What they're doing is what students have been doing for time immemorial - cribbing other peoples' stuff and trying to change it sufficiently so that you get away with it.

Monkey Island remakes

It's probably me, but I was a little disappointed with the Monkey Island remakes. They looked gorgeous, and the humour was still there, but I found them rather tedious after becoming accustomed to games such as Fallout3 and Skyrim, inasmuch as most of the tasks in Monkey Island felt like the dreaded 'fetch quests' that blight RPGs.

Having said that, I have a lot of affection for Larry Laffer so who knows? But I can't help thinking that the Adventure Game genre has had its day and people demand more these days.

Impressive

Good stuff, and good to see that *someone* at HMRC had enough brains to go for this approach rather than flinging £35million of our money at Capgemini as would usually have happened.

Yes, John Smith 19 has a fair point, but this is a good start to weaning applications off IE6.

Daily Mash

I thought I was reading the Mash there for a moment. :o)

Reading Oracle closed

I'm shopping in the Oracle today and just witnessed the GAME store closing and the staff walking out. A hand written sign on a whitwboard says the store is closed and will not be re-opening.

If employment is conditional...

Notwithstanding the excellent advise to stay polite and professional, there is a possible legal issues of Economic Duress, Coercion of Will and possibly the Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977.

I'm not sure which, if any, apply at interview stage as they are all contract law, but you could argue that an interview is the first steps to forming a contract of Employment.

GIMP

Horses for courses really. GIMP is pretty powerful but it has a pretty poor user interface and you do kind of have to bludgeon it into submission a bit, but you can get some pretty impressive results way beyond the rather dismissive "resize and crop a picture" that AC@14:38 seems to think its level is at. Users who want to do that are better off with Paint.net and I active dissuade such users from using GIMP - it's way too powerful and complicated for simple tasks like that.

The main draw (no pun intended) for me is that GIMP gives you a hell of a lot and it's free and Open Source. Photoshop may be fine for those with incredibly deep pockets or very loose morals, but quite simply I have neither so GIMP is a very credibly alternative.

Sure, Photoshop users look down their nose at GIMP users, but at least we have the smug satisfaction of knowing we have both our kidneys and a clear conscience. :o)

There's a product on the market that will physically disconnect your battery if the level drops below a certain level, which is designed for cars that sit unused for long periods, so that when you go to drive them you are not left with a flat battery.

I don't understand why the Tesla cars don't have a similar safeguard system that disconnects all parasitic load when the charge reaches a certain level to specifically prevent the batteries becoming bricked.

@sleepy_chicken

sleepy_chicken - I sincerely hope you *are* the main driver and aren't "fronting"

Anyone else catching the whiff of the hastily rewritten press release about this article? The author has forgotten to change "our" to "their" in one sentence.

You keep saying that word...

Of course one of the greatest sword fights of modern times has to be in The Princess Bride.

Eh?

How is this raunchy?

Bad but could be worse

Salted hashed passwords are useless to the attacker unless they know the salting algorithm, and even then only for replay attacks.

Likewise, if the credit card details are properly encrypted then they are again useless to the attacker.

Having said that, I agree that changing your password and keeping an eye on your credit card statement is fair & responsible advise rather than going "la la la nothing to worry about" or denying everything, so fair play to Valve there.

Car parks

The trouble is that, although cars have got wider, car parking spaces haven't. So although these fatties may benefit from the wider car they may find they can't get out of it once they park up.

I loved the first couple of Monkey Island games, although they did go downhill somewhat after that.

Honourable mention to DotT too.

But, for me, the greatest Lucusarts Adventure was The Dig. A slow burner as it had almost no humour, but oh the atmosphere! Totally captivating. I would dearly love a reimagined HD version of The Dig.

Does a rose by any other name smell as sweet?

I always thought that "Maemo" was a decent name whilst "Meego" had a whiff of the naff about it.

Not really new

I remember many years ago playing Doom to much. I was coming out of a lift (in real life, I mean) and someone made some grunting noise and I froze, expecting it was one of the monsters that always made a grunt before pouncing you.

That's probably the closest thing I've been to what is being described in the article.

"a large percentage of osCommerce websites can't be bothered to install it"

Clearly the author of this article has never used osCommerce.

The way you apply patches, mods and customisations to osCommerce is to merge the actual PHP source code and it very quickly becomes a nightmare. Even if you are fastidious in delimiting changes in comments, it is still a huge diff-merge task to take on an upgrade and one that is beyond a majority of users.

I remember spending days trying to reconcile two osCommerce sites developed for my (now ex) wife that had been developed by the same web "designer" but at different times and based on different versions of osCommerce and it was insane; the differences between them were enormous and trying to make a unified version with the only differences being the visual customisation proved impossible.

Having said that, 'Rich 2' is probably right as well.

TVR

Oh here come all the tired clichés from people who either knew someone who had a TVR, or else treat Jeremy Clarkson as the Messiah and believe every word he says.

Still, leaves those of us who actually own a TVR to enjoy them, I guess, whilst the sheeple buy boring cars and trot out their half-baked secondhand ill-informed opinions.

(Although, I will admit that build quality was variable and they do need a little fettling to be at their best)

Filofux

Back in the 1980's the "Little Black Book" was replaced by the "Filofux" (note spelling) so I guess the "Shagbook" is the next logical extension.

Gnome Classic

I installed Ubuntu 11.04 and likewise was aghast at the steaming pile of uselessness that was the default UI.

Fortunately someone told me to log out, and when logging back in choose "Gnome Classic" as the UI from the logon screen.

Much usability restored.

Gizmondo

I was impressed to see a Gizmondo in there. I didn't realise any of them had actually been sold.

I still have my developer one in a drawer somewhere