Posts by Fuzz
706 posts • joined Wednesday 25th July 2007 17:00 GMT
All gone?
Looks like I missed out by seconds, it showed up at £115 but as soon as clicked on the link they were all gone and the price was back > £400
Shame the 16GB model would have been ideal as a living room, instant on, web machine and £89 would be about the right price.
SSL
I have in the past used my t-mobile phone as a tethered modem. I find it slow and unreliable, that is until you go to an encrypted site. As soon as you hit one of those and you're bypassing the "transparent" proxy, everything speeds up.
If I have to use one I just open a Citrix session to work and browse out from there.
Openzone and FON
So skype charge you 11p per minute to borrow somebodies bandwidth via Open Zone. Is the BT customer who's bandwidth you're borrowing getting a cut of this 11p?
I reckon no data cap is right
If they're borrowing bandwidth from openzone and FON then I think the speed is limited to 512Kb/s so I make that about 3p per MB at full speed. You're going to run out of money much more quickly than you can cause any bandwidth issues.
How is this different?
Not sure how this is different to my friends syncing there phones with any other online service. I have my contacts synced to my gmail account. My Windows phone also pulls in my friends from facebook and if they have shared their numbers with me I also see those.
A lot of my friends will be doing similar things, so my number exists on Google's servers, Microsoft's servers, facebook's servers, Apple's servers and any other sync system my friends maybe hooked up to. I haven't given my numbers to any of these companies but they have the numbers anyway.
Personally I don't worry about it, at the end of the day the worst thing that can happen is I need to get myself a new number. An inconvenience but not the end of the world.
Posted in New DVD discs claim 1,000 year life
capacity
"Millenniata says it can store three hours of video, 1,200 photos, or 100,000 documents, which might mean anywhere in the 20 to 50GB range."
Nope, 1200 photos, three hours of video, sounds like a standard 4.7GB DVD to me.
You must seriously be "getting on a bit"
Dr. Dre has been around since the 80s and has remained around ever since so either you're seriously getting old or you've had your head in a ditch for the past 25 years.
Posted in Motorola hints at Microsoft deal
sounds good to me
I had a Motorola Windows mpx200 years ago. I seem to remember it was great as long as you didn't let the battery run out.
Posted in Patriot Wildfire 120GB Sata 3 SSD
£240?
Why so much money? A 120GB Crucial M4 is only £180 and looks to be very nearly as quick.
Posted in PCTV NanoStick T2 USB TV tuner
Good but expensive
I've got one of these and it's a decent tuner, note that USB tuners aren't just for laptops. Mine are connected to my Acer Revo which has no PCI slots so no other way to add tuners.
I've not installed the software so can't comment on whether or not the HD EPG is decoded. I use mine with Media Centre which downloads the guide for those channels from the net.
It's a shame Media centre isn't capable of pulling multiple channels from a single multiplex. All the freeview HD stuff is on a single multiplex so that would mean you only ever need one DVB-T2 tuner. I think I paid £75 for mine but that's still a lot of money for a single TV tuner. My dual DVB-T tuner cost £20.
Hopefully more manufactures will get products to market as the standard is adopted in more countries.
Also this nanostick isn't just a rare beast among portable tuners, it's rare amongst all tuners. I only know of two tuners on the market that can receive DVB-T2.
Posted in RFID drives the self-service pub
Imperial Pint
Imperial pint is 20 ounces so 64 is just over 3 pints in the UK.
people at work
Most people at work are working, rather than filling in IQ tests on the Internet.
Posted in Apple MacBook Air 13in Core i5 laptop
Stupid keyboard
If it wasn't for the stupid mac keyboard I'd consider getting one and just run Windows on it. It's a beautiful piece of kit and deserves a decent OS.
The missing Ethernet port isn't too much of an issue, a USB dongle for the odd times you need to hook up a cable will be fine. Non upgradeable SSD and RAM is less cool.
128GB Disk and 4GB RAM is going to look very poor in 3 years time when the rest of the laptop will still be fine.
Posted in Mobee Magic Charger
Get a decent mouse?
My logitech does 18 months on a single set of batteries.
Software on the computer tells me when the battery is getting low to give me plenty of time to plan a recharge or buy some new batteries.
One of the points of having a wireless mouse is to reduce desk clutter, this just increases it.
2 discs per movie?
What a joke, 50GB is more than enough room for 4 hours of well encoded HD.
The container format used on BR is extremely inefficient. If you rip a bluray into MKV with no editing or recoding of the data the files are around 40% smaller.
Posted in MS bashes BlackBerry in tablet fight
Not the web but email
I'm pretty sure you can access the web directly, the issue comes when you want to access your email, you know that thing that blackberry built their business on. To access your email you need a blackberry phone, the phone gets the email and the playbook gets it from the phone. Secure? yes. Needlessly complicated? yes. Possible without owning a blackberry phone? No chance.
Posted in Apple ups Mac Mini spec, lowers price
Media PC
Take the bottom model, put Windows 7 on it and you have a very nice Media PC.
Smaller and faster than my Acer Revo but also more than twice the cost and is a mouse and keyboard still extra with the mini?
Still I think it's a good price for what is essentially a 13.3" Macbook pro without the keyboard. touchpad or screen.
Posted in Ten... Portable USB 3.0 HDDs
Samsung price
Where do I buy the 1TB Samsung for £80? A quick look around shows the 640GB model at £100.
Posted in Hundreds of dot-brand domains predicted
pointless, just there to make money
"They no longer have to look to see what's available in .com," said Hansen. "Everything's available."
In just the same way as if you own coke.com you can have anything.coke.com
everybody understands their own country tlds and the main top level ones. I know that if I'm looking for a big brand it will be .com and it's only .com that are going to be able to afford to buy their own tld.
It just makes a system that's currently easy to guess, "What's Apple's domain name? apple.com" to one where you have multiple posibilities, is it apple.apple apple.com apple. so apple have to think up of every combination and make them all redirect to the correct site. Meanwhile world+dog keep searching for sites on Google and clicking on the links, bypassing any need to know or remember a web address.
upgrade might be possible
I managed to upgrade my CF-18 to windows 7, it was a fairly drawn out process especially seeing as intel never produced graphics drivers for it under vista or 7. I got there in the end with all functions working.
Activation Servers
It'll be interesting to see what happens here. XP was the first Microsoft OS to require activation. When it came out Microsoft mentioned the possibility of releasing a patch to remove the activation requirement once end of life was reached.
peripherals
If you have a decent scanner that you'd rather hang on to. Get yourself a copy of Vuescan, it's not a lot of money and is a far better scanning experience than the manufacturers software anyway.
As for your TV tuner, that's a surprise, has the manufacturer gone bust? Did they stop making TV tuners? If you can find a BDA driver for Vista, install that and you will probably find it works fine under media centre.
Posted in Volvo S60 DRIVe
driving test
I'm guessing you learned to drive quite a long time ago. When I took my test over ten years ago, it was quite acceptable to sit with your car in gear, feet on clutch and break ready to go at the lights. This is how I was taught and how everyone I know who has learned to drive recently is taught.
Posted in M-Edge e-Luminator Touch
angle poise
The lamp isn't angle poise it's goose neck. The important difference is that the head of an angle poise maintains the same angle as you move it.
How much protection does the case offer to the screen of the kindle?
potential for problems here
The problem with IE placing domains into the intranet zone is a real issue. IE will automatically attempt NTLM for any sites in that zone and the zone is simply any site without a dot in the domain name.
When computers are on your internal network they should be using search domains so any lookup for a single word is actually looked up with your domain suffix. Since we're all using domains we own or ones that end in something.local there shouldn't be an issue. Your computer will try appending the search domain first before falling back to looking up just the single word.
Re: Advantages of Plastic discs
I wouldn't count on being able to play CDs in the distant future.
I currently have 1 CD drive in the house in my laptop and 1 in the car.
I have 0 cassette tape players.
Providing you store your digital music in a non proprietary format it will continue to be supported for years to come.
Most mp3 downloads these days are either top rate variable or 320k constant. These days I'm about 50/50 between buying mp3s and buying CDs which are immediately ripped to mp3. If I cared about the virtually non-existent difference between mp3 and CD I would buy CDs and rip them to flac.
multiple drivers unnecessary for headphones
I can see the point in having a separate bass driver but here's a little insight, humans only have two ears.
The reason why two speaker DSP based surround systems for your TV aren't as good as proper multi-speaker setups is because you can't ensure that each ear hears exactly what you want. With headphones it's a given so DSP based surround should be perfect.
I also can't see that placing drivers slightly forward or backward on an earpad is going to make the listener believe they are hearing sounds from infront or behind. Therefore is these headphones are producing a surround effect, which the review says they are, they must also be using some kind of DSP processing.
Posted in Has UK gov lost the census to Lulzsec?
I'm agreeing here
Should slack security be highlighted? Of course it should, publicly and people should be made accountable for it. Is this the right way to go about it? No.
If I see someone in the street who's left their car door open with their wallet on the front seat do I?
a) Point this out to them so they can deal with it
b) Steal the wallet, sell the contents on ebay and then send a link for the completed auction to the owner.
These people have to understand that they're not sticking it to the man here; they're not fighting the power. They're just messing with people's lives.
Posted in Peugeot iOn e-car
printing money
How is £500 a month a good deal? I could lease a very nice car for that much and have change to pay for the fuel to drive it somewhere.
£700 to install a 16A charging point? £30 for parts and about 2 hours labour including testing circuit and hoovering up the mess. Want cheaper electricity to charge the car overnight? Guess what you can have that installed for free too, it's called economy 7.
I love the idea of electric cars but until they sort the cost out they just aren't going to become popular.
Story sounds realistic
If they turned up, pitched a tent and then left they were most likely going back to the exchange. A day spent in a van by a hole could well be a fibre blowing team.
Doing anything with BT is usually a long drawn out mess with far too many stages and too much paperwork along the way. The engineers, however, usually seem to know what they're doing and are on the whole very good. I often think that rather than having a BT account manager you should be simply given the number of your local BT engineer who generally seems to have far more interest in getting you what you want.
Posted in MS announces Windows Phone 7.1
Local databases are in
check the 7.1 beta dev tools, SQL CE is available.
shortcuts
If you know the 2003 shortcut you can use it in 2007 or 2010.
For example ALT,E,S,V ENTER still works in Excel 2007 and 2010.
Takes about a week to adjust from using the 2003 menus to the 2007 ribbon. You've had 4 years so probably time to quite moaning about it.
More base stations should be better all round
More base stations should be better for the not in my back yard crowd. More base stations closer together means less power used in transmission so lowering any perceivable risk.
auto start icon
At least Microsoft might be able to sort out the ridiculous way that skype starts up as taskbar application rather than minimised to the system tray.
Posted in HP's new EVA: The big reveal
really?
I only have very limited experience with EVA but our 4100 has run perfectly without ever throwing an error from installation more than 2 years ago.
silverlight
last time I checked silverlight is cross platform, it runs on OSX as well as Windows. Moonlight is just for linux
Posted in The Sandy Bridge Hackintosh
SSD failures
whilst I'm sure that sometimes when an SSD fails it does so in read only mode. My Kingston drive died after 6 months and it isn't even recognised by the system.
Posted in Acer Iconia Tab W500
active digitiser
If this had a dual purpose screen, capacitive for when you want to use your fingers and and active digitiser stylus so you can use the windows handwriting support it would be perfect.
Unlike the current crop of tablets it has a proper OS on it and unlike netbooks it has a proper resolution screen.
Is the phone locked?
If the phone is locked then no point buying it from three, just pay the extra tenner and get it from Apple.
Then stick a giffgaff sim in and top up £10 for 250 minutes, unlimited texts, unlimited data and unlimited on net calls.
Posted in Sony unwraps Android 3.0 tablet pair
corners
Looks like a rounded rectangle with a black surround to me, Apple won't be pleased.
dual screens
and why when you run dual screens does the menu bar for the app you have on your right screen appear at the top of the left screen?
Posted in Texas grandma gets first 'Super Wi-Fi'
numbers?
I thought this was a tech site, where are the numbers? What's the range of this new super wifi? What kind of bandwidth will this lady be getting? What kit is installed in her house? Where does the signal come from? How many people can the source serve? What are the drawbacks?
of course it can
As long as you're using the zune player app. Windows phone 7 can multitask in the same way old versions of iOS could always multitask. It's just restricted to the Microsoft apps. However you can't listen to tune in radio whilst browsing the web.
hidden SSID
Whilst I agree that this should be a feature, what kind of an idiot hides their SSID?
spellcheck
If it doesn't have one, then it's no good.
Posted in Nissan Leaf electric car
mini ≠ Cinquecento
Cinquecento is tiny, mini is huge, but I agree with the sentiment. Why bother making an electric car big and comfortable when it can only go 110 miles. Until we can get 200 miles from a 30 minute charge they will remain play things for rich families who don't need two cars but have them anyway.
nope
I definitely meant queue as in
"to arrange (data, jobs, messages, etc.) into a queue."
but thanks all the same :)
stylus
Pretty sure the stylus on this is an active digitiser type. This is totally different to a resistive stylus found on PDAs and a million miles away from the £2 type you can buy for capacitive screens.
I'm guessing that in pen mode the touch screen is disabled so that you can rest your hand on the screen whilst drawing.
Come quietly or there will be trouble.
Queue the robocop quotes.
Posted in Leicester unloses key data
"A series of tests"?
That'll be checking the file a-times then.
