Posts by Matthew Smith
122 posts • joined Monday 30th April 2007 12:38 GMT
Theres a secret in the Sorcery! games
Cast the Vic spell, that will always sort you out.
Re: Give me your money!
"Make no mistake, this is just a scheme to squeeze money out of the end users. They may as well brand it "Adobe remote wallet opening device". Yeah, and the pint of milk I bought from the newsagents this morning had a price tag attached to it. Pesky thieving capitalists wanting my money for their product.
Oh the hypocisy
But the game itself is a rip-off Game Dev Story. Whats the developers high moral stance on that? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Dev_Story
Apple needn't worry
Its not as though South Korea is going to be around by the end of next quarter.
"Super-fast broadband by 2015"
Are there any known hard figures on what speed this 'super-fast' is expected to bring?
Would
That is all.
Not a meterorite
1. The trajectory across the sky was almost horizontal. It should have been vertical.
2. It could be seen to be moving. If it truly was from space then it would be travelling at kms per second.
3. While it would leave some vapour contrail, there was too much smoky contrail left undispersing in the sky.
It was a plane.
Re: Death to Javascript
Because you shouldn't have to. The fact that === is included in the language as a cheap fix simply underlines how wrong it is.
Death to Javascript
Any language where ("0" == false) resolves to true is just plain wrong. Javascript is only used because theres currently no in-browser alternative, not because its any good. So good luck to Dart to try and displace it. It can't do a worse job.
The only search that anyone performs
Search : Images
Depth : 10 degrees of friends
Wearing : Bikini
Delphi was corrupted from within long ago
I spent many happy years with Delphi. But the advantage was never the language itself (I happily switched to using curly brackets) but that it all just worked. It spat out a single, highly efficient exe which could be sent off to the customer and would be guaranteed to work. How we laughed at VB with its DLL hell and java with its runtime engine.
Now that Delphi is all .net, it is all about which version of .net is installed, just the same as the other languages. Shame.
Posted in Sam Sung found in Apple Store SHOCKER
Re: Should change his name to...
I think the punchline you're looking for is that Sam has an Apple coworker called Sue Yu.
Re: An inspiration
I spent many happy hours on GAC after buying it for £24 (Five weeks paper delivery money!) My best effort, suitable for the mid-late eighties, was a Red Dwarf adventure. With lots of gradual paint-in images like The Hobbit.
"A method for inducing cats to exercise"
Inducing? As in forcing the cat to chasing the laser against its own will? Bah! The patent would be null and void once it was test on my old moggy. She'd think it was some sort of sunbeam and go to sleep.
Lets hear it for Lazenby
On Her Majesty's Secret Service problem is that it has Telly Savalas as Blofeld. Unfortunately instead of a creepy baldy super fiend, he plays the role as .... Telly Savalas. That pretty much makes it a Telly Savalas film, not a James Bond film. Lazenby does a good job with what he has left. This is the film where Bond marries his girl. Marries! That sounds a terrible idea, but Lazenby makes it work well. He carries the lines, 'That man had guts' after he throws a purser into a snow plough, every bit as good as Connery.
If he had stayed, we wouldn't have descended into the techno camp fest of the Moore years. And we would have been better for it.
"using nets and lasers"?
The game has an impressive tech tree.
Good find
So thats where the RBS backup got to.
Victims?!
I know this is meant to be a civilian project. But I just can't get past the double meaning of "the green boxes mark out where the drone's software thinks a victim might be found". How long to we see a weaponised Raspi?
Posted in VIA outs $49 Raspberry Pi-alike
New unit of measure
The Reg occasionally looks at strange units of measure, especially comparing countries to be multiple times the size of Wales. Well, I like the introduction of the banana. 3/4 banans in size looks good to me.
Pushing water uphill
The other problem with desalination is that all of the water starts off at sea-level, not surprisingly. London is only about 5m above sea level on average, but it will still take a large amount of energy to pump the water, rather than rely on gravity.
30 RUN
Yep, you never owned a Spectrum.
Nothing rare about rare earth
There are huge desposits in Canada and Australia. But digging up toxic heavy metals with rock grinders is not kind to one's lungs. In the first world theres understandable health and safety concerns which makes them expensive to mine. China doesn't have the same worries about its staff with its unlimited supply of willing men with shovels, so is able to undercut the other countries. The claim about improving environment conditions isn't a wild statement.
So its not that China has the supply of rare earth minerals, just that they are prepared to dig them up at a cost people will buy.
Tax dodge
So I write inventory tracking software for a living. All very dull. But if I write tracking software - WITH GUNS! - do I get a tax rebate?
Re: The evidence of biomass burning
Its reasonable to blame humans who showed up at the same time as the megafauna extinctions in the Americas. But the megafauna in Africa co-existed just fine. Humans don't ride giraffes. If its humans, why did they extinct the mammoths but not elephants?
Holy mother of God. In all my 37 years, this, THIS, is the moment I've been waiting for.
Whats the story?
They've done something "thereby reducing errors in computations.". But theres still errors. What have they cracked exactly?
Ugh. Javascript.
Javascript really isn't scalable in the same way as RoR isn't. It has no concept of threading, and its inheritance model is a bodged job. It might allow interfaces, but only in a kinda, sorta way. Its fine for manipulating web pages, but not for heavy serious cloudy backend processing. Which is where RoR also fell down.
If Google stick with Dart, that'll do the same job better.
Posted in Black Ops has best videogame ending ever
yes, this
I came on the forums to post this. Does Black Ops end with the main character throwing up down the loo, all in 48K? I think not.
Posted in The Sons of Khan and the Pascal Spring
Although...
The Delphi _compiler_ throws a strop if you try to assign a float to an integer type. I've just spent hours tracking down a bug in javascript which turned out to be caused by an implicit rounding error. I worry that me complaining about the strictness of Delphi is that I'm just sloppier than I once was.
Posted in The Sons of Khan and the Pascal Spring
Death to the Curly Bracket!
I did a bit of Delphi work recently for the first time in years. Christ, it was hard work. Modern languages have made me soft. Ultra-strict typing, all variables declared at the start of a procedure before they are needed. And Begin and End instead of {}. And only a TList vector array as a data structure. And strings are just simple, well, strings; they don't have their own methods. Old school. It made me the bitter programmer I am today.
Posted in iPad SURVIVES FALL FROM SPACE
Ethical?
So they dropped a weight of a couple of kilograms from the edge of space, and hoped there was no one stood underneath when it hit. A bit dodgy.
<blink>
<blink>Always knew it was evil</blink>
Mysterons
Oh great, when the body snatching Mysterons turn up, they won't just impersonate Obama, they'll know how to forge his signature as well.
Posted in Woomera: Ghosts of Britain's space past
You can tell it was the British research base. Look at the size of the potholes in the road.
Theres no doubt that BW is a great man. But hes not unappreciated. He has many statues and buildings around the UK named after him, not least the students union building at Manchester Uni. I'm told that theres even a golf swing named for him for bouncing your ball across water. Plus he rightly made it into the BBC's top 100 Britons. The notion of him being unappreciated is, happpily, a myth.
Er, not quite
The debt of GDP for Greece is 161% of GDP, so thats like someone on 10K a year owing 16K. So its bad, but not that bad. The problem is that also, their deficit is -8.5%, so even though they take home 10K, they have to spend 10.85K to survive. and nothing to spend on the debt when they want their annual interest paying.
Heated skis?
Whatever suit you are wearing will be very good at generating heat to keep you alive, so channel some of that through the skis as well.
With the low grav, you could bound up to the top of the highest hill without the need to a ski lift. You might only accelerate slowly downwards, but should be at a fair clip at the bottom.
(Or, you could run up a ski ramp, orbit the moon once, and land again nearby. Theres good possibilities in this).
Posted in .Scot campaign seeks UK Gov backing
www.royala.scot
Yeah, I can see this being useful. Not very scottish though.
How well does this tech scale?
I can appreciate a giant cauldron of plasma powering a city, but will these little pellets of matter scale up to the same level as magnetic fusion?
Hydrogen vs Helium
Just wondering, its much easier to make your own hydrogen than buy helium. Would this give extra lift, does anyone know?
I'm no astonomer, but..
Does Jupiter generate its own light? Its got a chemically active atmosphere. Once the probe gets out as far as the Jovian system, won't Jupiter be the brightest object in the sky?
Not loved
The ability to magically create test users has been around for a while now. However the migration from the old API to the new graph API has not been handled well. And many of the bugs in the bug list go unaddressed. I'm eagerly waiting for Google+ to release its API. They can't treat us users any worse.
Glass half full
The Canadian Lewis analogue will be publishing a story of 'Idiot armed forces spend $164m on nine useless helicopters - to be used only as scrap.'
Radio 4 rentagob
Michale Buerk and Kevin Warwick met a couple of years back on The Moral Maze. Mr Buerk wasn't very impressed with him then either.
Highlights the usefulness of the EU actually
When you turn up at the borders of lonely Latvia with this unknown toxic concoction, they know its actually decent because the EU says so. They don't have to ban it first until they carry out their own tests.
Denmark are allowed to then implement their own laws. If they decided to ban it, then were overruled by the EU and had to allow it after all, THEN something would be very wrong.
Posted in Angry Birds hatches a plan for Easter
Agreed
There was another Angry Birds newsstory on The Reg yesterday. What is so special about it? Meanwhile Minecraft 1.5 and Portal 2.0 were released yesterday, surely far more important events if The Reg wants to report Game news.
I didn't understand the finale of the last series...
... with Big Bang 2.0 and all (Did we learn why the Tardis is exploding?). But the gist seemed to kill off all the previous story arcs and start over. So why is River and apparently James Corden still around?
I'm selecting the tombstone icon, cos it might simply be I'm too old at 36.
Bolivia will have the last laugh
When we move to electric cars, and need all the lithium we can get to build the batteries, guess which country will be the new Saudi Arabia?
Posted in Fukushima explained in crap cartoon
If this was truly representational...
...then Poo Boy would first have been hit by a freight lorry. After that, the building that the lorry crashed into would have rained bricks down on poor Poo Boy. Everybody standing around Poo Boy at that moment would have died already.
That Poo Boy now only has an upset tummy from all of this is most impressive.
But whats the payload?
I appreciate that staying aloft on solar power alone is no small feat, but how much energy is left over for the devices onboard? I can see a situation where my pseudo-satellite phone becomes less effective the murkier the weather. Or, if I'm downloading an extra large file and using excess bandwidth, I don't want to suck the power out of the engines. It will bring a whole new meaning to 'The file i downloaded crashed the internet'.
