I remember watching (or trying to watch) UK Gold as it was then about 4 or 5 years ago, and just giving up wen the breaks (trailers and ads) went on for longer than the bits of programme before and after. There really is a point where the trailers just become interminable. I accept that commercial TV relies on ads, and I'm happy to put up with a certain amount, but having to sit through trailer after trailer after trailer is just infuriating.
PS: bring back the black bits between the adverts!
Not necessarily a criticism of the review, but I'm fed up with LED edge-lit LCD displays being called "LED TVs". I was in the market for a new TV recently, and all the TVs in the local big box store were lablelled LED when they were clearly LCD panels.
Well remember uing CB a great deal in the late 80s. Met a good many friends on it, and got me into radio, building aerials, constructing microphones, etc. Bought a cheap CB out of the paper in about 2001 and had another go, waste of time: just foul-mouthed kids swamping the channels, chatting on channel 19, etc. A real shame, it was nice to have an alternative means of communication.
I agree with you most of the way. It isn't just the ads themselves that put me off TV and services like this, but all the guff that happens before and after the ad breaks: trailers, trailers and more trailers. It used to be that you only ever saw traillers between the programmes, not during them. It got to a point that the ad/trailer break lasted about 7 minutes, and I'd almost forgotten what programme I was watching!
It's just the way things are going. With 40-60 inch screens for the main TV being normal now, a 20-37 inch set is considered 'small'. I'm sure in the 0s, when a 21 inch screen was big, all those ancient 9 inch sets were considered small!
"...their counts only measure computers that are connected to the internet."
Have you tried using a computer that isn't connected to the internet lately? I recently moved house and had no broadband for a week. I thought I could use the computer to play games or do some word processing for work, but all I got were dialog boxes complaining about needing an internet connection.
Yawn, yawn! Another Opera browser, who cares.....actually, it looks pretty god! Hmm, ight have to give this a go! That's always been my experience with people and opera. I love it, but thenI have all the major browsers installed.
When was the last time you heard an actual local commercial radio station, broadcast from your own town by local people? The consolidation that's happened in the last 20 years has just created another national broadcaster with a different name in each market.
Oh, and DAB is poor, I agree. Before I moved out to California, I ad a DAB radio, reception was pretty good but the way the bit rates were being squeezed made it horrible to listen to. Perhaps a system similar to HD Radio in the States, they even have digital radio on medium wave here!
Just bought a three year old Saturn with OnStar built in. I always thought it was a gimmick to keep you paying a monthly subscription for something you woud hope never to use, but this puts the last piece of the puzzle in place. You'll be telling me XM satelite radios are tracking my music choices next!
How times ave changed! I like to think I'm up with the latest technology (especially reading the Register!) but voice recorders had somehow passed me by. I remember buying a little Sony microcassette dictaphone in about 1993, paid about £70 for it, and thought it was the bollocks at the time. But seeing these little devices makes it look like a wind-up gramophone! Very interesting round-up, shame I dont' really have a use for a voice recorder, really.
....going into a shop called a travel agent's and asking the chap in the blazer behind the counter to look up flights for you while you browsed the brochures? (un)happy days!
the FX parts "will offer completely unlocked processor clock multipliers for easier PC enthusiast overclocking ... giving overclockers and PC enthusiasts complete customization and flexibility." - or somewhere to warm your feet on a cold winter's evening!
I have an ipad and a kindle, and apart from one app on the iPad that cost me 99c, everything on both devices cost me nothing. I like to read on the kindle and browse the web (and draw!) on the iPad. If I decide I want to throw a few quid/bucks apple's or Amazon's way, that's fine, but I do get to choose,a nd both deices are very usable without having to constantly visit the stores.
My wife bought me a groupon for a local microbrewery. When the brewery went out of business, Groupon refunded the money in full.
Still, I'm not defending them, definitely shaky ground. It makes me think of a dodgy character with a suitcase full of cash, but only the top layer is actually money, the rest is newspaper.
Would love to see Canon make their G series into EVIL cameras. Would bridge the gap nicely. I would like to trade in my bulky but excellent Nikon D80 and 18-200 lens for something like this (but on Samsung), as I don't shoot enough to justify the DSLR bulk. Let's hope this sector does grow.
For me the biggest selling-point for the Kindle is the e-ink screen. I know the technology isn't quite there yet, but if they could come up with a tablet with e-ink, that would be awesome.
If you were, you'd know that you need to a) get the punter to click the link in the first place, and b) make sure they read past the first paragraph or two. This is a textbook example.
I remember one round the corner from us in the 70s, I would go round with my older brother and he'd let me put the 2p coins in so he could phone his girlfriend...had to get out of the box when the chat started, though! :)
Many years later, in 1989, I remember walking along the same street and, to my horror, saw a crane lorry parked by the old red phone box, with one of those horrible open silver ones on the bed all wrapped in plastic. I've since moved to the States, and went back to visit recently...there isn't even a phone box there now.
And that smell...yes! There's an 'English' pub here in Sacramento, California with one, and it has that signature smell inside!
I hope they don't put more programmes in to interrupt the adverts! UK TV has been on the slide since about2001 when they dropped all the slightly obscure, but entertaining stuff for looped repeats of Only Fools and Horses and what was on BBC 1 five minutes ago. They totally lost me when the ad breaks seemed to last longer than the programmes - I just gave up and switched. Somehow this announcement doesn't seem like it will improve the channels, just an excuse to run all the crap from Food Network - I'm sure the UK is totally ready for a Chopped marathon!
can you see any of these opportunist thugs jumping on the next chunnel to Brussels to offload the gear they looted? I suspect most of them just grabbed what they could then think of something to do with it later.
"...on the ceiling of a bus" - sharing the experience with other passengers, just like those bloody schoolkids who share their tinny music on their phones already! That's all we need!
Seriously, though, this is a great idea, having projector in a phone. And hopefully it will bring down the cost of 'real' projectors, so I can finaly afford that backyard movie experience!
As a British Ex-pat in the USA, this very much reminded me of the FREE PHONES posters you'd see in the Orange or O2 shops. They really are behind the times over here when it comes to prooting services with free (subsidised) phones, you still have to pay for phones here. Also the prices are just made up on the spot: my HTC Aria was $129 when it first came out, but within 6 months it had crashed to $24.99 (unlocked phone still about $390)
Love 'em or hate 'em, at least Google are trying to introduce European style mobile phone promotions to the States.
Reminds me very much of a 'light beam telephone' project I saw in a 1970 edition of Practical Wireless. I wonder how that would have coped with 800Mbps?
Well remember using DOS a great deal in the late 80s/early 90s. Even when running Windows you found yourself going into the command line to do stuff like copying and deleting - so much quicker than all that drag'n'drop business.
Just recently I rediscovered the command line on my Mac - I had a ton of files that needed to be renamed, so rather than going into Finder, i fired up the Terminal and started typing. All done in seconds! Funnily enough, I had tried to delete a file, forgetting it was Unix based, I typed DEL rather than RM. The old DOS never dies!
I think all wannabe computer students should be forced to use a command line.
I'd like an Iphone, but I don't really care if it's the 5, 6 or 256 - whatever's out when my current contract is up, I'll get. This sort of survey is rubbish - if asked, I would say I would like to buy a £2,000 laptop, but not having the money, I would get something cheaper instead. Would be interesting to see the figures for actual iphone 5 sales - when it does actually come out!
You're sort of right. Local rags seem to be about 10 pages of charity appeals, stories about sick kiddies or a late lamented local characters (usually a family man - if you don't have kids, you're worthless in the local journalism world). You might have a big photo of an old man trying to look sad outside a shuttered local post office, or some school kids holding up bits of fruit to publicise a healthy eating campaign. And then, on the page between all this and the dwindling number of classifieds, is a little strip down the side of the left-hand page with a few stories of real local interest.
Just imagine all that on television, what a waste of energy! If I want drossy local content (and I don't) I'll go to YouTube, thanks.
I thought that was the reason for mac minis - to put under the telly and use as a media centre. Yes, I know they want us to get all our content over the net, but out here in the real world, where DSL speeds are a lottery, we still use alot of optical media, thank you.
I'm definitely sticking with my 2010 model, does everything I need it to, has an optical drive and discrete graphics.
And yes, the mouse and keyboard you have to provide yourself.
Seems to me they're banking on most puntes dumping the DVDs-by-mail option and sticking with the streaming. That way Netflix can eventually dump a whole lot of expensive infrastructure, jobs, etc. It's much cheaper to have data centres with loads of films on them than warehouses full of scratched DVDs, beaten up paper sleeves and expensive humans dealing with the postbag.
I think it's a real shame, as Netflix seemed to work nicely, certainly better than the awful Lovefilm back in the UK!
I'm on the AT&T $15 200Mb plan, and to be honest the amount is fine for me. But after visiting the UK a couple of times in the last six months, where I bought an O2 mobile broadband dongle, I'm really surprised at how much we're paying for data here in the US. You lot in the UK might complain, but the UK and Europoe are light years ahead of the US when it comes to mobile data and how it's sold. Trouble is, there are far too many complacent customers here to provoke the carriers into droping prices, and little competition, exacerbated by carrier-exclusive phones, so if you want that nicer phone you have to o with that carrier. What a bloody mess (a bit like this comment!)
What is this phobia for paying tax in the US? I moved to CA from the UK and just don't comprehend how selfish otherwise intelligent people are here. You get the feeling that they don't want to pay tax because it's spent (wasted?) on poor people. At the same time, everyone wants European-style social services, roads, public transport, etc. If they want European style services, they have to pay European style taxes! Personally I would pay more tax to help California out, but I guess I'm a a majority of 1!
If I could convince my American wife to move to the UK or Scandinavia, I'd be a happy man. This state is going down the toilet fast.
If they really kicked 30,00 people off for being ugly, where are the discrimination court cases? Beauty is such a nebulous quality, BeautifulPeople.com wouldn't have a leg to stand on in court. Definitely just a PR stunt, and a pretty lame one at that.
Register
206 posts • joined Friday 8th June 2007 09:33 GMT
Page:
Agreed, but nothing new
I remember watching (or trying to watch) UK Gold as it was then about 4 or 5 years ago, and just giving up wen the breaks (trailers and ads) went on for longer than the bits of programme before and after. There really is a point where the trailers just become interminable. I accept that commercial TV relies on ads, and I'm happy to put up with a certain amount, but having to sit through trailer after trailer after trailer is just infuriating.
PS: bring back the black bits between the adverts!
LED TVs
Not necessarily a criticism of the review, but I'm fed up with LED edge-lit LCD displays being called "LED TVs". I was in the market for a new TV recently, and all the TVs in the local big box store were lablelled LED when they were clearly LCD panels.
Isn't Vme the Spanish-language PBS in the US??
http://www.vmetv.com/english_info/
"Porn parody"
Never!!!
Bluetooth headset?
Well remember uing CB a great deal in the late 80s. Met a good many friends on it, and got me into radio, building aerials, constructing microphones, etc. Bought a cheap CB out of the paper in about 2001 and had another go, waste of time: just foul-mouthed kids swamping the channels, chatting on channel 19, etc. A real shame, it was nice to have an alternative means of communication.
There should be a nostalgia icon!
I agree with you most of the way. It isn't just the ads themselves that put me off TV and services like this, but all the guff that happens before and after the ad breaks: trailers, trailers and more trailers. It used to be that you only ever saw traillers between the programmes, not during them. It got to a point that the ad/trailer break lasted about 7 minutes, and I'd almost forgotten what programme I was watching!
It's just the way things are going. With 40-60 inch screens for the main TV being normal now, a 20-37 inch set is considered 'small'. I'm sure in the 0s, when a 21 inch screen was big, all those ancient 9 inch sets were considered small!
Yes, Apple stuff is expensive and, arguably, overpriced. But you have to admit the engineering, build quality, design etc is outstanding
The question is....
...will your kite still get caught up in the wires with this design?
"...their counts only measure computers that are connected to the internet."
Have you tried using a computer that isn't connected to the internet lately? I recently moved house and had no broadband for a week. I thought I could use the computer to play games or do some word processing for work, but all I got were dialog boxes complaining about needing an internet connection.
Yawn, yawn! Another Opera browser, who cares.....actually, it looks pretty god! Hmm, ight have to give this a go! That's always been my experience with people and opera. I love it, but thenI have all the major browsers installed.
Wouldn't last five minutes in the UK
Nuff said.
Local commercial radio??
When was the last time you heard an actual local commercial radio station, broadcast from your own town by local people? The consolidation that's happened in the last 20 years has just created another national broadcaster with a different name in each market.
Oh, and DAB is poor, I agree. Before I moved out to California, I ad a DAB radio, reception was pretty good but the way the bit rates were being squeezed made it horrible to listen to. Perhaps a system similar to HD Radio in the States, they even have digital radio on medium wave here!
Awful
Just bought a three year old Saturn with OnStar built in. I always thought it was a gimmick to keep you paying a monthly subscription for something you woud hope never to use, but this puts the last piece of the puzzle in place. You'll be telling me XM satelite radios are tracking my music choices next!
Here we go...
'hooves'!
Great review, though. I have the first version of Elixir, very useful indeed!
That's all we need...
...school kids on the bus to work with one of these!
Wow
How times ave changed! I like to think I'm up with the latest technology (especially reading the Register!) but voice recorders had somehow passed me by. I remember buying a little Sony microcassette dictaphone in about 1993, paid about £70 for it, and thought it was the bollocks at the time. But seeing these little devices makes it look like a wind-up gramophone! Very interesting round-up, shame I dont' really have a use for a voice recorder, really.
Who remembers....
....going into a shop called a travel agent's and asking the chap in the blazer behind the counter to look up flights for you while you browsed the brochures? (un)happy days!
Ipad
I own an Ipad and an Android smartphone. Ipad is great for some things, smart phone for others. It's Amiga/ST all over again!
the FX parts "will offer completely unlocked processor clock multipliers for easier PC enthusiast overclocking ... giving overclockers and PC enthusiasts complete customization and flexibility." - or somewhere to warm your feet on a cold winter's evening!
1985 called...
...they want their stereo back. But hang on, what's all this 'streaming' wee-fee, stuff. :)
You choose
I have an ipad and a kindle, and apart from one app on the iPad that cost me 99c, everything on both devices cost me nothing. I like to read on the kindle and browse the web (and draw!) on the iPad. If I decide I want to throw a few quid/bucks apple's or Amazon's way, that's fine, but I do get to choose,a nd both deices are very usable without having to constantly visit the stores.
Sorta true
My wife bought me a groupon for a local microbrewery. When the brewery went out of business, Groupon refunded the money in full.
Still, I'm not defending them, definitely shaky ground. It makes me think of a dodgy character with a suitcase full of cash, but only the top layer is actually money, the rest is newspaper.
Canon
Would love to see Canon make their G series into EVIL cameras. Would bridge the gap nicely. I would like to trade in my bulky but excellent Nikon D80 and 18-200 lens for something like this (but on Samsung), as I don't shoot enough to justify the DSLR bulk. Let's hope this sector does grow.
E-ink
For me the biggest selling-point for the Kindle is the e-ink screen. I know the technology isn't quite there yet, but if they could come up with a tablet with e-ink, that would be awesome.
Look...
...we invented the ribbon, and we're damn well going to implement it, OK!
My eyes!
Damn the Replace Color function in Photoshop!
Xbox?
Nuff said.
Not a journalist, then
If you were, you'd know that you need to a) get the punter to click the link in the first place, and b) make sure they read past the first paragraph or two. This is a textbook example.
Ah memories
I remember one round the corner from us in the 70s, I would go round with my older brother and he'd let me put the 2p coins in so he could phone his girlfriend...had to get out of the box when the chat started, though! :)
Many years later, in 1989, I remember walking along the same street and, to my horror, saw a crane lorry parked by the old red phone box, with one of those horrible open silver ones on the bed all wrapped in plastic. I've since moved to the States, and went back to visit recently...there isn't even a phone box there now.
And that smell...yes! There's an 'English' pub here in Sacramento, California with one, and it has that signature smell inside!
Oh noes...
I hope they don't put more programmes in to interrupt the adverts! UK TV has been on the slide since about2001 when they dropped all the slightly obscure, but entertaining stuff for looped repeats of Only Fools and Horses and what was on BBC 1 five minutes ago. They totally lost me when the ad breaks seemed to last longer than the programmes - I just gave up and switched. Somehow this announcement doesn't seem like it will improve the channels, just an excuse to run all the crap from Food Network - I'm sure the UK is totally ready for a Chopped marathon!
Paste this into your status message:
"I'll fall for anything!"
Yes, but...
can you see any of these opportunist thugs jumping on the next chunnel to Brussels to offload the gear they looted? I suspect most of them just grabbed what they could then think of something to do with it later.
Sharing
"...on the ceiling of a bus" - sharing the experience with other passengers, just like those bloody schoolkids who share their tinny music on their phones already! That's all we need!
Seriously, though, this is a great idea, having projector in a phone. And hopefully it will bring down the cost of 'real' projectors, so I can finaly afford that backyard movie experience!
Free Phones
As a British Ex-pat in the USA, this very much reminded me of the FREE PHONES posters you'd see in the Orange or O2 shops. They really are behind the times over here when it comes to prooting services with free (subsidised) phones, you still have to pay for phones here. Also the prices are just made up on the spot: my HTC Aria was $129 when it first came out, but within 6 months it had crashed to $24.99 (unlocked phone still about $390)
Love 'em or hate 'em, at least Google are trying to introduce European style mobile phone promotions to the States.
Practical Wireless
Reminds me very much of a 'light beam telephone' project I saw in a 1970 edition of Practical Wireless. I wonder how that would have coped with 800Mbps?
Don't you mean...
Lynx user?
Useful stuff
Well remember using DOS a great deal in the late 80s/early 90s. Even when running Windows you found yourself going into the command line to do stuff like copying and deleting - so much quicker than all that drag'n'drop business.
Just recently I rediscovered the command line on my Mac - I had a ton of files that needed to be renamed, so rather than going into Finder, i fired up the Terminal and started typing. All done in seconds! Funnily enough, I had tried to delete a file, forgetting it was Unix based, I typed DEL rather than RM. The old DOS never dies!
I think all wannabe computer students should be forced to use a command line.
Like
Twunt - definitely adding this to my vocabulary! :)
Duh
I'd like an Iphone, but I don't really care if it's the 5, 6 or 256 - whatever's out when my current contract is up, I'll get. This sort of survey is rubbish - if asked, I would say I would like to buy a £2,000 laptop, but not having the money, I would get something cheaper instead. Would be interesting to see the figures for actual iphone 5 sales - when it does actually come out!
Not quite
You're sort of right. Local rags seem to be about 10 pages of charity appeals, stories about sick kiddies or a late lamented local characters (usually a family man - if you don't have kids, you're worthless in the local journalism world). You might have a big photo of an old man trying to look sad outside a shuttered local post office, or some school kids holding up bits of fruit to publicise a healthy eating campaign. And then, on the page between all this and the dwindling number of classifieds, is a little strip down the side of the left-hand page with a few stories of real local interest.
Just imagine all that on television, what a waste of energy! If I want drossy local content (and I don't) I'll go to YouTube, thanks.
No optical drive?
I thought that was the reason for mac minis - to put under the telly and use as a media centre. Yes, I know they want us to get all our content over the net, but out here in the real world, where DSL speeds are a lottery, we still use alot of optical media, thank you.
I'm definitely sticking with my 2010 model, does everything I need it to, has an optical drive and discrete graphics.
And yes, the mouse and keyboard you have to provide yourself.
DVDemise
Seems to me they're banking on most puntes dumping the DVDs-by-mail option and sticking with the streaming. That way Netflix can eventually dump a whole lot of expensive infrastructure, jobs, etc. It's much cheaper to have data centres with loads of films on them than warehouses full of scratched DVDs, beaten up paper sleeves and expensive humans dealing with the postbag.
I think it's a real shame, as Netflix seemed to work nicely, certainly better than the awful Lovefilm back in the UK!
Or...
10 PRINT "Dixons are shit"
20 GOTO 10
RUN...out of shop as quickly as you can!
Not surprised
I'm on the AT&T $15 200Mb plan, and to be honest the amount is fine for me. But after visiting the UK a couple of times in the last six months, where I bought an O2 mobile broadband dongle, I'm really surprised at how much we're paying for data here in the US. You lot in the UK might complain, but the UK and Europoe are light years ahead of the US when it comes to mobile data and how it's sold. Trouble is, there are far too many complacent customers here to provoke the carriers into droping prices, and little competition, exacerbated by carrier-exclusive phones, so if you want that nicer phone you have to o with that carrier. What a bloody mess (a bit like this comment!)
Selfish buggers
What is this phobia for paying tax in the US? I moved to CA from the UK and just don't comprehend how selfish otherwise intelligent people are here. You get the feeling that they don't want to pay tax because it's spent (wasted?) on poor people. At the same time, everyone wants European-style social services, roads, public transport, etc. If they want European style services, they have to pay European style taxes! Personally I would pay more tax to help California out, but I guess I'm a a majority of 1!
If I could convince my American wife to move to the UK or Scandinavia, I'd be a happy man. This state is going down the toilet fast.
Yahoo! Stocks?????!?
Definitely a pre-installed app - who would be daft enough to invest in stocks i this economy!
Definitely a PR stunt
If they really kicked 30,00 people off for being ugly, where are the discrimination court cases? Beauty is such a nebulous quality, BeautifulPeople.com wouldn't have a leg to stand on in court. Definitely just a PR stunt, and a pretty lame one at that.
Or
"purely for medicinal purposes"
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