Marc Roberts » mistake

Drop Clause 17 from the Digital Economy Bill

marcroberts — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 10:16:43 +0000

eBay, Facebook, Google and Yahoo have all signed a letter to Peter Mandelson urging him to drop Clause 17 from the Digital Economy Bill

Sam Knows – Web big hitters want Clause 17 of Digital Economy Bill struck out

This power could be used, for example, to introduce additional technical measures or increase monitoring of user data even where no illegal practice has taken place. This would discourage innovation, impose unnecessary costs, potentially unsettling the careful balance of responsibilities for enabling market change which Lord Carter outlined in the Digital Britain report.

Help show support against this draconian legislation by signing the petition.

How NOT to get a date

marcroberts — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 15:31:57 +0000

My favourite excerpt

… If you’re phsycologically normal …

Spot the difference

marcroberts — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 11:21:32 +0000

I needed to purchase a new motherboard to go in my Silverstone LC11 based HTPC. This case is rather slim and therefore has quite complex requirements on the motherboard it can take, the expansions slots have to be in the right places (see FAQ 3) and it also had to accept the Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 CPU I have spare to go in there.

After some time consuming searching I finally found a motherboard that met all the criteria and was in stock, the Gigabyte GA-EQ45M-S2 so I went ahead and ordered one.

This is what the product image looked like when I ordered it:

GA-EQ45M-S2 Rev1

This is what I got when I opened the box:

GA-EQ45M-S2 Rev2

Can you spot the difference ?

Well, it turns out Scan ran out of stock of these at the end of October and ordered new ones, which turned out to be revision 2 boards, and had not updated the image on their website.

Thankfully the customer service was excellent at Scan and I’ve got an RMA number already. Now all I have to do is track down another motherboard that matches the criteria.

Who goes and moves the expansion slots around on a revision to an existing board, I wonder if anyone else has been caught out by this ?