Re: Argos have stock of the Glowlight

Well. So far I have had.

Card not accepted

Card issue corrected

Order will ship

Order won't ship and its cancelled cos we made a mistake

Order cancelled as I haven't given them information they didn't ask for

Order will be with me on the 17th.

I suspect that the email I wrote telling them they established a contract at stage 3 according to their t'sandc's to deliver two ereaders and if they didn't respond within 28 days I'd buy two similar e-readers and charge them the difference may have had an effect.

Dunno how many will actually be delivered though!

Re: £29 e-reader dodgy marketing?

Exactly the same here. Lying buggers. They've formed a contract and decided not to honour it. Tossers.

Re: But hang on..

Not really. Hacking the XBox is almost absurdly simple. Admittedly the new slims are more difficult but once you've extracted the key, the old elites and 60/20/Arcades are just about plugging into a SATA socket and running someting-flasher. Some of the new slims you do have to hack the mother board but GAME and CEX are flogging off the older ones for buttons, and if you can get a Benq drive rather than Lite-on it's absurdly simple.

I have somewhere in the region of !20 original XBox 360 games and to be honest the difference between the PS3 and XBox for me is down to the quality of on-line, the interface and the controllers, all of which (in my opinion) are better on the XBox than PS3.

Note the 'in my opnion' bit 'cos that's quite important: Fanbois of either side may disagree with whether the things that I think are important actually are but isn't that the point of having two consoles ont he market with different selling points?

Re: Fisher39

OOPs,. Before the arsey pedants arrive I should have said 'distribution' not standard deviation.

Re: Fisher39

my definition's my definition mate. May not be yours - you can call it what the hell you like and I'll do the same. It's betting to take advantage of tiny differences in the odds in your favour ........

Oh and the fact that haye shuffle after every hand makes absolutely no difference whatsoever, Oh and it's not just blackjack, it's any game in which the expectation value of the bet exceeds one which can include three card poker if played optimally, You can even do it on video poker, but such a large proportion of your return is dependant on straight flushs that you need to bet tiny amounts and play large numbers of games.

It's not just the expectation value it's the standard deviation of expected outcomes, which is why the expectation value principle doesn't really work on National lottery betting.

Re: The odds are...

Yes you can. Over the whole set of probable outcomes the net gain is to the house but for a finite set of outcomes there is a probability (and a substantial one at that) that you'll win. If EVERYONE Lost casinos would be very empty. You need a largish number of transactions for the pattern to revert to the mean.

You can make money out of casinos provided that you only gamble when the expectation value is greater than 1 and for a brief period before the financial crash that was possible (effectively it's due to the house edge being about 0.3% on blackjack if optimum strategy is played and getting the free money on offer as matched bonuses). Sadly the arbitrage opportunities have gone now. Did make about £20K with my Winrunner based three card poker player though.

Re: You wonder why..

Probably because the media aren't quite as obsessed with the XBox as you are. To be that blinkered that you see a lump of plastic and silicon that you don't like everywhere you look indicates a need for some serious help

This is about one of the iconic brands of the 90's and noughties that's in severe danger of going right royally tits up. The XBox isn't relevant to this story - whatever way you look at it Microsoft make enormous profits, Sony don't and that's the story. Why Sony are in deep shit is an interetsting question but one things for sure i that the games consoles conflict is a sideshow

Re: Ooh, it's sooo difficult!

Yes it is difficult. we now have universal benefits, universal healthcare, universal education, bigger government and more complex and specialist things that government needs to do. Whether or not we should have all of those things is a different matter. Give all of those things up and, yeah, maybe 2000 civil servants writing on paper could do the job.

If you want those things then IT projects on scales that the private sector can't (and wouldn't want to) match are what happens.

THat you seem to regard Britain's victorian colonial past as a model for modern government makes you look very silly indeed.

Re: Pay?

Or the cost of the paper is negligible compared to the rest of the cost.

Not a bad job.

Good job George. instead of paying attention to the clusterfuck that you've made of the economy, both public and private, you've managed to get both bits of the economy squabbling amongst themselves rather than your economic mismanagement.

Nice work.

That's from someone who's worked in both public and private and, to be honest, the number of wankers in each sector is pretty much the same.

Truly Bizzare

Tell me Steve/Carole/Mark,

Why do you keep hanging around the Reg if you have so little time for it?

Trawling the site for any reference to XBox or Sony and then letting your inner infantile fanboi loose with an opinion based on nothing more than "XBox bad", Sony Good" is a little tiresome.

Hows about you fuck off for a bit eh?

Well I never

thought that I might agree with Steve/Mark/Carole.

Bar the looney, paranoid,ignorant, puerile fanboism of the first paragraph of course.

The remaining three paras do make a certain sense and every one has a choice about whether or not hey wish to pay to play. The ethics are questionable but the honesty isn't. Sony are clear about what you haveto do access the multiplayer code. You either have to pay retail or pay non-retail, but that's an open , honest up front choice.

I won't pay to play multi-player but because in fish-world that's less important than the multiplayer. Fish jr takes a different view.

It does beg the question wheher it's more patheric to hang around El-Reg in order to boost a large manufacturer of expensive boxes or for EL-Regto report honestly about what Sony or doing.

Personally I'd vote the former.

No, its because

MICROSOFT EMPLOYEES MADE THE COMPLAINTS. Can't you see it? It's obvious. Microsoft employees are complaining to discredit Sony becuse of all the XBoxers moving to the Playstation.

See... here's the proof:

Http://www.engadget.com/?7887ac8b2d?

ITS ALL MICROSOFTS FAULT AND THE REG IS OWNED BBY MICROSOFT. RUN AWAY!!!!!!!!!!!!

Not teens

Allegedly, they're all over the age of 20. Someone's dropped a file on Pastebin with their details. There's a sysadmin, a web coder and several students.

Plenty

Thing about government IT projects is that the successful implementations are transparent to the end user. So, yes, government has just put a system live early and under budget delivering payments on a scale that would scare the crap out of you.

And, no, its not an exception. The IT supporting Universal Credit is one of the most innovative and challenging IT projects that any one could ever work on.

I've been i both private sector and public and when you trot out the old line about public sector IT you sound like a complete twat. Is that what you want?

When you've delivered £200million of IT changes into a vast legacy infrastructure with multiple stakeholders, deadlines set by election dates rather than the critical path activities ministers and news crews looking for a screw-up and no ability to sweep the mess under a carpet of commercial confidentialty the you can talk.

Until then, how about a bit of professional respect eh? .

Me too...

Had to wait to get home. I'm on there!! Woo hoo - I've arrived on the Daily Mail shit list at last.

OOPps

I'm as stupid as Paris then 'cos all O see is a hypythosis based on an opinion based on guess based on an interpretation based on a particular world view that invents an anit-Sony conspiracy

Sorry Steve/Carole/Mark I'm sorry that your idol has feet of clay but then since I regard both consoles as disposable consumer gadgets rather than graven images I don't give an f either way.

I'll wait and see

Personally I'll evaluate the new XBox on it's merits and make a decision based on what it actually is. I have an XBox but no brand loyallty and if Sony meets my needs better it's a PS4 for me.

However, readin between the lines, and call me over sensitive if ya like, I get the impression that Steve/Mark/Carole has already made his mind up that an unnaonounced machine made by Sony is better than an unnanounced machine made by Microsoft. Which to my limited undertsanding is as intellectually barren as the other way round.

Open to correction tho

There is a treatment

Oxygen. Simple eh?

Helium naturally escapes from the atmosphere because it's so light. It does occur naturally on earth but it doesn't hang around naturally unless it's stored underground. It's a very slippery molecule and will escape from almost anything you put it in.

Peurile and juvenile is what...

Steve/Carole/Mark does best.

Personally when blu-ray reaches the £3 that DVDs now cost then I'll consider a player. I don't concieve the additional utility delivered by a Blu-ray is worth the extra cost, but then my TV doesn't do 1080p and according to El Regs calculation I couldn't resolve it anyway. Most downloaded movies are plenty good enough for me. I guess the question is are you a "I want to spend to get the best" or "I'm OK with adequate" kind of person. I'm the latter 'cos I've got far better things to spend my money on.

Irony?

Oh well it takes all sorts. Personally I don't think that it's smart to wish for either an xbox or Ps3 monopoly given how both participants in this market place show themselves as trustworthy as a maddened rattlesnake.

The 'grammer' bit was deliberate by the way... I guess it was a tad too subtle for some

Technically you can

Adam and Jamie proved that you could polish that particular item on an eisode of mythbusters

Don't think so

After a few months the only people who this will affect will be rabid fanbois of both sides and investors who face a masive one-off hit to the bottom line.

Other than that this will dissappear in the wild blue yonder reappearing only in Business School case studies of how not to deal with a crisis.

Really Carole,

don't hide behind Anonymous Coward. Poor effort this one.

Deranged?

Cor blimey. Sony having the power to unleash an earthquake and tsunamai to cover up a minor security cock up.

There's definitely a Playstation exclusive in there.

Several $100million dollars

Whether you like or not trademarks and marketing are pretty important in the grand scheme of things. The wrapper, the presentation and ownership of the brand are key - even to us techies.

You just need to look at the superior technolofgies that are in the trash can because they were poorly marketed - and the cobblers that can be sold because it was done well.

Well

BBC2 sounded plain daft.

could it be because

XBox 360 exclusives are actually better?

Oh don't bother replying. I know that the only reason the great god Sony is failing is because Microsoft are buying support... yadda,,,, yadda... yadda

Or we could be looking at a genuinely held view of a game that isn't quite as good as it should have been. Which is also true of pretty much every game to have come out over the last year. Except for BBFC 2 which pretty much rocks.

Pass the werthers originals.

Hope you're not driving my train

Title says it all really

No.

Sorry, didn't want to bring it up but seeing as how you mentioned it..... it's fine on the XBox.

thanks for trhe suggestions

Thanks guys.

I use the standard sky router 'cos its part of the ToCs - this seems to be a common problem that googling doesn't seem tobe able to find a fix for. At the moment we're doing Nazi Zombies in split screen so I'll pop your suggestions on my to-do list once AC:B is out of the way.

One each - they're cheap as chips really

They have an XBox each. At about £95 for a new arcade model and a couple of quid for a USB stick for profile storage, its a bargain.

No

I thikn you got downvoted because of your comments not because you own a PS3. Unless you have shares who the hell cares who's winning what war. I have an XBox and have more games than its possible to play and I suspect that the sames true for Ps3 owners.

I don't like Move, I don't like the PS3 controller but so what? I do like what I have amd if you like your Ps3 good on you but wetting yourself over an argument about sales figures just seems wierd to me.

Still, it takes all sorts

Or it could be......

PS3 owners genuinely having strong feelings? Or is it true that any criticism of PS3 is started by Microsoft?

Just askin'

Can I have my contribution to your education back then?

No-one's blameless in this one matey.