George's weblog » rant

Terra Nova

George Helyar — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 13:08:57 +0000

So I was at the cinema recently watching a certain disappointing 3D movie and a trailer came up for Battle for Terra, a CGI movie that is already available on Blu-ray in some countries but is only coming to UK cinemas in February 2010. The plot is that humans are the aliens and after destroying earth (crap, another eco-hippie movie) they go to invade an alien planet called Terra. Much like the other disappointing 3D movie with the similar plot, I couldn’t work out if I should be supporting the humans or the aliens.

Anyway, didn’t anyone notice that “Terra” is Latin for “Earth” when they started writing this thing? If it was called Terra Nova (new Earth) or something like that I could understand but apparently these aliens live on a planet that just happens to have exactly the same name or something.

Adverts for idiots

George Helyar — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 19:18:26 +0000

Just how stupid do you have to be to buy low calorie water? How many calories do they think water has in the first place?!

Double negatives

George Helyar — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 20:30:25 +0000

One of many things that annoy me is when people say things like “not uncommon”. If it isn’t uncommon then it is common, isn’t it? It has to be either common or uncommon. If it is anywhere between those two, then how rare it is isn’t worth mentioning in the first place.

On a related note, people should stop saying “it’s not unheard of” and start saying “it’s heard of”.

Play me off, Tom Jones!

“It’s usual …”

Over packaged.

George Helyar — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 13:57:11 +0000

And the award for the most ridiculously over packaged piece of hardware goes to … *drum roll*

The Lycom UB-109 internal to external USB adapter (scan).

And no, nothing else was in the box. Just this, cardboard and bubble wrap.

The main purpose of the box seems not to be to protect the contents but rather to repeatedly post random branding such as the logos for eSATA, SATA, SAS, PCI-X, PCI-Express, FireWire, etc even though they clearly have nothing to do with this product whatsoever.

Richard Starkey (Ringo Starr)

George Helyar — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 21:39:58 +0000

Can someone explain to me what Richard Starkey a.k.a Ringo Starr of Beatles fame was doing on an AVIVA advert one week saying that his name change was a good thing and another AVIVA advert the next week asking people not to call him by his stage name?

Whatever happened to Dell’s DisplayPort?

George Helyar — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 12:58:18 +0000

Years ago, Dell said that it was going to implement DisplayPort in all of its products (see a Dell white paper from 2006), removing the VGA port to make their notebooks much thinner, yet we are still to see any Dell notebooks that have made this change, even in top of the line models.

Notebooks, such as the MacBook Air, are getting thinner and thinner and Dell’s DisplayPort switch over promised to deliver this to even entry level notebooks. It was Fudzilla’s “first glance” review of the Dell Vostro 1310 that brought this back into my thoughts. Clearly this is a notebook that would benefit greatly from a DisplayPort connector in terms of thickness and yet, like all Dell notebooks, it doesn’t have one.

I bought a Dell 2408WPF monitor with a DisplayPort connector (it even came with a cable) when it was first released in the UK and have yet to have anything with DisplayPort that can connect to it. I briefly got an NVIDIA 9600GT from Gainward to connect to it but the card’s DisplayPort was seemingly untested and seriously flawed, as it would only even send a signal to the monitor once out of every few times I would try to turn the computer on (the solution being to plug DVI in, turn the computer on, turn the computer off and unplug DVI each time to get DisplayPort back on). Gainward have also brought out an ATI HD4870 with the port but as I already have a HD4870X2 from Sapphire and still have a bad taste in my mouth from Gainward’s 9600GT, it’s just not worth the switch.