Re: It's more expensive than Zen.

Pretty much speaks for me, except I'll have been with Zen for ADSL for 10 years this year.

I was surprised recently to see the Firefox add-on tell me I now had 103 GB of allowance for the month, but I think that they specifically monitor my activity and up the allowance every time I exceed the monthly cap and buy a top-up... I've only done that twice and on both occasions the monthly cap was increased the following month. Coincidence?? ;-)

Re: On the positive side...

Feel better after that do you? I doubt that the timely arrival of the ambulance would have helped, but the fact that she has eight other children is entirely irrelevant. Sadly this woman's chronically ill son died slowly in front of her, and you feel it's appropriate to have a tirade about her presumed circumstances?

Speaking as an atheist I find your insensitivity, attack on her presumed religious convictions and lack of empathy disturbing.

Why the downvotes?

The above comment merely reports that a juror told the paper that they had also broken the rules. The downvotes appear to imply that the poster agreed with the juror in question, which they state nowhere in the text.

Still a great media player IMO

I'm the last to approve of AOL, but my experience of Winamp is far better than that of certain apple shaped media software.

I'm all Linux at home, and am resigned to using iTunes lookalikes (Banshee, Rhythmbox) since I found XMMS2 a pain to find, then set-up on recent versions of Ubuntu and XMMS3 was just not very user-friendly (for my wife).

I still like and use Winamp on Windows machines at work. Their best feature IMO has always been sorting how I want it (Sort by > Path & Filename), but their playlist features are also great. I use it to create playlists for use on my phones, and their support of varied formats is also good. When I re-encoded music to the excellent he-aacv2 format for playback on my phones back in 2007, Winamp was the only player that supported the format.

As for support, once I got my recent defect noticed, it was fixed in what I would call reasonable time and is in the latest version... [aacdec] Detection of parametric stereo for AAC files made with older encoders.

Water = ice

Any ship not designed to avoid/deflect ice in space is doomed.

I'm no physicist, but I'm not sure how you expect to get (liquid) water in any volume in space.

Liquid water would need to be near to a heat source capable of making it liquid. Free floating in space without something to shield it (e.g. Earth's magnetosphere) , it would be rapidly boiled away by the solar wind (c.f. a comet's tail).

Secure printing?

There have been printers that allow secure printing for quite some time. The printer holds the job until the user is present and inputs a PIN. The user can then ensure that they take all relevant pages and nothing else, thus also preventing anyone else from seeing the contents.

Or to use the metaphor correctly...

Even a recruiter can't hold back the tide of idiots just by talking to them?

(Cnut's holding back the tide story was a metaphor to show that even the powers of the king have limits, not a serious attempt by a megalomaniac)

Same as up to xxx MP3s

Bitrate may not be as important as the codec used, but it's still a major factor.

I'd query where you get your figures from on DVR recording bitrates.

H264 1080i HD broadcasts from the BBC over Freesat average about 3GB an hour when recorded to my PC - or about the same as an SD MPEG2 from a DVD. Given how much room HD content takes on my SkyHD box I'd be surprised if they are re-encoding it to reduce the size before storing it. It adds a lot of complexity and adds an extra point of failure to what should be a fairly simple process (take the transport stream and store it directly).

By comparison, my Blu-ray of Watchmen (also H264, but now 1080p) is 38GB for a film of about 2.5 hours, or around 15 GB an hour. Admittedly this is an extreme, other rips are around 25 GB per film.

Given this I calculate I'd manage 160 HD films at BD quality (4000/25), or 800 HD films at broadcast quality (4000/5). Obviously these are rough figures and ignore the 1024/1000 rounding that disk manufacturers get away with.

I personally would argue that anything supposedly in HD that is at less then broadcast quality is bordering on being no better than scaled good quality SD. All that real estate demands a decent bitrate, and squeezing a HD film into 2 GB (or in fact significantly less when you factor in a 384 kbps 5.1 soundtrack) does not sound like quality to me.

Not compatible with Marketplace

As these cheapo tab manufacturers are I will hazard a guess not paying Google for their upsells, but simply using the free version of Android, they will not have Android Marketplace (nor Google Maps, GMail etc.) so your assertion is more than likely incorrect.

Must get my eyes tested

Initially read that as "Imperial wankers"

Umm, isn't research all about predictions?

I don't know about hardware engineering, but in the basis of scientific research *is* prediction. If your experiment is that unpredictable, then it's probably not very good science. Science generally deals in very small, but very accurate increments in the amount of knowledge that we have. There are very few paradigm shifts, or giant leaps.

Admittedly in some cases the extrapolations used to make the prediction are wildly wrong, and some experiments suffer from lots of unknown variables, but this does not change the fact that scientific research relies on proving or disproving a prediction made with as much prior information as possible.

I'm not saying that this DARPA experiment is bad science either, just refuting the idea that research deals with the unpredictable.

Error in calculation

You seem to have missed that there were actually seven of some animals (according to Genesis). Obviously this is enough to balance the equation ;-)

DLNA org say it's not their fault... because they are powerless fools

It really is as shit as all that. My experience is as stated above, DLNA renderers simply reject outright anything that is even slightly at variance from a very limited spec. Implementations of other formats than MPEG2, MP3, LPCM, and JPG are riddled with non-standard DLNA-PNs that cause the server vendors to have to handle every client differently.

I *DO* have TBs of MPEG2 on my home server (rips of all my hundreds of DVDs), and it is all served to my DLNA rendering TV, and it works (very well thank you very much). I do appreciate that I am a lone voice crying out of the wilderness on this one. One of the few with an entire library of DLNA compliant media. The reason for this? I am geeky enough to have got in on DLNA early and in the days before transcoding servers. I also didn't really have any downloaded videos (except Red vs Blue series 1-4 in avi), so I could build my library from scratch.

What the manufacturers behind DLNA and the DLNA.org seem to fail to appreciate is that mandating only MPEG2 video to get a compliance sticker is simply not going to wash with the general public. The majority out there want to see the mp4s that their phones have recorded and any number of other formats that they have created or acquired over the years, and they shouldn't have to jump through hoops because the device (which someone stated above can play the files locally) won't play that media type via DLNA.

One solution is to use a transcoding server, but this is only possible on servers that have some grunt available to them, i.e. a desktop PC. It is not possible on an always-on, low-power DLNA server on a NAS, i.e. the sort of device likely to be on when you want to watch your videos in bed.

Hit the North

Damn, I was certain he was referring to Mark E Smith et al.

reviewer error

The reviewer either ran out of time, or did not have many media types.

Sony TVs support MPEG2 as well as AVCHD videos. Not exactly a stunning range of formats, but certainly better than just the (relatively) obscure AVCHD format.

I use both formats via DLNA on my 37EX403 (essentially the same TV as the 40EX43B, only slightly smaller display and minus the Blu-ray player).

The first rule of apostrophe club is...

Possessive apostrophes for singular nouns go between the noun and the "s"

Liked the quote though :-)

Umm

That was exactly my point. I never suggested that my TV scaling the image was HD gaming, and neither would playing a Wii game on a Wii 2 be HD gaming, in exactly the same way that PS One games look crap on my PS3.

Sony Ericsson is not Sony.

It's a 50/50 joint venture that depending on location of the office has a greater or lesser affiliation with either of the parent companies e.g. people in Lund are much more affiliated with Ericsson, ditto people in Tokyo with Sony. Ultimately though, it is its own entity independent of the parent companies.

All I can say about your actual comment is that DRM is best avoided if you know how to sort out your own media, then you can't end up in the situation you describe.

Because it's a stock photo?

Looks like a stock marketing photo to me. As an ex-SE employee, I'm only surprised that one of the contacts is not Ricardo Montoya.

Seriously though, not everyone wants to pay £50 for bluetooth headphones when they may have already invested in some decent wired ones from a company with pedigree that work with any CE audio device.

Personally, I'm very pleased to hear this news. Here I thought I'd be stuck with an out of date phone for the last year of my 2 year contract.

Problem is with a broken feature of the form

As I said, the form is broken. The I'm referring to is supposed to be for those who can't remember what email address they used. The field it validates is one that gets hidden and /should/ be empty. If it is empty, then sending the reset details fails.

I freely admit that I should have updated my email address before this happened, but that doesn't change the issue of the very functionality designed for idiots such as myself being broken.

Currant games?

Also the raisin and sultana based games for PS3 won't work.

Missus hated 10.10 netbook remix

Subjective and minus the technical discussion on the merits of X and Unity, but I had to switch the Maverick install on the missus netbook back to a default Gnome desktop because she hated it so much. She actually quite liked the UI in the lucid (10.04) netbook remix, but the 10.10 one was a step too far.

I presume that she is target demographic for UNR as she knows nothing of the underlying system - other than its name, but if her reaction is anything to go by following the upgrade then Unity is not ready for the likes of her.

Then be very surprised

Your assumption is perhaps understandable, but it is false. As you state the above mentions USB, not DLNA which *is* restricted as I mentioned above.

From the same page that you posted:

DLNA Renderer: Photo (jpeg)/Music(LPCM/MP3)/Video(MPEG2/AVCHD)

I could go further and link to the the DLNA certificate, but I think that I made my point. I have one of this series of TVs and the DLNA and USB support do not match.

Yanks?

'We' call 'you' Yanks about as often as 'you' call 'us' Limeys... i.e. not very often, and then mostly said by idiots.