The real point is that, at £30, Chromecast is a true impulse purchase, so why not avail yourself of one?
Er, becuase competitors are the same price? Roku is £34 at Tesco complete with Netflix, iplayer and bundled remote handset.
Posts by Jim 59
2047 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Jun 2009
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Google Chromecast 2015: Puck-on-a-string fun ... why not, for £30?
Tuesday 6th October 2015 10:27 GMT
Re: Streaming devices need to be wired and come with a proper remote IMO
Some people don't like having 7 remote controls.
Harmony remote FTW. And if people don't like having 7 remotes, they will like having 6 remotes and a smartphone app even less, especially when they notice universal remotes can't emulate smart phones.
AdBlock blocker biz bought
Monday 5th October 2015 16:20 GMT
Re: One word
Agree with Mark 85.
Once they get the green light, larger advertisers must pay ABP a fee for their ads to appear in people's browsers.
A regressive business model. It could be argued that what ABP has done is (a) to release a "virus" that attacks legitimate (albeit annoying) advertising software, and (b) demand a sum to re-enable it again.
Couldn't it be classed as extortion, just like wheel clamping is in Scotland ? Impeding legitimate business operations then demanding money to remove the impediment ?
Admit I use Adblock for all sites except El Reg.
Hyundai i30 Turbo: Softly, softly, catchee Audi
Monday 5th October 2015 13:51 GMT
Hyundai's are now good looking cars, especially around the front, where many other cars are now a tarted up mess.
It will be interesting to see which manufacturer becomes first to drop the rising shoulder line, an annoying design cliche that serves no purpose other than to block rear visibility. It won't be Hyndai.
Roku 4 specs leak: Yes, it's got 4K streaming and a games controller
Thursday 1st October 2015 08:34 GMT
A media streamer needs to have proper power & be able to watch all sources. But this is never going to happen. The market is doomed to be a series of low powered machines with budget CPUs and clunky interfaces, hamstrung by whatever temporary media deals the manufacturer can pull off at the time. Notwithstanding the quad core in this one.
The market is so poor that many are nudged towards the illegal route - torrenting, kodi-enabled hows-your-father in a Pi2, media PC or similar.
And the BBC contribute to the situation by being very restrictive about what the iPlayer will run on, in order to protect their 1930s funding model into perpetuity. How much they had to pay Apple for that "i" we will never know.
The BBC's Space: A short history of 21st Century indoor relief
Indianapolis man paints his ball every day – for FORTY YEARS
Things you should know about the hard work of home working
BBC Micro:bit delayed by power supply SNAFU
We are the Knights who code Ni!
Scotsman cools PC with IRN-BRU, dubs it the 'Aye Mac'
Asus ZenBook UX305: With Windows 10, it suddenly makes perfect sense
US Catholic Church launches app for Jesus-phone
Game CARTRIDGES make a comeback ... for smartmobes
Don't bother buying computers for schools, says OECD report
Tuesday 15th September 2015 12:41 GMT
Re: Is it my imagination
Another bear on the woods?
It's not the technology but what you do with it. In the early 80s my school had 1283 pupils and one computer. But computer was always busy, it was always being programmed. For several years, the school churned out Computer Studies pupils capable of programming.
Then came the great dumbening of the Labour years. School got 100 computers or whatever, and the kids just learned powerpoint. British software industry migrated overseas. Was last seen in Asia. Where, surprisingly, the school computers are always busy, always being programmed...
Journos to be spared replacement by robots, BBC claims
Tuesday 15th September 2015 12:30 GMT
Re: Bloggers to Automation
It is getting hard to find quality output (like this story) amoung the oceans of blogger guff (like my own blog). Some news sites are turning themselves into buzzfeed (like el Reg is sometimes must be said), when they would be better advised to watch the quality control and then let their output speak for itself.
In other words if you publish good stuff, written by professional writers (like this story), it will get read. If you publish blogger-level guff, it will just merge in and be lost in the digital ocean. Taking your magazine with it.
'A word processor so simple my PA could use it': Joyce turns 30
Thursday 10th September 2015 11:48 GMT
On the subject of 3 inch disks. They were pleasant to handle. Well made and they didn't bend, and they seated in the disk drive with a heavy, satisfying "thump". Very chuckable.
The 3.5 inchers became much more popular, but were flimsy in comparison. The sliding door was on the outside too, instead of being tucked safely away inside the case. Then thumb drives were heaven.
Thursday 10th September 2015 11:36 GMT
Re: Proper manuals
Pre Internet? the Inertnet <sic> was around in the late 60s , the Wibbly Wobbly Web came later when the Berners-Lee chap...
Yes I know. However Internet/web did not reach the small office/home environment until the 90s, long after the Dragon 32 and CPC464. Users in 82-85 therefore had no Google. But the large, spiral bound, well written manuals made up for that. They had to.
The Dragon 32 manual is available here. I read it cover to cover in '83, and still use a little of that knowledge today.
http://www.uroboros.es/dragon/manuales/DRAGON_BASIC_v1.pdf
Wednesday 9th September 2015 16:11 GMT
Re: Yes, dBase II was the key ingrediant for me.
Says CAPS LOCK When we ran out of disk space we upgraded to a clone PC and thence to a 386 PC with SCO Xenix and SCO Foxbase. Guess what, we still use some of the Foxbase programs today, although on FreeBSD and MS Foxpro Unix.
Ditto. The PC1512 clone was nice too. Fast and neat, with a smaller foot print than some others. Sold in the zillions despite IBM spreading FUD stories about it, which Sugar countered strenuously. Served as a Pascal programming platform for my final year degree project.
And we have all been on the Moore merry go round since.
Wednesday 9th September 2015 14:14 GMT
Great system
I remember the PCW8256 as a great business machine that achieved tremendous success by running CP/M and Sage accounts software. It did just this for a decade or more at my family's engineering business located in NE England, where Sage also originates. Many other small companies trod the same path and now Sage is a multi-national.
Staff would sometimes volunteer how nice the PCW was to use, how fast to boot up and how reliable. They said this without being asked. It proved to be a more than successful replacement for a £10,000 Olivetti minicomputer.
However I never realised the other side of the PCW until reading a good article in last Saturday's Guardian. It's other role was to be the first word processor owned and used by many famous authors. Seemingly it revolutionised their working lives by freeing them from typewriters. Typing words directly into a screen was new for them, as was the ability to go back and correct. these people used it to write whole books. In that context, the advantages offered by a simple word processor are mind boggling.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/28/how-amstrad-word-processor-encouraged-writers-use-computers
Grinning BBC boss blows raspberry at UK.gov, eyes up buffet
Monday 7th September 2015 16:17 GMT
Re: The BBC threatening to help Osborne, sounds implausible
At best it's a pointer towards what young, left-wing, London-dwelling arts graduates think should be important. And Andrew Neil on Sundays
Slight correction:
At best it's a pointer towards what young old, rich, left-wing, north-west London-dwelling arts graduates think should be important. And Andrew Neil on Sundays.
Monday 7th September 2015 16:17 GMT
I am probably even more anti-BBC than Andrew Orlowski. However, if and when they go to a subscription model, we will, one way or the other, end up paying a lot more for our TV. We might be happy with that, but it will be more expensive.
The Beeb can only knock out telly for £145 because the entire TV owning population pays on pain of criminal prosecution. With a subscription model, their subscriber base will shrink and as it shrinks, remaining subscribers will pay more and more. In the end, BBC will probably cost even more than Sky, because Sky is an efficient private company and the Beeb is anything but efficient.
So it will be 2k per year for Sky or 3k per year for beeb.
Travel back to the 19-Z80s this weekend
The Raspberry Pi is succeeding in ways its makers almost imagined
Friday 28th August 2015 09:46 GMT
@Trixr re: Grandad
I get the impression that the story is set in Australia. I live in Canberra, and...
Whoops. My cynical "Grandad" joke was only meant to be a joke, not to upset this cheerful thread. Like Trixr, I also guessed the Australian thing and the great distances there. I confess to owning 2 Pis myself, and to using one of them to spy on my own empty house when I'm not there. And to being the author of several if the Pi Internet guides accessed by these kids. It's true that webcams are no substitute for a visit but everybody knows that anyway.
Thursday 27th August 2015 12:47 GMT
Grandad
"I can bring up a web browser, and take photos inside grandpa’s house. Has he moved his coffee cup today? Is the telly on? At least then we’ll know he’s okay. And I can even type messages” - she changes focus to a textbox inside a web form - “that show up on top. We used ImageMagick for that part...here, you can see it in our code.”
ie. "Yipee! Now we don't have to visit Grandpa !"
Sorry about that.
"Completely at home with Raspberry Pis, these kids Google around for the things they don’t know how to do - because when you’re 11, you don’t know what you can’t do."
Perhaps not that different from programming your Dragon 32 in 1984, from a computer magazine.
The most tragic thing about the Ashley Madison hack? It was really 1% actual women
Thursday 27th August 2015 14:07 GMT
Re: Dating sites
the ID was bombarded by other men, the number of messages went into multiples of 10 within an hour. That certainly did not happen the other way 'round!
Yep. That's what happens when men outnumber women 50 to 1. Each man sends 25 witty messages and gets back one disinterested acknowledgement. Each woman is inundated and has no time to answer all messages, or even a small proportion.
Pretty terrible for both sexes. The men obviously waste their time. The women probably don't want to check their inboxes.
Thursday 27th August 2015 13:53 GMT
Re: How Many Men Actually used AM?
Having used Internet dating sites, I have always suspected that the number of men dwarfes the number of women. I have no proof, but the user experience suggests it.
Having far more men than women is the norm IMO, which is why they don't function anything like portrayed in TV adverts etc. It does not work well for either sex. Somebody should start a site that admits only the same number of men as women, and use that as a selling point. Big bucks await.
Twenty years since Windows 95, and we still love our Start buttons
Wednesday 26th August 2015 12:28 GMT
Re: while enabling ... the Windows Store
Hi Terry 6, Linux is different from Windows, and there will be strangeness for first time users, especially non experts. But in some ways new users will find it easier than Windows: No viruses, no popups, no malware scanners, no bloatware, no adverts, no nagging. No software installing "free" evaluation copies of itself. No awful slowing down as the system gradually sinks beneath the weight of these things.
We have all been called on to help friends/family with Windows, and half the task has usually been to clean off the reams of rubbish that has installed itself over the years. Sometimes we even find that several competing nagware/evaluation packages have become installed, each interfering with the other and both nagging the user, hourly, to purchase the full version. The less expert the user, the more of this stuff is usually found. Software companies do this deliberately, of course. Computer shops in many UK towns make a modest living just from "cleaning up" Windows PCs.
Linux is different but equivalent. Anything you do in Windows, there is a way to do it in Linux. Not the same way, but an equivalent way, sometimes requiring the learning of a few new concepts. For the beginner coming from Windows there is strangeness, but the added simplicity might make up for it.
Wednesday 26th August 2015 08:30 GMT
My Dan 486 DX (4 MB (yes, MB)) of RAM / 120 MB disk / S7 video / VESSA bus was top of the line and ran Quake & Doom beautifully. Windows 3.1. Turbo button. And it opened "Word" just as fast as a modern PC does.
I remember the week '95 launched. There really was a sense of a corner being turned. At the time, Microsoft was everybody's friend, not a creepy monopoly, and their strange policy of ignoring the Internet had not yet done any damage.
Tuesday 25th August 2015 11:16 GMT
Re: NT - Long filenames
Long filenames were a kludge, but what a relief it was to break out of the old "8.3" file name limitation. It is strange, when you think about it, that 8.3 continued for so long. I mean it would barely have been acceptable in the early 70s, let alone 1994/5.
Another top notch Windows 95 feature: right click context menus. Nice to use and time-saving.
Monday 24th August 2015 16:28 GMT
"Windows 95 introduced long filenames and a redone user interface including the taskbar and Start menu, replacing Program Manager in Windows 3.x."
At the time, those were killer features. Proper multitasking and a start button. That basic UI really solved the UI problem, and continues to this day in desktops such as MATE. Windows 95 was indeed a pleasure to use. The start menu let the user see where everything was, without looking.
Windows 8 in contrast baffles the user, and has been deservedly rejected.
Which shows that people really do like new features, when those features are good, and dislike them when they are bad. Who knew.
More deaths linked to Ashley Madison hack as scammers move in
Web Summit looks at new homes ... this time with sun and decent Wi-Fi
Does Linux need a new file system? Ex-Google engineer thinks so
Monday 24th August 2015 11:09 GMT
We've all needed a new file system since about 1992, viz some kind of tagged file system that frees us from the directory structure, while still somehow preserving it. Something equivalent to a nosql database. But this is still a vague fantasy.
In the real world, I'd like ZFS-style deduping please, and optimisation for both flash and rotating drives. The deduping alone would allow us to bin 99% of the worlds disks. Maybe that's why it hasn't taken off in the way everyone expected.
Intel's Compute Sticks stick it to Windows To Go, Chromecast
Using complicated electrical devices to curry favour with brats – the new black?
Thursday 20th August 2015 13:34 GMT
Re: To True...
The reward was a significant amount to help me get my first 'pc' to help continue my studies (a couple of years earlier I really badgered them, wanting a BBC/acorn, it was the pinnacle of IT to me then, how little I knew (didn't get it, of course).
It was the pinnacle of expenditure too. If you are talking about 1984 or thereabouts, a BBC B was £1200 in today's money, more than the parents in the article are offering. And that's without the essential monitor and keyboard.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
