Posts by Ironclad
32 posts • joined Friday 10th June 2011 15:47 GMT
Posted in Trip the fight fantastic
Re: A few comments
"In car terms both of them have (console / PC) have an engine which produces 500bhp. But the PC weighs in at 3 tonnes and only has rear wheel drive. The console weighs in at 1.7 tonnes and is 4 wheel drive. It's lighter and has more grip off the line (sorry I've been watching a lot of top gear lately)"
Ok, it's Friday and post lunch so I'll take that car analogy challenge and raise it some:
The PC can be fitted with superior cooling and then have the CPU and Graphics Card overclocked (Nitrous and Turbocharged), it can also be fitted with an SSD drive (slick tyres?) while the console has to be stock clocked or even underclocked in order to avoid overheating it's tiny box . So the PC is the drag racer, while the console is the production line machine. If you watched Top Gear a few weeks back when they drove around the U.S.A you'll know how that turned out.
Plus joypads suck, keyboards and mice for teh win.
+1 for Rollerball
I'd put Rollerball in there. Not just for it's depiction of escalating violence for entertainment but also it's vision of a future dominated by large corporations.
Logan's Run is another with a very big idea at it's core, a post-apocalyptic society
where euthanasia is enforced in order to preserve limited resources. Bleak, but certainly
makes you think.
Posted in Twenty classic arcade games
Virtua Fighter
...the game that launched dozens of '3d' beat-em-ups
Amidar - weird game where you play a paint roller
Jump Bug - a game I was so addicted to that on holiday in Spain once I used to play a broken cabinet version that had a small electric current running through the metal joystick with my hand wrapped in a t-shirt until the tingling became too intense.
How much to play Monopoly?
Come on Lenovo, £1058 for a table top computer and the best you can come up with is touch screen Monopoly and a virtual roulette wheel?
Could have least got a Worms or Civilization port up and running.
D- for imagination. Must try harder.
What he said
Have to agree with Avatar.
Halo just scraped a few bits from various PC shooters, stuck em together in a cliched sci-fi environment and marketed it at 10-year olds.
"Master Chief" come on give me a break.
Next stop James Bond renamed Agent Spy.
Minimum Legal Payout
Surely the real scandal is the Statutory Redundancy pay which is currently capped at £430 per year of service (roughly).
When first introduced in 1965 it was £40.
The current equivalent of which would be around £638.
Makes it much cheaper for international companies to lay-off employees in the UK compared to the rest of Europe.
Of course it also makes it attractive for companies to hire in the UK knowing they can divest themselves of staff at relatively low cost.
Not sure that really makes for a solid basis for a stable economy.
Had to know about the green hair
Apparently the hot water stripped copper from the pipes in new houses:
http://www.thelocal.se/37994/20111217/
Douglas Quaid
Everybody knows there are huge reactors under the surface of Mars just waiting to generate a breathable atmosphere.
I saw a rather disturbing documentary on it a while back.
Presented by Arnold Schwarzenegger I think.
I could be confused.
Too late
I also got tired of waiting and bought a Nexus 7.
Think Amazon have missed a trick. By the time they launch the Fire 2 here a large chunk of the market will already have a rival tablet, either Apple or Android.
Looking in the wrong places
There is good drama on British TV you just have to know where to look.
I find many BBCs headline dramas (with the exception of the excellent Shadow Line last year)
derivative and as you say often 'made for export' but get off the beaten track away from
crime and kitchen-sink dramas and you have the likes of Sherlock, Channel 4's Misfits, BBC3's
Being Human and The Fades.
In addition for every Sopranos and The Wire US TV churns out plenty of dross.
Just look at Channel5's schedule and the turgid remake of The Killing.
Good drama doesn't need technology, just needs a bit of imagination.
Posted in Streetfighter 2: The World Warrior
The reason I bought a SNES
This was the sole reason behind my purchase of a SNES, lost many hours to trying to complete it, broke several joypads through throwing them down in disgust and even bought a programmable joystick to try and finish it with some of the trickier characters. Ahh happy days.
Deep Thought
If the LHC suggests another, bigger LHC should be built then the Douglas Adams estate is due some royalties.
Posted in HTC One V Android smartphone
vs Xperia Arc S
I seriously looked at this phone for my first smartphone purchase but in the end I plumped for the Sony Ericsson Experia Arc S which can now be had for around £250 sim free.
The Arc S has this beaten on most fronts (bigger screen, faster processor, more memory, better camera) but I would say that it doesn't feel nearly as solid and well put together as the wife's HTC Desire S.
Posted in Will Nvidia 'n' pals pwn future gaming?
Meh
Still don't see it happening anytime soon for a couple of reasons:
1) If I'm interpreting those latency charts correctly and you're looking at 160ms as your 'ping' then that's way too slow, I'm just a kean amateur FPSer but even I know anything over 100 is bad.
2) Bandwidth - if you're piping all that graphical data to an end user rather than just exchanging a few bits and bytes of positional info you are quickly going to eat up your monthly allowance or exceed your 'fair usage' policy (for 'unlimited' users). The ISPs would have to have a vested interest in providing very fast unlimited connections.
Posted in Vote now for the worst movie NEVER made
Only one vote ?
I so want to vote for 3-4 of those.
Then pledge money so that they are never made.
The money would pay for a superhacker modeled after the 'girl with the dragon tattoo' who monitors potential suspects e-mail and assassinates them at the first mention of any of those titles.
Sounds familiar
All valid points but isn't this fundamentally the same article as this one:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/17/f35_carriers_plot_by_bae_and_raf/
Bah !
Deleted my copy of MW3 at the weekend. Got fed up of all the haxors in multi-player.
With no proper dedicated servers, no votekick option and no sign of the promised Elite option, PC players are shafted with the CoD series.
Will avoid fervently.
BOFH vs Steve Bong
Now there's a crossover that'd rival Marvel's best.
P.S. enjoyed the article, keep it up, somebody needs to keep pointing out the emperor is stark bollock naked.
Thumbs up
"Let there be dinge" resulted in serious drink spillage.
Love it.
It's all broken from the top down
When senior execs can make enough money in 3-5 years to live comfortably without ever having to work again then short term-ism is inevitable.
Until we get independent analysis and stringent long term performance clauses in executive pay it will continue unabated.
Payoffs and bonuses should be linked to companies performance 5-10 years after the exec's leave the organisation. So the company's fortunes nosedive during your tenure and after you leave you get nothing.
So is it only me who looked at that picture.....
....and thought The Big Bang Theory ?
From left to right, Raj, Howard, Leonard, Sheldon.
Friday caption competition anyone ?
Posted in So, what IS the worst film ever made?
Santa Claus Conquers the Martians
Many many years ago at a sci-fi convention in Cardiff I sat through this drivel at about 3am in the morning.
Even drunk and sleep deprived it's sheer awfulness left a lasting impression.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058548/
Does it tiny tiny chicanes ?
or is is just me thinking 'World's Smallest Scalextric Set' ?
Prior Art
I can hear the CEO at Sodastream on the phone to a patent lawyer right now.
Rematch
I'm with Arrrggghh-otron that's a pretty anaemic quesadilla.
Throw in some chopped chillis, chicken and chorizo and bring it on.
Bloody Hell
Fascinating and scary as hell.
Chip and PIN
Difficult to cast comment with out technical info but a few questions spring to mind
Option 1) seems to forget that Chip and PIN ever happened. Whatever it's potential vulnerabilities it has reduced Point of Sale fraud significantly http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/10/uk_plastic_fraud/
It also assumes banks will be happy to handle transactions received from retailers that use a phone number instead of a card number. This would not be a trivial change. There are quite a few ISO standards that dictate how this stuff should work. Alternatively retailers would have to implement enhanced terminals or software to dial a unique PayPal authorisation system. Neither of these sound cheap.
Option 2) fits the existing infrastructure better but then why not use your credit or debit card ? In addition as previous posters have pointed out there's the question of legal protection.
Option 3) employing door lurkers to check the receipt on your phone doesn't sound like a cost saving and would seem to just move the queue from the checkout to the door. Plus the difficulties in verifying the receipt seem complex.
Interested to hear more, but doesn't sound like a sea change in payments processing to me.
Apple to sue IKEA.....
.....claim Skarsgaaard chair imitates 'look and feel' of iPlank.
Vertical launch through a ring of balloons
Just a thought but could you not tether say four balloons via a lightweight but rigid ring ?
The ring would attach to the 'basket' holding the rocket which could be positions for a vertical launch.
Assuming you know how much the ballons will expand before launch the ring would have to have sufficient diameter that there's still a hole to launch through.
Portmanteau.
Surely ballocket is a better portmanteau than rockoon?
Illuminati - how to waste an afternoon
Grab 4-6 mates, a crate of beer, settle down and prepare to waste a thoroughly enjoyable afternoon playing Illuminati. Just don't be surprised if you never trust those mates again.
