Posts by Heff

Bing!

@ AC 01:52

Remember Windows Live! Search? collossal failure. Im not sure when it happened, but somewhere down the line someone at microsoft decided they should try and do absolutely everything to do with your computer and the internet.

so far, for the home user they've managed 3 barely acceptable operating systems in the past 10 years. TEN YEARS. Why does Microsoft flourish as the OS of choice? There's no serious competition. anywhere they attempt to push into where there's already healthy competition, or even just a single other competitior, they fail, and fail badly. The Zune. Live! Search. Bing. They dont compete because they have absolutely no idea how to do it.

Even in an industry setting they dont compete : how many sysadmins do you know that change from linux to MS or back again? people buy MS because they always have. people search google because they always have, and if you want to raise the Altavista shadow : There wasnt money in search back then.

re: Anti google Apple. There's a surprise. I cant imagine google releasing a device so intentially crippled as the iphone, probably because google seems to still cling to that now-outdated idea of "once you bought something, you own it".

Not news :

2008 From here : http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/14/kentucky_domain_name_grab_amicus/

2006, from here :

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/07/18/betonsports_arrested/

What fucking "leave the internets alone" policy are you talking about?

What a fabulous idea

I mean, considering theres no big label support, and they're releasing a nive little player to go with it! which is super cute, because being a complete unknown and competing with iPods is afantastic business model which cant possibly fail at all.

you really want to push DRM music? let me download an album in FLAC --AND-- throw in the digital masters, so I can strip individual elements. then we might have something to talk about, otherwise... really? every DRM system has a built-in fail point beyond which the files will refuse to authenticate and play. why would I pay money for something that is guaranteed not to work one day, and not because of a bad scratch, cracked vinyl, or tired tape, but because the DRM company couldnt hold up its side of the bargain?

and unlike disc scratches, tape failure, etc, when that day rolls around its not just one album. It'd be like waking up one morning to discover every CD you bought from EMI just evaporated. thats why people dont touch the damned things.

thirteen years

long enough for the licensing wing to really get their hooks into HTC.

MS as a corporate entity enjoys using its ability to use the stick and the carrot : oh, you're using windows mobile? that great. as a bonus for doing that, we're prepared to extend favourable bulk licensing for your windows workstations. not a problem!

as your business ticks on down the line, your budgetary model adjusts to cheap licensing from MS, and then you decide you're going to sell your flagship models with a competitors software. Of course, thats up to you, says the Mobile rep. We understand. thats fine. Im sure the technical support guys we have working in your company wont have a problem with that, and Im sure your proposed roll-out to window7 across your company network and servers will go smoothly, efficiently, and cheaply, too.

I can see a situations where an under-paranoid CEO suddenly finds its cheaper to lose money on a flagship product than it is to replace microsofts floating contractors, and re-licence all its workstations, servers, and office licence at full retail, and the associated loss in productivity and ancillary revenue while the whole process goes on.

I think google needs something more than free to convince people to leave in these situations.

what?

Ok, just to abuse multi's TV analogy :

XP is black and white. Ok, so what features of 7 make it colour?

XP is scart , Ok, Im still wondering what features of 7 make it HDMI.

We're not talking a massive integral-worth leap, like black and white to colour, or regular to HD picture on a piece of technology whose only use is to be viewed.

W7 has no features I physically need, and nothing I want thats going to massively enhance how I use my computer. and like the last tiem I had this arguement with the Vista fans, they end up resorting to telling me in glassy tones about the Aero interface, which for sure, is really pretty for something that eats system resouces like a digital cancer.

the extra network "security" aka, asking me a million "are you sure" questions, the file and registry control, etc. It feels, bluntly, like an OS for thickies. If they come out with a "Pro" flavour, where the OS assumes a level of technical knowledge above, say, an oyster, and stops asking me pointless questions and just does as its fucking told, then maybe I'd consider upgrading. (alas, alack, NT, where did your "RTFM" attitude go?)

@Jean-Luc

What the ISS did for its money was establish something like 20 different major structural revisions to its design. When I say major, I mean "fuck this lets start over" everytime a country backed out on the funds it had said it would back the project with. the thing was originally tabled to be something 1.5x the size of a US football field. Add onto that every country involved demanding its own paid gonk on the teams, the obligatory middle management empire building nonsense, and the PHB-mandated obligatory design process where engineers are given modern-day da-vinci problems to solve : this helicopter will work; we just need you to find a man who can turn these pedals with the strength of 1000 men. and he has to be short.

ISS was pretty cheap for what we got in the end. and whilst you bemoan the massive sum of cash, dont forget it goes into paying scientists, furthering the goals of science as a whole, and on a more real-terms level, pays for the refining of commercial construction process, spurring advancement in manufacturing, and whatnot. the trickle-effect of 'grand works' for a society as a whole is immeasurable.

frankly, if you're looking for innvation in space, look to china. on the world stage they seem to be the only single country with a solid determination to back its own dreams : the US is schizophrenic; it wants Great Dreams And Hope™ but doesnt want to pay for them, the UK is too busy spying on supermarket parking spaces at 4am looking for phantom pedophiles, THE UN and NATO countries as a whole are too busy stroking their tiny beards and trying to rebuild their economies in the wake of the derivatives trading fiasco. Russia is... Well, whatever happened to Russia? Im sure they'll let us know at some point. Who else is going? Nobody. If not china, Then give it 50 years and it'll be another X-prize.

I dont get it

If you need the crazy speed, you go with SLC racks. If you dont need the crazy speed, you're probably still using non-SSD racks. It comes across like they're trying for second place and then charging and arm and a leg for it.

Given how SSD tech is improving right now, this just seems like a product without a niche; am I missing something?

maybe the answers are in my coat

megawhat?

Want to see UPS plans for a 65MWH, even the capacitors for the minute or so it would take a bloody huge diesel generator to kick in would be interesting. Is 65MW the magic numer, though? at what point does your UPS/emergency system have to constitude a small powerstation in its own right? how long before Darpa boffins are building collossal holding lakes and Hydroelectric dams for on-demand power? and then how long before they propose building overcapacity into that dam, in order to provide a tick-over they can resell back into the grid, to offset the ludicrous cost of building it.

Either way, building huge data warehouses that'll generate a thermal footprint you can probably see from space doesnt seem Ze Smert, so defense and ethics considerations aside, Im totally interested by the mechanics.

"proceed with this nonsense at flank speed", cos, well...

Hooray!

Frankly, If this is true, its the best encouragement for piracy I've ever seen.

Look, Freetards. I Pirate. Napster went legit. Napster makes money. Shawn now probably sleeps well at night knowing hes not about to be arrested. Im sure Sunde and Co will be very happy in that respect, and thats a good thing.

Why?

Napster Pirate -> Napster Legit -> Napster Money

TPB Pirate -> TPB Legit -> TPB Money.

Let the trend continue until its a risky but attractive business model. till it ends up like Pirate radio; Get Cred, build a brand, build a userbase, sell out to consortium. rinse, repeat. Frankly Im glad to see this, its better than the cold freezeout which led to the downfall of places like Lokitorrent.

As for the conspiracy theorists... really? cry more, can you. you sound like the apoplectic teenagers when Napster went legit, yelling that their doors were going to be smashed in and mommy and daddys precious computer was going to be taken by the big bad Po-lice. You're not that important. Piracy does not make you that cool. the RIAA does not care about you, and you are not sticking it to the man. Freetards as a 'lifestyle' or a 'rebellious phase' are just this generations beatniks at woodstock; just as deluded, just as discardable, just as pointless.

I dont see what the remaining freetards are crying about. Your 'heros' just made a pack of cash. another torrent site will step up and fill the space. The people interested in Scene releases for copyright protection, in advance movie leaks, in torrenting massive libraries of music : they are still out there. If anything, this result makes Piracy more legitimate , it states it can be a pathway to legal money. And well... I'd rather people like Shawn Fanning and Sunde &co get a bucket of money. Its hard to have principals and no money. With a lot of money... what can you do?

Genius sticker, because most of the comments here so far are incapable of watching a market trend, tracking prosecution-to-record IP statistics, or even keeping up with basic internet revenue models.

Page... is.... populating...

The problem with documenting fetishism is simple, and amongst subculture BDSM a practical, applicable law : if you can imagine it, theres someone out there with that fetish. Probably with a newsgroup, a quiet little yahoo circle, or back in the day a BB forum hosted on geocities.

The problem with taking a serious view of documenting fetishism is that most people dont want to. We want to mock Dacryphilia* (nice one, AC); somehow its becoming declasse to mock transvestites, but if you want a woman covered in peanut butter you're ripe for a humiliating put down; please see http://xkcd.com/471/ for a further example. So, you have to vet your site, which means restricting the flow of people who can create articles. Which means the two guys out there into porn about a woman putting her bare foot down on an accelerator pedal probably arent in your "approved" stack; and besides, are they serious? is there really a penguin-suit fetish out there?

So how do you populate your pages? How to do you weed out the Joke submissions and the Mocking edits from the serious, and probably deeply marginalised and persecuted Dalek-fetishists?

Frankly, I applaud the aim, if its sincere : a giant, factual, non-biased approach to sexuality would be a great boon to society as a whole, especially the much-beleaguered Sex-ed programs of the US and UK; discovering that not only are you _not_ a freak, but that there are others with the same inclinations, and you all meet in vegas once a year to dress as Ike Turner and have Butch Transvestite Tina Turners kick you in the balls is likely to be a pretty Good Thing™

-H

*and no, Generally Dacryphiles probably dont need to avoid funerals. Fetishism is a highly conditional thing; a cute redheaded with a low-cut top having a quiet sniffle is probably likely to make better grumble-fodder than your overweight aunt maude with snot all down her face.

@Mark Aggleton

It varied according to company, duration and placement of Ad. frankly, I would have thought applying a range to such a broad industry was obvious.

Coat. Get yours.

@ Kev Campbell

Industry insider monkeys says : SC2 is in final rounds of beta, test-booths have been seen at events like PAX. expect a buggy POS to be released sometime between december and june next year, judging by blizzards current release quality.

Diablo 3 : Since the shit his the fan with fans demanding more dark, less cartoony*, Ive not heard a lot since. As far as I'm aware, they have the engine prettymuch finished and its just content building from here on in

As for DNF/Franchise, expect to see a sequel shortly if 3DRealms has folded : Take2 will want some ROI from the franchise, and frankly, I'd like to see Valve pick it up. The source engine would be a good platform, and they've shown with things like TF2 and Portal that they have a sense of humour that they can work into a game. and a producer-publisher combo is probably the best way to go, some insidious little one-time production house being farmed by EA or Ubisoft would likely result in a rushed nasty POS. mind you, theres no real guard against crap : everyone believed in Romero, and we ended up with 'Storm over gift 3' and bloody awful Daikatana.

either way, I'll still be happy to hear the sound of those pig-guards in games here and there, and 'll miss Duke, in all his pixellated glory.

-H

*production stills give you a colourful sparkly world like NWN2 with all the spell effects turned to 'rainbows and kittens'

Urban solution!

Not bikes and scooters then, as in other dense urban populations that have had to solve this problem (see india, china, anywhere with large populations and low incomes) or mass transit systems (see entire western hemisphere)

instead... its... an electric trike. GJ, guys. GJ. high fives. and not a small, practical one, either. its a giant fucker, the kind of thing that screams "great wind resistance" and "90% of weight made of batteries to generate enough charge to power the locomotion of the weight of all those batteries" (bad sentence, but you get the drift)

Paris. Boobies. etc.

OMG WAIT WAT

Legally fair T&Cs and EULAs on the horizon?

being in a position with telcos and service providers where the contract I sign is the contract I ACTUALLY FUCKING AGREE TO, Not something else 6 months later?

-hand on heart, tearing up here.

p.s. Paris, boobies.

We'd love to hear your un-trademarked, un-patented ideas.

Is it me, or is Ramji as transparent as Blizzards UI modding department for WoW?

"Of course, you can make anything, but if it becomes ridiculously popular, you should know we'll add native support for it and do away with the need for you completely".

Only Ramjis more of a "I want to listen to the open source community, hear what we've done wrong, how we can make things easier for you guys out there, because primarily, thats microsofts job, right? making things easier for Open Source Developers, so we can... uh, you know. share the... uh... GPL... uh. monies. "

Mines the tombstone with "wheres the money" written on it.

NO USER SERVICEABLE PARTS INSIDE

Wow, a fucking _think-tank_ to tell me what I've known since I was in the single digits and OS/2 shareware vanished from the front of PC magazines. Free market forces dictate, only they arent free in the tech sector because R&D is a minor bitch, but licensing is a major one.

lets recap!

IBM said : make it IBM compatible.

Intel said : We'll pay for your advertising if you only sell our chips

Sony Said : Blu-Ray is the future; because we say so.

Apple Said : You will buy songs through us, and only us.

Cellphone networks said :you will never own your device. you 'lease' it from us.

Microsoft said : This is a EULA. you own nothing.

Nokia said : Symbian, and only Symbian.

Games Developers said : This is a more Bizarre EULA.

XBLA said : you dont buy the games. you buy points to spend on games.

Steam said : you buy the game through steam, but if we think you're pirating anything, you 'lose the rights' to everything you bought.

MS strongarmed Dell into not selling linux. Then Dell would sell linux online. on bottom end boxes, in some out of the way fucking labyrinthian part of the online sales site. on a machine you got no discounts or rebates on. they got geek credit for this,media face-time, and MS's antitrust woes waned a little.

Apple says "sure, you 'own' the iphone. but, uh, we dont want you using it in any way we cant control. but you dont own the music you paid for. also, have a crippled bluetooth stack. have a constant war over applications. and we'll issue a new patch to re-lock the phone, because you insist on jailbreaking it to do the things you want it to do that its actually capable of."

I too miss the days where the Shit I bought was MINE. Where I could pick up a game and not be lectured for ten minutes about what I am and am not allowed to do with it. Where a telephone came in a box with two pieces of paper; a guarantee and an instruction leaflet.When Music was something you got on a tape or a CD and when you were bored of it you could sell it on or give it away. Where buying a computer meant purchasing interesting things in boxes, spending a day assembling it, and never, ever once being forced into a situation where you agree to do a bunch of pointless bullshit just so a lawyer on the other side of the planet can get a lapdance at lunchtime.

These days are gone. I dont own my phone. I dont own my cable box. I dont own my operating system or a single piece of software on it other than the stuff I write myself. In the future, I wont own my television either. My kids probably wont own books, they'll lease them, or rent them through some kindle clone/descendant, which will track what they read, for how long, and what time of day. we'll rent the books on the cheap, so every other page in the rented, electronic book is an advert about other books like the one we're reading. Our TV will log our requests for On-demand TV and build a profile of what we like to watch and when. We'll subscribe to a brand of radio station that plays music I think I like, thats carefully selected by labels that subsidise the station. I'll take the cheap package. every 5 or ten songs someones upcoming gig from the label will be pushed in my face.

Give it another twenty years and owning a soldering iron will be grounds for a search of your house to make sure you arent circumventing some corporations rights by tinkering with _their_ hardware. My TV log and cellphone usage and book-rental list will be searchable by law enforcement agencies in order to ensure im not a terrorist. Another ten years after that, they'll be submitted to Credit Agencies to determine how much of a liability you are. You'll agree to this, otherwise you wont be able to rent books or watch TV or use a phone. Freedom of information act, not to mention nutbags with agendas and good old fashioned crap security means that If I watch 'Natural Born Killers' 18 times over the course of a month, someone might come and knock on my door to have a chat about _why_.

If you think this is all tin-foil-hat talk, the purchase and distributions of chemicals now places you on a watch-list, as certain chemicals are integral in the fabrication of explosives and horrid toxic shit like Sarin and the like. of course, I _might_ just be trying to start a cottage-industry soap factory in my basement, but I bet im going to have to fill out an awful lot of forms for it, and isnt it suspicious that I want to make my own soap?

We'll reach a stage where opening something to find out how it works, probably what got most of us into the tech sector to start with, will put us in breach of the law. I crack my iphones case and wire in a replacement bluetooth stack; I've just voided my contract, breached RIAA/MPAA/DCMA jargon and m now liable for a fine. because its not mine, even though I payed for it, even though Im still paying for it, even though i'll be legally obliged to continue paying for it even after my service has been withdrawn due to me tinkering with the hardware.

really. no user serviceable parts are inside.

@ AC 16.56GMT

Extra Stuff in the box! I remember those days. I buy games now and I get a .pdf on the DVD and a booklet of adverts for other games the publisher makes, and I wonder what the hell is going on; I've had to drive 30 minutes to a store, pay $50 for a DVD that may or may not run with its ludicrous copy protection, and I get a bunch of advertising and a box to keep it in that I frankly dont have room for.

OTOH, I _love_ limited edition releases. Fallout 3s lunchbox and t-shirt and tiny bobblehead doll was a great reason to buy a hardcopy. I loved that. Bioshocks LE had tiny Big Daddy models. I miss the days of maps and real manuals; things like that were the incentive I wanted to go to the damned store; when your retail product is identical to an online pirated version, you have no edge besides doing the 'moral' thing. when your retail version is actually MORE of a pain in the ass than a pirated copy, and you provide nothing to offset this, why the hell would I pay for it?

at the current state of gaming for PCs, the only non-morality reason to buy a game legitimately is that it makes the now-industry-standard practice of dealing with Zero day patching and bugfixing easier, usually because the game house ties your CD key to your right to fix their broken product.

as for DRM in the wider sense, Take a look at good old XKCD : http://xkcd.com/488/

Less guru, More increasingly-dated obsessive

Look, I think Pete is a nice guy and all, and Bullfrog turned out some frankly breathtaking work with him at the helm; the Populous saga, Dungeon keeper, Syndicate, the Theme Series, etc, etc. I was even one of the maybe 6 people on earth that bought a copy of Hi Octane.

Since moving to lionhead though, things seem to be getting... a little formulaic. and heres the formula;

Promise of a free, open environment where plays can RPG good or evil, every action they take affecting this balance + time + promise of revolutionary features = bullshit product, behind schedule, lacking 50% of features, other 50% badly implemented.

Black and White 1 was 95% hype and 5% working content : the creature mechanic was a nice toy. The morality mechanic was a nice toy that didnt work properly. The weather-linked to the internet, and the game state linked to the computer clock was... a nice toy. Gestures were revolutionary, though atrociously implemented. B&W2 was a little better as a game, but promised probably three times more shit that didnt make it into the final cut. Whatever happened the 'physics' that you bleated about for _years_ Pete? oh, right. Didnt make it; like the gestures, which were made strictly optional, instead dropped for a toolbar, and a "tribute" reward system; tell me, as a God, who am I "buying" this stuff from?

Fable was an atrocity. Sure, the console monkeys loved it, but it was the new darling of the xbox market, and set the standard for crappy ports to the PC from then on; ranks of nested menus, childish dialogue and character progression, and once again, the big focus on "morality" that was implemented as thinly as an anorexic spreads butter on toast; and of course, the pointless toys; the brothels, the 'good' armour, the 'evil' armour, the entire spellcasting thing, the ownership of multiple houses, stealing and stealth...

I could mention "The Movies" here, but really, whats the point?

Fable, Black and white, and its successor have come across as games made with singular, talented vision, unfortunately afflicted by ADD.

And now, Fable 2 cometh. Pete goes to GDC and tells us all about the great things that are coming from Lionhead. I've given up, truthfully. He promises to provide these amazing games, a continuance of the wonderful, involving, revolutionary, _GENRE CREATING_ stuff churned out by Bullfrog... but he keeps disappointing. The marketing of features that never materialise, the promise of 'cutting edge AI' that feels like you're trapped in a lift with a bunch of drunks playing blind-mans-buff. it keeps continuing, and he keeps selling product.

I've figured out why. he turns up at GDC, at E3, at tradeshows everywhere, and dazzles with these videos and talks and promises and the press does a fucking backflip of glee and writes it all up. The consumers read their glee, buy the game, and are disappointed. I just read the article, and the cycle repeated itself again, only, without the glee.

Is it just me? I cant be the only one who thinks that lionheads offerings have been decidedly mediocre and the old fart has lost his touch?

mp4? What that?

wasnt that a proposed format for Mp3s that could be DRM enabled, only nobody could figure out a way to add better/tighter compression than mp3 in as well, so it got shitcanned? if it got resurrected as some other video/audioformat, whoop-di-doo for it, Ive never seen one or downloaded one, everyone I know uses AAC/Flac/ogg for audio and the still-extremely-venerable .AVI standard for video.

@DR ; The cost-of-living/wage table calculations has ever been utterly screwed up, usually by failure to poll a broad enough spectrum, link that spectrum to specific areas, and then they have the brass balls to delete and modify embarassing data from the table, like mortgage prices, fuel costs, home heating bills. basically the tables all insist we live in a nice, warm apartment, with good, thick walls, have cheap electricity, own a recent-model tiny car with 35+mpg (which we make no payments on) we're all over 25 (so our car insurance is minimal) etc etc etc.

@vlad ; the same people who spend !thousands on a super-TV are also the same people who buy tiny TVs for the commute into london, Brum, and Edinburgh. when PSPs came out I thought that the commuter subgroup as a whole had forgotten what books are for*. Why read when you can catch up on the TV shows you have to miss because you dont get home from your 9-till5- until 8.30?

*also, disturbing number of commuters watched porn on their PSPs. really. screen viewable from many angles, guys. plz to be less creepy.

Paris, because chances are she plays a lot on the Clapham-LSP route.

Failphone has fail

why are phone manufacturers still releasing units with sub-5mp cameras in them? I dont get it.

@ Bassey, yeah, they did. it was like a Startac crammed into a sexy dress. and like this ancient POS of yore, you got it home, took the shiny wrapper off, and discovered it was a hideous old dog that had tricked you.

Cant help but think

they have this ass-backwards, and should be pushing Mac Mini as a glorified typewriter and email checker box, perhaps with a mini-pro variant with a blu-ray drive, improved storage and graphics for the mediabox darlings.

It wants to steal and convert PC users. the best way of doing this is to shunt hardware out that doesnt do everything a PC does, but do it damned cheap. a 300quid mini right now tempts the PC users in, and then they gradually tire of it not doing games, or complex high-graphics/ram jiggery-pokery, and upgrade to a 'real mac' because they love the interface; god only knows, apple doesnt compete with PC users on a hardware basis, so it prettymuch boils down to "love our tiny box and interface!!!", and the only way they are gonna do that is by selling people a Fkin mac to start with, and to do that, you're gonna need to go _cheap_.

Honestly think they shouldnt be trying to make it better, just splitting it into electronic-typewriter version and mediabox version would draw the crowds. can you image a blu-ray version of this? I'd buy the fucking thing, I cant find a single bluray player that actually looks _nice_ that isnt made by Crazy swedes for 10 grand.

Remember Natural Born Killers?

You know, before Games were Cool For Kids with ++ Violence (is he bleeding? at 340x280, I cant tell so much) we blamed the mass murderers and psychopaths squarely on Quentin Tarantino, and this 'mad obsession' with watching his movies.

Simple truth; if you're crazy, you'll find an outlet for it. games are relatively cheap, easy access, simple gratification outlets. you take them away, and all of a sudden the crazies arent gonna sober up and lead a nice, normal abiding life. You cant blame Dahmer or the Wests or Moira on violent videogames, but they still happened. The Yorkshire ripper was clearly influenced by frogger though, so you know, I'll leave him out.*

You take away guns from nutters and you ended up with that dude who ran amok naked in a church with a fake samurai sword around the time of the dunblaine ban. you cant stop crazy, and the sooner these ban-everything-munters accept that, the better.

Of course, theres always the possibility that this is a political thing. you ban violent videogames, you can claim you're actually doing something to stop the crazy, you take away guns, you're stopping the crazy, no more violent pornography = we're stopping the crazy, dear voters.

and we'll roll back into another couple of decades of SSDD, only without an easy scapegoat. perhaps we'll go back to calling them 5th column sympathisers, eh?

Tech icon, because 99% of voters cant understand historical precedent.

*yeah, Im not sure if its timeline applicable. bite me.

Die early doing nothing

Seriously, son, dont just sit there, Block, Duck, he's gonna hammer you!... aww, see, Fatality.

...anyway.

The shady funding is absolutely zero surprise, the junk food industry funds these little excursions, not to slap down marketplace rivals but as a backtop against the myopic-laser-like eye of the campaign focussing on them;

"we need to tell kids to eat less candy, drink less soda, eat less burgers, and go outside more"

Spokesman for Cadburys - Surely chocolate isnt the problem? we can always withdraw funding if theres a conflict of interest.

Spokesman for Pepsi - Soda isnt the problem, taken in moderation. But we can always withdraw funding if theres a conflict of interest.

Spokesman for McDonalds - We also sell a range of salads, but if you feel there's a conflict of interest, we can always withdraw funding.

Ah, so we're agreed, the problem is the little blighters arent going outside more!

The department of health probably has a mandate handed down to it, telling it to get serious and produce some fucking ads making kids go outside and not be fat. its given zero extra funds for this, and is told to "seek public-private-partnership for your funds" You, the campaign manager, hit up sports companies, sportsdrinks makers, red bull, etc. They refuse to play. why? they're already doing their own, individual, successful ad campaigns, and research shows that comitting their funds to something without their name on it is a waste of fucking time. You take your project to the enemy, and the enemy pledges money if you'll just focus on someone else. all of a sudden, you, the campaign manager, can hire a few hotel conference rooms, plenty of pretty interns, a couple of campaign-owned cars to drive around in. You've enough funding to make the campaign last for 5 years, which is welcome job security. You go and play golf with marketing execs from McDonalds and Pepsi. You submit a report to central office about how you've successfully attracted funding from a source outside the government. You get a pat on the back and a reacharound from your bosses boss.

Good job, bureaucracy.

wow

God bless Irish ISPs for having a sense of fucking integrity.

<3

@Jord

"Dictionaries can't be trusted nowadays"

Give it a fucking rest, you're showing your age. Dictionaries are a compilation of widely used -defined- terminology and phrasiology, and as any lexiconographer will tell you, THERE IS NO STANDARD ENGLISH LANGUAGE, NOR HAS THERE EVER BEEN.

This tedious opinion you expound here might well be culled from the fossils on BBC3 talking about the 'decline in standards', and frankly, on a tech website its a little strange, as the analogy would pan out into; '"grep" isnt a programming term, for gods sake, what happened to good old assembly? what is this _shit_ the kids code in nowadays?"

As for dragons den being a little shonky... well, Ive lost track of the amount of stories of "winners" not getting contract money from 'dragons' after the show is over, and people who got turned down by the aforementioned repiles-o-doom picking up VC from elsewhere and actually making a go of it. As for plastic-strap guys relative legitimacy, I find his pimping of his already-preexisting product to be about par for the show, which traditionally seems to flog inane muppets trying to sell hat-and-shoes-to-match, Bowler-hats-with-sleeves, chocolate teapots, cars powered by water, etc etc.

Its fast become a VC version of Antiques roadshow, where if your property is horrible enough, dented enough, and you couldnt sell it at the car boot sale, drag it in front of our panel of specialists, who'll graciously tell you its worth about 5 quid.

highly technical content sticker, because, well...

only now says hate?

what did it say before? Battered-wife-loving? jailhouse-loving?

@Don. wont happen. if Intel cant score an antitrust suit after basically paying OEMS and resellers advertising costs in full when they feature that fucking annoying intel jingle in their TV spots, and threatening to dick with OEM supplies of new chips if they start selling AMD as well, its never going to happen.

they'll just do to AMD what they did to transmeta ; rape their intellectual property, hammer them with anticompetitive marketing practices, file frivolous lawsuits to drain their available cash, and if a judge ever does manage to catch up to them, they drag it out for as long as is possible before finally copping to some 100-million dollar fine for effectively putting the competition into administration.

100+million dollars to effectively cripple AMD is small change for industrial sabotage for a business with an operating income of 9 billion dollars a year.

replies:

@ chris C : dont get me started on microsofts keyboards. and as for dicking with the home key block, if I ever lay my hands on the PFY gonk at logitech that thought moving my insert and delete keys around was a good idea, Im gonna cut him in the parking lot.

@ the Heff/Hoff AC ; you're down to insulting my internet handle? seriously? Good job.

@NG : I dunno, man. Maybe MS is _really_ pushing for the asiatic market?

@ Davey : I can see the arguements for not giving your kids unfettered net access or a TV in their room, and to some extent a phone, but 12 years old and no walkman*?

@ apple haters ; Im not particularly blown away with Apples desktop hardware either (I cant really justify dual-booting either; I'd dualboot for games, and whats the point unless you have a decent GFX card?), but then, having spent a lot of time dicking around with their software, the hardware is'to-task', in that it does whats needed of it.

*yes, Im still calling them walkmen. its a little device you carry on you that plays music. its a fkin walkman, no matter what silly damned name you give it.

Idiocy

the BBFC shouldnt be able to review anything alone at all; being able to review and classify a single movie based on the opinion of one reviewer, be it porn or anything else, opens the entire system much wider to the moires of personal taste and corruption.

and with that obvious pitfall, your rewviewrs will stream into two categories; ones that pick up the phone to vivid/anabolic et al and say "Im watching your porno. give me a grand and I'll sign off as un-offensive" and ones that mark an increased percent down as offensive to avoid on-the-job investigation.

fail idea. Cost-cutting without the slightest notion of human behaviour. good job.

Color me freetard, but

I'd rather spend CD money on gig tickets ; bands get more of my $$ that way anyway. as for the percieved loss of revenue, I think thats only coming up as an issue now because previously, with tapes, it was practically untrackable. all record compaies need to do now is log into piratebay and track how many seeders/completed downloads of a torrent there are, then cry foul.

I'd also love to see some comparison between record industry losses directly attributable to plummeting sales DIRECTLY CAUSED BY PIRACY, rather than backing of insipid and shitty artists, and carrying around massive legal firms on balls-deep retainers to fight pirazy lawsuits against people who dont have any money.

I guess thats just the economist and empiricist in me, the guy who wants to see cause and effect rather than label people Freetards and parasites, or slam record companies for being overzealous pricks.

made of the fail

Great. UAC. yet another bloody "do you trust this" application barrier I have to turn off. Every single fucking step from NT4 is designed to raise my blood pressure ; if theres an SKU out there with a big red "I know what Im fucking doing, leave me the hell alone" button, I'll take that one.

Im sick to death of spending hours sorting Admin-user access levels, firewall exeptions, program permissions, whitelists, blacklists, program priorities and fucking antivirus autochecks.

Yes. Im sure. Yes, I want to download this. No, I know microsoft hasnt WHQL'd this exe. Yes, I know, a file has changed. No, its not a virus. yes, I realise your crappy heuristics has it flagged, _fuck you_, mcCaffee/Norton/Kaspersky. I am sick and tired of my machine second guessing everything I do 'for my own good'.

Im not a genius, or some MSCE/cisco supernerd. im not even a codemonkey, Im just a guy who's owned computers since cases had a 'turbo' button on the front, and when I feel fed up and patronised by this crap, I cant help but wonder what people in the industry do; ubuntu and SuSE?

What the Bejesus?

practically cut-n-paste from previous commentary on microsofts "app store";

"Remember the days where Microsoft made operating systems? I mean, as opposed to today, where MS tries to out-google google, and now, apparently attempts to out-perform apple in the downloadable apps store section of the marketplace.

Dear Microsoft.

You've shown, over recent years, with your titanic bungling of hotmail, your extremely ill-advised ploughing of cash into Live! rebranding and search functionality, that at best you're a little schizophrenic at redmond. at worse, with your atrocious support standards for GamesForWindowsLive, and product crossover from Xbox to PC, that you cant even have 2 departments within the same building talk to each other."

...And now, fresh material!;

And now bricks-and mortar, too? What are you going to sell? Home consumers get their OS from Dell, with a new machine. You're going to sell what? Zunes? To who? the existing 3 zune customers already have theirs, and are probably very happy with them unless they bought a 30gig brick. you'll sell copies of Office, maybe? because home users upgrade this often, I hear. they dont just go with whatever was packed from their OEM.

So, people wont buy your operating system they'll buy it from Dell, probably cheaper than getting it direct from you. Or office. or fucking Zunes. I doubt you're planning highstreet stores to sell MSSQL server to joe-6-pack.

So it must be... um, what else.

Support! You'll sell support to people, right? you know,establishing new stores, hiring a bunch of windows fanboys* to staff them, nice, knowledgable people, right? and then you'll launch windows 7. and these fresh faced peeps are gonna handle the unwashed masses who arent happy windows 7 doesnt work right.

You're... well, brave isnt the word, is it?

*you know, like the apple fanboys. there are windows fanboys, right? ...hello?

@AC

I find it difficult to grasp why you'd get a communicator these days, versus a small netbook or a blackberry. comfort with same-old-device standard from the old communicator to the E90?

as for playing games on it; you're kidding, right?

-gloom-

@ mark : Gyro gimbals. sea swell on something the size of the nimitz is pretty negligible, as for vertical rise and fall, I believe naval artillery accounts for that on a per-shot timed basis.

@ stevie : if you can move a nimitz-sized vessel (or hell, even a good ole regular battleship) with the recoil from this cannon, I'll give you a cookie. Oh, by the way, its in water, too.

@ mike : yeah, coilguns are an utter breeze to both assemble and understand, right? Only they deform under high load. and you cant cycle the coils fast enough.

the most practical use for something like this that I can think of, considering the guns inherent necessary downtime-for-refit would be a sudden-emergency strike thing, where a reasonable large target needs to come under fire within a very specific time frame, with the option for an abort; i.e. Our OP went wrong, please smash this mountain now. (conventional ship ballistics and even cruise missiles have a massive to-target time compared to hypervelocity projectiles)

frankly im inclined to believe that this is just a step-one in research process, where rail technology could be extended to existing ballistics, essentially accelerating already conventional rounds to ^^velocity, which is what the video looks like : some kind of cut-down rocket/exposion-plus-sled delivery vehiclewith a good pulse tacked on the end.

Irrelevance can still equal 5bill market worth.

the thing you're looking for is right there in the Q4 annoucement. subscription revenues dropped 25%. whilst AOL can certainly coast along on unwilling and ignorant customers for a good long time (like the last 5 years)people are jumping ship. the original crop of cutomers are being forced to leave, mostly by their kids who cant understand why mom and pop are paying $25 a month for a sometimes-on DUN and the rent of an email address.

Google might have wads of cash, but long term, they dont have enough cash to act stupidly; cashing in their AOL chips now to claw back 250mill is better than waiting a year and losing another hundred mill. Frankly Im wondering when the AOL truck is finally gonna run out of power, and if its going to sink Time warner along with it.