Posts by I Like Heckling

Oh no they won't...

Until Price per GB falls by hundreds of %... HDD are here to stay... and by that I mean when you can pick up a 4TB SSD for less than £100-115, then those that require proper storage capacity rather than speed for a few bits of software and to be impressed by how quick their PC boots... will still require a HHD.

What's more of a concern is the pricing cartel that we've had since the 2011 floods, a cartel that has artificially kept prices high long after production returned to normal and going against the trends of the last 20yrs that saw HHD prices fall in line with larger capacity drives being introduced. Now those larger capacity drives get introduced at ever higher prices and never drop more than a few % over the course of several years... a 4TB drive I paid £115 for in 2013, is still between £110-120 today... Yet every other drive I've ever purchased over the previous 19yrs has double capacity for roughly the same price as the previous one... going back to a 2GB drive in the later half of the 90's... £60.. 6GB.. £60... 20GB... £65.... 40GB.. £65 and so forth and so forth... right up to those floods of 2011. Pre-flood prices the last drives I had purchased was a couple of 1.5TB & a 2TB drives... for guess what... £75 each (gotta take into account a little inflation over almost 15yrs).

These days, there's a jump of around £30-35 per TB across the board... so that 4TB at around £115...... the 5TB at around £150 and the 6TB at around £185... and there those prices remain for the last few years... In spite of current production levels being high and manufacturing costs being as low as pre-flood prices. It's no more than price gouging, trying to convince people that SSD's are getting more competitive by keeping HHD prices artificially high.

So when I can buy a 4TB SSD for less than a 4TB HDD... then and only then will I believe any codswallop about HHD being a dead format.

I'm on the fence with Virgin at the moment. I was with Sky for the last 8yrs but got fed up with the constant price hikes and overpriced content. A few years ago I dropped the TV side of Sky and shared the Sky Go side with my folks, I even contribute a little towards their bill each month... It's only ever used for the F1 anyway.

But with the 40mb broadband and phone being hiked to £47 a month recently... I jumped ship when they refused to offer me a better deal. Instead I've ended up with Virgin 100mb FTTC which is about 20-30yrds away from my house and I'm getting a consistent 97-98mb from that, it does drop a little in evenings and weekends during peak hours... But that's kinda expected and as there's not many VM customers in my road.. doesn't hit me too hard. But my VPN seems to be throttled. My provider says there's nothing wrong at their end, but for months now since the switch my VPN service cannot get above 14mb when it was able to pretty much max out the 40mb with Sky... I suspect that VM are doing some throttling on data they can't inspect/monitor/censor... And as one machine has to be used with a VPN 100% of the time, it's never being turned off... I just have to put up with it... It's a work machine so not used for anything else, I have a gaming rig that gets full speeds ok, and latency isn't a huge issue as I don't play a lot of multiplayer games that require low pings any more.

I switched my mobile to them last year and get a decent package for £9 a month (that's just risen to £9.27), plus extra data (3GB) for free, and I've yet to use all of the 3000 minutes or 3GB data in a single month... But I did have to raise a major complaint because they didn't give me the same calls package for my landline as I had with Sky, and didn't even have caller ID included as standard (which makes my call screening phones worthless).. But a complaint over the way I was kinda 'bait & switched' on sign up made them work pretty hard to keep my custom as it was grounds for breach of contract... I got my call package at no extra cost for 12 months and caller ID for free permanently. So I'm still paying £32 for the next 9 months... soon to be £33. But when it rises to £40 (plus whatever rise is added on) I shall seriously consider some alternatives and perhaps start looking into smaller ISP's who may be able to offer broadband only as I'm starting to wonder why I keep a landline, I could drop that, save some money and upgrade my mobile package to compensate... I don't have a phone on contract ever, so sim only deals are quite reasonable these days.

Oh no... I couldn't access my online banking for 30hrs... what a crime... some one should be shot for this outrage...

May the first persons up against the wall... be those whining little toe rags who's cries of faux outrage point to an utter lack of anything interesting or meaningful happening in their sad little lives.

I'm a customer... I couldn't access my bank statements until this morning... end result.. I waited... disruptions to my life... feck all... If anything the only actual real life result from this whole thing.. It's made me despise these little whiny tossers even more... Gawd forbid anything monumental happens that actually disrupts their lives... they couldn't cope with the stress, their heads would explode from all the ranting and raving they were doing... We'd see bodies laying in the street headless with blood and brain matter splattered all over the nearest cash points (which were working fine, as were card transactions... you just couldn't look at your statements online you feckless losers).

How is this different to the beginning of the 2000's when every manufacturer rushed out and slapped a tiny little, barely readable LCD onto anything and everything they could and boasted that it was now DIGITAL.

It's time to end this kinda of trumped up marketing bullshit that only serves to deliberately misdirect and mislead consumers. Marketing 'spin' is getting worse than government 'spin' these days... but at least marketers aren't claiming success for their handling of some disaster that could have been avoided and peoples lives saved if they'd not been responsible for the cuts that ensured said disaster in the first place.

Can't quite see the actualy size of the thing from the pics, but I had a thought... It could be about the size of the nVidia Shield TV box and if they could put something like that inside with a sensible amount of ram and room to add storage.. Would their games run emulated on an android based platform. If they used something like the K1 rather than the X1 or upcoming P1 it would keep costs down.

Bundle it with a load of the old classics from the 80's and 90's and setup a portal to buy other games for around £1 each.

Could be a money spinner... it all depends on the initial cost of the device itself... £60-100 could be good window to slot it into. Anything more and it will put people off completely, as much as I have a fondness for my old original 2600... I had no hesitation in selling it to put the money towards getting a Commodore 64 as my xmas prezzie when they came out.

and let's be honest... some of the games were so basic that nostalgia will soon resort to boredom... So get it to emulate ST games too.

Why is anyone still surprised by this?

It's always been this way... one of the most recent things that springs to mind is what happened to HDD's after the floods of 5-6yrs ago. In the immediate days after the floods... Every single vendor raised the prices of their 'exisiting' stock and claimed it was due to lack of supply. The fact that this stock was already on the market at the old prices was ignored and it was nothing more than price gouging.

Those higher prices have NEVER fallen back to the pre-flood prices. Instead theyve stayed the same for around 6yrs now whilst newer larger capacity drives are just brough in at ever increasing prices that never reduce over time.

Based on almost 20yrs experience of buying hard drives, from around 2GB upwards. I have always paid an average of £60-70 for each HDD in a larger capactiy... Roughly doubling or tripling the size each time.

Now... I paid £115 for a 4TB drive 2yrs ago and today the same HDD is a little more expensive than that.

It's not down to a slow down in the market, that's only affecting small capacity drives due to the uptake of SSD's. Larger capacity drives are still the best VFM over SSD... and until you can get a 4TB SSD for less than a HDD there's no reason to make the switch.

So they continue to price gouge consumers to artificially keep profits higher on a platform that will eventually become obsolete. In the meantime, my media server gets lower and lower on space and I refuse to upgrade because to make it worthwhile I need to replace a couple of my smallest 3TB drives with at least 6TB ones or it's not worth doing... But it's cheaper to replace the motherboard with one with extra SATA sockets and buy another 4TB that fork out for a single 6TB drive... For the price of 2x 6TB I could also replace the CPU and double the memory, or buy a low end Ryzen setup... and those aren't exactly cheap.

The consumers are always shafted... just that here in the UK, we're getting shafted more than most..., and we're expected to bend over, lift our shirts, drop our trousers and say 'thank you' for the priviledge.

I'd love to see what my attempts to fudge these invasions of my privacy have on those results... I ad block, cookie block, disable scripts, use a VPN and will even switch browsers for different things... For example, firefox for default things fully guarded and blocked as much as I can... but I use Chrome for a few minor google related things like gmail, youtube and so forth, and I am forced to use IE for Sky Go because they are still using the antiquidated silverlight for their service and no one else supports that outdated and irelevant POS outside of MS.

PLEASE! STOP!

C'mon! El! Reg!

Enough! with! the! stupid! Yahoo! headlines! that! only! serve! to! annoy! readers! It! stopped! being! funny! years! ago! but! you! still! keep! on! flogging! a! dead! horse!

Roflmao - Pay for ad free content... I can't get up... my sides hurt so much

1: Don't use chrome

2: Use more than one ad blocker

3: noscript

4: Privacy badger

Block anything that's not completely relevant to the content I want to see... that means all ads, trackers, cookies and anything else I've fogotten to mention. if it slips through, eentire elements are blocked, any site that manages to slip through a popup/over/under/tab is blocked at the domain level and cannot server up anything more than a completely blank page.

Any site... and I do mean any site that tells me I cannot see content unless I disable my blocking... doesn't get my custom and there isn't a web retailer out there that would try that kind of crap because it would lose them more business than they gain.

This 'war' is entirely the fault of both ad companies and those that choose to use their services. For the last 2 decades they have been fed lies by ad companies that ever more intrusive ads are the key... not enough clicks on your ads... let's add animation/sound/video/warnings to piss people of even more.

The end result is a large section of people who will 'never' trust anything they try to force ads upon the viewer, a large section of people (if 22% of UK adults is accurate) that numbers several million potential and now lost customers.

Serve up ads that make content harder to see, throw multiple ads in the middle of content so that a single article that takes up 2 page scrolls... now takes 5 page scrolls.. is intrusive and unacceptable.

I'm currently house hunting and have been training my blockers to stop serving up ads from the likes of rightmove and zoopla (amongst others)... the number of trackers and elements that have been blocked is ridiculous... But after a few minor annoyances, I can now house hunt in peace safe in the knowledge that I will see no ads, cannot be tracked by 3rd parties and have no degredation of my browsing experience.

If I see a house I like, I contact the agent directly... I'd never give my details to any site that wasn't delivering me something I specifically ordered and those that do require some kind of account... get fake details and my spamtrap email address... Say hello to Mr A Heckler of 123 My Street, Anytown, Anycity, AB12 3CD

tl:dr... trust no one, all ads are bad for you, do everything you can to block them.

I want one of those suits....

Although in my case, it's more of a Fattrooper than a Stormtrooper.

What Ads... What Shops?

My solution is simple

1: I never look at ads

2: I have never bought anything because of an ad I saw (instead I decide I have a need/desire for something and go looking, do my research and have no real brand loyalty to anything except perhaps a findness for Japanese cars)

3: 95% of all my shopping is done online from a google free browser, my net searches are done via duckduckgo and when I do actually go into a shop it's some kind of food store for my fortnightly shop or top up... or a petrol station.

On the rare occasion I go into a department store, it's purely to check out something in the flesh before going home and ordering it online... In fact I occasionally play the Dixons baiting game, where i go into a store to check out a product... wait for a sales drone to 'eventually' saunter up and try to sell me something.. confuse them with questions that require they actually have knowledge of a product and whilst they're taking their time looking stuff up... order it online and tell them it was quicker to look up the answers and order for free delivery when they come back.

It's fun for all the family.. cheaper than taking the kids to the safari park to watch the monkeys and just as much fun.

I do 2 things with my music

I listen to my music collection in 2 ways... Via my computer through an amp and surround speakers and although 99% of it is in mp3 and the rest Flac, I only rip my CD's at 320kb. I refuse to purchase music online because it's tied to a single account and is normally in 128 or 192 and I do consider them to be sub standard because you do get clipping on high/low frequencies when you crank the volume up.

The other way I listen is in my car, and that either means filling one of the 6 discs with a CD of mp3 files (because it won't play anything other than mp3 or wav) or hooking up my phone via the headphone socket to the aux input because Bluetooth streaming doesn't give me the best audio.. now my car does have the top end factory fitted premium sound system complete with sub and sounds great... so it could be my car has crappy BT because my BT headphones sound great streaming from my phone/tablet.

I am not storing 20,000+ songs in multiple formats just so I can listen to them in the best quality possible in my home and car. MP3 is fine for what I want and whilst I can tell the difference between low bitrate mp3 and my preferred settings, my ears are now 40yrs old and have been put through thousands of gigs standing too close to speaker stacks, hundreds more gigs as a drummer and countless hours listening to reasonably loud music on good quality headphones (meaning not ear buds).

If there does actually come a time when mp3 really has become obsolete and no one is supporting it anymore and I no longer have any devices that will only play those filetypes... I may consider ripping my CD's again into a newer format... or acquiring replacements in a newer format... whichever is most convenient/quickest for my legitimately purchased music.

For the audiophiles & cinephiles out there... as some one who has had surround sound home cinema setups for about 20yrs now and always had a fondness for DTS over DD (AC3)... Can you tell me if the AAC codec provides a better sound quality than either of the other two in their various formats. It's just that I'm thinking about replacing my ageing Yamaha HC amp and relegating that to my office and getting something with all the new toys for the lounge. Not looking to spend more than 300-400 for the amp as I have decent JBL control 1's for the corners and Yamaha sub/centre

How about this for a simple solution

For every one hundred pounds (or equivalent currency in whatever location you purchase) you spend on a phone, you should get security updates for a year.

That shiny nexus you paid 500 for... 5yrs security updates... that cheap 99 pound phone... you'd see basically no difference to what you get now.

However... things like this need to be enshrined in law, we need legislation to force manufacturers to produce products with an adequate shelf life which should be displayed clearly in massive print on all packaging.

We need to get away from this disposable culture when it comes to consumer items like this. No one needs to replace their phone every 12-18 months unless it's lost/stolen/accidentally damaged.

I purchased a Wileyfox Storm and the phone is great... but they have basically wiped their hands of it already... No longer getting updates after owning it for 12 months. So not only will I not be getting another Wileyfox, I shall be reconsidering anything android... and I admit that I loathe Apple devices and their overpriced tat and smug owners.. not to mention their walled garden but at least they seem to be supporting their devices for 4yrs or more (the average time I keep a phone).

My tablet on the other hand is an nVidia Shield K1 and that's been getting regular updates every month or two. Last one was about 6 weeks ago updating to Nougat followed a week or so later with a security update.

Perhaps nVidia should consider getting into the phone market.

So... users don't read the ToS, use a FREE service and are surprised when it turns out that they're the product and it's their info that's earning some one else money.

In my opinion... anyone who gives ANY 3rd party access to anything that contains their private information is asking for trouble and deserves no sympathy.

But some people really are that gullible and believe that everyone in the world is honest and trustworthy.

I block app permissions on my phone to stop them accessing anything I don't think is essential to it's use... I get constant complaints from some apps saying they won't work properly without access to the phone or my entire contact list and so forth... when it's not a phone or messaging app.

I have some apps that are blocked from everything except wifi access.

But normally... any app that requires access to things it doesn't need... never get installed in the first place. Because I'm a just a little paranoid about my privacy and very, Very, VERY cynical about most things.

What about us Storm owners?

I spoke with Wilefox customer support about a problem with the OS that has left my torch non functional... the flash itself works fine, but the torch function has been removed entirely and I was told (and I have it in writing) that the Storm would be getting an update.

That was last year... and still no mention if the Storm will be getting the Nougat upgrade or not.

I loved the concept of the phone, all of the extra security and privacy measures are essential in my opinion and I already have truecall and it works very well indeed. In fact they just updated it so that you can now use it for SMS filtering too... although I've not tested that part as it means changing SMS to use truecall app rather than my current one.

If the Storm doesn't get this upgrade soon, it will be the last Wileyfox product I buy... Far too many makers hang customers out to dry in this manner.

Compare this to the nVidia Shield I purchased 12 months ago... Came with Android 5... and has now had 4 system/OS updates over the last 12 months. 5.1, 6 and just a couple of months ago they pushed nougat OTA to users... NOW THAT'S HOW YOU SUPPORT CUSTOMERS.

Every other manufacturer should take note and follow nVidias example. It's convinced me to replace my crappy little android TV box with a Shield TV one next month.

Just tell the whining SJW tards to feck orf... they will never be satisfied with any solution to anything, they just love hearing the sound of their own complaints... well... when I say the sound off... I mean looking at the hashtag that they'll post on twitter/facebook/snapchat/insagram... because nothing says dedicated campaigner and righter of all wrongs more than a post on 'insert relevant site here' containing a current popular hashtag.

Google can......

go f*ck themselves.

I bought some phones with call blocking/screening built in. Not had a single spam/scam call now in 6 months. I got some for my mum as she was getting half a dozen a day and now gets none.

Takes a few minutes to set up, and for new numbers it's a single press of either 1, 2 or 3 to allow screened call once, permanently or to deny/block entirely.

Peace and quite at last.

I once knew a guy who worked for an online retailer... He was able to setup (with permission) a little gaming server for our little clan (back in the days of Return To Castle Wolfenstein and the original Battlefield 1942 with mods) outside of the firewall. It consumed very little bandwidth and was never heavily used as we were a small clan.

It actually ended up being a positive thing for the company, as we experienced an intermittent stuttering issue when playing... that when traced back turned out to be a misconfiguration with the ISP equipment at the exchange (probably BT back then).

It wasn't used during working hours and it was done with a managers knowledge and OK.

I know what President Grump should say

Our leaks are the best leaks, the greatest leaks you can get, we're going to build a great big wall around those leaks and make every one pay for them.

Why VR is doomed to be nothing more than a Niche within a Niche

I'll put it in simple terms... ANYTHING which makes the user look silly is historically doomed to failure. Sure it might become a short term fad, but it will then slip away into obscurity in the same way that 3D s doing. No major manufacturer is producing any 3D tv's... and with that death toll, 3D enabled blurays will soon follow. 3D may survive in the cinema but until such a time as they can make a universal glasses free 3D experience that everyone can enjoy... It's a dead format, it just hasn't realised it yet.

VR will go the same way. It's already a niche product in a market saturated with niche products and it makes the user look like an utter idiot when wearing them... Regardless of the tech involved... that alone means it's doomed.

I predicted the demise of 3D TV and have been proved right... I'm predicting that VR will never become a mainstream product and will remain a niche within a niche only for a tiny minority of hardcore gamers who just 'Have' to have the latest shiny things regardless of it's usefulness... and who will eschew it's greatness because it makes them feel justified in spending their money on it.

Kinda like people who buy the latest i devices. :)

I went for the floppy drive... because it's ripe for backup devices. No need for a spinning disk when you can have a disk with some flash storage on it. Hot swappable with a USB 3/C connector, some simple software... Looks retro with a modern use.

Could easily have large capacity retro looking disks of a TB or two.