about ten years ago...

as i cycled down the street in my small market town, a van drove past and the man in front gestured to me to pull over.

doing so, he opened the side of the van and showed me 2 large loudspeakers - complete with a supposed store display card showing the RRP.

we had a pair left over, he explained - you can have them for £400.

i said no and left, later i heard that it was a regular scam - the speakers were cheap crap essentially.

tactile feedback

perhaps in the future this can be used to give touchscreen devices tactile feedback - which the currently sorely lack.

probably fake

no evidence so far that it's any more than a fake - and who would pay $150 to play copies anyway?

until it's up for me to download onto a memory stick of my own i call bullshit.

oriented !?

Please don't speak american - it's orientated.

model M FTW

using a model m myself - both at work and home - fantastic, wonderful - pinched my first from a defunct ibm 286 at work that itself weighed a tonne.

not that political

if it's all political, how come a different country wins almost every year?

i;d suggest our lack of success is more down to the other countries sending their big stars and us sending 19 year old talent show winners...

speaking as a welsh person...

the idea that the welsh speak welsh is pretty much a myth.

first time i ever encountered it was as a 6 year old - a teacher arrived at our school and announced that we would be learning ' our ' language.

even then i thought it curious that it could be my language when i'd never heard a word of it.

language is a means of communication - the world needs less languages, not more.

emblaze bought my house

back in the heady days of the tech boom, i bought some emblaze ( then geo interactive media ) shares for 40p - sold them for £30 about 8 months later - shortly before they crashed to about 15p.... lovely!

speaking as a welsh person

it's political correctness gone mad!

i still recall the day the welsh language entered my life - i was about 7, someone turned up at our school telling us we would be learning welsh as it was our culture - that being the case it's funny that i never encountered it before then.

language is a means to an end - a way of communication, if the world one day ends up with a single language then that's all the better - leave the rest in a museum.

and yes - putting road signs in both languages is just as daft - done to make a point, not for any practical point.

waste of money...

you'll spend hundreds to get a 50% speed boost from your processor, and then in 6 months a bog standard off the shelf processor will be 10% faster than that with no fancy stuff required.

liquid nitrogen should be kept for it's proper uses - such as throwing into swimming pools.

3.2mbit SD would be nice too

using the h264 codec and 3.2mbit for sd would definitely give iplayer quality equal to broadcast quality - that would be worthwhile

no they didnt fall sharply.

they fell by 5% - for about an hour.

then they rose - and ended up 2% higher than they opened - finishing the day in positive territory too.

so in other words the market thought it to be good news.

nice buildings

their marlow premises are very nice - as there's a public right of way through their land you can stroll through it and spend the afternoon on the riverfront.

i recall something smaller

i recall quite a few years back ( windows 95 days ) seeing a tiny little handheld device that seemed to be running 95 - defintely seemed to be 95....

not hammer

so it's different crew and different actors - not really hammer at all then - only in ( purchased ) name.

it's a great game

It's not bad at all - it's great in fact.

only negative i would say is it does seem that the makers have scaled things back - lots of stuff that was in san andreas isn't there anymore - aeroplanes etc.

i can't help but think this is so they can put it all back in again for the next title - therefore making it seem a progression.

but still - it's engrossing and great.

i think buying a pc for games is the stuff of madness but if you happen to have recently purchased a reasonably powerful one, you really do want this game and i dare say it will be better than the console versions - by virtue of running on far more expensive hardware.

i recently played the ancient GTA 3 on my pc at 1920x1200 resolution - but can't play gta 4 on my PS3 doing that ( even if gta 4 managed to still look a lot better regardless ).

broken wings

the opening lines of broken wings by mr mr....

babe, don't understand, why we can't just hop along into each others pants.

if you don't make money... why bother ?

if microsoft had never bothered with the xbox, they would have a few billion more in their pocket.

while a few billion isn't much to them, you have to wonder, if they don't eventually turn a profit ( when the 6th version of x box turns out to be a runaway success ? ), what exactly is the point?

and the same for sony - if there's no eventual profit, why bother?

No longer needed

a couple of years ago H264 1080p decoding would have been much appreciated.

nowadays a dual core can decode it without breaking a sweat so who needs such a card now ?

i saw one!

as a young kid doing work experience at the rutherford laboratories i saw such a beast running - from memory it was a nice shade of red - wouldn't have looked out of place at dfs.

it was a james bond style setup - there was a giant room filled with big reel to reel tape drives and a few thousand of the tapes hanging from racks waiting to be queued up.

at that size, lcd

37in plasmas are rather rare, and if you find one, due to technical limitations, it will have a resolution less than that of 720p material - let alone 1080p as used by Blu-ray and HD DVD.

You should be able to get a 1080p LCD at that size, however.

Plasmas should be considered for sizes over 50in - only those that big can manage the full 720p resolution - although even then you will find it hard to get 1080p without getting into 60in, or bigger, sets.

And I invented Flash....

about 2 years before it appeared on the internet, I had the idea that if a website could generate it's own polygon animated graphics, you could have animated websites without the need to download large quantities of data - I got the idea upon seeing how quickly tekken loaded on my then new, fangled playstation. of course I did sod all about it but even so... give me my billions!

vertu phones

saw a very shiny bejewelled one in selfridges last year - yours for... £39000 (!)

amazing value!

for the internet that is - since having a 10mbit - now 20mbit line fitted 2 years ago, they have failed to ever take money from my direct debit - here's hoping they dont realise in 5 years time and charge me all at once.....

you dont need a sky hd box

investigate the world of the dream box and dragon cams etc - these can work with the subscription sky hd channels - no sky hd box required - you still need a valid subscription though

seasick!

I'm reliably informed that on buildings such as these, they are built in such a way as to allow movement in wind and the like - and the higher the building, the more they do it - to such an extent that if you had the penthouse on a building such as this you would be able to both see and feel the sway - not one for those who dislike boats on the sea!

I know where you live.......

if i'd received the money I'd be ever so slightly worried that the sender knew where i was and knew i had his money.

Wouldnt put it past them to break into your house and torture you into handing it back.

not the first time.

It must have been last year when i read that a youth aimed wheelchair type device from America with 'spaz' written on it was criticised by a UK disabled group - who seemed to miss the point that it meant something else in America.

re: howls of outrage

unlike a certain other phone, this one won't be costing the user that price - within a month or so they will be given it at no extra charge with their contract - just like almost every other phone out there.

has the evidence turned up yet?

I'm too afraid to check beasttube......

this steak tastes like child!

i've been to some bad dinner parties in my time but this takes the (wife flavoured) biscuit.

why bother making them?

I find it hard to see when Microsoft expect to actually profit from their console endeavours. They lost well over a billion on the first, things seem to be just as bad with this one. Maybe someone at Microsoft loves the idea of making consoles regardless of profitability.

fancy phones

i've been saying for a long time that the vibrate function on phones was getting too strong.

too much money!

quite why sony felt the need to have the most powerful console - with the subesquent cost, is a mystery.

the ps1 was less powerful than the rival N64 - and yet was more succesful

the ps2 was beaten in the power stakes by the xbox - but once again dominated

the lesson is, you dont win the console war by building an expensive, powerful console.

if you take a look at the japanese software top ten it's dominated by Nintendo DS games - which presumably cost far less to create than PS3 or even Wii games - which makes you wonder if the PS3 will ever turn a profit for Sony.