Posts by Andy Farley
203 posts • joined Wednesday 2nd July 2008 09:10 GMT
Posted in Ants have careers; you don't want them
Could it be because foraging is more dangerous?
Therefore for the investment made in creating an ant, you want to get your wear out of them with the safe tasks before risking them outside.
Makes sense to me.
I know there's very little crossover...
But the guy is on the Football 365 site, even the "eight miles in the other direction" is a trope from there.
There's an 80 page thread on there about it.
He's mainly just having a laugh. If they hadn't been so heavy handed he might have just let them have it for a nominal fee.
As is, good luck to him.
I disagree.
They're playing double-or-quit. Good for them, it takes balls in their position.
And...
We've got something to tether the shadow squares to.
Don't care.
If I was buying a phone with my own money I'd probably go for a Lumia 920. Bored of iPhones and it's got a good camera and looks nice.
People really get too heated about all this. It's only a phone.
Posted in Dishonored game review
Re: First person. Ugh.
I can't stand 3rd person - I want to BE the character, not navigate the character.
Hopefully you are in the minority and TPS's don't become the norm.
Posted in Dishonored game review
Re: Glitches
Playing the PC version (with 2G RAM) and I've had zero glitches so far. It's built using the Unreal engine so the underlying tech is rock solid.
I've had one mission where I thought I'd hit a glitch but turned out the NPC was lying to me - brilliant when I realised that.
Posted in Jaws restored Blu-ray disc set review
I saw this when I was a kid.
I wouldn't put my feet to the bottom of the bed in case there was a shark there.
The shark looking crap was the making of this film. Much more tense without seeing it.
Posted in iPad Mini pics spied on Twitter
The edge
looks rounded, rather than curved as in the iPad, IOW the edge will go out, then come in to the glass.
Seems...crap. The large iPad (maxi-pad?) is nicely designed and the edge of it is one of the most signature bit. Seems an odd thing to change.
Still, I reckon they'll fly off the shelves.
The 920 looks good actually...
Apple jumped ahead with a quantum leap in smart-phone usability and build quality. Now the other manufacturers have caught up or exceeded them (still think the iPhone 4 is the best phone to hold) other differentiators will start to have an effect.
I think that's where Nokia can build on its traditional strengths - good reception, great cameras and bullet-proof build quality.
I'm 6 months away from the end of my contact but a 920 may be on the cards.
I don’t think we need FtL to colonise the galaxy, considering there’s no rush.
Start mining the asteroids, shipping the proceeds to Earth.
Start trading amongst the miners – no gravity well so it’s cheaper.
Asteroids declare independence.
Mining happens further and further out.
Eventually realise all you need is mass, and not that dot of a Sun.
Start to leave the solar system.
Hundreds of years later hit the Alpha Century system.
Thousands of years after that hit other solar systems.
Colonise them.
Do the same again.
At that point humanity is probably several dozen clades and might bump into FtL Earth ships near habitable planets – but they would never bother living in a gravity well anyway.
Re: Ugh
You do know it's made up don't you? Not the conclusions but the quote. Pretty obviously humour rather than fact.
For the first time...
scanning the papers, MS & Nokia were talked about in the same breath as iPhone & Android.
If they start offering some kind of app swap ("We'll buy you 50 new apps to replace the ones you have on iPhone!") they'd probably get more traction.
The more the merrier AFAIAC.
I just want...
a waterproof eInk wifi Kindle. I'd replace my current Kindle with one of them and go back to reading in the bath.
HP MicroServer
+ OpenMediaVault for all your badly named storage needs.
Posted in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
Re: Cool, but...
Hell yeah. The betas were so much better.
Of course the last time I tried to play an FPS online my wrists felt like broken crockery after an hour.
Stupid.
MS could have actually made some real gains with W8 - made it the OS you use when you want to get stuff done, rather than consume media.
In the time they've taken they could have re-written it to be safe from the ground up and far easier to use by building on what people already know how to do.
Instead they're chasing Apple like a cat after a laser. You'll be able to hear them hit the skirting board from here.
Not to step into libel territory
But we had a double disk failure on a HP SAN, a "one in several million" chance. Unfortunately this was caused by the controller firmware so could have happened again at any time. I wonder if their firmware was fully patched?
Luckily we'd built in proper redundancy (it was a pension company) and had bitwise VM backup to other-site machines so we were down for 20 minutes with very little data loss.
Of course, they ran off the same SANs, bought at the same time, which meant squeeky bum time while the SANs were replaced and upgraded - four weeks later as we had to wait for HP to test the patch.
Re: I'd like to hear more about
Cheers Peter & Sir Spoon.
Don't know why that other guy is talking to himself.
I'd like to hear more about
how the change management process is counter-productive.
It's something I've, well, "felt" for a while but if it could be quantified & qualified I'd be very interested in hearing the details.
I've always thought....
Liquid nitrogen + sledgehammer might do a good trick against the concrete & steel of an ATM. Poor some on the wall, crack it and viola.
You'd need to be careful picking the money up mind.
Re: If he can make swordplay realistic..
Well....realistic is a bit much to ask. However
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dishonored_%28video_game%29
is coming out soon, made by the people who made
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Messiah_of_Might_and_Magic
which I've heard had a very good melee combat engine.
*shrug* we'll see.
Gabe.
Don't you have games you should be making?
TBH I'd welcome games on Linux. Would my home machine stop running Windows? No. The Mrs can use windows and I couldn't be arsed teaching her how to use anything else.
Science fiction
...is a way of examining humanity.
Change the environment people are operating in, then see what their behaviour is. There are things that change and things that persist. The things that persist are what humanity actually is.
Snow Crash was brilliant, but Anathem is transcendental.
I want
my singleship now please.
Survey asteroids over long period
Find the ones that have a high density from gravitation perturbations of the others
Send prospectors out in covered singleships
Find high densities of gold/platinum/uranium/unobtainium
Fit asteroid with ion motor
Fly it into L4
Melt it with solar mirrors
Spin it to refine
Let it cool
Take the lovely minerals
Match Earth velocity
Drop on desert region
...
Profit.
I'm not much of a salesman.
Always makes me think of
http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/spirit.png
Awww.
Re: I think she's read "The Culture: Look to Winward"
More The Algebraist.
Re: By 2004 people had *enough* power
If experience changed the general rule, I'd point to many Apple products that I've known that have lasted vs. many cheaper ones have broken.
I can't stand the cult but they make some good stuff.
I just wish MS had a better answer. Some of the stuff Apple gets a pass on MS would be eviscerated for.
By 2004 people had *enough* power
So the old sell of "Wait a year and get a more powerful laptop" stopped being relevant, so people started to invest in ones that were good and would last.
At the time - and now - Apple made the best laptops - they looked good, lasted a long time and never went out of fashion.
So buy an Apple and have it last 5 years *and always look good* or buy (at the time) a Dell, have it break in 2 and look meh by 12 months old.
Lots of other factors of course but I think this had a major effect.
Quantum computing
To me it reads like "We do this computer thing, then this computer thing THEN THE MAGIC HAPPENS".
I guess I'm obsolete.
I thought
It was called that because everyone said "God! Where the hell IS it?"
Eh?
Why did the skydivers hand off to psychologists?
Didn't...
...didn't America used to be cool? I'm sure when I was growing up it was a beacon of freedom and enlightenment.
Now it seems to be rapidly moving towards being a police state and incapable of rational political discourse.
I like the Metro interface...
on a phone.
I'd even like the ability to have a live desktop I could pin tiles to...but to abandon the window based task model of all previous iterations is just insane.
Posted in Passwords are for AES-holes
In user testing
For websites we found most people have 3 passwords of various complexity that they always re-use. Force them to do something else and they forget them and are likely to use a standard guessable one. IOW, let people enter what they want to enter.
I'm all for password unblanking functionality as well. Off by default but if you're at home what does it matter if the cat can see over your shoulder? How many of us are in cyber-cafes logging in anyway?
Password blanking is the illusion of security, nothing more.
Posted in LG pitches £7k 55in OLED TV, again
Re: Wall mount?
Don't see how if all the gubbins is in the stand.
Can't see the point really.
Posted in Colour Kindle incoming says mole
As long as...
They come in under £100 they will fly off the shelves. What I really want is the ability to leave it on the train/beach/roof of the car and not have to commit sepuka.
Of course if it was waterproof too I'd go and get one even though I have a Kindle.
It's always an option
to copy the question into the answer - apart from the obvious ones:
"Least favourite job"
Pulling lobsters out of Jane Mansfield's arse.
I don't think I've seen a thread
with so many ACs.
Funny that.
Posted in Ten... two-bay Nas boxes
Re: I went down the DIY route
Yep - HP MicroServer with OMV is the way to go. Mine is happily serving content from the cupboard under the stairs via some TP-link homeplugs. Put 4 old 500Gb disks I had spare in there in a RAID 5.
Works a treat and got set up in about an hour.
Got it via my company, VAT back & £100 = ~ £110.
Absolute bargain.
Data is just data
And we will have different devices depending on what you want to do with it.
Consume it on the go - mobile phone
Consume it while stationary - tablets
Create is on the go - laptop
Create is while stationary - desktop
At home I've got a Linux server for my data, 2 iPhones, 3 iPads (Mrs + 2 kids really) & a fast desktop PC.
I think that's what most information workers will end up with eventually.
Heh heh.
Boobs.
HR have become powerful
because we’re in a “maximising value” era of management. If you can boost the share price by losing 200 people off the wage bill then you do it, and need HR as an instrument to do so.
The fact that you’ve just fired the R&D staff and in 10 years the company will be nothing but a nostalgia brand held in the Caymans suits the management – the current management – down to the ground, as that’s where their winter home will be.
If we were in a “creating value” era, then engineers & techies would be valued and HR would be relegated to the clerical task it truly is.
Posted in Hunters 2
Combat Mission
is out on iPad.
I thought it was a joke but no, it's there and pretty decent by all accounts.
Posted in Novatech pushes affordable Ultrabook
No LAN port?
Dear god, don't let this become standard.
The main thing wrong with ME3
is Origin.
That's why I've not bought it because I doubt that will be fixed.
Re: Interesting
I'd love to see the battle shown from the Empire’s point of view: guy drafted into the Stormtroopers, goes “in country” with his buddies, only to see them all taken down one-by-one by furry little bastards who live beyond the wire. With a kicking soundtrack – Fortunate son, Wipeout & finally The End.
Instant classic.
Surely...
they can self-fill? Or should be able to soon.
