* Posts by jason 7

3181 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009

Lingerie-clad she-devils romp past watchdog

jason 7
Happy

I sat and watched every disgusting frame of that film.......

.....twice!

The true, tragic cost of British wind power

jason 7
Alert

Re: Please.....

Just curious to those that gave my post a thumbs down.

Just what exactly, is your alternative method of meeting the UK's power needs over the next 50 years?

jason 7
Meh

Please.....

..I just wish our country would stop dicking around and pandering to focus groups and just build the 5 or so nuclear reactors we needed to have built at least 5 years ago.

Get on with it.

How else will all the self-styled eco-warriors charge up their iPads and warm their Starbucks lattes?

jason 7
Mushroom

It's about the money not saving the planet.

If we withdrew the hefty tax subsidies/payments from the wind farms then 95% of them would be shut down and sold for scrap within a week.

Workers can't escape Windows 8 Metro - Microsoft COO

jason 7

After two hours using it......

....I've come to the conclusion that it's WIndows 7 but they have just made it 10 times harder to use.

I can't see how its slicker, quicker or more intuitive at all. The corporate feedback on this will surely bring on a u-turn from MS?

The main problem I have is that there are no prompts or breadcrumbs as to where I should go or do to get to things (still haven't worked out the proper gesture or sequence of stuff to get that right hand side menu up, unless spastic clicking-jiggle is the right thing to do). Plus it seems I'm having to use hot keys and the keyboard more where with all previous versions I'd just click with a mouse.

It's like an motorway system with the road signs removed. Interesting as an experiment but bloody tedious very quickly.

jason 7
Unhappy

Re: Just installed it.

Okay I've found them.

But seems an awful lot more travel and clicking to get to stuff. Like clicking on My Computer, to get to properties I now have to right click and trail over to the other side of the screen to select Properties.

That just seems daft, then I have to go back to the desktop to use it.

...am I missing something here or is this just a major step backwards? I haven't felt this lost since I went from 3.1 to Win95 but after a few minutes I was fine.

Has anyone at MS sat their mum or dad down with a Windows 8 PC and said "there you go, do the following tasks!" and just watched what happens?

jason 7
WTF?

Just installed it.

I sat down to try it cold as a normal user for the first time.

So ...errrr.....where are all the applications like Notepad,etc.?

Where do I find them?

I don't need 95% of the stuff on the Metro page but the stuff I do need I cant find anywhere.

I'm trying to be clever and clicking on blank parts of the screen (there are lots of those) and that doesn't do anything' but make the desktop go small (why do I need it to do that?).

I did click somewhere and got a bit up the right hand side that gave me some options but I lost it and cant get it back.

I feel like one of my ordinary customers that hasn't had the benefit of 20+ years PC experience like I have. It's really humbling and to be honest a OS shouldn't do that.

I am not looking forward to rolling this out to my long term XP/Vista customers. It will be carnage.

Citrix drops Rush Limbaugh over 'slutgate' slurs

jason 7
Meh

Re: There I fixed it

Or...

Powerful friend of the ruling corporate overlords getting done over in a US court?

Metro breakdown! Windows 8 UI is little gain for lots of pain

jason 7
Meh

Re: Played with it yesterday

Yeah the 360 is now a nightmare to use with a controller or the DVD media remote. Just doesnt work. So slow too.

A big step backwards. The UI just doesnt let you move around the mass of (let's be honest here) junk that takes up most of the features of the 360 setup.

MS meeds to junk a lot of the so called features and streamline it big time.

I cant imagine a lot of folks using the Zune movies now so thats one item that can go.

Court rejects Tesla’s latest libel spat with Top Gear

jason 7
Stop

Re: Tesla is the future, old people....

This expensive fragile toy isn't the future.

Cheap, no frills 1000cc 4 seater commuter cars with high efficiency twin turbos are the future for most of us.

Unions: MoD 'mad to fire staff while increasing consultant spending'

jason 7
Mushroom

Simple Solition - Ban Powerpoint

You can then get rid of 25% of your workforce with no reduction in performance.

If fact it should improve as people can do real work.

Spotify v. Pure Music

jason 7
Happy

Spotify is good.

We have the 4.99 option and its been 18 months since we last bought a CD.

However, it needs more Budgie. Only got the superb Breadfan at the mo.

HD bandwidth limits BBC Olympics 3D coverage

jason 7
Meh

Re: Re: standard definition

Nah it's crap.

Luckily at home I have a rare 32" Sharp Perfect PAL TV that has a 960x540 screen so it matches up nicely pixel to pixel (you dont see 35 lines or so as its hidden in non image data) with SD Freeview and DVD material. Looks fantastic with none of that horrible upscaling pixel wobbling you get pushing it up to a 1080 screen. Plus if you push 1080 material through it then its a very neat 50% downscale and it still looks great. My friends still comment on how much better and smoother the 360 looks playing on my TV in 1080 downscale than their mega screens.

My dad bought a 37" 1080p Panasonic a few weeks ago and the SD material looks really messy on it to me. HD looks good but anything else you have to sit 15 feet or more back from it to not see the 'bubbling'.

Why didn't they choose screen standards that properly scale up and down?

Overclockers UK swallowed by private equity firm Afinum

jason 7
Meh

Havent bought from them in a while.

Used to use them all the while but just not the cheapest anymore.

I still use their site to spec up builds for a rough price as its the fastest for that.

Then I go to Ebuyer who usually end up £5 cheaper and also give you free delivery, to purchase.

Space: 1999 returning to TV?

jason 7
Happy

Dragons Domain support group.

It's really odd I remember a few years ago I mentioned being scared witless at this episode on another forum. The reaction was much the same as here. Loads of 40 somethings all saying "Oh my god, I'm not the only one!" You could almost sense the relief.

I haven't come across anything else like it. I wonder if whoever wrote it realises they managed to create such a 'terror' for so many.

I'd shake their hand and buy them a pint.

jason 7
Meh

I also watched several episodes of UFO a couple of years ago.

I had to make sure I wasn't watching the same episode over and over (I wasnt) as each one had roughly the same plot.

Which is -

Stryker sits pensive in his office/bunker, annoyed over some office politics. Meanwhile moonbase picks up three inbound UFOs. Interceptors launched to intercept. Two are destroyed and the third damaged, crashes on earth and has to be located. Meanwhile Stryker deals with office politics.

And repeat.........

Not the most exciting show I've ever seen.

jason 7
Happy

Dragons Domian......

....terrified me as a kid back in 1975. I was only 4 but remembered those skeletons being spat out vividly. Stuff of nightmares. Slept under the covers for years after that.

Was intrigued to watch that episode again in 2009 when they were all repeated for the first time since I was 4. A cathartic experience. Most odd.

Season 1 holds up the best though Season 2 mission jackets were cool.

Dunno about a reboot as the original premise is pretty ropey really.

Sinofsky shows off Windows 8 on ARM and Office15

jason 7
Happy

I got in....

....when they were £1!

Still think they are a good but for the next few years.

jason 7
Happy

"Limiting what you can do with it..."

Well thats music to many many corporate IT depts the world over.

A remote device that the users have little choice in the junk they can install on it but has all the main apps the corporation uses for work.

Heaven!

Colorfly Pocket Hi-Fi C4

jason 7
Meh

Vinyl listeners - cloth ears?

I've listened to many turntables from Amstrad to Linn and they all have the same issue. The needle drops, pop crackle, crackle then after about a minute you get into it, past the surface noise. Then you get 5-10 mins of reasonable sound. Quite enjoyable. Then physics and the inherent limitation of the media kicks in as tracking distortion mounts. Then its 10 minutes of nails down a blackboard as the distortion becomes really noticeable. In this instance you cant help but 'listen to the hardware', the limitations are hitting you over the head.

This is on properly aligned decks too. After 20+ years of CD/digital sources I just cant get past the distortion of LP. Yet if you mention this on a audiophile forum they all say "No I cant hear it, rubbish!" To me its far far worse than what you could possibly get while listening to a 160k digital Ogg stream on Spotify through a £40 soundcard.

Which must prove they have terrible hearing. Which is why they can enjoy it maybe? Good for them is all I can say.

jason 7
Stop

Unless it has a......

....massive battery in there why does it have to be so large?

Looks to me like it was initially designed to take a HDD of some sort.

Open it up and chances are a lot of it may be fresh air.

jason 7
FAIL

I was one of those.....

...that had a full Meridian Audio setup, would strip and clean my system down every few months, had the spiked tables, the £200 cables between CD player and amp etc. etc.

All you do with those setups is listen to the hardware, not the music. Very few 'audiophiles' ever learn this or will admit to it. They cant as they feel idiots to admit they spent all that money and have forgotten the key element in it all...the tunes. Just enjoying the tunes.

Since then the Meridian gear has gone into storage (I might get it out as an ironic joke one day) and most of my listening is now done on a separate PC speaker system through a Spotify account on my PC.

I now listen to far more music and really enjoy it. I don't care what the hardware is doing anymore.

LG HLX56S net savvy 3D Blu-ray soundbar combo

jason 7
WTF?

The secret is....

....not to let yourself get into that truly awful situation where you cant stand average TV audio.

I'd dread to think how some would manage if faced with a truly life threatening situation.

jason 7

Try a Sharp instead.

Had a £120 Sharp soundbar demoed to us a few weeks ago. Then we listened to a £400 Sony one. The Sharp one weed on the Sony from a high height. I didn't buy either was just curious.

As for the reason behind Soundbars over multi-speaker setups is that not all of us are that anal about having full surround and also we don't like having wires and boxes strewn around the living room. I've seen very few surround systems that look or even work nicely. Most are just a mess.

Some folks just want to add a bit of oomph to their inch thick TV.

No 'Xbox 720' in 2012, says MS exec

jason 7
Meh

Evolution rather than revolution

I don't think the next gen from MS and Sony will be as big a leap as the current gen were.

The bar is now set at 1080p and both companies will have done their market research and probably found that folks dont want to pay that much this time round and also they will not want to make such a large loss per box as they did back in 2005/6+.

Anyone expecting 6970 GPUs and 12 core CPUs with 16GB of ram are going to be disappointed not to mention a little delusional.

jason 7

I dont think its about the GPU anymore.

After all it only has to push say 60fps at 1080p. A modded/optimised 6770 could probably manage that. The standard is now set very low. Back in 2005 that would have been a tough point to reach with average hardware.

I think the secret is to bump up the CPU side and do more interesting effects in software. That and bump up the cache/ram side of things. But as MS will probably utilise a modded DX11/12 platform it could make it difficult for developers to go off-piste so to speak.

jason 7
FAIL

Yeah new dash is terrible.

Easily the worst one its had so far. Just trying to find stuff is hard enough. Up down up down, left right up down. Jeez.

I still think the first or second dashboard the 360 had was the best.

I was hoping too for some new hardware this year.

Sony BDP-S185 Blu-ray player

jason 7
FAIL

Blimey.....

.....reading through some of these posts either some folks are trying too hard or living with Blu-Ray is a real struggle.

What happened to the simple 'open close play' of DVD?

Step backwards me thinks.

Starship Voyager dumped into skip

jason 7
Meh

If you sold a 3 bed room house for just £140k before the crash it must have been a bit of a shithole.

jason 7
Happy

Bought it 17 years ago?

At the bottom of the market. A one bedroom flat would maybe have cost around £30000.

May well have been paying £50 a month mortgage on it.

I know as I got my one bedroom flat in a city centre for that around then.

Currently got it down to £40 a month.

Netflix vs Lovefilm

jason 7
Meh

Started using Love Film online a few weeks ago.

I have a 16Mbps ADSL link and picture quality is pretty good. Only get a bit of pixelation when something goes really crazy on screen.

Not that much different to Freeeview. The only criticism is as mentioned previously navigating the collection is really horrendous and time consuming. A lot of gems are really hidden away if you are just browsing.

jason 7
FAIL

Using anything with the new Xbox 360 interface...

....is nigh on hopeless without a bloody Kinnect. As I'm 40 I refuse to buy such a thing.

Worst user interface the 360 has ever had. Awful.

Hitting back a couple of times then takes you to a "Go back in icon" that just takes you back to where you wanted to leave. The whole across the top and then up and down...christ.

FFS!

Ten... boomboxes

jason 7
FAIL

One word....

Awful!

More Brits desert high streets to spend £50bn online

jason 7
FAIL

Comet is a mess.

Went into my local Comet superstore a couple of weeks ago, it was awful.

No real organisation, the flat screen TVs had no sense of organisation. All the sizes randomly scattered around so you couldn't get any idea of comparison. New stock mixed in with old etc. etc.

The best bit was their clearance table. All the stuff that by the looks of it had been run over or used as a doorstop in the back of the store. All with an amazing too good to resist £1 off!

Sad.

George Lucas: 'No more Star Wars'

jason 7
FAIL

Exactly, hilarious he's making a remake....

....of a perfectly good TV movie as his last film.

How the mighty have fallen.

The original movie isn't bad so why bother? Oh I guess no one was around to say "George wtf are you doing that for????"

Not an original idea in that head....ever.

jason 7
Meh

The guy retired pretty much after 1983.

Nothing really of note since then.

He got lucky with the first Star Wars movie and had a lot of people around him keeping him under control and telling him in no uncertain terms "George, that's a load of crap!" and therefore it was a vastly better film for that. By RoTJ things are starting to go astray and mistakes of judgement are being made.

Since then no one has ever dared tell him to his face when he's going wrong. Except the 7 billion that don't work on his payroll.

If he had kept a few strong personalities around him and listened to a few folks then it may have been very different.

It's just so sad to watch those making of scenes on the prequels where you see talented actors running around empty green draped hangers for sets giving no emotion or depth to them. Whilst Lucas sits a few feet away looking at a monitor with a latte in hand. No wonder all the performances are totally flat. Must be soul destroying for an actor.

I remember Terrence Stamp summed it up nicely when he said that at first he was quite excited to appear in a Star wars movie till he realised he was just in a glorified toy catalogue.

Flash stalks Seagate's hybrid drives

jason 7
Thumb Up

I agree to a point.

I have the WD 7200rpm 320GB in my laptop shortstroked to 100GB. Works a treat. Plenty of space still.

I also agree that this doesnt fit all folks. I just dont see the need to carry my entire 'digital life' around with me. I have yet to find myself needing 278 hours of audio or the contents of Blockbuster video on the go. Very few folks want to look at my 407 holiday snaps of Canada 2008 either.

Plus if you lose that laptop......you did encrypt it didnt you? Ahhh I guess not.

Wheels fall off Aviva Insurance's website for 5 hours

jason 7

Not quite

I think you might find Aviva sold the two data centres in Norwich and moved all their kit out some time ago. The two centres have been fully refurbed and are now run by Sentry42 and very nice they are too.

Sentry42 would be more than happy to have Aviva put their data back in should their current system not be up to scratch.

Netflix goes live in Blighty

jason 7
Happy

Local Library is the way!

We've been doing this for a couple of years now. £2 for a new title for a couple of nights.

10 minute walk to the library. Reservation is dead easy too.

Comet 'sold 94,000 pirate Windows CDs', claims Microsoft

jason 7
FAIL

Ermmmm....

..just what the hell are you on about? Run that past us again?

So folks need to go rummaging into the BIOS code? Plus use torrent sites?

Well that's a step forward for the common man.

jason 7
Thumb Up

On the right lines....

But the problem isn't really with MS when it comes to the actual media.

It's Acer/Asus/HP/Compaq/MSI/Fujitsu et al that actually make the decision to not include the media.

Now if these companies as you say had a download section that allowed you to type in your serial number or license key and download the appropriate ISO then that would be superb.

Would cut their support overheads I would have thought?

jason 7
Happy

Ahh but......

...that doesnt stop us having a good moan about another topic in a similar vein that bugs us.

jason 7

Chances are you cant use an Acer disk on a Dell.

Unless you meant can't instead of can. If so sorry.

The keys etc. are checked to make sure the licence key issued for say a Dell ties up with the OS installed thats likely flagged an Acer OEM version.

Years ago you could rebuild anything with a plain XP OEM CD but MS have tightened up big time on this.

To be certain if its a Dell you are rebuilding then you use a Dell reinstall CD, likewise for any other OEM brand.

YMMV but its quite rare for mix and match to work nowadays. Hopefully maybe the EU will step into this and make it so as long as you have a valid licence on the machine you can use any disk that matches the type of OS or make it so physical restore media has to be supplied.

It's enough to make you install Linux.

Almost.

jason 7
Stop

More to this than meets the eye I reckon.

It could be that Comet were charging for the disks rather than just including them with the PCs that caught MS's attention.

I get very agitated when a customer asks me to repair or rebuild their old XP/Vista machines. The first question I have to ask is "Do you have the original OS CDs to hand?"

There is the customary pause then they usually respond "Err no!"

If its a Vista laptop/PC then usually there is a recovery partition but often these are so complicated I wonder how the average user is supposed to use them. Some even need the PC to be properly working to actually recover from! If its a Dell that's okay as I have a full selection of Dell recovery/OS disks to hand. If its an old XP Acer/Bizzaro brand then its pretty much tough luck as MS have tightened up the activation checking databases and unless you use the exact manufacturer OEM CD now you are screwed. They really don't want you re-using that XP now.

It can be so frustrating especially when you are just trying to re-install a OS that the Machine has a licence stuck to it for. At the end of the day there is no change, the user carries on using XP/Vista just as they paid for a few years back but oh no.....

I now have to spend around 90 minutes for every laptop I buy in for customers creating the damn recovery DVDs. If I leave it to them then chances are a year later I'm screwed.

Virtual sanity: How to get a grip on your home PCs

jason 7
FAIL

Arrghh I meant Explorer 8 or 9 not Windows.

Sorry.

jason 7
Facepalm

One other change I'd like....

When you have rebuilt your PC and are then downloading and installing the 118 updates for XP/Vista/7 that half way through the install (when you have walked away for a bit to do something more interesting) that it doesn't stop the install to ask if you want to install Windows8/9!

Well yes I bloody ticked the box so just install it and stop asking me if I want this or that running I dont care!!!!!

Many is the time I have come back to an install an hour or so later to find it sitting there waiting for me to tick 'yes' with 75 updates (and a lot of .NET ones at that) to go.

jason 7

Sounds like hard work to me!

The only real changes I'd like to see are simple lift and shift single folder migration for Outlook/contacts/favourites etc.

All those silly hidden folders and data stuck all over the place for what is for some such a core application.

Sorry but the import/export options are not good enough.

Would be so cool to be able to copy the user folder and drop it into a new machine and all the appropriate installed apps just pick up the data and run with it.

BlackBerry PlayBook in US price plummet

jason 7
Stop

Isnt it just a case of....

.....if you have email via a Blackberry then you need the Blackberry?

Anyone else using Gmail/Hotmail/webmail need not take notice and just access their mail via the browser as usual.

I wonder if folks in general have got the wrong end of the stick and think that they cant access email at all unless they have a Blackberry phone to tether to it.

jason 7
Meh

Nice hardware.......

....shame about everything else really. I had a look in the apps selection and whilst I agree its not the be all and end all to have 50000+ apps with only 10 good ones that are worth using but the RIM app store is woeful.

My other half was interested but as there was no proper Kindle app she walked away.

Year of the Penguin - el Reg's 2011 Linux-land roundup

jason 7
Meh

Please not a Mac UI!!!!

I borrowed a Mac Mini a few weeks ago to see what the fuss was about.

I was expecting a life changing experience after all the hype.

What a disappointment. It just felt clunky and looked clunky. I'm a long term Windows user and after using Win7, OSX just felt awful.

I even prefer using the Ubuntu 10.4 Netbook edition on my Acer Aspire One netbook for getting stuff done.