Posts by Peter Kay 647 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Feb 2007
A 64 bit Windows version is, as with most other software, not included by default. Considering they've been creating official builds throughout the process, how much effort would it have required to add it?
To be honest, not terribly impressed. It's faster but still tends to freeze at times. It's only a bit of inertia stopping me checking out Iron and IE9..
I'm not a huge multiplayer fan. I don't do online gaming, and I like a strong story driven FPS.
That's probably why my favourite FPS is Jedi Knight. Granted, I enjoyed Doom (but not Doom 2), Rise of The Triad, Duke Nukem 3D, Quake and Quake 2 (I haven't played much more modern FPS). I thought the move to the Quake III era of no single player campaign and endless bot/online fights was a tremendous step backwards.
I'd far sooner travel through a level where the objective is obtaining an item, rather than killing everything, then finding out that obtaining it causes the spaceship you're rushing through to plunge to the ground leaving three real time minutes to get to an exit.
That's much more fun than any number of monster kills.
Check out the Steam user who lost access to all their games because they asked about selling their account.
If you're smart, you'll only use Steam for cheap games and buy the rest either DRM free or on a DVD that has a serial number or that can be cracked in the future.
I still have games pre 1992 that I run. I do wonder if I can run current games in another 19 years..
I may have had a few beers, but let's get down to brass tacks :
1) Is twitter making money? Apparently not
2) You're advocating rival clients rather than advertising? Where's the income stream?
Don't get me wrong, I like twitter and will disappear if they flood my twitter feed with ads. However, twitter are making absolutely no money from me, they don't provide sufficient value to make me pay for it (or to be more accurate, the value I place on it is extremely low - 5 to 10 quid a year, absolute maximum and that's allowing for various events twitter has informed me of).
Involve third parties? Absolutely. Not if they aren't willing to provide revenue either directly or indirectly though..
Still, I'll admit the most of the time it's the Internet you want to access rather than an Intranet.
In any case, other objections should be obvious :
1) Lynx is not large and a system is not about to stop working by not shipping a media player..
2) The software respository might be blocked in the firewall
3) It requires a download. This is not necessarily free, or reliable, or fast.
4) In the event of a failure to root prompt, if I remember correctly there is no help to speak of. Using apt-get requires remembering to use apt-get, whilst at least an installation of lynx means the documentation can be studied.
5) It's one more thing that can break. Installation of programs requires a working installation infrastructure. If it's there by default, this is less important.
6) apt-get requires an accessible repository. I cannot remember if there are fallback repositories, but it does not help if you have a dead box and no record of alternate repositories.
In short, the argument would be much better applied to superfluous functionality such as games, music players etc
Such as a default installation of lynx and preferably also screen/tmux and gcc.
OpenBSD gets this one right - it's possible to fix things from the root prompt when things go wrong. If you want to browse the web on a broken Ubuntu box you were out of luck, at least in earlier releases (not tried the latest one yet)
If someone is buying a 5990, they'll have a one or more monitors to go with it. It's one of the few cards that can run Crysis on maximum detail, at full 30" TFT resolution and never drop below 30fps (much cheaper cards can generally match the speed, but their minimum frame rate can drop below 20fps)
AMD has been strongly pushing Eyefinity, and at particularly high resolutions using beefy games, a top end graphics card will be required.
It's overkill for the rest of us, though. For most people buying an AMD card the only reasons to go beyond a 6850/6870 are either a) exhausting heat outside the case (this is why I went for a 6950) or b) double precision floating point support
Loved Rebel Assault, would like to have played Rogue Squadron more, did play X Wing but I have to admit it was a bit too space sim for me - found it difficult at the time.
Have Lego Star Wars, KOTOR2 and Jade Empire here in shrinkwrap but haven't tried any of them yet. I am aware the reviews of KOTOR2 and Jade Empire weren't good, but the games were fortunately cheap .. The rest of the titles I simply haven't tried.
There are of course the original Star Wars games available with arcade and home computer adaptations - bloody good. It's also true that although the Jedi Knight series were good, each new title lost a few little things - iMuse between Dark Forces and Jedi Knight and a light sabre that actually lights things between Jedi Knight and Outcast (I haven't finished Outcast, MotS or started Academy)
4 and 5 were alright, 6 not so much. 3 is actually better than 6 if you assume that everyone in the Star Wars universe is a moron. 1 and 2 are best left in the dustbin..
However, the computer games are fab. Dark Forces, Jedi Knight, Jedi Knight Outcast.. Currently playing through the stunning Knights of the Old Republic for the first time :)
The Arthurian legends are in reality a mixture of English, French and Welsh mythology. Apart from the finer details, this influence can be gathered from the very English title of Malory's books 'Le Morte d'Arthur'...
Alternatively you might want to check out The Quest of the Holy Grail (actually don't - it's a terribly tedious book with constant Christian symbolism and one dimensional characters) written by a Frenchman or the various other collections of myths, also written by the French.
It's all very well to say 'why doesn't someone make a more functional device with an e-ink' screen, but it misses reality.
e-ink doesn't update quickly and is thus completely unsuitable for most devices. The more it's used, the lower the battery life is - a key point of the Kindle.
It is possible to run apps on the Kindle, but in the US only (unless you jailbreak it). Overuse of apps will - surprise, surprise, lead to lower battery life..
I don't understand how you can describe a Kindle as weighty - it weighs considerably less than a hardback, not that more than a large paperback and vastly less than the dead tree equivalent of the 80 books and PDFs I have on mine.
It isn't perfect, but it is damned good as an e-reader - brilliant screen, can be read one handed squashed up on a train and offers the ability to find books recommended or vaguely remembered by friends there and then. You can't do that with dead tree.
There's a difference between direct translation emulation and adding in suitable features to make emulation easier. That doesn't necessarily breach any Intel IP.
I'd also like to see some benchmarks. Irix is now dead and buried, but the one thing owning SGI boxes teaches is suitability for tasks. My SGI O2 boxes can (if I had a fast disk subsystem and could be bothered) read in full frame PAL video, wrap it round a 3D object and write it out as compressed full frame video in realtime. Not too amazing now, but not bad for 1996. It's far too slow for modern software, though. Likewise, the MIPS R8000 was stonkingly fast at the time if software was specially tuned for it, but otherwise hideously slow.
The first free Doctor Who game was great, even if it was (understandably) targetted at kids. Worked well on a 3D monitor too..
This just makes the whole Who universe considerably more fun - the animated adventures and games were decent additions.
(can't comment about the novels and audio plays - never bothered with those)
Perhaps they've gone over the top with the toys, but I'm not complaining at this - provided they keep some of the nastier Internet elements under control..
Five months is one thing, six months is another - which is roughly how the development cycle of Android products and releases is going at the moment. As already mentioned, Android 3.0 is due out soon, so this product will be obsolete at launch.
Does the product do what it says? Yes it does - the same as the Creative Android tablet cum MP3 player. The supplemental question, though, is : should Android succeed? If so, all these flawed devices do not help.
Tony et al, can you please start trashing companies who don't implement the Android platform properly, or who you know even before launch will have minimal future proofing?
300 quid is not 'entry level' and the inability to upgrade is likely to drive even greater fragmentation of Android devices. It's precisely why I haven't bought one - Google are right, Android 2.2 is a phone OS scaled up, not a computer OS scaled down.
Apple must be laughing their socks off. I don't rate their platform at all, but a properly managed closed platform may well outperform a poorly structured 'open' platform where every new device seems to have a different marketplace.
You'd be much better recommending the Polaroid Pogo - works with most modern digital cameras and phones that have a decent bluetooth implementation (i.e. not an iPhone). Cracking fun at parties..
Also, the product and film are less than a third of the price and it comes in black, red and pink
Lynx is unusable for serious web browsing - I know, because I use it and elinks regularly (including right now).
The lack of graphics isn't necessary a huge problem, but the different font sizes and lacklustre (non existant : lynx, flawed : elinks) javascript support, plus the continual prompting when loading SSL pages and the need to mess around with the config file to make it half way viable.
Then there's the over zealous cacheing - lynx simply does not refresh pages when it should do. There's probably a config setting to fix this, but frankly I'm tired of fixing something that works in proper web browsers.
It is, however, ideal for emergency/casual use in constrained environments. The OpenBSD developers wisely ship it in the base system, and it should be included in almost every standard Linux distribution as without X or another system, obtaining files can be troublesome.
Fairytales don't exist in 99% of cases - if that's what someone expects, they need a severe hitting from a cluebat. It's perhaps reasonable, if optimistic, to want someone who fits into your life without compromises you'd rather not make.
Of course, this worked because it wasn't a fairytale - it's a situation where there must have been some (manufactured) common ground, and the ability for the woman to 'help' and provide some commitment to the 'relationship'.
How much time and money would I give up front? Not too much time if I hadn't met them, and no money. If I had met them, giving money is one of the fastest ways to break friendships and relationships..
..on the other hand, handing money - any money - to someone you've never met? Really?
Clue : it's not love if it isn't mutual, you've not met them and the 'love' hasn't actually been tested.
Also, cue unrealistic expectations.. Real person locally that requires compromise, or fantasy that doesn't exist elsewhere. hmmm...
They'll do you a hard wired Dvorak keyboard in PS/2 for about 50 quid (plus about another 20quid to ship to the UK.. best to get more than one - they're heavy beasts)
Either plug that direct into your computer or buy an Aten UC10KM or an Aten UC100KM to convert it to USB, and you're sorted :)
First, the review doesn't mention what form of communication the keyboard requires, which is important when there's plenty of interference in the environment.
More importantly, they're all a bag o'shite. Quiet, spongy keys? Eww..
Here's 50p kid, buy yourself a real keyboard : http://pckeyboards.stores.yahoo.net/
Get a lovely clicky keyboard with a variety of layouts and can be customised to your personal needs. Buckling spring rules!
I have tried various wireless keyboards and mice in the past, and have now standardised on a Unicomp Endura Pro and a Logitech MX518 - both wired..
The ergonomics on it are poor - try a bit harder than ripping off an iPod..
After using the Kindle for the past few weeks, I'm convinced side buttons are the way to go - the Kindle can be comfortably and securely held and pages easily turned, especially in space limited environments such as a crowded train.
The Orizon offers nothing new - for forty quid extra than a 3G Kindle the only vaguely interesting part of it is the SDHC slot.
Granted, you're right, and probably they should be run at a lower resolution - either the max 'standard' 1600x1200 which is well under the fully resolved dot pitch, or 1920x1440 which is just a nudge over what's probably possible.
However, it looks fine (if slightly small at times) due to the analogue nature of CRT. TFT scalers are better than they used to be, but missing out the occasional pixel will tend to have a much more jarring effect.
It might be a different matter if I was doing colour critical media editing, but fortunately I'm not.
I have two 2048x1536 monitors - they're 22" CRTs. The nearest equivalent TFT is a Dell U2711 at 2560x1440 costing 700 quid..
(Whenever people lambast me for keeping with an 'out of date' technology, I point out that 2x100 pound refurbished CRTs is a lot cheaper than close to 1.5K..)
How sensible is it to expect that a tablet with an extremely healthy profit margin is not only going to feature a hideously expensive very high pixel density panel, plus uprate the processor and graphics chipset to cope with it, and unnecessarily limit what software runs on the system.
It doesn't make sense - far more sensible to improve the display slightly, and run a faster graphics chip so that new applications become possible.
To state what *should* be bloody obvious, there's nothing wrong with open sourcing an old market provided :
1) You have your fingers in more than one pie, or use your income to exploit another dying market, as eventually the old market will die
2) Money is made from the services associated with the open source, customisation, etc.
It's business. If you can make money at it - why not? Don't sniff at CA because they're picking up products in decline. If CA are consistently making money with that strategy, than even if it's not sexy and new is it sensible to knock them? Really?
The whole point of Wikileaks is not the information released, or what Assange may or may not have done, but that it has mobilised slightly more of the general populace than usual to question authority. None of the information revealed so far has been even mildly surprising, or interesting, but it should drive people to check out both Wikileaks and other sites such as Cryptome.
If this is true I rather hope the rest of wikileaks sidelines Assange as soon as possible. This is not about one man.
..the technology that is, not the wristwatch.
It does neglect to state that a dualmode Bluetooth/BLE phone is required to communicate with the watch, but the ability to communicate at speeds higher than that of bonded ISDN isn't bad.
I do wonder how long continuous operation would be with a watch battery, but it's still impressive.
Nice title, but wrong picture (or an incorrect product).
The current (11th Doctor, Matt Smith) TARDIS has a St. John's Ambulance logo on the door, which is absent all the way back to the first four series (Doctor 1, William Hartnell).
(my Doctor Who geekiness extends to watching the programme and noting the difference, but not to knowing all the history - I thought the St. John's Ambulance sticker was a first with Doctor 11. Apparently not, see : http://www.themindrobber.co.uk/tardis-police-box.html)
Here, let me give you a bit of a clue stick :
1) Go and look at how many hardware platforms Windows Server 2008 supports. Clue : it's more than x86 and x64.
2) How many platforms did NT 4 support on release? It's more than one, and less than five..
By 'properly' I mean only when prices are low.
I've got several games off Steam, but I'm not going to buy anything at remotely approaching full price. It may work now, but it's dangerous to assume it will still do so in twenty years - I still (occasionally) play games from that era or earlier.
I did pay for the Orange Box, purely on the basis that it's always required Steam and buying the physical media gathered no advantage. I've kept to the rule of buying physical media for anything over a few quid though.
Can't say I'm surprised with Which's survey. £33 quid actualy sounds quite good to me - the shop has to make a profit and if the game is priced too close to the original item, who's going to bother buying it?
Technically the 'Doctor's daughter' is a clone, so he's marrying himself (I know, I know, they do look a bit different). Surely that's not allowed..
I wonder how many other Who marriages there have been - there's already precedence for a 'Time Lord' marriage when Tom Baker (fourth Doctor) briefly married Lalla Ward (Time Lady Romana). Of course, Lalla then went off and married Dawkins, so they're obviously subverting the universe from within..
Tankards will never return due to food hygiene laws - you're not allowed to re-use glasses without washing them.
I'm not sure I want to drink out a pewter tankard, and the glass ones are even more uncomfortable than the old handled pint glasses. There are a few pubs that you can get handled pint glasses in, but stock is usually limited and they're not offered to anyone that looks like they might cause trouble
If I wanted to fling birds around, I'd buy a Nintendo DS. Even if I wanted to browse from the sofa/bed I'd still prefer a keyboard as the responses I want to type extend beyond 'LOL'.
None of my social circle have one, but I have seen at least a couple on the train - being used in a variety of raised cases as a book. A book in huge iPad format, on a train, as opposed to a custom device like a Kindle. Boy, that's sensible.
Whilst Intel occasionally make claims about the gaming performance, that has never been their real focus. Their graphics chipsets provide decent 2D acceleration and video decoding with low power usage.
For laptops and general office productivity their chipsets are ideal. I have Intel chipsets in my work systems and my laptops and with few exceptions don't want/need more power. My home desktop which plays games as well as productivity, is of course a different matter.
There's a nice shiny shop with a huge carpark and multiple well tarmaced slip roads from the main trunk roads and also a number of private roads created by the shop to help people transport from long distances.
Then, there are quite a number of customers who want to get from the lovingly surfaced lanes via badly pitted private routes with restricted space. The maintainer of these private roads whines that they didn't expect people to actually /use the road/.
Sounds ridiculous when you change the viewpoint, doesn't it?
Did the network providers pay the content providers when mobile Internet was in its infancy and no-one wanted to use it? No? Then why do they feel they can ask for money from the content providers now, other than because they are poor at business?
Also note that costing operators to implement pay-as-you-use is no different from any other company, and if I remember correctly, telecomms operators have charged customers for what they use since the inception of the services.. Again, business failure.
You don't state why you had problems re-installing ESXi on another system. It sounds like you didn't have either a spare chassis, or another server that the disks could be taken from and directly transplanted to another server. Was it the case of an unprotected boot disk but an alive array? In that case the boot drive should be protected with at least RAID 1.
I may be missing something, but I don't see how you recovered it in the first place as RAID 5 can only survive a loss of one drive, unless it's both a hot spare and one of the drives that fail.
In any case, I don't see why you chose fast SATA disks when 15K SAS disks are only marginally more expensive. Nor do I think that RAID 5 is necessarily the wrong choice, provided the rebuild times in case of a complete failure are acceptable and the cost/benefit of the risk of failure is appropriate.
I don't understand why the transfer time of VMs using vSphere is valid. Either the system is working and the transfer time of a day is likely irrevelant, or a rebuild is required, or ESXi is dead but the array is alive but suspect - in that case it's just as appropriate to use an external disk to transfer the data.
If by 'treason' Assange's actions were undermining morally admirable (yes, I know this is a grey area, and no, I can't be bothered spending paragraphs explaining) operations, then I'd have more sympathy.
As it is, whilst it may be treason by the strict dictionary definition, Wikileaks is actually highlighting hypocrisy and outright lying that should be brought to light. None of the information revealed so far seems to be even slightly remarkable, will all be known by the real opposition to various governments and thus the issue is mainly the populace who now have clear and unambiguous information that they were repeatedly lied to.
Wikileaks should be given a medal for starting to force politicians to be more honest, and hopefully encourage more of the wider populace to think for themselves.
It's such a blatant and pathetic witch hunt by various governments around the world that it's not funny.
Few of the secrets reported by the media are anything other than abundantly obvious, although I'll grant that if there was anything that really couldn't be reported by the media they'd have to skirt around the issue..
The question needs to be asked as to what all this focus on Assange is diverting attention from. The strategy of focusing attention on something unworthy of a Europe wide arrest warrant could easily backfire and drive more people to read Wikileaks.
The conclusions have to be :
The security services are diverting attention from something else
or (more likely) the security services don't give a toss and Assange has annoyed a load of non job politicians who lack subtlety, see their ability to lie to the public diminishing and have their fuckwit 'Something Must Be Done' hat on.
Marilyn wasn't fat by modern standards - it's an urban myth. She may or may not have been a size 16, but a size 16 in 1950 is not the same as a size 16 in 2010. A quick google will tell you that she had a small frame with large breasts.
In any case, size 16 is now the average dress size in the UK and if you have big boobs it's usually necessary to go up a dress size to fit them in.
'Women long for the classic Barbie figure with big boobs, long blonde
hair and blue eyes'
Doesn't sound like a problem to me - can't be more than about twenty quid from Toys 'R Us, surely ;)
Barbie isn't my idea of an sexy woman, and I'm not sure what evolution would say about the unnatural hair colours of several of my partners.
The battery life - which you don't specify, is three hours for e-books only, and it's supposed to be charged for 12 hours at a time the first few times it's charged.
It's not worth buying, even for 65 quid. E-ink on the Kindle is so much better than any other display you care to mention it's not funny (with the minor pointless exception of trying to read it in the dark; there the soothing turquoise backlight of my ancient mono Handera 330 palm handheld is better)
I was sceptical about the Kindle, and thought I might want an Android tablet. After actually trying the Sony e-book readers, the Kindle and the Samsung Galaxy Tab my opinion is : Android tablets are currently too immature - wait a while. The Kindle is a lovely device, the e-ink is stunning. The only things the Kindle is missing are a touch screen, an Interactive Fiction interpreter, more format support and possibly a reading light. Plus of course reasonable e-book pricing..
Without trying to be especially mean, what makes publishers so amazingly special? In most other businesses payment terms of ninety days are not even slightly unusual and sixty days is frankly good.
Separating your own personal views from 'publishers dislike ebooks' would be wise. For you, a book may always be more than paper and ink, for others there is a balance to be made otherwise everyone would exclusively buy hardbacks. The technology still needs some improvements, and the best way of exploiting the unique capabilities of the format and the different business opportunities is probably yet to be fully discovered.
I don't understand how in one breath you can admit that you use e-books (on an unsuitable device; e-ink is light years ahead of anything else) and that e-books make you more money, but that it's still not worth considering?!
I have no real axe to grind either way; I don't have an e-book reader yet (because the pricing is poor). However, the technology is now almost mature enough, e-ink is remarkably good and there's a whole range of intriguing opportunities that can't be delivered from a disconnected paper book.
Not everyone here understands the costs - that's why they're asking and questioning assumptions.
The basic assumption seems to be that the retail outlet takes 40-65% of the purchase price. For an e-book store this is not sustainable - at some point a dedicated e-book competitor to Amazon will start to drive down prices by taking a lower margin.
The argument of 'who would buy a hardcover if there's an e-book available' is a specious one. Who would buy a hardback if paperback is available? To state the blindingly obvious, hardbacks sell either because the material is available in no other format, the quality of the typesetting/form factor is significantly higher or because it has a number of extras (decent illustrations, etc) unsuitable for other formats.
There are ways selling e-books could work, whether that's a release simultaneous with the paper book or later on, but publishers sticking their head in the sand and claiming it could never work seems to me the height of foolishness.
You're not getting it, are you? The points are a) in an e-book world, the seller will not be able to maintain a 40% margin and b) The publisher does not have to publish assuming a 40% margin
Base cost of dead tree, as per your figures : 935 quid. Base cost of e-book as per your figures : 185 quid.
185/250=74p. 74p+1.06=1.80. Now add margin - even at 40% that's only 2.52.
You can probably get away with more than 2.52 retail, and as an e-book publisher's costs are lower (no warehousing), they won't get 40%. End result : the publisher's margin is higher, and the author receives more money.
Where's the flaw with my reasoning?
Picky note - V.90 wasn't the last modem standard - the last was V.92, which few people bothered with.
In any case, the iMac was a horrid plasticy computer. I thought it looked horrid then, and I still think it looks horrid now. The hardware may have been basically functional, but the ergonomics were pathetic. Substandard CRT monitor, poor adjustability of monitor, pathetic keyboard and mouse.
I'd argue it was only with the introduction of the PowerMac Quicksilver that some semblance of style was introduced.
It's also a bit much for Mac fans to claim that OS X was so revolutionary. Sure, it was a definite improvement over the particularly tired Mac OS Classic, but OS X had plenty of rough edges and frankly still isn't perfect in its last PowerPC incarnation.
I'll give it credit for introducing USB and not needing a floppy, though.
Nemesis is titled Gradius over in Japan, and there's also Parodius - an official parody of Nemesis with even more bizarre ships and enemies.
At some point they decided not to separate the names, and now all releases seem to be called Gradius.
shmups aren't very popular these days, so I expect that might be why.
If you want a commercial shmup for the PC I'd thoroughly recommend Jets n' Guns Gold
Space Invaders therefore passed me by. The earliest game I played was probably Frantic Freddy on a Spectravideo.
Pac Man is of course eternal, and Tank Attack remains pretty decent. Beyond that, many of the classics are showing their age.
If I had to nominate a few more arcade classics that'd be more tricky as I never really used coinops much
Galaga - splendid shmup action, much better than Space Invaders
Tank Attack - still fun
Pac Man
Arkanoid - loved the block destruction games
Would definitely agree with Star Wars. Played it only briefly, but the coinop rocks - even now!
Space Wars - this is superb on a Vectrex, but originated on coinop
Gauntlet - mostly played home computer version here, but coinop was great
Frogger
Nemesis II - cause Nemesis 3 for the MSX was never a coinop
Street Fighter - simply because I spent lots of time watching friends try and beat it
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