I've had money taken from my account twice in 10 years. Both times I phoned my bank, reported the transactions as fraudulent and they credited me the money back by the next day. A week later they sent me a legal form to sign declaring that I didn't make the transactions, and that was the last I ever heard about them.
What does annoy me is the way they automatically block my card every time I use it abroad. Last time I went to the US they blocked my card after I used it to pay for my hotel room, then their automatic security system phoned me at 4am local time to ask if the transactions were legitimate.
More expensive, heavier and a shorter battery life? If you ship after your competitor aren't you supposed to ship something better? And shipping with OpenOffice is meant to be a good thing?
Rubber banding is really annoying in racing games. Race really well for the first 2 laps and it makes no difference, you don't build up a lead. Make one mistake on the final lap and all your good driving is wasted as the AI shoots past you.
Personally I really don't like adaptive difficulty. Sure, let me select what difficulty to play on, but once I've chosen the difficulty don't do some hidden calculations in the background and change my selection.
In fact, I have to rewrite most of the ESL papers before submitting them to clients due to the vast amount of simple grammatical mistakes.
I think there's an internet law about making mistakes in posts complaining about grammar.
Fry is a huge Apple fan, he's always used Macs. He's also got a major gadget addiction and suffers from bipolar disorder, he apparently goes on manic iPod/Mac buying sprees.
It seems like NG's difficulty (I've just got to the end of chapter 2 on ninja dog) is cheap difficulty, the worst kind. The camera is so bad and close in you can't actually see who's hitting you most of the time, so you get trapped in a corner and lose half your health.
What was the average age of an SMB player? I'd guess it's much younger than an average gamer these days. As a kid I was prepared to slog away at a level 10 times to get through it, these days I've got better things to do.
So if someone leaves their bike unlocked on the street, you'd have no compunction in taking it? They didn't bother to lock it up, right, so that's their fault? Or if you saw a clumsy person drop a $20 note, you'd be fine with not telling them and keeping it?
Note - I'm talking ethically, I don't care about the legal side of things. There are plenty of legal things that you can do that still make you an arsehole, like not holding doors open.
I have a usage cap on my ADSL. Anybody else using my connection is therefore stealing something in the non-RIAA sense of the word: any bandwidth somebody else uses is an amount I can't use.
(and yes, my WiFi is using WPA2 with a long passphrase, that doesn't change my opinion that anyone using somebody's WiFi without permission is an arsehole).
In a small school I can see the problem. But in a larger school, does it make all that much difference to have (say) 5 mixed ability classes vs 5 classes based on ability? Sort the students by end-of-year exam results and assign to classes accordingly. I guess you could end up with problems if lots of students get equal marks, but that's basically how it worked at my school.
The state school I went to switched from setting (individual classes based on ability in that subject) to 'streaming' (same class for every subject, roughly sorted by academic ability, 2 classes per stream) to mixed ability in the years around when I was there. Many parents loved it because they thought it was fairer somehow.
I'm sure there are plenty of ways to do well in life without doing well in formal education. It's much easier if you do test well, though. Qualifications are a way past the first filter when applying for a job when you're starting out.
You could ask the question from the other perspective: how much of a failure is it if a smart child ends up doing a crappy, boring job that doesn't challenge or interest them because they weren't pushed enough at school to realise their potential?
Fortunately I had parents rich enough to pay for private school when they realised what was going on, so I did OK in the end (good masters degree from a decent university). That option's not open to many people, though.
Because these are kids we're talking about, not small adults. A child can be very smart, but not able to push themselves enough to achieve what they're truly capable of. The right teaching could be the difference between doing "pretty well" and excelling.
I know what it's like - I went to a mixed ability state school (public school for USAians) and wasted 2 years just playing D&D in class because as long as you were above average they basically ignored you.
Why not just do what all good schools do and put pupils in classes based on ability? Then the teacher doesn't have to teach to a broad range of ability.
It's a tradeoff, really. Thickness is an important dimension for phone pocketability, slider keyboards are generally thicker.
One other advantage is that the keyboard is always instantly available. I used to have an HTC Hermes with a side-sliding QWERTY. Decent keyboard, but using it meant sliding the phone open and waiting for 3-4 seconds while the UI slowly reorientates itself to landscape. Slide out keyboards also require flat keys, whereas phones like the Treo and the Blackjack can have raised, separated keys.
My Samsung i600 has been pretty good. The new version (i670/Blackjack 2 in the US I think) is better, apparently. All the common special characters are on the keyboard (using the Function key).
It's a Windows Mobile Smartphone, personally I prefer WM Smartphone to Series 60.
The Opposition party just disagrees with everything the government does - Labour moved right, so they moved left and the Liberal Democrats just kind of floundered around. F**k knows who I'm going to vote for at the next election.
Agreed, people here are far too quick to give up their rights. As an MP pointed out the other day, Robert Mugabe would be proud of the laws the government's trying to introduce.
One law that's really confused me recently is the ban on selling knives to under-18. You can leave home at 16 - does that mean you have to use plastic knives in your kitchen for 2 years?
They've started to teach basic fuel-economy driving to learner drivers over here (UK). Things like you describe - driving smoothly, not using the brakes unnecessarily, shifting up early.
That's just an example of competing with an entrenched, high-quality open source project. BBEdit and Textmate are doing pretty well despite the existence of Emacs etc.
Surely the answer is to offer something that's of value? If the value of the tool is greater than its cost, then I'll look at it. I can't see that much value in distributed programming tools: our distributed team works fine with IRC, Perforce, code review and email. We've tried software aimed at distributed teams before and always fallen back to our old system because it's easier and it works everywhere.
For example: there's an expensive, commercial ARM compiler despite the existence of GCC. People buy it because it generates code that's ~20% smaller and faster.
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I've had money taken from my account twice in 10 years. Both times I phoned my bank, reported the transactions as fraudulent and they credited me the money back by the next day. A week later they sent me a legal form to sign declaring that I didn't make the transactions, and that was the last I ever heard about them.
What does annoy me is the way they automatically block my card every time I use it abroad. Last time I went to the US they blocked my card after I used it to pay for my hotel room, then their automatic security system phoned me at 4am local time to ask if the transactions were legitimate.
More expensive, heavier and a shorter battery life? If you ship after your competitor aren't you supposed to ship something better? And shipping with OpenOffice is meant to be a good thing?
Rubber banding is really annoying in racing games. Race really well for the first 2 laps and it makes no difference, you don't build up a lead. Make one mistake on the final lap and all your good driving is wasted as the AI shoots past you.
Personally I really don't like adaptive difficulty. Sure, let me select what difficulty to play on, but once I've chosen the difficulty don't do some hidden calculations in the background and change my selection.
In fact, I have to rewrite most of the ESL papers before submitting them to clients due to the vast amount of simple grammatical mistakes. I think there's an internet law about making mistakes in posts complaining about grammar.
Fry is a huge Apple fan, he's always used Macs. He's also got a major gadget addiction and suffers from bipolar disorder, he apparently goes on manic iPod/Mac buying sprees.
It seems like NG's difficulty (I've just got to the end of chapter 2 on ninja dog) is cheap difficulty, the worst kind. The camera is so bad and close in you can't actually see who's hitting you most of the time, so you get trapped in a corner and lose half your health.
What was the average age of an SMB player? I'd guess it's much younger than an average gamer these days. As a kid I was prepared to slog away at a level 10 times to get through it, these days I've got better things to do.
So if someone leaves their bike unlocked on the street, you'd have no compunction in taking it? They didn't bother to lock it up, right, so that's their fault? Or if you saw a clumsy person drop a $20 note, you'd be fine with not telling them and keeping it?
Note - I'm talking ethically, I don't care about the legal side of things. There are plenty of legal things that you can do that still make you an arsehole, like not holding doors open.
Bad analogy. Unless you find reading somebody else's network traffic particularly useful, I guess.
I have a usage cap on my ADSL. Anybody else using my connection is therefore stealing something in the non-RIAA sense of the word: any bandwidth somebody else uses is an amount I can't use.
(and yes, my WiFi is using WPA2 with a long passphrase, that doesn't change my opinion that anyone using somebody's WiFi without permission is an arsehole).
In a small school I can see the problem. But in a larger school, does it make all that much difference to have (say) 5 mixed ability classes vs 5 classes based on ability? Sort the students by end-of-year exam results and assign to classes accordingly. I guess you could end up with problems if lots of students get equal marks, but that's basically how it worked at my school.
The state school I went to switched from setting (individual classes based on ability in that subject) to 'streaming' (same class for every subject, roughly sorted by academic ability, 2 classes per stream) to mixed ability in the years around when I was there. Many parents loved it because they thought it was fairer somehow.
I'm sure there are plenty of ways to do well in life without doing well in formal education. It's much easier if you do test well, though. Qualifications are a way past the first filter when applying for a job when you're starting out.
You could ask the question from the other perspective: how much of a failure is it if a smart child ends up doing a crappy, boring job that doesn't challenge or interest them because they weren't pushed enough at school to realise their potential?
I'm sure parents will argue with anything, but most setting is done by test scores, so at least the teachers have hard evidence to fall back on.
It scares me that schools even *consider* mixed ability classes.
Fortunately I had parents rich enough to pay for private school when they realised what was going on, so I did OK in the end (good masters degree from a decent university). That option's not open to many people, though.
Because these are kids we're talking about, not small adults. A child can be very smart, but not able to push themselves enough to achieve what they're truly capable of. The right teaching could be the difference between doing "pretty well" and excelling.
I know what it's like - I went to a mixed ability state school (public school for USAians) and wasted 2 years just playing D&D in class because as long as you were above average they basically ignored you.
Why not just do what all good schools do and put pupils in classes based on ability? Then the teacher doesn't have to teach to a broad range of ability.
It's a tradeoff, really. Thickness is an important dimension for phone pocketability, slider keyboards are generally thicker.
One other advantage is that the keyboard is always instantly available. I used to have an HTC Hermes with a side-sliding QWERTY. Decent keyboard, but using it meant sliding the phone open and waiting for 3-4 seconds while the UI slowly reorientates itself to landscape. Slide out keyboards also require flat keys, whereas phones like the Treo and the Blackjack can have raised, separated keys.
My Samsung i600 has been pretty good. The new version (i670/Blackjack 2 in the US I think) is better, apparently. All the common special characters are on the keyboard (using the Function key).
It's a Windows Mobile Smartphone, personally I prefer WM Smartphone to Series 60.
His 5 minute statement about why he's resigning is an excellent summary of the situation IMHO:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7450728.stm
The Opposition party just disagrees with everything the government does - Labour moved right, so they moved left and the Liberal Democrats just kind of floundered around. F**k knows who I'm going to vote for at the next election.
Agreed, people here are far too quick to give up their rights. As an MP pointed out the other day, Robert Mugabe would be proud of the laws the government's trying to introduce.
One law that's really confused me recently is the ban on selling knives to under-18. You can leave home at 16 - does that mean you have to use plastic knives in your kitchen for 2 years?
They've started to teach basic fuel-economy driving to learner drivers over here (UK). Things like you describe - driving smoothly, not using the brakes unnecessarily, shifting up early.
That's just an example of competing with an entrenched, high-quality open source project. BBEdit and Textmate are doing pretty well despite the existence of Emacs etc.
Surely the answer is to offer something that's of value? If the value of the tool is greater than its cost, then I'll look at it. I can't see that much value in distributed programming tools: our distributed team works fine with IRC, Perforce, code review and email. We've tried software aimed at distributed teams before and always fallen back to our old system because it's easier and it works everywhere.
For example: there's an expensive, commercial ARM compiler despite the existence of GCC. People buy it because it generates code that's ~20% smaller and faster.
Top Gear tried it a while back, pretty much wrecked the things: Youtube link (SUV is called a people carrier in the UK)