Posts by Phil

re: B3vil: PS3 Reliability

There has been a fair few reports of faulty PS3's on the PS3 forum (but nothing like the 360 failure rate), but unlike MS where it can take 6 weeks to get a 360 fixed, one phone call to Sony usually gets a replacement to your door for a straight swap within 48 hrs.

That seems a much better policy than the 360 one?

The only reports I've heard of people waiting longer (and even then they aren't waiting as long as I waited for my 360 to be fixed) are when people with the original 60GB PS3 wanted theirs replaced with another 60GB (PS2 computability) and Sony were waiting on supplies. Sony then gave them the choice of waiting, or having the newer version within 48 hrs.

re Stewart Knight

The 360 hasn't got a 3 year warrenty as standard, it has a 3 year warranty for one fault only, a known fault, the RROD. If you phone up with a 14 month old console and say your consoles hanging, and you haven't got the RROD, it will not be covered (of course the sensible thing to do would be to blatantly lie and say it does have the RROD)

Why don't they

try using this idea on BluRay

I'm surprised no ones thought of this already?

@ Andrew Adebowale

In my youth (must have been 1979 - 1980) we had 13 of us in an Austin 1100.

This included two people in the driving seat, one doing the pedals and one steering.

We were on our way to a party. We all got out at a village pub on the way, and could only work out how to get 11 of us back in

I couldn't win

As a spotty faced youth, I had a job in a hardware shop.

Someone came in and asked for a skirting ladder, I told him his boss was winding him up. My boss then had a right go at me for not trying to sell him something.

A few weeks later a guy came in and asked for a spirit level bubble. We did sell the replacement glass bits with the bubble in for certain levels. I tried to sell him one, then had to endure both him and my boss taking the piss out of me for 30 mins.

Roll on a couple of years, a kid came in looking for a tin of tartan paint. We had our Saturday boy looking for over 20 mins with this kid, before we finally got him to take a £5 deposit and say we'd order it for him :)

re: shop floor space

The Wii is a different sort of games console with a different user base.

I bet when the Wii fit is released, it will be in all the gameshops windows and prominent areas.

The fact of the matter is, teenagers with 360's and PS3's are going to be spending their pocket money/paper round money on the latest game as soon as they can afford them (and give them £200, they would have no shortage of games to buy).

The same teenagers, while they may well like the Wii, have a go at a sports challenge on it now and again etc, given the choice, would want to buy games for the PS3 or 360 first.

I have PS3, 360 and Wii in my house, if I turned the Wii on tonight, both my teenagers would want a quick go, want to vote on the voting channel and see the results of previous votes etc, but within the hour would want to be on COD4, Halo etc on the 360 or PS3.

A lot of people I know with the Wii aren't what I'd call hardcore gamers, they enjoy playing the supplied sports game, enjoy messing around with their Mii's etc and hardly (if ever) go into a video games store.

@Simon Painter

I totally agree with you. But do you let your brother go to his friends houses? No matter what you think is unsuitable, unless you keep them under lock and key, they do get to play them elsewhere.

Personally I do the same as you, play the game, and if I think its suitable, I let my son play it. That said, I only apply it to 18 rated games, a year ago I would have applied it to 16 rated games but now my sons 14, having witnessed many many 16 rated games, they have the odd F word in them (far far less that they hear in the playground) and I know my son, I know how he thinks, I know he realises the difference between fantasy and real life, and so far, I haven't found a game rated at either 16 or 18 that my son wanted to play and I found unsuitable for him.

In fact I often see 15 rated films that seem a lot worse than 18 rated games.

Creative (and Auzen) just lost a sale

Was about to buy

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=SC-000-AZ to replace my Auzentech X-Meridian.

Creatives stupid action has now hurt Auzentech, I appreciate Auzentech products are superior, but they license the product from Creative and I refuse to ever give Creative another penny.

The canes pointless

We had the cane. Did it work? No.

If you hadn't been caned then you weren't one of the lads. Around 30 years ago now since I was at school.

Could list page after page of the things we used to get up to. The cane was a zero deterrent.

Got out of a caning one day as the teacher was so wound up, they got the head of science to cane me and a friend in front of the class. He caned my friend, my friend turned round and said "have you done it yet", the head teacher then caned him so hard the cane broke, the result, we were rolling around on the floor laughing.

Not proud of what I used to get up to, but corporal punishment didn't work, and I had very very strict parents (and would get beaten at least once a week over my head with my mums shoe).

What I will say is that too many teachers don't know how to teach. They go to Uni, get degrees on the subject they teach but know nothing about controlling classes. At my school there were loads of teachers we could wrap around our fingers. There were others you wouldn't dare mess with. Corporal punishment had nothing to do with it. One of the oldest teachers had some of the roughest people in her class, yet she had the knack of shutting people up, making them look stupid, and not letting them disturb her lessons. She never had to get people caned or give them detentions.

The way some of the teachers treated us was totally out of order. The trouble is, we are now the parents, so when our kids get into trouble, we remember the crap teachers we had, we know how unbearable school was for us, how out of order some of the teachers were etc hence we take our kids side.

I went to school in plush old Guildford, and my school wasn't the worst one in the town either. That award goes to my wifes school. On her school trip at 15, before she was hospitalised for alcoholic poisoning, one of her teachers told her how he had a bet with another teacher that he couldn't get her into bed before the trip was over.

In comparison, the kids from the local schools round here (Norfolk) are perfectly behaved

@jeremy

I brought the components to build my PC along with OEM of Vista Premium. There's nothing at all illegal with that, I am the system builder hence am entitled to use OEM software. Just that if I need support, I have to contact myself to obtain it :)

@Mark

You running your drives in AHCI?

I was dual booting, decided to give SP1 a go. It installed fine.

I then tried doing a complete reformat (as I have image backups of my XP install), setting my drives to AHCI and doing a fresh install. Everything worked until I applied SP1 then sure enough, code 10 with my DVD.

Did another fresh install without AHCI and all is fine.

I like Vista but mainly use XP

Vista isn't nearly as bad now as a lot of people make out. but my biggest complaint is what MS did to the way sound works on Vista.

I multi boot xp/vista/linux.

Vista runs everything I throw at it very fast and with no problems, except for the sound. Go over to say Creatives forum and just take a quick look at how many people still aren't happy with the quality of sound through their vista drivers.

I use Auzen X-meridian and that gives a LOT better sound quality under XP than it does under Vista, which gives the end result of me very rarely booting to Vista due to this one reason.

If MS re-introduce DirectSound 3D hardware acceleration etc and simply sort this mess out, I would use Vista every day, but as it is, I have to stick to XP

Dont see the point of it

As others have said, it's expensive for what it is.

I doubt very much that you will be able to use the PS3 for gaming or to play DVD's while it's recording, that being the case, it's even more useless.

I'm happy with my 40GB

Sony do supply instructions on how to upgrade your HD should you so wish ( without voiding your warranty) and personally I'd rather buy something like a 160GB HD from the likes of Overclockers for £46 inc VAT than pay Sony much much more for a bigger one to begin with.

Sounds ok in principle

But who wants to place bets that someone will both end up wrongly on the list due to 'computer error' , and then end up being murdered by so called vigilantes?

As for discipline, my daughters 16, I've never had to smack her, she's polite, doing well at college and cant stand people who swear.

My sons 14, I've had to smack him twice when he was little, it was that or him sticking things into electrical sockets. I've also thrown a glass of water over him once when he got into a temper and was being arrogant and not listening to a word being said, the shock of the water snapped him out of it.

Both enjoy my and my wifes company, we purposely put their PC's and games consoles downstairs so they don't end up shut away in their rooms, now my daughter has a laptop, there's nothing stopping her shutting herself away, but she prefers to use it in the living room and be in our company.

It's all to do with upbringing. Personally while I know what people mean when I see how some brats behave (I feel like thumping them), there's a huge difference between discipline and hitting. If you teach kids that in order to get them to obey you, you achieve this by inflicting physical pain on them, what are you really teaching them?

I was caned at school, made zero difference to my (or my friends) behaviour, it was seen as a sort of status symbol. My mum used to smack me over the head with her shoe if I didn't do what she wanted, the fact that she used to do this 2 or 3 times a week should show how well this worked for her.

@Tim

Well I'm 43 and my wife brought me a PS3 for Christmas.

My house now owns 360, PS3 and Wii. By far the most popular with my 14 and 16yr olds is the 360, this is almost entirely due to the way MS have implemented their xbox Live system.

Have been very impressed with the PS3 and if Sony do sort out their PSN so that it's as user friendly as Xbox live, I think they're onto a winner.

With regards to the Wii, I ordered one for Christmas 2006, finally got it in Feb 2007. Was disappointed as to how quickly my kids got bored with it. Brought them a few wii games for Christmas this year, my son spent a few hours on Mario, but the draw of an online battle on Halo or COD4 was too much and the Wii hasn't been on since. It is a fun machime, but in my opinion it's the sort of machine you use at a party or Christmas day when the families round.

not perfect, but a step in the right direction

The address thing is fine. If your not a business then you wont be displaying your address, if you are, then like the majority of other businesses, get insurance against being burgled. I suspect a lot of the power sellers don't even keep stock but simply act as the middle man and order it when it's sold. Some people wont be happy, but those will be people that are using ebay to run a home business without wanting to admit to it to the tax man/benefit office etc

With regards to feedback, I like the idea suggested in above posts for the seller to leave feedback before the buyer. The current system doesn't work. Yesterday I looked at 4 items from different power sellers, all had 97+ feedback. I checked the negative feedbacks, all fair comments in my opinion (no business pleases all it's customers) but I then looked at the feedback of people that had left the bad feedback, ALL of them had perfect ratings except for one negative, you've guessed it, a negative from the power sellers saying things like "avoid at all costs". Although this had the effect on me of not wishing to deal with a power seller that couldn't handle a complaint without being childish.

@Mark Rendle

That may be true.

But what about all the games that don't come out for the PC?

What about say in 2 - 3 years time when PS3 programmers are streamlining their games to take full advantage of it's capabilities. By that time new games coming out for the PC will require the latest £450 graphics card to run with all guns blazing, will have been optimized for however many cores is then standard, rather than single or dual core etc etc etc.

Last year, not including my monitor I spent £1400 on a PC. I still had to spend ages tweaking certain games (oblivion, FSX) in order to get them playing smoothly. I pretty much assume that spending £1400 should give me around 3 years of relatively grief free gaming (no upgrades needed to play at decent settings). I fully expect to have to do a major upgrade at that point (i know, it's a lot of dosh, but it's my hobby :) .

Given the choice of spending £700 and £1400 I would take £700 every time. But playing games maxed out on my nice 24" monitor at 1900x1200 I need a top notch graphics card.

On the other hand, my £299 PS3 on the same monitor at 1080p looks superb.

Not forgetting I can also run a load of other software on it, such as loading Linux etc

@Svein

I'm one of those muppets as you politely put it.

Reasons quite simple.

If I want a big hard drive I'll throw a 250+GB in for around the £60 mark.

If I need more than 2 USB ports, I'll use one of the many USB hubs available for around £5

40GB PS3 £299

60GB PS3 something like £350

So I'm paying an extra £50 for 2 USB ports and 20GB of extra disk space. An extra 20GB (or 40GB) wont make much difference, if I use it as a media server I'm going to want a BIG drive, hence whatever Sony supply, will be replaced. If I'm using it just for games, 40GB should be ample.

I have a PS2 should I want to play any PS2 games, but haven't turned it on since I first brought my 360 in 2006, backward compatibility wont be missed by me.

Sony were spot on in my view with their 40GB.

The brazilians can still play everquest 2 then?

@Doug Lynn

I'm also a bible loving, creation believing, global flood believing, born again Christian. I LOVE everquest2 and play a wizard. There's a huge difference to playing a character such as those found in games such as EQ2, and sorcery as described in the bible.

Are you against Harry Potter too? Pointy hat and fantasy wizards and witches are not what the Bible is talking about. Most such Christians seem to have no problem with the Lion, Witch and Wardrobe, that has a witch, but its written by a Christian, so that makes it OK?

I would NEVER touch the anything to do with the occult, again there's a difference to my wizard casting a spell that lets me turn into a tiger for 5 mins on a game and me devil worshipping.

Saying that, I can understand someone whose been involved in the occult, wanting to stay clear of anything that might remind them of such things.

I didn't hear about the Grand Theft Auto guy, but I have heard of Christians Bombing abortion clinics. The actions of a few deranged humans shouldn't make the rest of us sit around in padded cells playing with cotton wool just in case we get the urge to hurt someone.

@Paul

Not sure what I think of this. A few years ago I would have agreed with you 100% but since then I spent a few years helping run a youth club for 11 to 15year olds.

During that time I witnessed various kids copying exactly what they'd seen on TV and in some video games (such as whacking someone with a folded chair, while imitating what they saw a wrestler do)

This wasn't limited to one group of kids or one incident. As a rule though it tended to be the kids that couldn't say more than two words without using the F word, the same kids that seemed to show zero respect for the people running the club (or anyone else). Obviously that shows it's their parents/upbringing thats the real root of the problem, but around half the kids fell into this bracket, and they did seem to be influenced.

@dale

Been reading AVforum where a lot of people are saying exactly what Mark says, the PS3 is one of the best upscalers out there.

I don't think he was stupid

As others have said, he should have been right.

What he has done is to publicly show up a major flaw with the banking system.

Well done JC

Ah those were the days

Number crunching job been running for something like 3 days Only had around an hour left to go. Me being the bored tape monkey (computer op) decided to play around with one of the terminals.

Oh there's a command called "debug" I'll give that a go.

Two secs later the Cray starts counting down until it shuts down

Got quite a bollocking over that one. If memory serves me correct, if only I'd known about the command "bugoff" all could have been saved.

Never seen someone making out on one (after all, weren't they all in 24hr sites?)

live still is miles better than psn

Over the crimbo period live has been awful. But this glitch aside, it still runs rings around PSN.

Would rather pay £4 per month for a service like xbox live, than pay nothing for a service like PSN

Before anyone accuses me of fanboyism, I own both the PS3 and 360 and they're both great consoles. But 99% of people that do own both will say Live is much much better.

@dave

Contrary to what people believe, not only is it perfectly legal to take pictures of your own children, it's also perfectly legal to take pictures of other peoples children in public places.

UK photograpers rights can be found here

http://www.sirimo.co.uk/ukpr.php

PHOTOGRAPHY IN PUBLIC PLACES

You are reminded that under English law :

there are no restrictions on taking photographs in a public place or on photography of individuals, whether they are adults or minors;

there is no right to privacy in a public place, although photographers are of course subject to the usual libel laws in the same way as other citizens and should observe them;

equipment or film may not be confiscated, or images deleted, by any person or officer unless a warrant for such action is issued.

Any attempt without a warrant is considered assault under English law.

Interesting thread relating to this here

http://www.ephotozine.com/topic/t-54561/p-0

A thread relating to pics of children here

http://www.ephotozine.com/topic/t-37856/p-0

My daughter loves it

My daughter asked for GH3 for crimbo and has hardly been off it since, playing against all her friends online. She absolutely loves it.

Oh, she can also play a real guitar and bass.

It's just a game for crying out loud

Just seen a reasonably priced dual format

LG GGW-H20L Blu-Ray Disc Rewriter + HD DVD ROM Drive Internal SATA

for around the £180 mark.

-

* Write Speed

* BD-R (SL/DL) 4x

* BD-R (SL LTH)16x

* DVD-R DL 4x

* DVD-RW (SL/DL) 6x

* DVD-RAM 5x

* DVD+R 16x

* DVD+R DL 2.4x

* DVD+RW (SL/DL) 8x

* CD-R 40x

* CD-RW 24x

-

* Read Speed

* BD-ROM (SL/DL) 6x

* BD-R (SL/DL) 6x

* BD-R (SL LTH) 3.8x

* BD-RE (SL/DL) 2x

* BDMV (AACS Compliant Disc) 4.8x

* HD DVD-ROM (SL/DL) 3x

* HD DVD-R (SL/DL) 3x

* HD DVD-Video (AACS Compliant Disc) 3x

* DVD-ROM (SL/DL) 16x

* DVD-R (SL/DL) 12x

* DVD-RW (SL/DL) 10x

* DVD+R (SL/DL) 12x

* DVD+RW (SL/DL) 10x

* DVD-RAM 5x

* DVD- 8x

* CD-R/RW/ROM 40x

* CD-DA (DAE) 40x

* 8cm CD 10x

* Video CD 40x

-

* Sustained Transfer Rate

* BD-ROM 215.79 Mbits/s (6x) max.

* HD DVD-ROM 109.65 Mbits/s (3x) max.

* DVD-ROM 22.16 Mbytes/s (16x) max.

* CD-ROM 6,000 Kbytes/s (40x) max.

-

* Access Time

* BD-ROM 180 ms typ

* HD DVD-ROM 210 ms typ

* DVD-ROM 160 ms typ

* DVD-RAM 180 ms typ

* CD-ROM 150 ms typ.

* Buffer Size 4 MB

* Loading Type: Motorized Tray

* Interface Type: Serial ATA

About the same speed you get with Virginmedia XL broadband package then

As title says

The IT crowd had the best idea,

Change 999 to something like

0118999881999119725 3

(and if I got that correct, it shows how memorable it was)

Last time I went out of my way to report something (roadwork traffic lights on a blind bend, where both ends were green at the same time), phoned my local station, got the 3rd degree off of some rude policewoman, firing me questions for around 15 minutes and vowed never to bother phoning them again. Guildford police station up to their usual high standards.

re: 770,000 360's by AC

I hate keep reading crap like that. They've fixed the problem many months ago. Now the failure rate is no different from any other console/electronic bit of kit.

I've had a 360 since March last year, my kids are on it constantly, still working fine. My daughters ex, used to put his in his rucksack each weekend and bring it round here, it got battered, kicked and all sorts, it STILL works. Most of my 14year old sons friends have 360's, all of them are on their first console.

Personally I think a big problem for the PS3 has nothing to do with which console is better. A couple of my sons friends have PS3's but all their friends are playing Gears of war and Halo 3 etc over Xboxlive on the 360. Guess what, both friends with the PS3 are now getting 360's for Christmas.

I wanted to get a PS3, so tried to use my kids (14 and 16year old) as an excuse. Neither can think of anything they want as their main present so I suggested a PS3. neither was interested. "What's the point, all my friends are playing the 360" said my son.

I've no interest in this game, BUT

I'm tempted to buy it out of principle (although that's what the game makers are hoping for)

I presume the security forces are going to keep a close eye on the BBFC members who have played this game, as it's obviously so bad they are all going to end up homicidal maniacs?

Teach your kids some patience

I ordered a Wii for Christmas last year. I explained to my teenagers about the shortage and that I'm not going to pay loads of money to get one off ebay. I gave them the choice. I order it and they have to wait, or I cancel the order and get something else.

They waited. I ordered it on 12th November 2006, it finally turned up on February 26th 2007.

Not only did we have a great Christmas, we had a great Feb/March too.

@Andy Rock

If they've improved that much then great, a good step in the right direction. I run Gentoo myself so haven't had any recent first hand experience of one of the popular installs.

That said, a good friend recently commented (Aug 2007) that he has spent the last week trying to get "mandriva linux spring free 64 bit" working.

He said, "Seems the retail versions (with discovery pack) have the updated Nvidia drivers installed, the free downloadable versions seem to come with generic ones? (which don't allow the 3D desktop or graphics acceleration to work?? )

That's a full day and a half spent trying to install drivers using command line interface, for some reason beyond me... after a lot of googling I found instructions yet the required commands in "root" seem unavailable?"

@ Joe Stalin

So you would be quite happy to find your entire bus/train jailed (including yourself) ???

I didn't descend from monkeys

Everyone else did :P

Seriously, I look around at the planet and history of the human race and to put it bluntly, if we weren't created, we'd have died out years and years ago.

Two week bin collection

On watchdog a couple of nights ago there was some dude sticking up for the many councils decisions to have a fortnightly collection.

On the complaint of maggots etc, if memory serves me correctly, he said that we're supposed to put food into plastic bags before we put it into the wheelie bins.

I presume fortnightly collections don't exist in London?

Stupid idea

It's a stupid idea for the numerous reasons others have already listed.

Someone has a nicked DVD player, they go into their local electrical store, make a note of the serial number of the display model , then use this in their advert. Not marked up as stolen so will be no problem.

That took me 5 secs to think up, the average criminal will probably be able to come up with 100's of better ways.

In the last week, twice I've ordered free things online (one being the free wii handset jackets available from Nintendo), both times I was required to enter the serial number of the product to confirm I really owned one. While this could obviously be got around if someone so desired, now all we have to do is look up ebay and get one from there.

Personally I think he got off light

@idryl

Yes it is so bad. Personally I think scum like that are a complete waste of both space and resources and I would be happy to either

a) pull the lever

b) flick the switch

c) do the injection

all 3 of which are better than he deserves.

As if the kids will care

A lot of phones are stolen off of teenagers by other teenagers. They couldn't give a toss if it becomes locked in 6 hrs, let alone 48. They just make a load of calls, use up the available credit and then chuck the phones away, and pick on their next victim.

Am I missing something here?

All this talk of space, surely the airlines will just fit more seats in, so the average passenger will be just as cramped as they are now?

Would still love to fly on one though

Fastest my arse

Was with Virgin/NTL for years. Up until they started traffic shaping their 20mbps service.

I've gone from VM's 20mbps cable service to ADSL24's ADSL service

I now have a nice 6.5mbps ADSL line which is much much much much much faster than the "often not much better than dialup" speed I was receiving by paying VM for their 20mbps service.

http://www.cablehell.co.uk/forums/ exists for a reason

Given the choice, I'd give money to save humans

They should have more of this sort of thing. How about a counter for each time someone in the US gets shot?

or a counter for each time someone in the US is made homeless (especially for the under 16's)

We would still end up paying though

Chances are, if the big boys sold PC's without an OS or the add-on s/w, the price would remain exactly the same and they'd add on some sort of clause along the lines of

"Special offer, get Windows Vista, Norton, Works for free"

I remember about 12 years ago I had £1500 to spend on a PC. Phoned Simply Computers, told them what I wanted, they gave me a price for them to build it, but it would take around 2 - 4 weeks (cant remember how long they said).

Me wanting it that day said I'd assemble it myself. I was then given a revised price of around £200 more for them not building it, as buying the individual parts didn't qualify for various discount codes.

Ended up taking my business elsewhere. Can see a very similar thing happening with the preloaded OS and cant really see a way out of it unless all special offers and discounts are made illegal?