Stephen fry said exactly what i was going to say "The rest of the world can
mock as much as it likes. If you’re going to have a phone/video
player/slideshow/music centre/web browser/camera in your pocket, is it so wrong
to want one that makes you grin from ear to ear? Not with smugness (though
heaven knows the enemies of the device will read that into the smiles) but with
delight."
May I present my Iphone, yes I have as my Gee at work put it. "Sucked on the Apple Crack Pipe." (C) 2007 www.podrush.net
I didn't have a good time with the Nokia N95 and found it to be a bit of a dog with a battery life of a dying bee. So lets hope the iphone is better.
Broadcast Engineering the local parish magazine in this neck of the woods printed a Phil Crawley esk article on running media over networks.
One of the great statements it makes it that "the indeterminate nature of an IT network is fundamentally at odds with its use in media applications. It could be argued that Ethernet and IP are the worst possible network technologies for real-time media systems." and that "A modern broadcast technologist must think in terms of both the broadcast engineering and IT domains when designing a networked infrastructure that must support real-time transcoding." So the next time our designing a broadcast IT network, don't let the spotty Dilbert from IT that fixes the email server design it, call in a qualified broadcast engineer.
The Article in question http://broadcastengineering.com/storage_networking/real-time-media-networks/index.html
Sex and violence may sell, but if you want better ratings you got to have some substance says a study, the boston globe covers it here
"fuck you you fuckin fuck" Crudeness and the slipping standards of TV, despite big fines fruity language is up on TV, you can read the full article
Did you get a chance to make a cup of tea, well put that cup down, its already booted.
New Asus Mobo's will have Slashtop on them, The point of Splashtop is to get you surfing the web seconds after you press that power button. Virtualise the device and your up and running. check out the video below for more info or check out their website http://www.splashtop.com/index.php
I hadn't really watched a movie on it just used it to play games through till this evening when I came to watch Hot Fuzz I bought in the US. I finished playing Bioshock and popped the HD-DVD in the drive. it opened up got the lovely universal HD DVD logo and then BANG the dashboard popped up with an error COULD NOT PLAY CONTENT Error C667000A. First I thought it must be the disc or region encoding so I googled the error with not much luck. Then I came across the answer on this page.
Basically there was a dashboard update for the HD DVD player in May 07 and this fixes the problem. The reason I had not recieved the update is that you have to start the HD DVD with no other disks in the XBOX drive so it doesn't switch to a game in my case Bioshock first. Once I removed the game, made sure i was connected to Xbox Live I pressed play on the HD DVD and the dashboard update popped up and downloaded...and Eureka the disk restarts and plays fine.
If you don't connect you XBOX to Live then you can download the update from the page above.
Well this could be a intresting stand to see at IBC
On
its joint stand with NuMedia Technology, the BBC is set to show the
latest addition to the Dirac family of open source video compression
codecs. The Pro 270 application of Dirac allows the transmission of
HDTV signals using the cable and infrastructure already used for
standard definition TV. Which is quite sexy if I say so myself....
This requires
more compression of HDTV signals than Dirac Pro 1.5, but the new Dirac
Pro has the flexibility to achieve this with very little loss of
quality. Broadcasters that employ the Pro 270 will have the ability to
transform their programme output to HD quickly.
Other reasons
to use it include the fact that 1080P50 HD islands can be connected
between sites over existing links. And because Dirac is Open Source,
the wider industry can use the technology, add to it, and develop other
applications. This will be helped by the fact that Dirac is license
free too.
Nokia has identified that in very rare cases the affected batteries
could potentially experience over heating initiated by a short circuit
while charging, causing the battery to dislodge. Nokia is working
closely with relevant local authorities to investigate this situation.
Nokia has several suppliers for BL-5C batteries that have
collectively produced more than 300 million BL-5C batteries. This
advisory applies only to the 46 million batteries manufactured by
Matsushita between December 2005 and November 2006. There have been
approximately 100 incidents of over heating reported globally.
Sony the makers of the world famous exploding batteries have sent out another product recall. This time its the Cyber-shot DSC-T5, I posted back in Nov 06 about the LCD recall.
This time Sony has announced a recall of another 350,000 digital cameras. But there's
no need to reach for your fire extinguisher, because this time the
recall is focused on the metal casing of one model that has the
potential to cut or scratch users.Someone used the wrong type of glue and they are falling apart at the seams.
The problems surround the Cyber-shot DSC-T5 camera with serial numbers between 3500001 and 3574100, which was released in 2005.
365main one the San Fransisco's biggest facilities, had their PR monkeys issued a press release celebrating the site's "two years of 100-percent uptime at 365 Main's San Francisco facility." Oops.
Not wanting to tempt fate this morning/last night their facility shut down due to a power outage losing Craglist, and Livejournal as well as other big names. The area has been seeing power problems all day but it seems the backup supply didn't kick in.
Reminds me of a story about a nameless facility that had generators on the roof to run the technical mains in case of power loss then on winters night when the snow was heavy on the ground. The facility lost power and the generators kicked in, after about 15 minutes the generator started to set off the alarms for low fuel. Its seemed that whoever wired the generator into the building wired the fuel pump into the house mains rather than the technical so the pump was not working. So some poor engineer had to spend all night hand filling the generators till the morning came and the power came back on.
well if you can see this it means my blog is back up again...it's been off since Mon 02/07/07 it seems that somewhere between the company that supplies my blog and interweb is going wrong at a very regular interval. Its been dropping off line since March when i first reported the problem. Well lets see how long its up for?
Yesterday my blog was flodded by a bot called ID-Search bot with the useragent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; IDBot/1.0; +http:// www.id-search.org/bot.html). Within a few minutes it requested around 1,386
pages and came from the IP 66.90.101.75 raping about 50MB of band width in the process...you've got to love those Russian spy bots
Is this a spam-bot or a serious project? Three things which make we wonder
1.) The bot does not (yet) support robots.txt. A quote from their FAQ
Does IDBot accept the directives from robots.txt file?
IDBot can recognize the directives from robots.txt files only
partially, which is the result of the scantiness of our resources. Full
support of robots.txt will be launched soon.
2.) They are not willing to release their IP addresses. Quote:
Can I learn the IP addresses, which IDBot comes from?
Unfortunately, You can’t since it is against the rules of our company.
3.) They flood servers. According to their FAQ you can write an
email to tech support if the bot is causing problems. IMHO this is not
a workable solution.
In my time in tech support land and being a bit of a techie bloke you get some some of the strangest requests and some of the funniest from around the office because you know about technology they think you can fix anything, as I'm not there so often these days I do miss them. Today for instance someone in the office asked me if I could get their ActivSync working as their mobile phone would not sync with their email. Ok I'll have a look, I walked over to the mobile picked it up and noticed the black screen. I didn't want to say "Have you turned it on?" but it just slipped out.I pressed the power button and as if by magic it all started syncing! If only they were all that simple.
Like I've said before I'd post a review of the phone up here when had a good look at it. Well before I starting writing my I say I've just phoned Orange to return the phone back to them. If that isn't a sign of how much we don't get on I don't know what is! Coming from a Window Mobile environment its was hard to use what seems like a backward OS in Symbian, I suspect if you've always used Nokia phones you find it a blast. I found that the phone took 3 clicks on the keypad to do any normal funcation. It seems Nokia have hidden away all the funations inside a lot of menus and you really have to dig down to get to some of the setting. Some of the feature of the phone I liked were the maps and gps navigation. I tried this out on Friday on a journey to meet a friend on the Southbank for drinks.
I turned the gps on and it started download the map via 3g. I typed the location of were I was trying to get to and the phone told me the location didn't exist, not a good start then i tried the postcode and it found the location and displayed with the address i typed in that it said didn't exist. Oh well not to worry lets check the route. The route seemed to be sending me down all the major roads and across all the main bridges. I check the settings and yes I'd set them to 'foot' rather than 'car'. The route that the phone would have sent me on was going around the houses down the main shopping streets when the quickest route was to use the back streets and across Hungerford bridge. Ok so the route planning looks off. Lets use the GPS to nativate there or find out were we are, I have a little Polstar GPS which I've used around the world to get about with Pocket Streets and it normally picks up the 3 satellites its needs to navigate in about a minute once your out of cover. The Nokia N95 didn't even connected once or give me any GPS data at any point during the whole journey to the Southbank. Yes the GPS was on as I could see 3 or 4 satellites on the information panel but it seems you need 5 for the phone to lock and start giving you data to navigate by. In London the chances of getting 5 satellites to lock if about 1 in 50 due to the height of the buildings and width of the streets which makes this possibly valuable feature useless. The feature set on the phone does seem to be tied together having two gps apps in different places on in applications and one in tools just seems daft. It looks like Nokia have just been trying to hard.
Also Orange have block access to Truphone the VOIP system that comes installed on all Nokia N95's from the factory, this feature has been disabled to Orange can protect their call revenue and not have you make cheap VOIP calls.
All in all if your not it a big city, not into VOIP and you like Nokia OS you might just think this phone is the bees knees but I'm sorry to say its not for me....looks like I'll be getting a SPV E650 after all.
Neil king knows that a man should be judged by the devices he owns, with this in mind the old Orange M5000 aka the brick as James Clarke called it. Has been upgraded and retired and I got a all singing and dancing Nokia N95 as a free replacement. Well see how it goes and i'll post a review in a few days. Love the intergrated GPS so far.
Sime doesn't like blackberries much, well i think he's made his point that he really wants it to work. But i don't think that the blackberry could stand the Extreme Tech Support that can be meated out by engineers these days. Other PDA's be warned.
* Comcast issues apology for programming glitch
Disney Channel viewers in New Jersey were stunned to see the inadvertent display of pornographic programming in place of the children's show "Handy Manny" on Tuesday. The error was chalked up to a technical issue at a Comcast facility. New Jersey's Board of Public Utilities will reportedly take up the matter with the cable provider.
---- i just wonder how many heads have rolled. I know many stories like this from my short time working in Soho. I especially like the one that had a company dubbing tapes and someone used some recycled vhs tapes instead of new when dubbing a supermarket training video. The training video was played at a conference they let in run on after the end of the video and the guy didn't stop the deck, so after the training video finished there was about 30 seconds black and then the hardcore porn that had been on the recycled tape. Sadly the guy who dubbed the tape carried the can for that one and lost his job. always remember use new stock....
Well i thought it might only be a matter of time before my Xbox 360 broke again, at Christmas the unit failed with a error were Icould not load any disc into the CD drive the drive made some crunching and loud buzzing sounds on start up. That unit was replaced under warranty by Mircosoft. Today while in the middle of playing GRAW 2. The DVD drive made an awful sound for a second or two. I thought the worst but the game kept on playing and I completed my mission. I turned the console off and then went to do some work I came back tonight to play again and what do I find. the DVD drive will not accept any games or dvd movies it just comes up that every disk is unplayable in the tray icon. So it looks like I'll be returning a second console to Microsft with the same problem. below is a picture of the error from my cameraphone
We've all heard about employees being sacked for blogging. will staff soon be sacked for failing to blog? Last week, Sony BMG UK issued a new corporate marketing strategy.
According to an official release from the group, Ged Doherty,
chairman and chief executive of SonyBMG in UK and Ireland, said the
company "has made it obligatory for all senior staff at both Columbia
Records and RCA Records to start blogging actively".
So what happens to staff who refuse to toe the corporate line, or perhaps fail to produce the required quantity of blog blather?
Yesterday, Westminster eForum staged the first debate in the UK
on "Net Neutrality" - chaired by former DTI minister Alun Michaels and
Shadow DTI Charles Hendry. El Reg gave a brief presentation. Here it is, with selected highlights, and a collection of external links for further reading. more monkey hanging
Vodafone is still refusing to officially recognise
the Connect union, which is so keen to represent its members it has
taken Vodafone to the government's Central Arbitration Committee to
force recognition.
Over half the 200 people working at Vodafone's "Technology: Regional
Operations North" office are already members of Connect, which means
recognition can be forced on Vodafone to allow collective bargaining on
pay, hours, and holiday.
Connect has been fighting for recognition since November last year,
and recently went to ACAS with Vodafone in an attempt to negotiate a
deal, without success.
Vodafone does not recognise unions in the UK, though its operations
in Germany and Ireland do have representation. Vodafone said in a
statement it has elected to "follow the statutory recognition route" -
which translates as refusing to recognise any union until the law tells
it it has to.
"Vodafone continues to value open and direct communication with its
employees" - The key word here being "direct", as in not via collective
bargaining.
Union membership in high-technology industries has, traditionally,
not been very high - when employees can change jobs every month there
seems little cause for collective bargining. But as the industry grows
up and consolidation constrains the job market, union membership starts
to look more attractive.
Connect is currently recognised by BT, O2 and Kingston
Communications, though it has members at most of the comms companies,
so we can expect similar disputes over the next few years. ®
A coalition of big technology companies
wants to bring high-speed Internet access to consumers in a new way:
over television airwaves. Key to the project ... more»
More bright Ideas it says, well I think a bright idea would be to turn off the lights at 3:16am on a Sunday morning and save us all from more light polution.
I think the other Mr King would approve of this story that was found by Damien one of our Dev Guys. He found it on Tom's Hardware Guide. Its a classic case of the geek going too far.
"Using your laptop while driving can be hazardous to your health as one Californian man
found out. The 28-year-old man died after his Toyota Corolla slammed
head on into a Hummer on Highway 99 north of Sacramento. California
Highway Patrol Commander Scott Silsbee told UPI that the man was
probably lost control because he was typing on a laptop.
Despite the crash, the laptop was still powered on and was
plugged into the cigarette lighter. The occupants of the Hummer were
slightly hurt and were treated and released.
Well balanced individual: So what if you answered hell yes to some of the
questions!? You are in touch with your inner geek and you aren’t ashamed to
admit it - but there are limits…
Something caught me tonight while looking at something else on amazon.com and amazon.co.uk, it was the crazy pricing that is being quote for Windows Vista Upgrades on both sites. I've included a screen shot to show you what I mean, the top site is amazon.com and the bottom amazon.co.uk.
Conversions at todays exchange rate of £1.00 = $1.95. If you did a straight conversion the UK prices for both would be:
78.92 UKP for Home Premium, Differnce of £56.02 which is 42% increase in price 128.11 UKP for Ultimate, Difference of £86.88 which is 40% increase in price.
How can Amazon/Microsoft don't know who is to blame on this but i think I can guess as I see that the marketplace price, justify the near 1:1 conversion rate. Do you think that microsoft forget that you don't just replace a $ sign with a £ sign in prices.
Thankfully the OEM prices aren't as bad and it looks like much more of a deal at mircodirect they are:
Which are much more like the US upgrade prices, Ok you can't transfer license like you can with full retail versions but I don't think I've ever transfered a personal license I know I have at work, so OEM can be a steal, it will install on a preinstalled system which I have done and it worked off the bat, see blog passim.
So is this a case of Micro$oft getting greedy or another case of rip off Britian.
While helping a friend out with the problem that he bought a S-Video to Scart cable and not a Scart to S-Video cable I came across a new site that I thought I'd better tell you all about. Its Pinouts.RU there in a link to the site on the button below For many years I've used the Hardware Book http://www.hardwarebook.info/ i remember when it was a standalone app, both have a wealth of infomation and great for getting you out of trouble.
