Posts by jason 7

Yayyyyyyy!

Yet another neither one thing nor the other 80% review.

We all live in a 80% world it seems.

All these constant 80% reviews......

.....dont really help.

Are we just surrounded with lots of average products?

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)

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.

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.

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%

So lets get to the real important issue.....

Whats the default Auto setting that it will be set in for most cases like?

SheWee?

Just saying.

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.

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.

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"

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

I remember mentioning this in a hi-fi forum

a few years ago and was laughed at for wondering if it caused an issue for such things as radio and hi-fi.

Well f**k you, you audiophile tards!

Thanks, I feel better now.

We dont need bruteforce rendering from GPUs

This current trend of just adding more horsepower is crazy. All we get are hotter, noisier and bigger cards. Thats not clever.

What we need is for AMD or Nvidia to take on PowerVR tech and use that system for rendering as its far more efficient.

If we had PowerVR style rendering we could maybe have cards with the rendering power of the 6970/580 but with the power draw of a 5570.

It's all in the rendering.

They will just do it again.

Tesla are idiots. All Clarkson will do is then take another tesla on the track and thrash it for real as they would do. If it does less than 60 miles Tesla are screwed.

They've gotten the wrong end of a stick re. a episode that most of us cant remember and most didnt take seriously anyway.

Tesla....out of business.

NIce unit ..but oh dear....

...they put the VGA socket for the heaviest cable at the top.

MIght cause a problem for some. Rather have that at the bottom.

So lets see...........

....move forward five years from now and we'll have -

This guys system costing $500 to anyone that wants it.

BAe's version that the UK Gov will be buying for $5000000 for each licenced application.