Messages

106

Computers - Technology / Re: TV on PC

« on: August 17, 2008, 12:55:13 am »

Yeah, it's just like a freeview box, I've never personally set one up, but a friend has and got it working really nicely. I'm looking at getting one in the next couple of months though.

But here's an example of where you can get them: http://www.ebuyer.com/search?sort=pricelow&store=2&cat=216&limit=10&page=1

Just make sure you grab a review of them first!

107

Computers - Technology / Re: Win Vista 64 bit Ultimate

« on: August 15, 2008, 02:01:00 pm »

200 Mb? I've not heard of this, I bet they're planning to achieve that speed by axing upload  . 100 MB, is 100 down, 100 up, perfect in my opinion!

Copper vs. optical is only about the wires to your home. The actual local exchange is not likely to be running on copper , so once you get to that point there's very little technical difference between virgin and random ISP x, there's only performance of implementation.

The big question is what to do about the internet back bone infrastructure. As it stands if large numbers of people started watching DVD quality shows on it on a regular basis, even with more modern compression techniques the internet would simply collapse under the weight of the required bandwidth.

108

Computers - Technology / Re: TV on PC

« on: August 15, 2008, 01:52:16 pm »

Erm...

Just get a TV card, stick it in your computer and then stick the ariel in it. You get full freeview then and can record T.V shows and in many cases watch others at the same time. But read about on reviews of them.

109

Computers - Technology / Re: Win Vista 64 bit Ultimate

« on: August 11, 2008, 12:09:31 pm »

Most of your phone based broadband  structures  suffer horribly during peak times, where speeds can be at 3Mb . Just had a talk with Virgin and now up to 16Mbs on recent tests. You will never get full potential but even BT came 5th to 8th on broadband scale. BE is not including  times when they too suffer. Its like anything else. these companies will promise you the earth on their broadband speeds,most for the average user never reach anywhere near  what they are supposed to be getting at 5-9PM.. Phone based broadband is not the way to go,unless you just want average speeds.
cheers

Huh, interesting statement there, because suffering during peak times has absolutely nothing to do with it being a phone based phone structure. Rather simply how well the company has implemented local loop unbundling and more importantly how much bandwidth they've given their local exchange, Virgin are just as likely to suffer from this if they have a high enough peak in an area they've not invested in well enough.

I've been on phone based broadband services that don't suffer at all during peak. The only big difference between fibre optics and copper is that you don't have to make nearly as many technical compromises with fibre optics, like you can have symmetrical connections again (which virgin don't implement ) you can get speeds up to 100 Mbps (which virgin don't implement ) and you can use them to travel much further distances from the exchange (which Virgin implement on a very limited basis ).

110

Computers - Technology / Re: Win Vista 64 bit Ultimate

« on: August 10, 2008, 12:20:31 pm »

Just a slip on the keys. Yes 20Mb, No need to worry about exchanges ,it is all fibre optic cable straight to the house. Virginmedia with the UK`s fastest broadband. Unlimited downloads.
If I get a quiet moment ,will hook cable directly to PC and unplug wireless router and see what sort of figures I get.
cheers

That must be a very subjective definition of "fastest" given BE offers 24 Mb download 

I don't know Virgin's infrastructure, but I imagine there will likely be some technical reason why you don't always max out speed.

111

Computers - Technology / Re: Win Vista 64 bit Ultimate

« on: August 08, 2008, 11:14:32 pm »

Just so you know, 20 MB is not 20 MB broadband, it's 20 Mb, there difference being that there 8 b in a B (8 bits in a bytes).

So on a 20 Mb broadband connection your maximum possible speed is 2.5 MB/s, so you're very very lucky if you're actually achieving that speed. I don't know which service your with, but if it's on ADSL2+ there are a number of factors which can slow it down, distance from the local exchange and the type of weather are 2 big ones. But even if you were sitting next door to your exchange and it was a clear day, I still wouldn't expect 2.5 MB/s out of the connection just connected to a single source (downloading over http or ftp). Your more likely to max out on a private torrent site, or if you run multiple downloads at once.

112

Computers - Technology / Re: Win Vista 64 bit Ultimate

« on: August 07, 2008, 07:06:56 am »

I'm not sure if there's anything special about ultimate, but driver support for 64-bit windows is much better than it was only a year ago. Expect it to keep improving, 64 bit is becoming very popular.

This is the price of improved technology, I only wish Microsoft was to take a bigger jump and use a minimised kernel or something similar.

113

Gaming / Re: Games,oldies and even older

« on: August 04, 2008, 08:42:39 am »

Best and popular are not the same thing 

I mean Halo... seriously?

114

General Discussion / Re: suggestions

« on: July 30, 2008, 08:30:27 am »

Very few new plasma T.Vs are made, it's all LCD these days.

Questions to think about:
What price range are you looking at?
How much do you care about quality?
What size are thinking about?
What are you going to be using it for?

115

Gaming / Re: Females in your games

« on: July 24, 2008, 09:30:08 am »

:/

The related links were because there was "sex" and "games" in the title of the youtube video...

116

Gaming / Re: Females in your games

« on: July 23, 2008, 06:09:24 am »

... *sigh*

Watch this to get my view on the topic: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFywW99Uvwc

117

Gaming / Re: Sony " PS3 " a computer **YES**

« on: July 21, 2008, 03:00:30 am »

Yeah, it's quite cool that you can run Linux on it, I do approve of that. If I had one I'd certainly give it a go  , but it in no way makes me want to buy one lol.

118

Gaming / Re: Sony " PS3 " a computer **YES**

« on: July 20, 2008, 09:14:49 pm »

uhhhh ... right

So the PS3 has 8 cores, not 6, and the reason they only allow 7 cores to be used is because they had a really really bad manufacturing process when they started out so if they'd manufactured to make all 8 run they would of had to throw over 75% of their stock in the bin.

Running an OS on cell processor and calling it "powerful" is much like running an OS with a Pentium 2 clocked @ 400 MHz and 2 x Radeon HD 4870s and calling it a super computer. The problems with both of these set-ups is:

1) You will never get the theoretical maximum speed

2) There's no architecture to run single threaded or non-parallizable multi-threaded code very fast and this still makes up about 97% of the amount of processing required on a typical desktop application.

I'm not saying the PS3 doesn't have its uses as a computer, but I really think it's more suited to scientific labs having cheap access to a cell processor to get to play around with and see if it matches their sort of work.

119

Computers - Technology / Re: Essential Freeware(A small list of mut haves)

« on: July 20, 2008, 03:04:29 am »

If I knew how to karma you for it I would lol

Just click "High Five" under the Karma rating.

120

Browsers / Re: The Best Firefox Add-Ons

« on: July 17, 2008, 08:29:14 pm »

At a guess he means FoxyTunes: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/219