* Posts by Maxson

100 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Mar 2011

Page:

Google unveils Nexus 7 tablet, Android 4.1 and Nexus Q

Maxson

No Card slot?

Bit dissapointed about the lack of card slot, my phone has a £13 class 6 32GB Micro SDHC card in it, I'm not about to spend about £40 to bring the tablet to half of that so I'll probably give this a miss as I don't /need/ a tablet.

It's dangerously close to impulse purchase but a tablet doesn't do anything I really need and I'm a stickler for storage space.

Neo-Nazis scoop YouTube ad revenue from UK telcos

Maxson
FAIL

Re: Jesus said he will come back and slaughter us all....

No, that's not what it means at all. The "slaughter" you describe is the rapture. If Jesus said he'd come back and kill all humans in a book, what Jesus said would be "hate speech" the book itself isn't.

See, what you've done is try to make a point by deliberately misunderstanding somethign quite simple.

Brits spent £334 each year on games

Maxson

Re: Fixed it for ya PC gaming

You can do that on PC too, modern graphics cards have HDMI out and few games don't support a controller!

Still, if you like enough PS3 exclusives, then its ok to own a PS3.

Reloaded Doom 3 shoots onto shelves this autumn

Maxson

No free update for those of us that paid £30 7 years ago unfortunately.

Luckily I didn't, I picked it up in the id pack on steam and won't be paying £20 for some minor updates to an average game.

Maxson

Re: "Bringing the classic first-person shooter to consoles "for the first time"."

DOOM1 & 2 are available on XBox Live Arcade. They're actually pretty good ports too, the textures have been rescaled so the pixels aren't the size of fists on HDTVs.

Samsung S3 finally catches up with the Palm Pre - if modified

Maxson

Re: wireless misnomer

So long as you also have a backup wire so that you don't have to rub your face on your desk to take a call while the phone is plugged in that's the best justification I've seen for these.

Budget smartphones all the rage as punters look sub-£100

Maxson

Magic Number?

Is it jsut me or is £100 still sort of considered a magic number for pricing at or below? £100 has been £100 and items have been considered reasonable at below £100 since I was a child, and chocolate bars are 3 times what they were then.

Even when inflation makes everything more expensive, and minimum wage goes up, £100 is still considered some sort of all important barrier. I guess that even though Min wage is up, most people have less hours, and people on more than min wage are accepting less so I suppose I've answered my own question as to why it's still an important number for pricing.

Maxson

Re: Bragging rights

True enough about the battery, but I think it's fairly undeniable that smart phones are useful. I had a standard Nokia phone for a long time and dind't get smart phones. I got my first smart phone when I was a newbie contractor and it's saved my arse a bundle of times.

GPS has stopped me getting lost loads and when emails came through pointing out I hadn't filled in my time sheets and thus wouldn't get paid on time unless I did it right now, it was a matter of sorting it out quickly rather than not even noticing the e-mail till I got home.

Your mileage may vary dependant on how good your memory is, or how good your sense of direction is, or your watch ownership, or a multitude of other things. But the phone has helped me out a lot, so I can see the appeal.

Battery life is shit though.

Molyneux chisels away at social experiment

Maxson

So....

Anyone else just going to skip the £50,000 chisel and just run 100 virtual machines each runnining a mouse script?

Touchscreens to get finger friendly

Maxson
Happy

I know it's a bit gimmicky but...

So is pretty much everything involved with smart phones, I really, really like this, the bit I hate about my smartphone is the part where I'm just bumping my thumbs off a flat surface with no identifier of what I'm touching outside of my phone vibrating gently.

O2, Be Broadband axe Pirate Bay access

Maxson

Take their business elsewhere?

To Where?! Every ISP will soon block TPB....Personally I'm not all that bothered, there are other torrent search sites. I agree that it's a potentially slippery slope as this could pave the way for blanket bans of other websites, but TPB doesn't really have a use other than piracy, and it IS the right of an IP owner to protect their work and their cashflow. That's just business.

Study: The more science you know, the less worried you are about climate

Maxson
FAIL

Seems a bit like....

....they did a test, then when the test didn't show the "right" results they said "well, those guys we tested were the wrong type of people anyway, we're still right!"

Facebook ninjas scale wall, pluck iPhone techies from Apple's garden

Maxson
Angel

Re: Ummm...

Damn, you beat me to it.

Diablo III

Maxson

Not sure how writing a review with "everything is great/amazing except a server problem that will soon be fixed" makes it an 85%?

I'm enjoying it a lot, it's a touch repetative though!

Pete Townshend condemns Apple as 'digital vampire'

Maxson

Dear me

"APPLE IS A DIGITAL VAMPIRE....UNLESS THEY GIVE MUSICIANS MORE THINGS FOR NOTHING!"

and

"GIVE ME MORE MONEY"

Oh Pete, you tosser.

Avast still focused on Windows, despite new Mac security app

Maxson
Stop

Heh

What Mac users don't seem to understand is that the reason Macs get fewer viruses is primarily because they are a smaller, less juicy target, as Macs become ever more popular, there will be more malware written specifically to target them.

Are you honestly...HONESTLY saying that Mac users are more tech-savvy than Windows users? Honestly? Really? The users tied to a company which has always said "It just works"?

The average Mac user is no more Savvy than the Average Windows user, that's a major selling point of Macs, you don't have to know what you're doing, you just need to have a large wad of notes.

Macs will become festivals for malware writers soon enough.

I see people above saying there's a 3000:1 ratio of Windows:Mac virus signiatures in Avast, duh they've been producing a piece of Software for the dominant computer OS for about 10 years, and been producing a piece of software for the STILL less popular OS for much less time, of course there are less viruses in their list of viruses.

Macs are defensible only because they were never a major target.

Apple will 'own games industry'

Maxson
Stop

Silly...

What all these industry commenters don't seem to understand is that Apple's position doens't allow them to dominate the games industry. Or rather not the traditional games industry.

See, there are really two games industries since the advent of the ipod touch/iphone, one is the £1 app, play a few rounds on the commute to work industry, and one of the games industry proper, with the triple A titles. Apple can try to dominate the prior one, and they've a good chance of succeeding, but they're not in a position to dominate the latter.

The two markets aren't mutually exclusive, you don't HAVE to pick between the £40 game and the £1 phone app, you can happily pick both, Apple's pricing model allows that...for the most part.

The major weakness of Apple in an attempt to conquer the traditional Triple A title market is that they have no dedicated triple A developers, they've got....being thrown a bone by Valve, and I think you'll find, that Valve has their own delivery system that they're not likely to sell to Apple. Apple has no placed in the traditional games industry, and I don't see people buying ipads or iphones ahead of consoles.

LulzSec disavows alleged Census hack

Maxson
Meh

Not sure if it's believable or not

Not sure what to believe on this, as LulzSec recently came out and mentioned all sorts of things they have hacked but not brought up before, so hearing them say "We haven't advertised doing this hack" is less than confidence inducing. Still, I'm sure a group of guys just "doing it for the Lulz" is always completely honest...

Bloke pissing in reservoir prompts 8m gallon flush

Maxson
Facepalm

Don't meddle with medals

In this wonderful world of hysteria (where some people get worked up about how long frozen food has been frozen for), the employee in my eyes was right to flush it because some people would kick up a massive fuss over there being pee in it. the guy who peed in the reservoir should probably get some sort of anti-medal like a sign that says "I am a fool who pissed into a resevoir".

Elite UK police agency website downed by Lulzsec

Maxson

Surely...

...LulzSec are just asking for trouble with stuff like this? They really do seem to consider themselves Too big to fall. It will be interesting to see what the final outcome of Lulzsec is, part of me expects some jail sentences.

Duke Nukem Forever

Maxson
Meh

That's not really fair

Games designed after traditional, archaic shooting style can still be great, painkiller was far too late supposedly, and it was excellent, it's still better than the latest military shooter. Unreal Tournament 3 was a tonne better than Gears 2 for multiplayer (and let's face it, with a 4 hour long campaign, the multiplayer is where your £40 goes). Somehow Gearbox have failed to make a solid old skool shooter out of this.

'Great Reversal' as world's forests stage a comeback

Maxson
Joke

So....

Is Global Warming over yet? That crap is ruining a perfectly good drive towards a dystopian fuel-dependant future (depending on who you believe).

Russian computer programmer buries himself alive

Maxson

Probably...

As life gets more complicated people like to search for solutions to their problems that require less work than just solving them properly...Clever people join cults because cults come to them in their time of need, when they're less likely to think straight. Clever people believe in homeopathy because it solved (or pretended to solve, with placebo effect) an issue that was perhaps much harder to solve, or took longer to solve the traditional way.

Google Apps end love for Firefox 3.5, IE7, and Safari 3

Maxson

Support is one thing but...

Whether it works or not is another, gmail still works pretty much fine in IE6, support really just means whether they go out of their way to make it work or not...and means whether they can wash their hands of it if their system doesn't work right for you, I wouldn't be too worried....the other alternative for gmail users is to use a mail client other than their browser for gmail.

Tragedy nurse's boyf fined over medical records abuse

Maxson

On what grounds

On what grounds do you suggest the death sentence?

New Mac scareware variant installs without password

Maxson
IT Angle

Unless...

The files are included in torrents, or e-mailed to a user? You seem to be expecting google to administer the whole internet, which is not their job, they offer some tools to warn you about potentially malicious sites, but end users will frequently click through the warning, or - for the obvious reason - Google won't have a warning in place for that particular site.

(Hint: The obvious reason is that it's impossible to make a system 100% impervious without dedicating a disproportionate amount of staff to it, and having that staff never make mistakes. Google's system, I believe, is automated, and needs to be updated to deal with emergent threats, they can't make it too automatically strict as it will make lots of false positives).

Maxson

Much of the reason for that...

Is likely because Macs are only nwo becoming popular enough to be an obvious target...likely the issue isn't patched because Mac users always thought they were too big to fall, too.

Much better wireless power transmission possible - boffins

Maxson

...but

Not directed in a straight line or at a small area, there's enough electricity alright but not in a focused enough way if there was enough latent charge floating about to power a microwave without intervention, the the whole discussion would be a moot point.

Maxson

Touch worried

I'm a touch worried about putting enough power to power a microwave over a distance any further than in direct contact, even if it's done right, half of people think mobile phones cause head cancer, I imagine these same people would be terrified at the prospect of electricity in the air...maybe a repeat of Brasseye's "heavy electricity" bit?

Researchers find irreparable flaw in popular CAPTCHAs

Maxson
Flame

I noticed a stunning flaw in many CAPTCHA systems too...

Half of them are bloody unreadable. I know the idea is so computers can't read them and thus it prevents bots, but half the time I can't read them either. They're especially annoying when paired with websites that reset the password fields on failure and websites which don't check if a username is free before you hit the submit button....it's a barrel of laughs trying 7 captchas, finally getting one right and then being told your username choice is already taken...

Remastered 4K, 3D Titanic steams towards cinemas

Maxson

Is this really a movie that gains anything major from better image quality?

Seriously? I thought it was all deep and important and a fantastic piece of cinematography or whatever...the only thing that's going to be "epic" about this is how much money Cameron will make....

I just don't get it with Cameron, he's made some amazing movies, some of them using cleverness and skill in place of CGI effects and now he's just throwing fistfulls of rendered rubbish at you in 3d and people buy it.

Why doesn't he remaster Alien in 3D at 4k? That's something that might benefit from 3D and a bit of modern day polish (it still looks fantastic considering the alien is a 7 foot tall guy in a rubber suit).

Apple to support reps: Don't confirm Mac infections

Maxson
Thumb Up

Windows user here;

It's "Viruses" anything else is bad latin...see, we're not all thick ;p

Maxson

Well now...

See, I've always been of the opinion that an unpatched box of any OS platform is woefully inadequate against even slightly determined attack, Mac users have always said that Windows vulnerabilities are strictly Windows vulnerabilities and macs have no vulnerabilities. My belief has always been that Macs were simply too small a target due to their lower market share. Now that market share is increasing, and thus they're a bigger target, malware infection has skyrocketed. Now that Macs have become a bigger target, the complacency of their userbase has likely made them a big, easy to hti target.

Now, where's the "E-mail this article to a friend" button? I've some smug people to deal with.

Videogames give kids the munchies

Maxson

In fairness

It's not actually the statistics they've made up, it's just a lack of dilligence and rigor presented in a certain way. As I said above, 80 calories is balls all, even 80 calories per hour of gaming is close to balls all. If it was the other way round and the story was "Video games help annorexics gain weight" it'd not get reported. Maths and statistics don't lie, but PR guys do.

Maxson
Heart

Is this obvious enough to be considered for

Department of the bleedin' obvious?

People get hungrier (even if only subconciously) playing games than they do when resting...great, well established, I appreciate that there's probably a serious study here somewhere, but even just doing lots of thinking and small hand movements will burn some calories, the human brain loves it some sugar, water and fat, 3 things you're probably consuming more of if you're eating more.

An average 80 calories more is fairly miniscule really. Giving everyone spaghetti isn't a great mitre for how much tubby post gaming eating may make you as it may not be the amount, but the food that makes a difference. Spaghetti is pretty high in calories due to it's excess of carbohydrates, if they're only winkling 80 more calories out of it then the results are practically inconclusive. They should do an oreo test and a salad test too at minimum.

Your PC, our problem

Maxson
Stop

I can't imagine....

....letting a user pick their own machine, even the most savvy ones will bring something that's just a mass of inconsistencies, I can appreciate the idea of letting them have their own machines and saying "your pc, your problem" but the simple fact remains that HP customer support (or acer customer support etc etc) won't provide support for any bespoke software, and from my experience, bespoke software is what screws up most of the time, hardware fixes are relatively rare where I work.

Because of this, it's pretty likely that your IT team will need to be nearly as big, but customers will still have to liaise with their manufacturer. Which is similar to my workplace now; We do everything, if something breaks we tell <provider> to send us a new part, or send them the whole laptop if it's the motherboard.

I can only really see this working well in a smaller business that doesn't do anything particularly fancy with their machines, but from where I'm sitting, I see a 4000+ users who would buy the pretty looking one and come knocking because none of their software worked.

Interestingly, all our laptops are fancy looking brushed aluminium jobs with terrible build quality...so maybe it's not just end users who make poor decisions on this.

Sleazy Aussie 'hot babes' network goes MIA

Maxson

....cool story bro

And I have nothing more to say.

UK student hacker sentenced over gaming Trojan

Maxson
Stop

Most likely because...

It's not illegal to own cracking software, It's pretty much only illegal to successfully use it. In the days of digital downloads, owning the files to some software without a license key is a very grey area.

Most cases of software "theft" aren't criminal offences, they're civil offences, which means that a case is only brought forward if the software's Intellectual Property owner brings a case forward, to successfully win a civil case you need a "balance of probabilities" which essentially means you need to prove your property rights have been trodden on, if someone unsuccessfully tries to steal software, but causes no further damage (to the software owner, in this case they damaged themselves but can't sue themselves) then there's no reasonable grounds for a civil offence case.

Teenage duo sentenced over credit card Ghostmarket

Maxson
Alert

Jesus Jones

So if I leave my front door unlocked it should be legal to steal mine and other people's stuff, then I should be flogged for having my shit stolen?

Steven Moffat fumes over Doctor Who plot leak

Maxson

Storytelling isn't JUST surprises, Steven

Don't get me wrong, I can kind of see how he's upset, but if his storytelling's key element is surprises then he must be a fairly poor writer, good quality writing can engross you even without a surprise, I've seen the godfather a good half a dozen times, and I'm not so forgetful that I forget

[spoilers]

They shot sonny on the causeway

[/spoilers]

Setting the scene and writing first class dialogue are important too, though I suppose everyone just assumes this is the work of the director.

Nintendo confirms Wii 'successor'

Maxson

right now it's called "Project cafe"

....but surely the obvious name is WII (W two)?

Smartphones eat games handhelds and cameras for lunch

Maxson
Stop

I think somebody missed something

The thing is, it's not necesarily sales that the iphone is stealing from cameras and traditional handhelds, it's sales that'recreated by the popularity of the device. I highly doubt that any self respecting photography enthusiast who'd previously own a Nikon D90 would buy an iphone, it's just that iphones have become popular and expanded the market.

I generally appreciate what Pachter has to say, but he'd be the first to admit that he's been wrong before.

Asus Eee Pad Slider

Maxson

If they can get it near as possible to £300 or lower

Then definitely, I'll be getting one, I fancy an android tab and this sounds like a good idea.

EA dubs Nintendo Wii a 'legacy platform'

Maxson

I imagine it's because....

The Wii sold well because of it's quirky bullshit, as sales began to slow, the two competitors needed their own quirky bullshit, it just happens that theirs is better tech.

Maxson

In terms of pure hardware...

....It should be slightly more powerful than the original xbox, but Wii developers are incredulously lazy.

WTF is... cloud gaming?

Maxson
Thumb Down

Dear me...

Don't get me wrong, but your logic is kinda flawed....Bad Company 2 just got a paid expansion that included less new stuff than the average WoW content patch, and generally there's 2-3 of those per year....you're paying for continual new content, and access to 6 years worth of old content....plus people frequently play WoW many hours per day every day for a long time, lots of people do that on Bad company as well (you can tell, those bastard medics infuriate me with their rank 50 and their killing me for a billion miles away with their stupid LMGs), but it's more common in WoW, and if you want to play WoW for just 1 month it's £5-10 for a starter box, not many new £40 games are worth playing for more than a few days....

also: Read the goddamn article, it states there is a permanent purchase of the game option (less than the high street boxed price) and also an "unlimited access" option that gets you full access to all the games under a catchall price per month, that gets you lots and lots of games for you money per month.

Maxson

I like the idea

Part of me likes the idea of OnLive (I've had an eye on it for some time) part of me still clings to the old ways. The notion of running 720p and having about 80MS response time (if I'm lucky, and I do consider it "response time" as it's the time between pressing a button and seeing the repercussions of this button press) is fairly unacceptable for someone who's always put down the money for a really good PC over the last 10 years (if you go for upper mid-range it's not monumentally expensive like it used to be). Maybe when common internet connections get faster this will be a good idea, but really, how much can the latency be lowered by?

People bitch that monitors don't have 8ms response time or better, so is it really likely that up to 150 ms would be acceptable? That's an amount generally considered intolerable in online games nowadays....will we soon be claiming "LAG!!"? in single player?

Dragon Age II

Maxson
Pint

I'd agree with you there....

...If not for the massive differences all round in the game, some of them good, some of them bad. Sequels are frequently massively different. For instance Star wars I through III were utter bollocks. I'd never review something as a great Star Wars movie, I would review it as a great MOVIE, even as a continuation of a series, a product should be judged and reviewed on it's own. There's nothing wrong with comparisons, I agree, the first game was better in comparison, but the game should not be reviewed in comparison.

I blame a numerical rating system for this as it forces people to assume that a title rated 8/10 is identically as good to another 8/10. A good example of this is that on Metacritic, the user rating for Halo 2 on PC is 5.2/10 Dragon age 2 is scored 4.1/10 purely because some people are rating it 0/10 Can you honestly tell me that a weak Xbox sequel ported to PC 3 years too late is better than this game?

The fact is, people have rated this game based on the amount they liked the first game, which many hardcore RPG players I know called "baby's first RPG" Origins wasn't some mystical godlike game it was just a very good game that was kind of dumb. I'm smart enough to not think I'm above playing games which are kinda dumb.

Additionally, and finally:

While you say it's a continuation of a series, again, I'd point out that that's not really a fair comparison, it's not "the continuing adventures of", it may as well not be a sequel to Dragon Age: Origins, it features very few of the same characters, it's almost entirely set elsewhere. Maybe it'd be better to think of it as a spinoff?

Good game, sadly flawed. Sequel to a great game, Sadly flawed.

Maxson

Comparison != review

Why is everyone rating this game in comparison to Dragon Age: Origins? The title should stand on it's own, not how good it is - in your mind - when compared to it's prequel

Maxson
WTF?

You misunderstand what a review should be...

A review shouldn't be a comparison to anything, the game should be rated as it's own product unless it is an addon to another product. Comparing it to dragon age origins should not lower it's score. The score is given for the product, not for the product in relation. Think how you'd feel about it if DA:O Never existed.

The game is good, I'd rate it late 70s early 80s if I must give it a number. I admit to being a bit disappointed with some of it's oversimplifications, but I'm also very pleased with the fact combat now doesn't feel as though it lumbers along, and the fact the game looks considerably better than it's prequel, especially when it comes to facial textures and animations.

As for your points:

-I found nightmare harder than DA:O on it's hardest difficulty, and I've completed DA:O with 0 main character deaths on it's highest difficulty playing a gimped rogue.

-I am a little disappointed that Fenris looks like he's from Final Fantasy

-OTT animations? they've removed a lot of the ridiculous finishing moves, though seriously, you're essentially complaining about "OTT" because of what? Who said the game needs to look none OTT? They're shooting fireballs from their hands.

-Agreed on overhead view, this is frustrating =/

-Agreed on map reuse, I really don't like this, it feels very lazy, but even ignoring that, the game has more to do than most recent games.

-Agreed on the storage chest....what were they thinking?

Page: