Looking forward to the PC version

I pre-ordered the PC version on Steam last weekend, since they're throwing in MP1 and 2 as well, all for £29.99. I haven't played the first two in ages, so I think that will make a nice appetizer while we wait for 3. Hopefully the PC version will be even better than the console version.

Happy times. I did the first year or two of university using my speccy 128 for word processing and stuff - Tasword 2, +D interface, and an Epson dot matrix printer; it wasn't all playing Bomb Jack and Thrust 2. It has to be said, it wasn't work or games that made speccy obsolete for me, it was porn. Sam Fox Strip Poker on the speccy just did not cut it once I got an Amiga with 4096 colours.

By the way, if the bastard who borrowed my Interface 1 and microdrive at school and never gave it back is reading this, I still hate you.

Ahh, Mythbusters

Ahh, Mythbusters, and their decreasingly rigorous testing of decreasingly mythical myths. It was good once upon a time, but they're really scraping the barrel these days in therms of the "myths" they take on. At least putting lives in danger adds a bit of an edge of excitement to things, so I hope this isn't the last time they do it. Explosions and Kari in a tight t-shirt are the only reason to watch that show now.

Crap sales

I buy most of my computer stuff from eBuyer, they have reasonable prices and in general I have no problems with them, used them for years. But the one thing they do really badly are their sales; I know it's normal to highlight the biggest savings in the adverts for a sale, while the stuff anyone actually wants to buy is not discounted much, but eBuyer really take the piss on that. I hope they lose more money from their servers being down than they make from flogging their unwanted tat, maybe they'll learn.

By the way, I just got on there, and they have Hayes Accura 56k PC card analog modems for £27.76. Try not to knock anyone down in the stampede, people.

Easy now

Don't get your knickers in a twist, doll. It's a survey; those were the results. You seem to have gone out of your way to make the most non-PC interpretation possible of what was said, just so you can get your hackles up. Seems to me that existing marketing strategies in the sector often are a bit patronising towards women (do I need to go into the marketing of the typical targeted-at-women handsets?), and those comments are actually suggesting that that should change, and more attention should be paid to how women actually use their phones.

Probably false economy

When I last measured the standby draw of my kit, most of it came out very low indeed; I think the TV was about 1W. My V+ box burns 20W or something, but that has to stay on standby to record shows. Just for fun, I'd like to know 1) how long it would take for this device to pay for itself in energy savings, and 2) how long it would take for the carbon emissions it saves to cancel out the environmental impact of its manufacture/transport/etc.

Let's assume your PVR/STB is going to stay powered to record stuff, so a typical household might be switching off the TV, an amplifier, and perhaps a console or disc player. My TV is about 1W in standby, Sony amp is about 0.25W, xbox360 is 2W, so call it 4W in total. Let's assume the things are actuall in use for an average of 5 hours per day, so standby for 19 hours/day (generous), or 570/month. Let's call it 13p per kWh. So 0.004kW * 570 hours * 13p = 29.6p per month.

So it's going to take 8.4 years to save you the purchase price. Of course if you have a sucky old energy hog TV, it might be better, but then you might be better off saving up for a new TV. I'm not even going to start trying to work out the carbon footprint of manufacturing the thing, or how long it might take to offset that.

And as usual, the BT Business service status page showed absolutely nothing of relevance (4 local issues, nothing to indicate a national issue). The support phone-line just rang, not even the fun of getting into a queue. How frigging hard is it to put something on the status page to let people know there is a national issue and it's being dealt with? I didn't know for sure if the problem was at our end or at BT's until the story made it to the BBC news website.

RE: Local tv

"Does anyone, and I mean ANYONE think this is even worth the effort?"

Depends. People seem to think the clusterturd of pointlessness known as YouTube is worth bringing to every device in existence with a display. Can it be any worse?

Great series

I remember getting a pirate copy of Civ for my Amiga back in the day. I guess this is a case of piracy leading to purchases, because I went on to buy Civ II, III Conquests, IV, and V (bought Civ V just recently on Steam, but haven't downloaded it yet). I never got on with IV, but I still play III - for some reason it just never gets old.

Good car

I've got a 2009 Scirocco TDI and I absolutely love it. The only thing wrong with it is the rear visibility isn't great; I got the rear parking sensors option to help with that. The improved fuel economy and lower tax bracket of this version one means I'll have to see how much I can get for my current one on trade-in, it might well be worth me upgrading. I get about 40-45mpg on my daily commute, I think the stop-start might make a big improvement on that.

Umm..

"Now I’ll get a GMail or Hotmail account and hope for the best, or perhaps rely on never-ending employment with El Reg for my mailbox."

You must surely know that you can register your own domain, and thus keep the same email address regardless of what ISP or mail provider you happen to be using, via forwarding. You can't possibly not know that. But you sure talk as if you don't in the article?!? Feigned ignorance for effect?

The only reason not to do that would be cost, but you'd have to be a real tight-arse, and since you've been paying for your io.com address for twenty years, I'd have thought that wasn't an issue. You might not be able to get a two-letter domain, but you're bound to be able to get something more memorable than a generic googlemail etc address, so it can't be lack of available domains.

?

Shocked!

Sandy Toksvig made a joke that I actually find funny!

Vapour

"In the tablet world we're going to become better than number one. We call it number one plus."

Ah, another worthy addition to the vast lexicon of marketing bollocks. Is there a school where they teach people how to come up with this crap?

We don' need no steenkin' title

I'm with Ofcom on this. If they're going to spend time and resources dealing with domestic interference problems, it would be better spent trying to find a way to deal with abuse of the 2.4GHz range by crappy baby monitors and video senders etc, i.e. problems that are starting to affect almost all wi-fi users. The problem of interference with ham radio and shortwave broadcasts will go away simply by waiting a few years for the few remaining people it affects to die of old age.

I say

I'm sure Toshiba has succeeded in interesting lots of people with this tech, but turning the interest into sales requires a realistic price point. Considering that there isn't much 3D material around, these sets will primarily be used to watch 2D material, so basically you're being asked to pay £1800 for what most of the time is an ordinary 20" TV. Seems a little steep to me.

Moreover, they use the same parallax barrier technology that's been around for a few years, and have the same problems; you have to park your head in a small sweet spot if you want to see the 3D effect at all, so you're not going to get your whole family watching a movie in 3D on these things.

http://crave.cnet.co.uk/televisions/toshiba-glasses-free-3d-tvs-explained-50002115/

WTF

As benjymous says, the BBC have been busily cease-and-desisting anyone providing third-party apps to let us view iPlayer content; I recently lost the ability to access iPlayer on my PDA as a result of them killing MyPlayer for WinMo. They used to have a web page with the live BBC channel streams in a format most devices could use, but guess what? They've added browser sniffing, and "your device is not supported". As far as I can tell, they're doing the opposite of what they're saying in this article. Would love to see them live up to what they're saying, but I'm not holding my breath.

Give it a chance

OK, it will probably be crap, especially without Whedon. But occasional, these "re-imaginings" and "reboots" come up trumps. Witness Battlestar Galactica, which was great, and J.J. Abrams Star Trek, which I was surprisingly not complete rubbish. I don't hold out too much hope for this, especially as it will be hard for a one-off movie to satisfy fans of the series' long story-arcs, so it will probably just end up being a fairly generic Buffy-themed action flick. But it's still possible that it won't suck, fingers crossed.

V++

The biggest f@#k-up with the current V+ is that it always records 3 minutes of overlap either side of a program - fine and sensible in most cases, but if you record two consecutive programs on the same channel, it's not smart enough to do that with one tuner, oh no. Hence if you say schedule recordings on BBC1 at 8-9pm and 9-10pm, then try to schedule another recording on a different channel at 9pm, you won't be able to; it'll report a conflict, because it's got 2 tuners in use between 8:57 and 9:03, and the third tuner is reserved for live viewing.

TiVo users seem to think it's god's gift, so let's hope this TiVo STB is a bit of an improvement on the V+, and that existing customers can get one without shelling out a king's ransom.

Me too

I used to reliably get pretty much the full 10Mbps I'm paying for most of the time from Virgin, but it all seemed to go down the pan a few months ago. Now I sometimes see speeds as low as 1Mbps, and the general reliability seems to be poor as well - no DNS last night, had to switch to using Google's public DNS servers. Their tech support is useless too. So I also won't be upgrading, unless they can somehow convince me that they can actually deliver something like what they're advertising.

Darwin award?

Not spectacular enough really, although stupid enough, to be a Darwin Award contender. I mean, how on earth do you get to be stupid enough to drive into a lake just because your satnav says that's the way to go? Was he not actually looking out of the windscreen at where he was going? Headlights not working? Or did he just think it was an unusually large puddle? I guess we'll never know.

Patents?

"Open source hardware, just like software, treads a fine line - become too popular and you'll attract the attention of patent holders who can often destroy such efforts."

I don't really see any mention of "open source hardware" on the Pandora website, at least not on the main page or the about page, are there schematics and artworks etc available so you can build/modify your own Pandora? That's what is generally meant by "open source hardware".

But whether it's open or not, I can't see any reason to think that the hardware might be violating any patents. It's all off-the-shelf components, and it isn't a clone of any existing device, so unless you have some inside information that you're not sharing...

The software (i.e. emulators) is another matter, but they don't have to ship the devices with those installed; the target demographic makes it particularly easy to leave it to the customers to install their own software. And in that respect it is no different than any other PC that is capable of running such emulators (i.e. pretty much every PC).

Google is losing it

Google seems to be increasingly focusing on superficial slickness and increased ad revenue, while the actual usefulness of their search engine is decreasing, due to annoying features and dumbing down.

Let me give you an example; last night while searching for book reviews, I typed in "deepsix jack mcdevitt review" (Deepsix being the title of the book I was interested in, note "Deepsix", not "Deep Six"). Now in days of yore, Google would have (and still does in many instances, don't ask me the whys and wherefores) prompted me with something like "Did you mean deep six jack mcdevitt?" and shown me the first two results on those keywords. That's annoying enough (I actually wrote a greasemonkey script to remove those lines), because 99.9% of the time I meant what I bloody well typed in the first place, and that prompt is pointless and a waste of space.

But in this case Google didn't do that, it just went ahead and used its "corrected" keywords. I get "Showing results for _deep six jack mcdevitt review_". And I have to click another link "Search instead for _deepsix jack mcdevitt review_" in order to search for the fucking keywords I correctly entered in the first place. Yes, Google now thinks it now better than I do what I want to search for, to the extent it just flat out overrides my queries. That is infuriating, and I'm on the verge of ditching Google for search because of this kind of crap.

Bio-diesel

Don't forget, diesels can also run on bio-diesel. So if they are environmentally comparable with a battery car when running on fossil fuel, they're surely light-years ahead when running on fully renewable bio-diesel. Yes, at the moment bio-fuels are made from food crops, and it isn't considered acceptable to divert too much of them to fuel production, as lots of poor people might starve due to the resulting increased food costs. But as the cost of producing bio-fuel from next generation sources (algae etc) comes down, that ceases to be a problem, and bio-diesel may well end up being the most green option.

Dark Ages

eBooks are stuck in the same dark age that afflicted digital music back in the day - DRM-laden product requiring incompatible proprietary devices to read them, ridiculous regional licensing nonsense (I found a US ebook site that would let me pretend to live in the USA but pay with a UK credit card, but it really pisses me off that I have to do that to get the books I want, especially if it's a UK author), etc etc.

I can only hope that the eBook market experiences the same reality check that the music industry got, then maybe in 5 years time I'll be buying DRM-free books at a competitive price to read on the device of my choice. For now, I'm ready to part with my hard-earned for books in any format I can read on my PDA, but if they won't take my money, I feel little guilt in obtaining those books from other sources.

Good

The public, in the main, is intellectually challenged and ill-informed. It's quite enough of a compromise that we have to allow people who can't name a single cabinet minister or coherently discuss a single government policy, to vote in general elections. We have people who can't manage long division supposedly evaluating the economic policies of the various parties in order to decide who to vote for; what a joke. The idea of letting them have a more direct influence on policy is quite horrifying. No, I'll take faceless bureaucrats and self-serving politicians over Joe Public any day.

Luddites!

And tight-fisted, commie Luddites at that. Yes, 2000 was a decent OS in its day, but that was a long time ago. XP SP2 on was better, Vista was even... just kidding, but Windows 7 is better still. Now to add to the increasing amount of software that doesn't support Win2k (ok, so the luddites are probably running 10 year old software on their 10 year old OS, so that probably isn't so much of an issue for them), MS is pulling the plug on its updates. It's 2010 now, but it's not too late, you can still join in with the 21st century. This is a great opportunity to dust the cobwebs out of your wallets and BUY SOME NEW SOFTWARE!

Bollocks

If you want to read an e-ink device in bed, you have to have a light on, because it's not backlit. And once you've tried the crappy cover-mounted reading lights, and realised that they're useless because of reflection, that means you have to have a pretty bright night-stand light on at the very least. A backlit device on a low-to-moderate setting is positively soothing by comparison.

Am I qualified to argue with a professor specialising in sleep disorders? Well, as usual we can't see the actual research to see what was actually published, only a clueless LA Times journo's interpretation of a dumbed-down press release. So we have no idea what the original research behind this story actually said, but I'm willing to bet that it diverges somewhat from the LA Times reporter's take on it.