Posts by Studley
212 posts • joined Monday 27th April 2009 16:16 GMT
Buy Tumblr > make Yahoo cool
Yeah. Just like dad doing Gangnam Style dance > make dad cool.
If you want to be the best, if you want to beat the rest, fragmentation's what you need.
Re: Twitter Music Joke
You could squeeze the entire works of Status Quo into a single message
Plan B?
Pfft, even Blackberry can afford Alicia Keys.
(Young urban music joke)
Re: SimCity
As somebody who put a lot of time and effort into bug-reporting during the recent closed beta, I'd question how much time the article author spent playing it...
During the three days of beta, EA's servers were knocked offline for 24 hours, meaning that nobody could play at all during that time. At other times there was an arcane lobby system in place, which would only allow a login check once every 15 minutes to decide whether or not we would get the privilege of playing.
Even once you managed to get into the game, if the servers went AWOL then the game didn't handle it very gracefully. At best, the user would just notice some weird in-game behaviour (it wasn't possible to put buildings anywhere on land, because the game thought that all of the land was water). At worst, there was an "Error connecting to Origin" message, with a solitary Quit button, and all progress was lost.
In short: Online games have their place, but forcing online connectivity for a solo gameplay experience is maddening. Also, expect Diablo III-esque failures on release day.
Classic Polaroid technique
Shaking it up, and waiting to see what develops.
Re: Shame his hands aren't mind-controlled
Problem solved then - all he has to do is think about kicking the lift operator!
Re: Risky kickstarter
It's touch-and-go for me, too, particularly given that Braben's last major project (The Outsider, itself heralded by the BBC) seems to now be firmly filed under vapourware. They're welcome to fritter away their own time/money, but I'd rather they were more productive when working on my dollar (pound).
Still, I'm excited at the prospect - however my donation is likely to be a significant percentage smaller than if I thought it had a cat in hell's chance of being delivered.
Shame his hands aren't mind-controlled
They could've pressed the lift button which would've taken him to the observation deck in about 30 seconds.
Metro is also still pretty pervasive in the official Windows 8 UX Guidelines (available as a PDF download at the top of this page) which refers to "Metro style apps" throughout.
The Interface Formerly Known As Metro
Am I destined never to get credit for that? :( cf. 14 August 2012
Re: How do i turn it off?
Start a new email, click the "More" down-arrow in the bottom-right of the compose pane, and select "Switch back to old compose".
I don't like it either, I don't understand what problem they're trying to solve. There's already an "In new window" button when composing mail, which will allow you to compose your mail in a popup window whilst you do whatever you damn well please with the rest of your display.
United Nations website offline too
Down for everyone. Conspiracy theories about the hurricane being a man-made weather weapon, like a bad S(ci|y)-F(i|y) Channel movie?
Windows® 8™ TIFKAM™
Bah, I knew I should've trademarked TIFKAM when I coined it. (It's my second biggest contribution to the English language, after I managed to get Boris Johnson's "BoJo" nickname to stick on his Wikipedia page some years ago.)
Presumably, Miss 8's "hard to get the mouse into the corners" was primarily as a result of running in a virtual machine, as a physical machine will resist the pointer at the corners; still, more empirical evidence that the decision to remove the on-screen Start button was pure unadulterated bonkers.
They're clearly...
codmonauts
Posted in Dishonored game review
So it does get better then?
So far I've only played through the opening section, up to the first encounter with the Observer (which appeared to involve a Half-Life Xen-style platform section, only this time with magic powers that appear to cut out randomly mid-jump). Much as I want to be sucked in, it hasn't happened for me yet.
Playing the Xbox 360 version with the game installed to the hard drive, the graphics are bordering on terrible at times. Sometimes you'll randomly get stuck with low-res textures, particularly after a reload; you'll be standing directly in front of a wall that's covered in signs/posters and the whole thing will be completely pixellated.
The stealth element seems very touch-and-go, in the opening mission it was hard to tell what guards were reacting to (how far can they see in darkness? how slowly do you have to sneak behind them before they hear your footsteps?) - though it looks like you can earn upgrades which allow you to see how detectable you are, so that might be some help.
And now the Observer has given me... a heart? Something to do with detecting treasure/upgrades? I really want to like this game, but how much further do I have to go before I get to the interesting missions that all the reviews have spoken about?
Not on Adama's ship
Everyone knows you don't network the frakkin' toasters.
Re: Old Joke
Or, to expand on the article subtitle:
"Siri, delete my coworker's files"
> searching for Mike O'Worker...
Re: death of app's [sic]
"natural language sets it's own direction"
I hope that was irony. I fear that it wasn't / was not.
Posted in Mio Spirit 695 LM satnav review
Re: No thanks, never a Mio again
For relatively small-name players like Mio, you also need to bear in mind that "lifetime updates" are "updates for as long as the company continues to exist / feels like supporting this".
Posted in Mio Spirit 695 LM satnav review
Re: fastest
Yes, that's decidedly odd. My guess is that it's the "fastest" route in ideal road conditions (because it's the M25) but that the actual time shown is accounting for the current traffic on the road (because it's the M25).
Re: So, from the title...
It keeps violently f*cking you, but you keep going back for more.
I can't believe the shutdown function made it through usability testing, knowing how much Microsoft does.
The most palatable methods seem to be:
1. Ctrl-Alt-Delete, and click the Power button in the bottom-right of the lock screen
2. Use Win-R to open the Run prompt, and run shutdown -f -s -t 0 (or create a desktop batch file to do the same thing)
3. Use the physical power button on your machine (you can teach Windows to do a graceful shutdown for this via Control Panel > Power Options > "Choose what the power buttons do")
I'd love to see some Microsoft metrics which state which of these methods is used most often, and how that compares to the magic invisible charm menus.
Re: Twitter is for twits
That works pretty well if you take "privacy," out of that sentence too.
Re: How long does it last?
The Developer/Consumer Previews time-out on 15 January 2013. The Release Preview will time-out on 16 January 2013.
Whether you feel able to use the preview until then, that's another story... sounds an awful long time to me.
Re: trying it now
You probably should've waited a day - currently there's only a Release Preview available, the final (RTM) version is being released to MSDN/TechNet tomorrow.
I've been using the Release Preview in a VM with limited success - mostly because VirtualBox isn't brilliantly compatible with Win8 yet (guest tools are flaky, and - even with 4GB guest / 8GB host RAM - it chugs like a mofo when switching in/out of The Interface Formerly Known As Metro). Dual-booting may be a stabler alternative, though like you, I'd rather not have its ungodly juices dipped too deep into my system.
Posted in Ten... console games you may have missed
In fairness, Dark Souls was released on consoles last year, rather than Q2 2012.
Spec Ops was much better than it had any right to be. Ignore the "just another FPS" trailer, it has a surprisingly deep story and a superb ending. There's a multiplayer mode too, but meh, and importantly none of the game's achievements/trophies are tied to multiplayer, so you can ignore it altogether (like I did).
Re: The next quarter will be worse
Same here. As recently as last month, it was advertised as "August". It's now "between December 2012 and May 2013", which is about the same as saying "fuck knows".
Posted in BIG BOOBS banished from Linux kernel
Re: Bootnote
Also - and it's only my quest for journalistic accuracy which makes me bring this up - Brian McFadden was in Westlife, not Boyzone. *shifts uncomfortably* Can we get back to talking about boobs, quickly?
Re: Died of shock
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Hour #39: Logged in!
Hour #40: RIP
It'll follow the Windows 8 trend
They'll get rid of the Save button, as they've noticed their sample of power-users prefer to press Ctrl-S, and their younger demographic doesn't understand the significance of the floppy disc symbol.
I would use the Joke Alert icon, but a nagging part of me thinks this might actually happen
"were-ever" [sic]
Do you think that we can get our commentards outsourced too?
Hopefully MoneySupermarket remembered to get cashback through Quidco.
Definitely wasn't "most"
I installed iTunes for the first time in several years and redownloaded my entire purchase history - only about 35-40% of it is DRM-free. The rest is still m4p-encoded, which is easy-but-annoying to get around (Apple allows you to burn it to CD a limited number of times, so just burn it to CD and then rip it with a standard MP3 ripper).
Still worth it to avoid the hassle of re-purchasing, but honestly it's not surprising why piracy is so rife when the hurdles for genuine buyers are so perverse.
Re: Maybe I'm being thick
The graph shows up to the end of 2011. The figures quoted are for the first three months of 2012.
But yeah, expect Christmas to put a massive kink back in physical's favour.
Re: iTunes vouchers of course
Really? Stuff that was DRM'd when it was purchased is now un-DRM'd?
I'll be checking that out tonight - if it's true, I might've actually found a compelling reason to install iTunes :)
Re: iTunes vouchers of course
Less great if you ever plan on owning a non-Apple device.
I once owned an iPod Touch and foolishly made a bunch of iTunes Store purchases which I now can't listen to on any other MP3-playing device. It's going to take me forever (and, if done legitimately, some repeated expenditure) to reacquire them all.
Re: What platforms?
Developer response on the Kickstarter comments page (no way of deep-linking directly to the comment I'm afraid):
We’ll be releasing the game on Xbox 360 and PS3. Plus Mac. And other platforms/devices over time. The critical difference that getting beyond our Kickstarter target funding makes is the rapidity with which we’re able to port the game to these other platforms.
Posted in Microsoft kills Windows Live brand
Re: Windows 8
Why not try it and find out? Or is that not in keeping with your pithy remarks?
I've been testing with the Consumer Preview since it came out, and for all of the accusations that can be thrown at it (Metro is not desktop-ready IMO), crashing isn't one of them.
Police have taken him to Snappy Snaps
and we are waiting to hear what develops.
Life Event > Health & Wellness >
Quit a Habit... > "Facebook"
3-6mins = not great for taking on safari
-----------------------------------
It is a Bengal tiger. It is
looking at you and is running
towards you with its jaws
wide open.
-----------------------------------
yes, this has no chance of backfiring
1. Land on unstable object passing by planet
2. Destabilise it
3. ?????
4. Profit!*
*assuming there is anybody left to profit from
Posted in Microsoft unveils paid SkyDrive options
Dropbox links - not just paid users
Despite the assertion in the article, the Dropbox links feature doesn't seem to be limited to paid users. I've never paid Dropbox a dime (though I have acquired some extra space through referrals) and I can use the new Links option without any problems.
In fact there's nothing in the Dropbox blog post which indicates it's for paid users only either. Not sure where The Register got this impression from.
Re: It doesn't matter what Rapidshare want
> They can include a "report this link"
And yet they don't. The only thing they offer is a weasly DMCA takedown compliance message, which is only acted upon if reported by the copyright holder.
In other words, ignorance is bliss.
