Drives
Remember LaCie don't make the drives themselves, just the enclosures. So being sucked into the Seagate monopoly isn't so much of an issue.
As far as I am aware the Rugged models are as good as ever. Although at that price they should be.
Posts by Mr C Hill
398 posts • joined Wednesday 26th March 2008 15:10 GMT
Why should anyone comply? The ICO is a joke frankly!
I reported one large UK educational organisation for persistently spamming me despite being asked to stop on five separate occasions (including once in writing). ICO's response was that they couldn't help despite the organisations concerned clearly having no understanding of how to operate and maintain their own database.
So my guess is that we'll hear of a few high profile cases in the papers of the ICO taking action, but for the rest the ICO will sit around going "not my problem mate".
Posted in Aga cooks up phone-controlled 'iOven'
Re: Techies and geeks
To be fair, in our case the unit came with the house and I suspect that's the case for most people. Even the second hand cost is horrific and there is no way I would actually buy one.
But if it's part of the house fixtures and fittings then so be it. Ours has been in here for about 50 years.
Posted in Aga cooks up phone-controlled 'iOven'
Techies and geeks
Anyone technically minded and so inclined should be able to network up their AGA.
Think I'm joking? Our has an external gravity fed oil pump. Simply modify the pump with a few components from RS (motor etc), control said device via RS232 and bingo, you have one networked AGA.
NB: If you burn your house down doing this I am not responsible.
Great!
That'll be Lacie's excellent range of rugged hard drives ruined then. Mine go everywhere with me and with FireWire 800 they are all I ever need in the field.
Posted in Raspberry Pi
Only Linux?
Nonsense! Someone posted on Twitter the other night he had an Amstrad CPC emulator running on his Pi. And that means CPM+ can now be added to the list of OS's.
Posted in Raspberry Pi
Extra costs
To be honest, if you don't already have a spare keyboard, mouse, USB hub and display, you aren't nearly geeky enough to own one of these.
Posted in UK mobile broadband carriers compared
Recommended peripheral
If going on holiday I take an active USB extension with me. Hand the dongle out of a nearby window in a rural location and you can often get big benefits. Normal USB extensions don't seem to work.
Posted in UK mobile broadband carriers compared
T Mobile
Quick note about T-Mobile. Been happily using PAYG for a year now. They often chuck deals at you when you login which is quite handy if you needed a few days anyway. Think I got 7 days for half price over Christmas for example.
No, not the mind probe!
Heaven help us if they ever invent "mind probe" technology. The MET will just snatch people off the street, take them down the station and extract any information they need against your will.
Oh, hang on.
Self Destructing Drive?
Sir Clive Sinclair got there years ago with the Microdrive.
Should your data fall into enemy hands, the Microdrive cartridge would instantly be rendered unreadable. In fact if it fell into anyones hands, including your own, it was also unreadable.
Re: It's war!
The old episodes of The Sweeney and Minder on ITV 4 are quite telling. Despite being produced with adverts in mind, ITV4 show so many adverts they have to hack an additional 4 or so minutes from each episode. This is often done with all the skill and finesse of a one armed drunken man with a chainsaw.
Mind you, UK Gold used to change all the advert slots in Minder so you'd hear the theme cutting in at the start of a scene where previously there was a break.
Re: Buy the DVD
The un-skipable anti-piracy adverts are best. The irony being that not only have you paid for a copy and have to be lectured to anyway, but the dodgy copies that can easily be picked up at any local market have had all that guff cleanly removed so they boot straight to the menu.
Posted in Does Britain really need a space port?
Build high
Couldn't we just build a giant winch, like they use for gliders? Simply winch launch your spacecraft. Granted the winch would need to be big and quite high.
I see no downsides to my plan and will be legging down the patent office in the morning,
Re: Approaches on petrol station forecourts.
It wasn't serious enough for that, apparently. The phrase "the cancer" will live with me forever though. The moment that left her mouth the entire thing turned into a scene from The League Of Gentleman.
Approaches on petrol station forecourts.
We've all been there. Some "geezer" approaches you asking if you wan to buy a watch/phone as you walk into the garage. You instantly sense something is wrong, feel very uneasy and decline.
The worst place for this on my travels is the garages on the A3 outside Guildford. Been approached there many times by people trying to flog stuff.
The other was a woman at Warwick services who needed £20 to take her sick mother to hospital. She had "the cancer" apparently and the more I questioned the more overbearing the woman became. Told the woman that why didn't she seek help in the shop from the staff? She started making excuses and backed off.
When I asked in the shop the staff said this was happening quite often and the police might turn up when they felt like it.
As I left the woman started on her next "victim". I guess if you hang around long enough someone will fall for the story and hand over 20 quid.
Posted in BBC deletes Blue Peter from BBC One
Re: *Yawn*
I'd welcome a 2012 revival of Why Don't You for the youth of today.
Why Don't You Shoot Up Some Smack, Happy Slap A Granny And Go And Hang Out In The Shopping Centre Instead?
Posted in BBC deletes Blue Peter from BBC One
Re: Not the best
Ooooh dear. Prepare for a massive downvote. Blue Peter was for kids who wanted more school after school.
Still, while the Blue Peter viewers were counting their milk bottle tops while drinking their weak lemon drink, Magpie viewers had Jenny Hanley:
http://flofblog.com/images/blog/63.jpg
Paris because like Jenny she also has some "interesting" performances in "films".
Posted in BBC deletes Blue Peter from BBC One
Ignore the Blue Peter angle for a moment....
This is about removing all kids shows from the main channels and putting them on CBBC.
Om CBBC repeat fees and certain rights fees are cheaper hence saving the kids department money. Also presumably the gap on BBC1 and 2 will be filled with the cheapest thing possible.
Well not the cheapest thing possible as that would be Pages From Ceefax which I would welcome!
Posted in BBC deletes Blue Peter from BBC One
Meh
Blue Peter was for kids who smelt of TCP and weren't allowed out to play. Magpie was where it was at.
Fasthosts not the best?
In other news, bears defecate in the woods,
3 years late
If they'd done it a few years earlier it might have stood a better chance.
I have an account. I used it once. Nuff said?
Gimp
The most aptly named bit of software ever. I was using Deluxe Paint V on my Amiga 1200 the other day and that still remains a more usable package than Gimp. In fact, gasp, I found myself enjoying drawing on a computer again rather than it being a mundane daily task.
I often think the world might have been a happier place had EA persisted with DPaint. Certainly they could have given Photoshop a run for its money. Oh well.
Easier than legit software?
Having spent a couple of hours today battling Adobe to get my 2 grand software suite activated thanks to it not recognising my previous version serial or my existing install, I have concluded that I probably could have downloaded the lot from a torrent and had a version that worked straight off the bat.
Sometimes I don't know who these companies hate more, the customers or the pirates. As a customer and speaking after todays experience I genuinely wonder what the hell am paying for where there is probably a cracked and fully functional version online that doesn't require me to have a ponderous text chat conversation with a support droid in India every time I need to install my software to get them to unlock it.
I need a drink!
Firewire gone
Hope there are some adaptors available that work at full speed or many of us won't be able to make the jump. I'm waiting for the new model but Firewire 800 is something I use every single day and while I welcome USB3 and Thunderbolt it would cost a fortune to replace all my firewire 800 drives.
Re: It's time
If it's taking you twice as long that's a bad thing.
One of the biggest mistakes any one man band business can make is to assume the owners time is free.
Re: Any chance of a CS4 patch too?
Can't fork out for the latest version?
Certainly for the production bundles, the cost of missing a version is slightly higher than just upgrading every time. The only time this doesn't apply is if you fall so far behind that Adobe offer a time limited upgrade price as they did with CS3 a few months ago.
And should you miss that final offer? Well you'll be buying a whole new version of the software at full price.
CUDA kudos
I have a CUDA card for video editing (a Quadro). Bloody lovely it is as well, but the cost and the lack of support are maddening. It's like having a Ferrari and then only being able to drive it around town at 30mph.
Thing is the architecture needs to become widespread and cheaper. The benefits are obvious on software that can take advantage. But even among flashy Adobe software, only Premiere really takes advantage and even then its only a set amount of tools.
I've just downloaded CS6 from Adobe so I'm hoping there might be a slight improvement.
Adobe love.
Just shelled out the 300 sovs for my copy of CS6. Not only have they moved from two yearly to yearly updates, if you miss a version you end up paying even more than if you hadn't.
Its basically subscription use by the back door (and oddly enough subscription use is what they would love us to all use).
Re: Poor quality content? Big gamble.
" it can help a lot if the presenter is very gifted and can entertain an audience without a script..."
I'm suddenly reminded of Jack Hargreaves on Southern. Those shows must have been made on next to no money but are still compelling in their own way. About as unglamorous as you can get mind.
Re: Web TV
ITV did get regional TV to pay. The problem was the government saw just how much money it made and raped it in the 1990 broadcasting act.
What followed is well documented but what it amounted to was the dismantling of a system that was extremely profitable and successful in order to extract maximum revenue for the government and ultimately shareholders.
But ITV was a national network. So the success of shows like Coronation Street filtered down to all franchisees and enabled them to produce regional programmes.
It was a system that was working fine until the 1992 franchise round. But then people like Carlton came in who were only interested in making money.
What you have today is a single network with a small amount of regional coverage produced on the cheap because Ofcom have a gun to their heads. No more than the minimum is produced.
This new idea won't work. To make the kind of stuff the old ITV franchisees made you need money and resources that only came in the days when an ITV franchise was "a licence to print money".
Oddly enough I was watching a clip of LWT's Six O'Clock show on Youtube the other day. A London only magazine show, it was hosted by Michael Aspel at the peak of his powers and had a studio audience (recorded in the main studio at LWT). The episode I saw had two separate live OB's feeding into the show. LWT did this because they COULD. A hugely rich ITV franchise, a relatively obscure teatime magazine show had the full force of LWT's facilities behind it. When you have the money it's easy!
White Elephant
Utter waste of time and money. The stations in Southampton, Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight were all dire, had no adverts and spent their time playing imports and terrible prints of 1940's movies.
Even Channel M in Manchester recently went bust and that is in a major city with a vibrant culture and plenty of money.
Even local radio stations are struggling for advertising and closing/merging left right and centre.
This entire idea is just a vanity project for Jezza Hunt, probably because one of his medja mates would quite like the opportunity to run one of the stations and possibly tie it in with a cluster of his radio stations (no names, etc).
80%
Poor picture, high price, no playback on USB.
Might I suggest that people go and buy the DVD version instead for a couple of quid and El Reg grows some balls and awards this release something closer to 50%?
Re: She's a Witch, She's a Witch......
Amiga Power was one of the few magazines ever to use the full 0 to 100 range. Made them a few enemies though from publishers who couldn't accept that 50% was an "average" game.
This was their reasoning:
http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/ap2/info/marks.html
Re: Tell me...
Indeed. 80% for some fake stereo and grainy picture is mad. The film stock isn't great so it will never look that good. Since the DVD can be picked up for a couple of quid they'd need to be a compelling reason to get the blu-ray release.
Downside of the modern age
People today will never experience the magic of the "crossed line".
+ 8 weeks to get a new line installed, and that was if you were one of the lucky ones.
I still remember my old man getting a new style box (as used today) from a bloke in the pub* and wiring it in himself from some instructions on the back of a beer mat. I was a small child at the time but even I knew that you weren't really supposed to be doing that.
* Suspect it was a GPO/BT engineer making a few quid on the side
Deeply offensive
It was a deeply offensive and sick thing to do. Shame on them for such a hoax. It caused terrible distress.........
Can you imagine how humiliated I was after I had spent 5 minutes singing "Ding Dong, The Witch Is Dead" at the top of my voice in the office?
15k?
15k? That's rubbish! Even my Amstrad did 178k per side!
Posted in Cheap MacBook Airs for all!
Best job in the world
Make stuff up about popular product and then get paid.
But anyone can play at this game.....
Dell may remove all DVD drives from laptops
Another PC in a Commodore 64 box may be launched
Apple may only install SSD's in new machines.
Seems an easy game to play.
Free Wi-Fi
Even when I was still on 02, the bloody thing never worked properly. Openzone? Closezone more like!
Re: Unsold Acorn Electrons
I think that rumour was spread by Micromen.
CD players were painfully expensive. The best figure I can find for 1983 is £700. In 2012 that's just shy of £2000. Our local radio station didn't even get a CD player until 1986 and even then they only had one. And that was the most profitable station outside of London in that era.
So CD players weren't really a factor. I think it was just some dramatisation in Micromen. More realistically Acorn were taking a spanking from Sinclair/Commodore and having to compete against the likes of Dragon, Oric, and Atari. Everyone and their dog had a computer out and the Electron died for the same reasons the Dragon and Oric, etc died.
Acorn for schools
I was a school kid at the time looking to work in computing. While the Acorn Archimedes machines had a flashy GUI and powerful GPU, I wanted to be using industry standard software. And the Acorns certainly didn't offer that.
Windows 3 was where it was at, even if it was absolutely f*cking terrible in comparison.
Bad batches of hard drives
Bad batches of hard drives are nothing new. I remember the guys who ran the hundreds of servers at the place I once worked complaining about certain batches of drives they had purchased being better than others. These guys had hundreds of drives on the go.
Or, as I mentioned previously, 5 IBM Deathstars purchased together all failing. Not sure if the full fall out of that was ever felt by IBM as our drives never went back as we didn't want the inevitable refurbs they would send us.
Hardly fanboys
I doubt it's the fanboys who have them. I have a tower myself and it was eye wateringly expensive.
On the upside, drives in my 2008 model are a doddle to swap. Really easy. Even your usual dumb ass Apple user could manage it as it's just four screws that actually don't need a screwdriver as you they are designed for finger use. All very nice. As someone who used to earn money building PC systems in the 90's and regularly used to cut my hands to shreds, has to be said the Mac towers are a pleasure to work inside as long as you are getting at the bits Apple want you to get at.
And for the 2008 model at least, there was no Apple custom drives with special firmware. All off the shelf drives and in fact all of my drives have been upgraded since. Things may be different for SSD's though.
As for 1 in 100 failure rate, you are looking at someone who had 5 out of 5 80GB IBM Deskstars fail on him 10 or so years ago. Frankly while those drives were failing on me I'd have happily taken 1 in 100 odds! :-)
X-Rays
Presumably it's an urban myth that SD cards are vunerable to x-ray radiation? Or the police might have to charge themselves with destroying evidence!
Perhaps they could "remote work" some of the pot holes out of the roads around here as well as clear up the awful fly tipping problems?
Opinion
David McLeman
My 25 years of comical IT buzzwords
Tim Worstall
Time to take a sniff at the coffee, perhaps
Chris Mellor
Will they have to drag him back like last time?
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