Posts by Greg J Preece

Cowon S9?

I seem to remember you calling it the "first real iPod touch killer"...

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/12/24/review_pmp_cowon_s9/

Best audio quality going, hands down, and a higher review score than the runners up. What gives?

Interface problems

That interface with those controls? That's going to be a disaster and you know it.

Like it!

Love the line about the wheel. I shall have to steal it and use it in situations that do not involve anyone named Travaglia.

Awesome, now fix the box

Network settings are still majorly b0rked on my Foxsat HD (very common box) and I can't find an upgrade for the firmware to fix it. So that'll be useful then.

Hope they sort themselves out

Adaptec have always made excellent kit in my experience (the RAID adaptors in my servers being just one example). Hope the company sorts itself outl Would hate to see them go down the pan.

Re: Anti-worm

Hey, that actually sounds like a bloody good idea. I'll get right on it. ;-)

@criscros

"The hardware support is limited, but the reasons for that should be clear: it's a Linux OS and can't install extra drivers."

Woah woah woah, hang on a minute.....what?

@Paulo - Freesat

I've had Freesat for a year. It has one major advantage and one major disadvantage. The advantage is that satellite transmissions have gobs and gobs of bandwidth available, and DVB-S2, so they don't need to multilate the picture as much. Even on my currently still-SD TV (saving up for one of those Samsung LED jobbies, oh yes), the picture is impeccable, with no visible compression artefacts at all on most channels. Friends who come round are always astonished by how clear the signal is compared to their own Freeview boxes, and nipping round to my neighbours for a gander at his HD-ready setup shows that HD channels look equally excellent.

The disadvantage is that you don't get the same channel range, and a large chunk of the EPG is comprised of Sky cast-offs. For example, I have no Dave, or Sky Three - those are only available with subscription.

When expectations are low, improvement is easy

"IE 9's score already beats IE 8 on Acid3"

Well that's hardly difficult. IE8 on Win7 here barely struggles to 20/100.

Come on, Microsoft, just give us SVG. Please? Pretty please? We've been wanting to use that since IE 4, for Christ's sake.

I already have a more advanced system

No, seriously, check this out:

Step 1: Install Ubuntu

Step 2: Install Chrome

Step 3: WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?

Oooh, new beta

The old one is pretty nice on my WM phone, think that's 9.7 beta. Have they decided not to finish that version and gone straight to 10?

Going to download it now. Want to see if they've got rid of the annoying slowdown bug in the Google search bar. If they have, that will be mint - Opera 8 blew goats, Opera 9 was a massive improvement with a couple of bugs, hopefully Opera 10 will be what I've been waiting for.

Brilliant for SMB business machines

I would wager that not a single one of our work laptops (bar mine) comes close to having 40GB of kit on it. These would be a great replacement to crappy old 5400rpm HDDs at not a massive cost. If any laptops suffer a HDD failure now I will be recommending one of these as a replacement.

That's absolutely brilliant

Nothing more needs saying really. Great achievement.

@Mactard

"This is NOT an iphone worm and it's incorrect and inflammatory to claim that. It's a work targeting the jailbreaks, nothing more"

Oooh, a touchy Mactard there.

It's a program that targets the jailbreaks on which phone?

@asdf

RTFA!

Jesus...

I feel very nerdy right now

I recognised that was a Dell without even seeing the monitor in the background, by the "lift here" arrows and the PSU cage.

I think I need a holiday...

Who gives a shit?

I really like the hinge design, to give a raised keyboard. That's a neat idea. But can you name one person (who isn't an overly wealthy twunt concerned only with being flashy) who actually gives two shits about ultra-thins?

Oooh, my laptop is so slinky! Pity I paid so much for something that ultimately can't do any more than an Eee.

Though I am amused to see this not only being thinner than the Air, but much, much cheaper.

Better photo

Full spec here, and a pic with the keyboard tray closed - looks alright like that, actually:

http://www.motorola.com/Consumers/XW-EN/Consumer-Products-and-Services/Mobile-Phones/ci.Motorola-MILESTONE-XW.alt

Oh noes, my browser is ugly

Give me a break. When was the last time your browser's appearance had any impact on:

a) Your browsing experience?

b) Whether or not you used said browser?

c) Anything, on any planet, ever?

I like having menus available, not hunting for them. At the top of my screen I have the menu, then the address bar, then the link bar, and then my tabs. Total screen usage? Not a lot, actually...

Sure, it's ugly as sin. Pity it works.

And for those people claiming this is a rip off of IE, well, you're right. But let's be honest here, IE7 was a complete and utter Firefox rip off. It's six and two threes.

@Rob - I also have a Foxsat

Hopefully I will be able to use it. Unfortunately the networking config panel on the Foxsat is so broken that it is incapable of remembering any static settings, and once you put static settings up the dynamic ones don't work either. Bloody thing.

Already patched?

I fully expected the issue to be patched by the time I finished reading the article, but it turns out it was patched before I even read the headline.

You'll forgive me if I don't panic.

@Richard Padley

Skype for Linux is still stuck on 2.1 beta. They just stopped doing any serious development on it a while back. On the upside, it means you get the old-fashioned barebones Skype without any of that stupid new fullscreen interface malarkey and 200000 alerts per second.

Beautiful!

Thanks El Reg, that cheered me up on an otherwise completely shitty Monday. However:

"Thousands of them."

Surely you mean "Faaaasands of 'em" ?

Well duh

I seem to remember getting jumped on around here for calling the Wii a fad a while back. Oh dear.

"We were unable to continue to release strong software."

Translation:

"We just realised that 95% of the games released for the Wii are total shite."

The Wii was a nice piece of kit that managed to become the Christmas toy fad in the year of its release, but as a console it blows because the games on it are sooooo bad. Almost everything I see advertised for the Wii is either yet another Mario rehash, or another collection of mini-games no-one cares about. I know quite a few people who bought a Wii during the fad, and after 5 minutes playing Wii Sports they got bored, and it's sat there ever since, gathering dust.

Ironically enough, I'm in the market for one, now that every light gun game maker in existence is porting to the Wii because of the instant hardware support. Pity the accessories for the Wii also suck donkey balls. Everything's just a moulded piece of plastic you shove the Wiimote into. No chance of a decent gun to play with (though Sony are guilty of this this time around, too).

The DSi is a pile of shite too. No-one is going to buy a console just so they can take pictures of people and mess with them. No-one is going to upgrade their normal DS for those functions, so what's the point? And if you're going to advertise these things to little kids, remember how long little kids' attention spans last...

Nice looking phone

I've been desperately looking for an Android phone with a physical keyboard, nice screen, and good battery life. You said that with all that crap on the front page (which I'd never use) the battery life is little more than a day - what happens if you turn all that shite off and run it like I do my WinMobile phone, which is set to connect every so often and then immediately disconnect afterwards, giving it a 4 day battery life despite said battery being 3 years old.

That kind of info would be muchly useful, please. :-)

@Jake

And has been previously demonstrated on a certain motoring programme, said pickup will survive having a caravan dropped on it.

How much???

Sixty five bloody quid??

You want a really good FPS controller for a console? Then you need to get someone to make an updated version of one o' these:

http://www.amazon.com/FPS-MASTER-CONTROLLER-Xbox/dp/B0000CO2UR

Might look ridiculous, but it's a brilliant controller. I've got them for PS2 and X-box. Each finger gets its own button, so you can keep your thumbs on the analogs at all times, which makes it easier to reload while running/turning/aiming/all the things that are really easy if you just play FPS games on the PC. Plus, all the buttons can be reconfigured and moved around from the controller, and it stores three onboard game profiles that you switch between with a single button press.

That and the fact that I paid no more than £10 for any of them, I'd say the FPS Master beats the crap out of this thing. Perhaps they should take some lessons from a superior product?

If you'll excuse me, I'm off to find an adaptor so I can use mine on the PS3.

@Marina

It might take you several days to come up with something like that, but judging by the comments here, not everyone else is that thick. Grow a sense of humour.

Errr...

"Bottom line is, no, OEM Microsoft Windows licenses do not have any transfer rights and live and die on the original computer they are shipped with and installed on, period."

Yeah, nice try...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/05/08/selling_oem_windows_copies_you/

@ratsac11

>>>-You can actually connect to the internet wirelessly, out of the box, or with either the drivers that come with it or those that come with most wireless adapters.

>>>-Other exotic hardware (like, um Nvidia video cards) works out of the box.

>>>-Exotic websites (like youtube) work without hours of mucking about (64bit version).

Err, the answers to that are:

1) You already can.

2) They already do.

3) That works fine too.

When exactly was the last time you used Ubuntu?

Animal Cruelty?

Eh? Jacking off a dog is cruel to the dog? Yes, it's a bloody odd thing to do, but cruel?

@AC 20:24

No AV kit running, but I still can't copy files at any kind of speed. Colleague is reporting the same problems, and they don't occur under XP. As far as I'm concerned, Win7 is doing this somehow. Just need to figure out how.

@ Lord Elpuss

"You can't use MS Office on [Ubuntu]"

Yes you can! Works just fine for me. The wonders of WINE.

See, that's more like it

Hippie-pleasing tech, a design people would actually buy, and a range that is more than useable for the vehicle type involved. So long as it's not monumentally expensive.