Posts by wowfood
741 posts • joined Thursday 5th April 2012 12:33 GMT
Re: Overpopulation
Yes I would Kent.
Reminds me of Steve from Microsoft. Steve kept calling us and eventually I was the one who got the phone. His opening was actually a pretty good american accent, until he said Steve in a distinctive indian tone. I just kept him on the phone until he gave up on his american accent completely, it proved to be a few minutes of entertainment.
If you have nothing better to do, just keep them talking as long as possible, it can be quite entertaining.
Re: I ain't Spartacus WTF....?
Become a lawyer.
Re: You could have warned us that this story contained "Winner" - I have a delicate constitution!
Bring out the jelly!
Re: Eadon?
If it was, I hope he didn't visit my profile.
Re: You don't know what it's like......
And on the other hand the guys in IT were thinking. "This is the fifth time we've had to fix a PC she's used this month, what the hell is that daft blond doing?"
I don't see why
the whole "ermahgerd it don't suppert legacy" thing is such a big deal. Up until ps2, no console supported legacy.
Can I play my nes games on my snes? nope, snes on my n64? nope, n64 on lamecube? nope. I honestly don't mind the whole lack of legacy thing and it's not really a deal breaker for me.
I mean lets face it, most legacy games are only played for the purpose of nostalgia (I still play ff7 every now and then) or because the new console doesn't have enough games yet.
As for the 'no used games' bit, that irks me slightly but at the same time I think it might actually be better for consumers. In the last few years we've had games that come with DLC, whether it be online mode, multiplayer mode, or key parts to the game itself (robin in arkham city) those DLC are being sold between £15 and £12.99 and yet you're still getting stores like GAME selling these games pre-owned for about £2 less then the game would be brand new, and people are buying it while losing out on the DLC so are technically paying more if they want the full game.
Now if the pre-owned market wasn't such a rip off it wouldn't be quite so bad. (I walked out of GAME with a large stack of games once, 7 games and they offered me £2.50 for them, most of these games were on sale pre-owned for £20 each) but as it is right now, I'm almost in support of blocking off pre-owned games.
Besides, if microsoft block pre-owned but sony don't, all that'll happen is these companies will continue to put in built in DLC for £10 or however much, and then customers will be ripped off even worse with the pre-owned section. End result is (hopefully) people realize that pre-owned is not the way to go anymore and they buy new anyway.
As a final note, kinda bored of all the comparisons of used games to used cars. You buy a games console and that's it, you have th console and the games and the car companies have their money. You buy a used car, you still (with a lot of them) need to buy tha tspecial toyota crank shaft which is the only one that fits your car without modifications. Used cars still make money for the manufacturer, used games do not. Y'know unless you buy a lot of DLC
Re: Watch the trend...
So what you're saying is the next doctor should be Justin Bieber? And he should be shot repeatedly by each of Doctor Whos enemies while simultaniously being kicked in the groin?
Would be good if the iWatch wasn't a watch at all, bu a portale blu-ray player.
It'd be nice
If they did a 2 round voting system on this, I mean with the number of candidates there will be many who'll likely only get one or two votes, (normally from the guy who proposed them)
I'd say unless there's a clear winner, as per elections, a second ballot is held with only the top few candidates from the previous round. That or somebody at El Reg could program a new voting system so that people can select a second choice candidate.
Wow
He sounds super cereal. If we don't stop the climate change and stop polluting the atmosphere then ManBearPig will take over the earth.
Re: Welp
I wrote a report at uni on the quality of graphcis vs gameplay. The general thesis of it was along the following lines.
Year 0, 8 bit games had extremely limited graphics and sound capabilities, the only way to sell a game was to focus almost entirely on the gameplay aspect. Some of the best of this genre were the text based games as they had no graphical foucs.
Year 1. Poor quality graphics and audio focus is still on gmeplay over graphics.
*fast forward*
Modern games (PS generation) graphics are now a key score on reviews matching gameplay. The developers started to focus on graphics more, but there was still a rather low ceiling on what could be done, so this was probably a fairly golden transition phase. Good graphics and a focus on gameplay.
PS2 generation, the graphical roof was raised and gameplay was focused on less and less, graphics continued to get more and more focus in reviews.
PS3 generation, pretty much no ceiling anymore, and a flood of FPS clones since the gameplay already exists without any additional effort.
There are of course games out there which have a focus on graphics and gameplay. But more often than not the gameplay is tacked on to make use of graphics and physics features, rather than graphics and physics features being designed to make the gameplay stand out.
£350 million
So what they're saying is they're paying them by giving each of the managers free rail travel for the year.
Re: Ain't no poet neither
I'd consider most of these limericks more than poems.
There once was a pretty young filly
to impress without looking too silly
I said, not to boast
I make great cheese on toast
Would you like a mouthfull of my... Piccalilli.
Re: @James Pickett
It depends, if you're a zuke it goes on top, if you're a Yook it goes on top, if you're a Zook it goes on bottom, those filthy uncultured zooks.
Re: Women + IT
Eurydice, let me reword what I'm saying since you seem to be misunderstanding. I'm not saying all women are inept at building furniture or other such traditional 'male' tasks. What I am saying is that studies, scientific studies have documented a different set of thought patterns among men and women based on estrogen and testosterone concentrations during the pre-birth period in the womb. And to a lesser extent the levels after that period.
Those with highest testosterone concentrations are generally better at tasks which involve logical thinking and spacial awareness, while those who have higher estrogen concentrations tend to be better at tasks involving memory and attention to detail etc.
These have been classified as a male mindset and a female mindset based upon the estrogen and testosterone levels.
There are women with ''male' minds, and men with 'female' minds.
I know numerous men who have female minds, and I know numerous women with male minds. This is not saying that women can't put together a piece of ikea furniture, it's saying that those with a female wired brain are generally less adept at doing so than those with a 'male' wired brain.
It is not a swipe at women, or at men, merely the way that our brains are genetically wired from conception.
Here's a second, more accurate link to do with that BBC program I mentioned before.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/sexsecrets/programmes.shtml
Makes me glad that, the first thing I did for out router was change the DNS. Although I forget which DNS I changed us to, any recommendations out there other than OpenDNS? (I think I set us up on OpenDNS)
Re: I'd never trust non-techies with Windows online.
I can probably get my dad using linux just fine, I was going to install it on his old laptop to try and give it a second lease on life. But my mum is, for lack of a better word, computer inept.
She still asks me what to do when a popup appears on screen, she used to be afraid of unplugging the computer incase she lost all the data.
It's not so much that she wouldn't grasp how it worked eventually, it's more a case of I don't want to have to teach her how to do things again, she's one of the folks where she'll ask about everything, and how every aspect works. I just don't have the patience to go through all that again.
Re: Women + IT
Can't help but agree with this. I remember watching a show a while back about the male / female brain. I'm not talking about male as in the brain a man has, but male as in a thinking type more commen to men.
They took men and women from two distinctly male / female professions and gave them a series of tests. Those in traditionally male professions did better on the active / doing tests (such as building an ikea cupboard, they didn't even need the instructions) whereas the female brain type failed miserably at this test (they didn't even get the frame built by the time the other team finished, and then they gave up)
Women aren't in IT because the majority of womens brains aren't wired right for it, the same way there are fewer empathetic men in nursing etc. We can't change the industry to attract more women because there aren't that many more women to attract. A woman in IT is like a male hairdresser. There really aren't that many of them, but the ones who are there are damn good at what they do.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/sex/add_user.shtml
Re: Well-intentioned but ...
I'm glad you put "Compared to wholesale prices" in there. My first thought was "Apple and Low Price? Isn't that an oxymoron?" until I read that.
Re: I'd never trust non-techies with Windows online.
I would love to do the same thing except there's a couple problems.
1: My parents aren't smart enough to use Linux, it took me long enough to teach my mum to use windows for gods sakes
2: I still refuse to pay over the odds for a mac, ditto for the rest of my family.
Instead, when a non tech person I know gets a new laptop / PC, the first thing I do is look up what is currently rated the best free anti-virus (since it seems to change yearly) then install that, malwarebytes, spyware blaster / spybot S&D. Stops them getting spyware, and removes any that may be on there.
Of course this may change next time somebody buys a new computer, who knows what the current standings of various security software are right now.
Compared to others
The BE unlimited policy is pretty darn fair. And it's not like they're the only company who advertises unlimited + fair use policy.
I'd rather see the ASA ban advertising "unlimited" altogether and force ISPs to advertise honestly, such as Uncapped broadband, or to reveal their traffic shaping policies if they have any.
Brain controlled Arms, brain controlled Helicopters, what next? Brain controlled lawyers.
I've said it before, I think when it comes to digital media the agency model is quite possibly the best approach so far as a fair deal to the publisher and the storefront. However I still wish that this agency model took the steps to deliver the ebook items at below cost, while giving the 'agency' the option to lower their cut, and pass that amount on as savings to the end user. That way although every seller might ship the book at £10, making £7 for themselves, the storefront can choose to sell it at below that value down to £7.
Noel Fielding
The guy would make a damn fine Doctor if you ask me.
Re: It occurs to me...
Crowdsourcing is good, but make sure you work in the words "the cloud" in there somewhere. Something along the lines of
Making use of a virtual storage location to facilitate crowdsourcing via a web3.0 interface in order to validate new patents which will be accessible via a repository in the cloud.
With that many buzzwords, people will throw money at you for your idea, even if it makes no sense at all.
Re: Ultrabook debacle
They invented the ultra thin laptop the same way they invented the popular tablet platform.
Re: Double the power of existing Intel graphics
So DirectX / openGL are the problem and not Intels hardware, insptie of the fact that both run fine on nVidia graphics chips, including those baked onto ARM, likewise with AMDs graphics solution that runs standalone, and is also baked onto AMD chips, and works better than intel.
Nope everything else working well is clearly no evidence at all, must be the APIs instead.
Re: Costs
But at the same time those costs are normally in a single one off starting fee to buy the rights, normally a couple hundered, maybe a few thousand for more established authors, in the case of authors not established at all they actually pay the publisher. And after that all payments are royalty based, normally a fraction of the cost of the retail price, pennies per book / cd.
And generally the author is only paid up front if it's for a series of books.
So the fact that the author is still taking a cust is really a very minor one. (about 10% before tax I think I read, and I imagine that 10% is on the profit, not on the actual cost of the book itself, so a $7.99 book isn't 79c profit, it's probably closer to 29c)
The final costs are still very much in warehouse, distribution and production. Of course there are the added fees of proofreading etc, but more and more of this is being done electronically, and then fixed in later versions by hand as fans et al point out spelling mistakes.
With ebooks it suddenly became even easier to address these problems.
Re: Ha
Actually bringing that up reminds me of a news story I read many moons ago, probably a daily fail thing I can't remember.
Basically it was a guy getting into trouble because he advertised that he only wanted English people to work in his resteraunt. His arguement was that the polish store down the road only hired polish people, and he was just saving foreigners from wasting their time applying for a job they wouldn't get.
Mind you it was a few years back. Probably one of the PC gone wrong complaints. Or some facet being missed deliberately if it was in the DF.
Re: Y'know what'd be great
What if you're hiring a doctor? Wouldn't ugly handwriting be a prerequisite?
Y'know what'd be great
If they did interviews in a similar way to "The Voice".
First round get qualifications only so you can offer round two interviews to those qualified.
Round two interviews have a written test,
Round three interviews, have a phone interviews with the remaining applicants.
Round four have a final in person interview with the remaining 2 or 3 candidates at once in a 'head to head' interview.
That way you couldn't really be accused (until the final round) of hiring based on looks / gender / ethnicity / religion because you don't know any of that stuff until the final round (or possibly the phone round if they have a thick accent)
Re: Pride comes before a fall
There not their. Perhaps if Apple et al hadn't pushed up the price of books you could have learned which was the correct spelling.
(I feel I must point out this is meant to be tongue in cheek)
Re: But why??
Live action Fantasia? I can get behind that.
Re: Perhaps a little research ?
I honestly cannot remember which distro or which application it was. The application didn't come from a package manager, and the distro didn't come with any built in way to install the application.
I had to extract the application via the command line, manually find and install the dependencies and then insatll the application. It may have been an ass about face way of doing it, there may have been a package somewhere which had a very similar / the same appliation but this was a fair time ago, and the help on the linux forums was... well there wasn't any really.
I THINK the distro was Mandriva, and it was around 2000 I tried it if I remember rightly. It put me off Linux for a few years, but now I'm using Mint perfectly happily.
Posted in Amazon faces its third strike in Germany
I can't
really see why anyone is commenting on either side at the moment without facts. It's all well and good saying in England it was slave labour, or they're getting paid too little / too much. But we don't know how much they're getting paid, or what their overtime / nightshift pay is like so how can we comment on it for either side?
All I'll say is that minimum wage should be raised to a 'living wage' level so people can actually survive off what they earn. If the germans are getting below the living wage for their area then more power to them, let them barter for better basic pay and a decent bonus for overtime etc. If they're getting a living wage, then it's unskilled labour and in my view they should be happy, although they may still have a case on nightshifts / overtime if it's at a basic pay rate rather than time and a bit.
Of course this is all conjecture, so anyone here work for Amazon germany who can enlighten us to the working conditions and pay rates?
Re: So in summary..
Agreed. I consider myself to be a fair bit of a geek, but it took me almost a decade to start using linux propperly. And even now I still have windows on my main PC for games (although that may change soon, fingers crossed)
Up until the last few years Linux was almost unusable for me. Even installing basic apps I needed to go trawling through the internet to find the specific command line needed to extract the package and installl it, and then I needed to find where it was installed to and use another command to create a shortcut to it.
Now it's so much easier. Although I've migrated over to MATE on Mint, I know not a huge leap from MS guis, but baby steps right?
Lets be honest here though, Microsoft didn't hold back Linux, at least not directly, linux held back linux along with devs. First it wasn't user friendly enough, now it's fragmented as heck. Originally nothing ran on Linux aside from special linux only apps, now more and more stuff is avaliable on the web, or on linux as well as on MS software.
I'd honestly love to see a few of these extra GUIs merged back together, if only to see a more concerted effort. I'd rather see 3 interfaces which are drastically different to one another, than 7 which are all very very similar.
Of course that kinda defeats the purpose of an open infrastructure I guess.
So as well as spending large amounts of money to bring in relatively profitless companies under the Yahoo name, they're also losing areas of their income from business, which will no doubt increase since this kind of thing is normally a rolling rock situation.
Place your bets on who's buying Yahoo!, facebook, microsoft or google.
Re: Why Kidz?
Not really no.
Re: But I don't wear a watch either...
I'd buy it if it came with a build in mini taser.
Every watch needs a built in mini taser.
Re: Why Kidz?
Google glass could be amazingly useful for folks like me, who can't put a name to a face even when it's their own family.
Google glass facial recognition. Looking at... "Barney".
Would make life so much easier / so much less complicated.
Re: Glasses.
As a man who wears glasses here are the three things I cannot stand when it comes to glasses.
1: Douchebag hipsters wearing thick frames because it makes them look 'cool' apparently, no you look like a douche
2: Douchbag twats who wear a pair of shades on their forehead / over the top of their caps because it makes them look cool. Once again no, you look like a douche.
3: The price. Why oh why do they cost so freakin' much. Go down town, see a pair you like which are hipster made and they're like, £10. Go to specsavers and you're looking at £125 for anything that doesn't look like it was made for a grandad. And that's before extras like reactions or ultrathin.
Short version. Glasses for those who need them are too expensive, and if you get them when you don't need them you're just a douchebag.
Re: Icon, for obvious reasons
Skynet?
I thought they were developing the sentinal program. First they'll build sentinals to fight their wars for them, and then they'll build master mold to build the sentinals, and control them on their behalf.
That is when the world is truely doomed.
Re: Zukenburgs response
By something stupid to the above, I mean a friend of mine who punched herself in the face while she was asleep.
Zukenburgs response
Come back to me when it's not that time of the month, in the meantime if you want the site cleaned up do it yourself, that's what women are good for isn't it?
I honestly only see one major problem with this, (not the above sentence there are lots of problems with that) there are going to be people who fail to see where the line is drawn. No longer allowed to show bruised women? What about news reports? I know the group says they only want the ones making out violence to be a joke removed, but there's bound to be somebody who shares a story of a video and makes a smart alic comment at one point of it. And that will get removed even though it shares quite a serious story.
Or the people who post pictures of themselves. I've had pictures of friends who've posted online with black eyes etc, normally because of something stupid. If new rules are passed although those pictures aren't the targets, there's bound to be somebody who interperets it that way and removes it.
Removing violence against a certain gender / race / blah is all well and good if it's done across the board, but just targetting one group will normally lead to it being... over moderated?
Re: You mean...
Yeah, £5 to that chinese guy down the market. Thanks to him I have Windo's 8 and a copy of Office 364 and it cost me next to nothing, mwah ha ha.
Re: Piracy is actually HELPING to sell these products...
I'm going with the idiot manager theory.
http://search.dilbert.com/comic/Cloud%20Computing
Companies are still stuck on office 2003 because they don't want to upgrade. Solution? Tack 'cloud' onto the latest release and they fish are sure to bite.
That and I'm sure part of it is the flawed logic that if all pirates were stopped from pirating they'd buy stuff legally. That's like saying if you cut a rapists penis off he'll only have sex consensually.
I apologize now for comparing piracy to rape. As I'm sure the MPAA have made abundantly clear, piracty is far worse.
I would imagine
Part of that, at least in major hospitals, is due to the drunk and beligerant you get in on friday and saturday after drinking just that bit too much.
10 surgeons for 10 schedualed cases, sure not that much of a problem.
10 surgeons for 10 schedualed cases, and a nurse popping in every few mintues. "We have another stab victim" can probably put you off your game. And even if they aren't actively bothering you it must be in the back of your mind, "the moment I get out of here, I'm gonna have to stitch up some drunk guy who got in a fight with a car window"
Re: The perfect target.
That or they're all collected under one roof for a big buyout from Microsoft / Google / Facebook for a discount price once Yahoo finally dies.
My money is on facebook since many of these are companies Facebook was rumoured to be interested in in the past.
Also they need a tinfoil hat avatar.
So
Does this make use of Webkit as in Webkit, or Webkit as in Blink.
/
Does Blink exist anymore, or did google drop it before it picked up.
