-81 and subsequently (for my 18th birthday) a Spectrum.
It amuses me that my current PC has 12582912 times the RAM of my ZX-80 (12Gbx1024Mbx1024Kb) ...
Boffins?
Just because you're a redtop doesn't mean that ... oh whatever.
Re: No profit ...!
That was true until about 3 years ago when very obvious cost cutting was introduced.
Try doing a web search on the subject or just take my word for it when I order hundreds of items each year. I'm extremely well placed to comment and I can assure you that Amazon's standards have declined. It causes me no end of hassle having to return items (they've changed that process to make it less easy to accomplish too!), Amazon accept all my returns with full apologies so I'm not taking liberties and I would very much like it to STOP!
No profit ...!
Any profit they might have achieved is probably eliminated by covering the cost of the extraordinary number of replacements they have to provide me for items sent out damaged or damaged in the post because of Amazon's ludicrous corner cutting (literally in some cases) packaging.
Re: If anything
Install a new GPU ... job done.
Now try that with a console.
Re: Annoying bear thingies
Somebody blessed with the ability to write might have presumed that Chewie had been taught to operate machinery by Han Solo or was otherwise educated outside his culture and that the rest of the Wookies remained less capable ... instead George had a go.
Posted in Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 game review
Running Crysis 2 in 64 bit mode with Direct 11 and hi-res textures on my twin GPU powered, quad core pc makes me think that those screen-shots look like a console ... ie very poor. Playing Mass Effect 3 is a giveaway too ... I go from fabulously marvelous (mostly) when my system is doing the work to utter crap when the console suitable cut scenes appear. It's really night and day. What I'm really trying to say is that games used to push the development envelope but consoles have dumbed down the concepts AND technical execution ... but you know that.
Re: A quarter of Brits fail to understand some science, that's probably excusable.
Randomly believing things without any actual empirical data should be outlawed ... You know who I'm talking about Mr Priest!
Black Mesa ...
My opinion is that the extremely regular failure of expensive government IT projects is simply a cover for black project financing ... Therefore the British combat spaceplane (codenamed X-Viper-Wing) and/or the governments fleet of laser equipped sharks are (pun intended) swimming in cash but undoubtedly years behind schedule ... Maybe.
QX!
How delightful to read a reference to Arisia's favourite project here on El Reg!
Peter vanBuskirk would/will be delighted ... !
D-Love?!
An animated character called 'D-Love'?!
After that hideous robotic thing that invaded my TV during the digital switchover this might be the tipping point.
Why do people think 'cheeky, loveable, cute, funny, SAFE' children's characters are a suitable marketing ploy or that ANY sane adult will appreciate them ... ?
(very limited) Zombie Apocalypse!
I am the walking dead ...
Re: Very happy to see flight dynamics cited
I for one had zero difficulty with the flight dynamics. Learn to pilot a Cobra is my advice!
I think you ought to know I'm feeling very depressed about this ...
Noise ... ?
I can't hear if my Superhub is making noise because of the insane afterburner like din of the various fans in my PC. Not least my twin GTX580 GPUs that are quite possibly slowly propelling my house down the street.
I've had other transformers that hum, whistle and squeak though ... it's usually the mountings being a bit loose. Putting something heavy on standalone transformers (the typical plastic black brick) usually works.
N900 debacle ...
I remember well the buzz of anticipation that NOKIA managed to generate when the N900 was announced and the huge number of very committed users of that device who recognized its potential and bought into the concept. I was one of them. We then cursed NOKIA's very soul as it allowed the opportunity to turn to dust and as it betrayed nearly every promise made to the N900 users. Promised software features never appeared including basics like MMS, firmware revisions were late and not complete then dried up prematurely. Most importantly MAEMO was hyped as the future of NOKIA's mobile O/S that would DEFINITELY be used for the subsequent final revision device and then they threw it away by attempting to integrate with INTEL. We all know how that turned out! What truly appalls me is that the educated predictions of disaster made by most of the N900 user groups ALL turned out to be true. If you do this 'x' will happen NOKIA. They did it and 'x' happened. If you don't so this then 'y' will happen ... voila etc.
I own a Samsung Galaxy Note.
Imagery ...
One useful ability of the 4K format is that it can get closer to displaying digital images taken with a consumer camera at their full resolution. I've got no way of doing that except by printing my images (or buying a very expensive and relatively small computer monitor) and printed images are not backlit and that really improves the quality.
Tommy Flowers
Mr Flowers IS getting recognition. I've seen at least two recent TV documentaries that referenced Bletchley Park and Colossus and went into great detail about Mr Flower's contribution and how he was an unsung hero. Bletchley Park has several displays dedicated to the man and the wikipedia entry for Colossus details his contribution. Many books on the subject also mention his work. I'll admit it's only recently that he's getting the praise and documentation he deserves but better late then never.
Well I ordered one!
And the most fiendish board game available is 'The War on Terror' ...
If anyone actually wanted the downloaded version rather than the disc(s) then they'd already be obtaining it. The fact that there has to be a 'special incentive' to get the downloaded version tends to indicate it's not really wanted ...
I'll stick with my carefully produced packaging and ability to store a long-life copy of my films on a convenient shelf please.
Overrated ...
I've been in the district several times. In 2005 I spent a troublesome couple of hours trying to locate a CompactFlash card greater than 2Gb and failed. In the end I paid triple the price for a 2Gb card that I would have paid in the UK. With the exception of cellphones and blu-ray recorders there was no tech that was cutting edge and unavailable elsewhere. Most of the shops sold bog standard kit available anywhere and basic souvenirs of Japan catering to the tourists.
'TGV' themed? Really? Not Shinkansen Super-Express themed?!
Re: wind sensor fault
I thought exactly the same thing. Some of the cabling was very exposed and tied together with tape as far as I can see. Weight reduction is key of course but it did look rather fragile in places considering the environment it would be exposed to.
Posted in New MPEG format paves the way for UHDTV
Here we go AGAIN!
How dare anyone invent a superior viewing experience that might actually be as good or better than films that I've seen in the Great Cinema Emporium when my 67 year old Etch-A-Sketch is still functional and capable of displaying perfectly good monochrome images at a frame-rate of 1 per minute. Seriously, some of you lot astound me. I'm amazed you ever invested in colour TV let alone HD and if one more person claims they can't spot the difference between 1080p and a 10 year old Nokia phone display then I'll probably have to scream!
I've seen this technology in Japan and it blows what you're used to clean off the planet. Have some aspirations for a change!
A Sea-Devil?
(Just compare the two)
but ...
What if a competitor accidentally continued to carry the laser gun whilst in the swimming section of the event and a passing shark happened to end up with the aforementioned energy weapon on it's head by benefit of some seaweed adhesive anomaly ... ?!
Now if VM could explain why the 'Fantastic' & 'Amazing' & '3 billion percent better than the competition' doubling of speed that they spent large amounts of money telling me about in January 2012 ('Coming SOON!') has been delayed until August 2013 then I'd be very interested. It's almost like it was a con but that would be a nasty insinuation and possibly libelous as would SCAM and RIPOFF and SNAKEOIL!
They won't keep anyone in Huntingdon / St Neots much longer!
Despite claiming perfect service for the last 4 days the broadband service used by thousands of people in the Huntingdon and St Neots areas has been suffering a 100% outage since Friday night. VM's customer service drones (what is the Urdu for drone?) go through the script and then invent a fix time. I've had 5 fix times so far and counting. 11pm last night was 100% totally sincerely and definitely guaranteed ... the sincerity failed to reactivate my service though!
