Posts by Adam T
563 posts • joined Monday 23rd April 2007 21:45 GMT
They can only profit.
There's not much of value on Origin that's $20 or under (nearly everything is RRP!), so I'm sure EA will mark this down as a PR win. Even if everyone on Reddit downloaded everything under $20, it would probably still be less than a week's marketing budget anyway.
Shame.
Posted in WTF is... NFC
Re: Security
"As for not feeling safe, why"
Not safe as in anybody can use my card without having to use any authentication. I'm not assuming this is how all NFC services are implemented, indeed there are people in the comments saying they've had both experiences, but that wasn't my experience. Thus, it didn't feel safe/secure/good. The shame of it is that it's a really neat technology; all I can do is say how I felt about it - even if it was some daft assumption on my part, the fact is unless people (me being one) feel like they can trust a technology, it's never going to have an easy time getting into mass acceptance.
Posted in WTF is... NFC
Re: Security
"Do you think that the designers have maybe thought of this? Or do you have such immense wisdom that it's only you?"
The designers of what? NFC, or the equipment that uses it?
The designers of NFC don't have to think of user security - they provide the means, not the solution.
The designers of NFC debit cards clearly didn't think of it, or if they did they didn't deem it important enough to come up with a secure solution. I've used my NFC-enabled Barclays debit card once, and it didn't leave me feeling particularly comfortable. Convenient? Sure. Safe? Fuck no.
Posted in iPhone 5: the fab slab to grab
GPS
According to iOS 6 Maps (on a 4S), I'm floating around a 100m area in a hot air balloon. I'm actually sat at my desk, slowly rotating around in my chair.
Didn't do that with iOS 5, so it suggests it may not be just the GPS hardware.
Posted in WTF is... NFC
Security
I do find it amusing that nobody's talking about the fact that NFC has one single glaring flaw: ANYBODY can use it. No PIN needed. And what happens if you tap with your card in your wallet, but you just happen to have several cards? Which card does the payment come from? Oh feck.
Perhaps Apple are just biding their time until they can implement a way to verify that the person using it, is the person who owns the handset. Been any fingerprint scanning/Apple-related stories lately? Believe in coincidences?
Re: He's not a deity...
He's just a very naughty boy.
On a more serious note, while I'm all for free speech and all that, when people are dying over a stupid pile of shit movie, I'm more for just removing the pile of shit movie trailer.
Liberties you say? Try arguing your point to a corpse.
Developers
I wonder how many of the day 1 sales are developers. And of those, how many bought >1 device (development, testing).
The one thing that gets a dev to upgrade kit is a new form factor, so it stands to reason people will be clamouring to get theirs early given iPhones are typically in a trickle supply (I know we do, after being burned more than once).
Charm Bar
"easy on a tablet or conventional touch screen if you swipe in from the left, but tricky to get right on the 82-incher because it has a thick bezel that makes it hard to get a finger in to find that single column of pixels."
You could have shortened that to "tricky because you have to walk over to it."
Re: Boredom
Riight, because you know me so well you know what I do with my phone, right? And saying it as an Anonymous Coward, just LoL.
Re: Satisfaction? Confidence.
Good job at completely missing my point, and pretending I said something completely different, that is inferring I do nothing but "make phone calls, send messages and tinker". As it happens, I make very few calls, send almost as few messages, and don't do much 'tinkering'.
Next.
Satisfaction? Confidence.
I'm at that point where I've been using nothing but an iPhone since the very first version and, to be frank, I'm rather bored of it.
I'd love to have a phone by another manufacturer, with a different OS to explore - I don't mind who builds it or what the OS is called, but so far there's nothing to inspire *confidence* in a switch-over. Sure the Galaxy SIII might be a great phone, but II look at Samsung and I think "inconsistent"... I look at other manufacturers and I think "struggling". I want consistency and I want the assurance of security. And I hate to say it, but iPhone is the only device that fulfils what I'm after - hell I couldn't even give two shits about the apps or the ecosystem, it's just a question of caring about what I spend my money on and what it means for the next 24 months.
Re: Wow
Perhaps, but who cares when the prices are from 1982?
I can also appreciate the function-over-form argument that thin bezels on a touchscreen you're meant to hold in your hands are largely impractical.
Re: too big
I'm actually the opposite - all this slender stuff is getting on my nerves, even the iPhone 4 cramps me up trying to hold it with 1 hand and type with the same hand's thumb.. And what do people do with their slender phones? Stick them in a >1cm thick case.
Re: Nevermind Sony...
You beat me to it.
Not quite as catchy as "HMZ-D2" , *cough*
Only $300 for a dev kit of you get in there quick-sharp, and this is 'supposedly' the real start of the long-failed VR revolution.
Cloud? Good metaphor
The problem with clouds is that you never know where they're going to end up, nor when they're going to burst and rain their contents all over the shop. Cloud services are the same.
Anybody remember Oddpost? A sweet little online email service, at the time it was years ahead of anything else around - better than GMail or Hotmail are today IMO, albiet lacking any pgp or other security.
I sighned up, used them exclusively - nice handy POP3 options so i could even collect and send my work email. Then Yahoo! bought them. Sod that.
Gmail? Google Docs? Now it's Google Drive, and a whole new EULA, and suddenly they *really* want you to share your documents. NO. I use it for my personal stuff, I want features aimed at ME working with ME.
Goodbye to that then.
There's only one cloud service that I find useful these days, and that's EC2. I don't have to leave anything on it, but it's there for when I want to do stuff - it's extra horsepower. Would I leave all my important personal stuff in an EBS or S3? Hell no. I don't want it there.
That's not to say I don't want a solution that lets me access my data from anywhere, and scales with the amount of crap I collect over the years (too many HDDs sitting on shelves, I don't even know what's on them anymore). But iCloud? Google Drive? Dropbox?
Sorry, these aren't the solutions to an all-your-shit-in-the-sky-forever pipe dream, because in five years time I'll have gathered enough stuff to fill their existing quotas several times over, and they'll either want to charge extra for extra storage, or they'll have been bought by Yahoo!.
There's a better way, we just don't know what it is yet, but when I see it, I'm buying shares.
In the words of Michael Stipe
Everybody hurts. Users, that is, anyway.
I'm looking forward to the day when we can say, "hey you remember those companies, Google and Apple? Whatever happened to those guys, huh?".
Re: Steam Linux?
Now you mention it, that does sound like a good idea.
People have tried it in the past, but they fall at the first hurdle because they want to sell kit (Pandora, EVO, to some extent GP2X, and lately OUYA) so everything starts on a spreadsheet instead of software libraries.
Then again of course, isn't that what Steam Box is?
Re: Direct X 9.0c is slower than Direct X 10+
DirectX 10 and 11 ... how many games run with DX10 features? I can't think of many. I recall Age of Conan promising it for years, then when they delivered most people stuck with 9.0c because it was actually slower (older kit, no surprises).
The rub is that, unless you're using features, there's very little reason to upgrade - by doing so you make more work for yourself, and you cut out a huge (the majority in fact) chunk of potential customer base. Each version of DX is different enough to put off all but the most dedicated (i.e. big budget FPS) developer.
That's not to say you're wrong, but it does make a good case for OpenGL, which has always managed to move on without requiring a different tin opener to get at the contents.
Re: WHY?!!
Well there's the issue of drivers, and going forward that's even more pertinent when you consider that, for instance, OS X doesn't yet support OpenGL 4.0. So by sticking to GL you're cutting off an arm to spite a leg.
Supporting both is more sensible, and IIRC it wasn't an uncommon Settings feature in many games a decade ago, when DirectX had a smaller footprint.
I've argued here for including both DX and GL options in our own titles, but the argument was (rightly) shot down because it needlessly increases our after-sales support overhead. Bummer, because as I've mentioned above, our own stuff is faster in GL on PC...but them's the apples if you're in it to make, not lose, money.
Re: You seem to be missing something here
Well, it depends what you're drawing and what part is running that extra 16% faster. Few devs will go out of their way to create extra content, but in general you'd probably benefit nicely from an extra step-up in quality level settings to your windows buddies.
GL faster than DX
We've been experiencing this for some time - we develop cross platform, with iOS & PS3 as leads, so everything starts out as GL (running on Windows 7).
GL appears to be especially faster than DX in transparency overdraw - we don't know why, our shaders are virtually like-for-like, it's just way better in OpenGL (3 in our case). We see (easily) a doubling of performance, not just 12%, which might be attributed to the fact we have bucketloads of overdraw in our current WIP.
On the subject of Linux gamers worried about Steam, I can't help but frown. You guys have spent years telling everyone Linux is better, and now someone with clout stands up and says you could be right, and your reaction? "I'm not installing that crap on my box", "it's a conspiracy to install malware", "they're just saying it to get to Microsoft".
I've always figured that the problem with Linux isn't Linux, it's the people that use it. Not wanting to tar everyone with the same brush, but so far it looks like I may have been right.
Posted in Qubits turn into time travellers
Proven already.
I experience this phenomena all the time when arguing with the wife.
Consider, arguing over a map while trying to get somewhere. She's accusing me of giving her the wrong directions, and I'm arguing a point that I am in fact correct. She refuses to see my point, thus the Point is unobserved.
Only later, when I'm proven correct by a situation which was YET TO HAPPEN does she see (and so Observe) my point. In this case, the point existed both half an hour ago, and half an hour later: it's the same point, but she sees it in a different point-in-time.
Thus I propose that arguments with the wife are in fact evidence of past-future-entanglement.
Posted in Jackson’s Hobbit becomes a trilogy
Re: I wonder why...Tom Bombadil
No thank you, i'd rather French kiss Ja Ja Binks.
Re: Metalwork class
The only dodgy aspect of this is that you don't need skill to print a 3D model, beyond making the CAD file in the first place (oh, have this email attachment good sir).
Stick a lathe or CNC (I don't even know what that stands for) in front of me and I wouldn't have a clue how to use it.
File->Print. Now that's the life.
Posted in iPhone 5 to be skinniest Apple yet SHOCK
Not so thin.,,
Once you've wrapped it in a giant rubber phone case.
Which always makes me laugh when people complain it's not thin enough.
Posted in Apple MacBook Pro 13in
But does it have 64bit KEXT?
Joke icon, only because there's a not a "half-joke" icon.
Darwin nominee
Both the owner and the person who nuked it (assuming of course that the owner wasn't telling porkies out of shame).
Moare tabs!
Writing this in chrome on a 4S... I've got 26 tabs open, seems quite happy.
It's not as slick as Safari in terms of feedback speed (zooming is a bit clunky, but not offensive). I do low that it remembers my username entry (as a dictionary word) for el reg, whereas safari doesn't - handy when you have my big ass email addy.
Also love the unified chrome search & address bar is carried across well - and not having to scroll up to the top of the damned page to see the address bar, which drives me crazy in safari.
Apple may be famous for enorcing UI conventions but when it's their bad choices they can't see the wood for the egos.
Re: The decline and fall of an apple....
"more of the same"...kind of applies to your post too :P
Re: MacPro 1.1
1.1 user here too, and mine is still running like butter six years later.
Therein lies the crunch though, as I buy workstations for graphics work every couple years, and while I've wanted Mac Pros, I always go with custom builds instead. I simply can't be bothered with playing the waiting game, only to find you have a measly choice of CPU loadout and graphics options.
How many Xeons were released this year? And all will be a year old by the time the 2013 MP comes out (which will probably offer 2 or 3, and won't tell you which chips they are on the product page anyway...all you need to do is know they're "really fast" :p).
Awesome
I've been waiting years for this. Now they've set the bar everyone else will be peddling like mad to get their own hi res displays on the market. I may not be buying this thing for a couple years (once the early adopter pricing has dropped down), but at least now we know that hi res screens are real now, and not just some marketing vapour being shown off in sealing displays at trade shows. Gimme a 220dpi 24" desktop monitor, ta muchly.
Re: Not Chinese
Indeed. And if paranoid bosses are happy to snoop on office workers' email, imagine the lengths a paranoid, sociopathic militant dictator would go to.
"You Excellency, we have made the ultimate snooping device!"
"At last! Deploy it among our people immediately!"
Posted in China claims piracy at new low
Piracy = Prosperity?
I could easily believe the Chinese Goverment is secretly pro-piracy where it suits them; the possibility that free software means chinese businesses have lower costs, higher income, pay more tax, and that's not ignoring the probability that free software means greater opportunity for learning and skills development using software, which leads to an increase in Chinese interests (turning a billion people into useful pawns).
As for common people... considering so many things are Made In China yet Sold by The West at inflated prices, it's really not a stretch that they might see it as helping themselves to their share of the goods.
Posted in South Africa and Australia to share SKA
Re: ten comments all downvoted (at time of writing)
I was wondering about the Downbotes myself. It's hardly as if there's anything contentious to all of this - two sides came out winners and science should do well. Could it be someone doesn't like science?
Re: Bloody annoying
Bloody annoying all right; El Reg's cookie pop-up keeps popping up on iPhone despite having already clicked I'm Fine With This every time, and I'm sure it won't be long till this is happening everywhere, and with confusion and uncertainty comes opportunity for mischief.
Re: The Aero about-turn is an Apple-bashing exercise, perhaps
Indeed. The problem with Aero isn't that faux materials is now out of fashion, it's that Aero was never a very good implementation of faux materials in the first place, and microsoft seem to have trouble hiring good icon artists. It looked cheap, it felt cheap and it ate more screen estate than it should have. I guess Metro is the best answer for MS after all, since you don't need an artist to draw an orange square.
On the question of screen estate, I see with the new file explorer Windows 8 has taken another step towards leaving us with as little space as possible for...well...file listings. Is there any decent way of making an explorer window show ONLY the path and folder contents (and maybe the status bar)? It's bloody annoying when trying to manage lots of directories without resorting to 3rd party software.
Re: Yeah, right...
There's no need to be so harsh; I've seen people confusing this for an IT forum before too.
metacritic bonuses
I've not seen this before myself, but I'm told it's becoming increasingly common. I guess this is just the modern equivalent of chart fixing.
Anything's better than nothing
I'm writing this on my macbook via my iPad via Splashtop. I can switch to my PC and play any of my PC games, MMO or otherwise, and the image quality is pretty good. This is over local wifi of course; when I try doing the same from the office, it's a different story.
If someone can improve image quality and responsiveness without relying entirely on faster connections (the reality is, they will NEVER put cable where I live, 20 meters from the beach in a stuck-up village), then it can only be a good thing.
Big screens
Watching Vampire Diaries last week, couldn't help but laugh at the lass who plays the main character holding a (was it a Note?) up to her head during a phone call. Never has there been a more silly phone since the Nokia N-Gage.
Posted in Nvidia shows off superjuiced Kepler GPU
Who cares
Show us product we can go out and buy. Always the bait-and-switch with nVidia.
No surprises here then
This is what happens if you stick all your stuff in one box, and you neither own the place nor have control of it.
You might as well ask a stranger who "appears the honest type" to look after your house keys.
I don't use iCloud myself anyway. Not just because of trust, but because I find it completely confusing; it does what with what? Sends it where? When? What???
The first and only time I tried to activate Backup via iCloud is proceeded to try and upload 6GB photos from my iPhone...before anything else. Obviously my photos are more important than my contacts and settings. Maybe I was doing it wrong, but asking Siri yielded no answers...
Gypsies
If they did that over here it would wind up overrun by gypsies.
Not quite the cast of Eureka.
lol
Speed isn't the problem, people are the problem.
Speed is just a symptom of idiots who think they're more important than the highway code.
Doesn't matter if you like it, by getting into a car and driving it you've automatically accepted the Terms and Conditions. Buy a fucking airplane if you want to go faster.
Re: Sounds to me like...
Well it depends what you do with it. I don't do text effects, I do pretty complicated texture artwork and painting.
Of course I make money from it so cost isn't the issue; it's the principles. If someone makes a commercial photoshop app that can beat it at it's own game, I'll be the first in line if they can restrain themselves from taking the piss every 12 months.
Re: $199 != £124 in Adobe Land
Yeah, they're not alone either - Autodesk have the same strategy of setting "market-bearing" pricing.
There's a few (but not nearly enough) disgruntled users on the Creative Cloud forum bitching about this, and Adobe's official response is that we're paying for the additional out-reach needed to do business "over here". Apparently that includes seminars and such - funny, because I've never been to and never want to go to an Adobe seminar, and the thought that I'm paying for them pisses me off even more. They're liars, plain and simple.
Re: It's time
I have to say, I've tried Gimp, and tried it again several times over the years hoping it would get better, and it just can't match the productivity of Photoshop. It's not just the UI, it's speed and workflow. Gimp in that respect is sadly aptly named. But there is a huge hole just sitting there for someone to make a real contender to Photoshop; not just for geeks, but for the Pro world in general.
Re: Lousy way to treat customers
I've had similar experiences with Pixologic and ZBrush I bought ZBrush 3 back in 2006, and they've not charged any of their users for a single upgrade (Zbrush 4R3 was released this year).
The net effect? They continue to sell new seats (the price is excellent value), they have no piracy issues, and their community forums are bustling with activity rather than angry people - their users absolutely love them.
Sure you can't expect a huge company like Adobe to give their software versions away for free, they have massive overheads in comparison, but they can at least afford to be honest and if anything give their users great value. Adobe are complete and utter knob heads, they really are, if they think being scrooges is better for business than being generous and respectful.
$199 != £124 in Adobe Land
"If that wasn't good enough then an upgrade to Adobe Photoshop CS6 would do the trick, at a cost of $199 (£124) or more"
Actually, it's £190.80 inc vat. Thieving bastards.
"tools to address major national security issues."
In other words, "Hulk, smash!"
