Category Archives: Rants

The problems with technology.

An open letter to Pebble and the new Pebble Time Round…

Here’s something I haven’t done for a while – HAVE A RANT!

Dear Eric Migicovsky,

I’m an original Pebbler, still am to this day and I love it, but can’t help but feel Pebble staff might have started eating bad Apples (pardon the pun)…

– Nice design, fair enough it looks like a normal watch, but..

– Why ditch the great thing about both Pebble’s so far – all week battery life?! 2 days just isn’t enough – fair dos it’s better than Apple Watch but not by far – 2 sizes, countless styles/strap combos… deja vu?

– At $249, I might as well spend 100 dollars more and just get an Apple Watch which does TONNES more and has almost the same battery life – not to mention the vastly better screen.

– That screen resolution isn’t going to get better by itself

Also what on Earth happened to that previous commitment to get timeline to the original Pebble? We were promised that MONTHS ago :(. It’s the same old story with every company – get successful, get rich, forget the people who made you.

Oh and by the way – Jony Ive presents new products way better than you do. You never saw him saying “maybe they’ll get one” with a cheesy yet desperate looking facial expression. Maybe employ someone else to do that job.

Sincerely,

Disgruntled early Pebble supporter.

Skype’s RAM usage is dreadful!

2 Replies

I’ve been a fan of Skype for many years now – as it seems to be the most reliable and practical way to keep in touch with friends on the phone for free. I was a user of the Skype “subscriptions” for many months and was very impressed with the value for money and quality of the service.

However, it has come to my attention that the newer versions of Skype seem to be using extortionate amounts of RAM – even when the client is in idle mode.

Above is a screenshot of my Task Manager in Windows 7 32-bit on my netbook. As you can see, it’s using well over 80MB of RAM in idle mode. If you go into a call, this will trickle up to over 100MB.

I find this a little excessive – especially since the program is only trying to keep a login alive whilst in idle mode. Do something about it, Skype!

Test Drive Unlimited 2 launch fails miserably – Atari’s reputation on the line

Whilst Atari thought they had the launch of the eagerly awaited Test Drive Unlimited 2 safely in the bag, sadly they obviously didn’t prepare well enough.

Test Drive Unlimited 2 (the successor of the very popular TDU1 released in 2006) was launched earlier this week around the world. However, Atari is clearly suffering from regular server problems which are upsetting the gaming community.

All platforms (PC, Xbox 360 and PC) are currently suffering from regular server downtimes which make the game unplayable – as it relies so heavily on the internet to function.

The TDU twitter feed is currently being inundated with tweets from frustrated users – and the official forum is taking quite a battering too!

I think Atari owes a lot of frustrated users one hell of an apology!

Mobile broadband data needs to get cheaper (on pay as you go)

Despite loving mobile broadband, I have to say that the cost of maintaining it is still very high. Even with 3’s very competitive rates, it is still very expensive. At £10 per single GB, that’s a very high rate. Of course, you can get multiple GBs at cheaper rates, but you still have the annoying 30 day limit with most networks. If you don’t use the data within 30 days, you loose it.

Mobile broadband has been around a fair old while now. It took off when networks starting giving birth to 3.5G services (or HSDPA) which offered speeds that were comparable to home broadband speeds. The USB dongle brought easy connectivity to the mobile networks, whilst in more recent months the Mi-Fi dongle has made mobile internet much more convenient.

I really do think it’s about time mobile networks started offering cheaper data rates for mobile broadband. The cost of providing bandwidth is falling and networks should start passing these savings onto customers.

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