To be fair, seeing as this game was origionally FOR the Macintosh by an origionally Macintosh only developer (ala the Marathon series) it's a bit more like buying a GameCube and complaining that Metriod never get's released for it.
In this respect it's fair to bitch at Bungie for misleading people, particularly since they said for years that it would get released for Mac OS at the same time as the PC version, even post-Microsoft buyout. It's now clear that's a big fat lie. Good game most disappointed in them for that one though, they have enjoyed the benifits of hyping *rabid* fans, a lot of whom are pissed off now, being Mac users who got shafted.
Not overly impressed with the Gearbox PC conversion I must admit, it's a shoddy straight port, not an elegant one to be proud of - dispite the DX9 effects it fails to actually take advantage of PC hardware when it should have had a re-worked engine (and the netcode is worse than X-Box over the Internet with X-Box GW ffs! It's netlag all the way, I'm sticking with my hundreds-of-players-at-once PlanetSide thanks), but it's still nice to play the game again with a mouse. Lan games should still be fun.
I'd note that Gearbox were doing Counter-Strike: Condition Zero but they stopped mysteriously and it was handed to Ritual Entertainment in mid development and no reason was given by them for this. That's probably just as well (though graphically it looks alright I'm a little disappointed in it too from what I've seen).
I think GearBox can make a passible follow up (e.g. they are reasonable modders - see BlueShift, Opposing Force) but I'm not sure after playing Halo they really did a great job in this port. It's passible, but it's not anywhere near as technically impressive as the origional.
I quite agree, Eolas are a much worse evil in this instance (though I'm sure they do not seem themselves that way, they no doubt belive they are heros of some kind), I was so disgusted I sent them the following email...
To: info@eolas.com Date: Tue Oct 07, 2003 03:09:36 PM BST Subject: Congratulations on your lawsuit
I would like to congratulate you on managing to successfully sue Microsoft and still manage to be seen as a despicable bunch of malevolent malcontents by the public at large (including industry professionals).
By exploiting the US legal and patent system and it's weaknesses (in particular it's notorious inability to deal with technical software cases) and infecting the rest of the world with your insipid patent claim (which is an insult to everybody with any knowledge of browsers, plugins, going as far back as the original inspiration for Tim Berners-Lee, Bill Atkinson's HyperCard) you have made the web a less pleasant experience, and you haven't actually contributed anything new to the concept of software plugins (those of us who remember HyperCards XCMD's are more than aware of that, even if the US patent office and the courts were not).
I'm sure your all convincing yourselves you've 'slain a giant' and that you are trying to re-enforce that opinion among yourselves for your own benefit, even though the rest of the world is largely telling you otherwise, most vocally. I'm sure you will casually disregard the voices you do not wish to hear.
Many people (those working for free in the open source world, as well as plugin developers and commercial software developers and web content maintainers) will now have to spend many man years working on an alternative non-patent-infringing format so they can be sure to remain free from your legal shenanigans. This is time that they could have spent working on other free an open software for the benefit of everyone (or who knows, even at the park, or at home with their families!). Not to mention all the end users that will be effected by this and who will have to now spend time downloading, installing and working around 'fixes' that will be necessary in the wake of your decision to sue.
In your own special way, you have truly made the world a worse place to live in.
"Atlantic Records has an opportunity with this because this technology is not copyable, it's not downloadable, it's not swappable."
A-ha, a-hahaha, ouch, my sides - it hurts! Make it stop, make it stop! Ahaha.....
If it's not copyable, that surely must mean they are making every copy by hand (from scratch?)! Wow, that's some busy backrooms you've got there! These things must cost hundreds of dollars each!
3- The original Need For Speed was good, because you could drive on a 'beautiful course'.
Yes, with wide open roads, which all made for great gameplay.
4- The current Neef For Speed has over the top scenery, and is so impressive with visuals that it doesn't look real.
No it's not as good (nor as it done as well) because it's got crappy low resolution graphics and god awful frame rates (at least on the console versions) and the handling is inferior. MSR was released ~April 2001 and the latest NFS/still/ looks (and feels) like a complete stinker in comparison!
Many (and I would suggest most) gamers like games with freedom of movement, where you can just drive around or walk around aimlessly if you want.
Morrowind, Driver and Midtown madness are good examples of open games (in the case of Driver, you can choose just to cruise around for fun) with GTA (original right through to VC) being the ultimate examples of just how much players enjoy freedom from objectives. Games like Sim City (along with more main stream 'god games') are similar in that they are free, open and not simply driven by narrow hit or miss objectives.
The biggest bug bear people had with the otherwise excellent MSR, and it's descendant Gotham Racing, was that it didn't have a 'free drive' mode, which I think backs this up.
I certainly want freedom of self determination in the games I play (and I think this accounts for a great deal of the popularity of games like EQ and SWG), but personally I don't mind some games being complex to get into if it's warranted by the design (e.g. Jane's awesome Apache Longbow simulator, took days to really get to grips with, excellent fun once you got the hang of it), not just because the developers were too stupid/lazy to think of any better ways of doing things.
I think 'greater accessibility' and 'more freedom' is what gamers are looking for and is all this gamer really wants.
I don't think they would lie about having low population on the servers.
I think the last thing they would want would to admit was that the user figures were falling - I'm sure they'd much rather admit to a number of bugs that need addressing. This is probably just a convienent time to help remove some of the duped money/items.
It amazing though, so many of these titles have obviously been designed very badly indeed, or in some cases not at all - the developers have just sat down and started churning out code without any thought as to how to write it efficently and securely. I am still stunned by this, and I think impatiant unprofessional developers and poor managers are to blame. Some developers don't see why/they/ need to play anything, and they know that managers like 'results', and managers typically push for visible results right away.
In my experience, you should sit down and discuss plan this sort of software for about 3-6 months before you even write any code (and after that have regular meetings to dicuss tweaks to the design that become apparent once you start putting the basic API's in place). To be effective, it should be a proper discussion, between the developers, with no domination by any one developer and no large egos involved (apart from by the 'lead developer', where firm decisions need to be made one way or another).
I know it can seem wasteful to have people sitting around talking and making charts for 6 months, and it might not/look/ productive, but I've found it can pay dividends back in a year and a half, because you'll don't end up having to spend another year re-writing the game to fix all the bugs in the second year.
I've found, with 6 months planning and a year of development you can achive the same as in 2 years worth of simple 'plunge in head first' development, because you don't have to waste lots of time bug fixing and traking down problems and re-writing significant bits of code.
The only disadvantage with the planning stage is that it you are 6 months later to market, but I think having a product that is twice as 'mature' is much better in the long haul (and if your in it to build a stable product, which you should be - as even if you plan on a quick sale, you can't always count on one right away - then it just makes much more sense to be later to market in many instances, even if you have competitors hot on your heels, customers will soon get tired of them if they have a poor quality product).
I'd be interested to hear other developers/project managers experiences...
The funny part is that many people never notice the blackouts other than newscasts or neighbours complaining because they live off-grid already.
I take issue with that. I don't see how you can claim 'Many' people live off the grid, at least by any reasonable definition of the word many.
Even enthusiasts with a tendency to drastically over estimate put the figure at 0.01% of the US population (again, that's a conscious over estimate, based on rounded up figures!). Figures in the rest of the western world aren't even nearly that high (and it's only that high in the USA because you have such a poorly regulated market - especially in places like California where viable alternatives happen to be avalible to those in California, who are uniquely wealthy enough to be able to afford the 20,000 USD to install a system in the first place).
Solar power, wind power, and if you have a fast creek running through your backyard, hydroelectric..
Solar power is not a viable solution in most of the world (it's just not reliable enough, even with very expensive Solar panels running at the giddy heights of 20% efficiency). It's not even a viable solution in most parts of the USA (though it's a fine solution for those in states such as California, Texas, or Florida).
Small Scale Wind Power, apart from being even less reliable, very noisy and an eyesore (promoting NIMBYim), is even less efficient. I think off shore managed Wind Farms are a great idea, personal Wind Farms are unworkable and entirely undesirable.
And as for personal Hydroelectric, it's entirely irrelevant as the number of people who have a 'fast [running] creek' in their backyard is infinitesimal and statistically irrelevant in this context (it makes no difference if they were all off grid, particularly when you think of how they are dispersed across the grid).
The first step is to reduce your consumption.. turn OFF your computer when not in use... (bla bla it hurt's you computer, costs more to start it up, and all the other idiotic lies that have spread through the years... NO it does not do ANY damage to your pc to turn it off
It does cause significantly more wear and tear on your PC when you turn it off and on (and shortens it's lifespan, particularly of components like CPU, PSU and Graphics Card fans and most significantly of Hard Disks, but I see someone else has already pointed that out.
replace all lighting with Compact flouresent lamps
The best I can say about that is it's ill thought out advice spread by people who haven't take the time to work out scientifically the amount of resources actually being used (based on real world usage patterns).
Lights in Living rooms, Kitchens and/or study rooms tend to have lights that are on for extended periods of time and you can benefit from fluorescent lamps (in terms of electricity used and cost to run). But lights which are only normally used briefly for short periods, such as in a Bathroom or Hallways, Utility Rooms or Bedrooms are far better being off being traditional bulbs. They use far less electricity that way.
It's a catch 22 we need power for our luxuries and toys like computers, tv, Air conditioning.... but they are the cause of the power woes
Well I'm still getting over that you think Air Conditioning and Computers are luxuries and 'toys' but I find the suggestion that they are the cause of power supply problems (or even a 'catch 22') boggling.
The problem in the USA is incompetent government management at Federal and State level (and voters that put up with it, and people to apathetic to do anything about it.). Italy also has a problem with virtually all of it's national infrastructure, but it's drastically worse because they have had appalling mismanagement for years (not to mention they elected a crook to run the country).
Other western countries don't have the same problem and you shouldn't confuse problems in the US with the rest of the world (though it
Yeah we've had them for 6+ years (surprised this is news to others). I've seen them BSOD, ask for a login, and the one round the corner from me had a DHCP expiry/conflit alert on it for 3 months. You'd think SOMEONE would be arsed to fix it!
(Still worked though, but it put other people off using it, meaning I didn't have to queue to use it).
Lots of them are color and have shockwave flash type intro's.
The underground here in London (well, really DLR, the Docklands Light Railway) has ticket machines that run OS/2, apparently in French or German though (definately not English!). They often die at early hours of the morning (~6) until rebooted remotely.
Both are good monitoring packages, it's up to personal preference really.
Actually Nagios is a lot more powerful that BB (which really doesn't do all that much), and aisde from that Big Brother is not 'free' (often people just don't bother to read the Terms and Conditions and think it's free).
You can use BB with no charge to monitor certain systems, but if you provide certain types of services you are required to by a license, and these days most medium and large ISP's fall under this category.
Big Brother is amazingly basic, I don't understand why people get so excited about it (I could re-write it in a day, and I'm far from a rocket scientist). Nagios, in contrast, is a full network and service monitoring system, and would have been much more useful in this instance and you could have used it to more easily identify the source of the incoming traffic.
Doom 3 this year looks doubtful, Activision certainly don't expect to ship it till 2004, though they have said it is in the hands of ID Software.
I would make business sense to not have them clash and get released at the same time, so I expect Doom 3 won't ship this year, but in the first quarter of next (unless they aim for Christmas, though I can't see it being much of a 'Chirstmas Title', what with the evil-scary-hell-spawned-zombies that make you want to turn all the lights on and hide under the sink with a big kitchen knife).
As impressive as HL2's physics/environment engine (and use of DX9) clearly is, Doom 3 is still going to have the edge in rendering jaw-dropping indoor environments with stupid amounts of eye candy, so at least it won't look 'aged' or suffer from the later release date.
Australian sentencing seems to be quite leniant by US standards. It seems to me to be very similar to the UK. In the UK (and I suspect in Australia too) there is much pressure on over crowed prisions.
Interestingly enough, this was a problem in the US when GWB came to power, so, duh, he though, we need to build a lot more prisions (a very GWB solution).
I'm not a fan of the US Justice System (it/still/ exececutes people for a start, which is entirely despicable in my book, and I find it US police are excessively authoritarian, though I do like the idea of elected high ranking police officals) but quite frankly building more prison space was a simple, logical idea. It worked too! - Crime was brought down. He was 100% spot on in building more prisons.
It's not because prison re-habilitates people that 'more prisons' work (most people go on to reoffend), and it's not that it's a deterrent (statistically, term lengths have very little impact because criminals don't expect to get caught). it's just that so crime is commited by the same group of poeple. If you keep them (a tiny minority) locked up, then they are not going around commiting crimes, so the crime rate falls. It's really that simple.
Of course in the long term you need improved education and social services too, so you can socially engineer the populace so they are less included to mug/rape/murder each other, but you need to 'keep the loonies of the grass' in the mean time - you can't have them running around in the street commiting drive bys and GTA.
IMO, this is what we need to do in the UK, more prisions and less 'lighter sentences beacause the prisons are overcrowed!'. We also badly need a 3 strikes and your out rule IMO. I am fed up with serial car jackers, burgalers and murders who get light sentences (out after 8 years for rape and murder, for example), only to re-offend. I mean, FFS, if the have been arrested for burglary/assault/car theft 10 times already what the fuck are they doing out of jail already?
Take the case of Tony Martin, who was sentanced to jail for life for shooting dead a burglar on his own land (there were two burglars who had come to steal from him, Tony Martin was alone in a remote house in the country). Tony Martin's sentance was reduced to 5 years on appeal (though he was refused early release), but most interesting point about the whole affair was:
The burgler who died had already been in court 28 times for crimes including theft, fraud, offences against property and public disorder. His accomplice was even worse and had 34 criminal convictions for the same types of offences!
There is no way either of these two should have been walking around the streets, it's just incompotence on the part of our justice system. The judges responsible *should* have been named and shamed and forced to resign. They are clearly not fit to serve. In this respect, the US legal system certainly works better than ours because sentancing is harsher in cases like this.
Oh, and get this - the wounded buglar (33 year old Brendon Fearon) is suing Tony Martin for 'loss of earnings', despite currently being in jail on an 18 month sentance for dealing heroin. The fact that he even has a chance of winning should disturb us all...
The funny thing is, the whole business of judges handing down light sentences so as not to further over crowd prisions really pisses the police in the UK off as well, they know that if they arrest someone and hand the case over to the CPS (Criminal Prosecution Service) to handle, they are easily back on the streets and commit crimes again because the judge will invariably go lightly on them and the whole exercise will just end up being a complete waste of police and CPS time as well of course of money.
This is off topic but as a Londoner I feel strongly about it (and for the record, I don't think any adult in jail should have access to a games console unless they are, for example, in a minimum security facility, in which case it's not really relevent if they have access to violent games or not, because volient criminals and those likely to re-offend should not be in minium security jails (IMO)).
But I digress. On beggers...
You same the very same people year after year at places like Oxford Circus, going their way down the tube asking for money and stinking up the carrage and pestering people for money.
I keep running into these fuckers, they are quite happy to pick fights and shout out 'Cunt!' and 'Motherfucker!' at members of the public just because they don't hand over cash to them. I'm fed up with it and would like to see the lot of them doing hard labour, jail or the army. They are NOT simply nice people on the inside. They are NOT all down on their luck. Some of them (most of them, being relatively fit, young, 20-30 year olds) are violent, drug addicted, criminals who will quite happily rob you at knife point if they think they will get away with it. By these people a sandwich (suckered!) and they will very often *throw it at you!* and ask for money, not food (I've seen this happen more than once, and usually accompanied by swearing). Please, if you visit London, don't give money or food or ANY sympathy to these scum, some of us have to live with them. DO buy a copy of the Big Issue however - it provides gainful employment while rasing money for the homeless, it's quite respectable.
Some of these people are mentally ill and need to be cared for, most of the ones I see just need a swift kick up the arse to get in line with the rest of society and stop leeching of the state (to which we pay such high taxes in the UK), stinking up the city, putting off visitors and getting in the way (and being abusive to, and commiting crimes against) tax paying residents. I consider myself left wing, but I still strongly think people have a duty to the state.
There are LOTS of options in country like the UK, who's state employs more people in heath care and social services then any other government in Europe (dispite us not having the largest area, or the largest population), it even has more employees than any other *company* in Europe. Our state apparatus is a sociallist legacy, and very extensive.
Our homeless housing projects are by and large excellent. There are plenty of hostels in the UK, with beds that go empty every night. The waiting list is about 2 weeks (max) for a perminant place. There is no shorting of housing, but to see the same people, month after month, year after year, you wouldn't think it. A one bedroomed flat in London will easily set you back 1,500 USD a month, that's what people on the streets in London say they want, well no, tough shit, go and live somewhere else, they can get a job, work hard and come back in a few years and pay for one themselves - they have no right to expect the state to put them up for gratis in what is the 3rd most expensive city in the world.
If your living on the streets for years in a country like the UK (which, for those who don't know, has a huge excess of housing in the north). In many cities in Scotland the council *advertise* hosing vacancies ('Contact us, get council housing, no waiting list!') in reasonable areas. I had a friend, a young fit ~22 year old single white male with no dependants, who was employed and quite happily living at home apply to the council for housing (it's cheaper, he was curious to see if he could get anything), and got council housing within the *week*. He must have been the lowest priority canidate, and he still got something right away, he's know bought the house from the council because he liked it so much (and they have too many, so are trying to sell them off).
I bought a Scottish drunk in north London breakfast in a cafe and asked him how long he had been in London (I refused t
Seriously, I think you just struck on what will now be my leading comment when telling people about this. I personally think the RIAA is just going for the first ones they could find. It's still a really wild internet out there and the actual users within their grasp is probably a lot smaller than they are letting on.
I think you're spot on. I've read about a couple of people they are after now, they both seemed to have been subcribed to the same site.
It sounds a lot like a recent crackdown on child pornography that the police did in the UK. They just stumbled across a single site in the US, and got all the user subscription details for that site and then went door to door and then claimed it was a 'big investigation', even though it clearly wasn't.
I think all they have done is found a list of subscribers to a single web site or service and decided to go down the list of users.
This is because the head Planetside programmer, John Ratcliff, has a very low opinion of non-Windows users. His view is that all Linux users are code thieves and software pirates, because anyone who uses a free operating system is unwilling to pay for any other software either. (As near as I can remember those were his exact words.)
As a paying PlanetSide subscriber (a MMOG FPS), I find SOE distinctly user hostile and not to be trusted.
I'm not by any streach of the imagination a 'whinger' on the boards, but they constantly give misinformation, are not aware of bugs that virtually every user knows about and has been aware of for months (like doors that don't open [makeing capturing a base impossible, which is kind of the point of the game], your character being killed for no reason if you jump in certain areas of the game world [and then taking over 5 minutes to 'reset'], map exploits to allow several users to overload and crash the server [which, after 3 months, was 'kludged', it's still exploitable, but it's more difficult now]).
An example of the behavior displayed by them:
The current (new) Producer Dallas Dickinson, when asked in an interview, says by way of a reply that new players should familerise themself with the game world using the training levels provided. This idea sadly, is a joke. 'Training' levels have been quite standard fare since at least the origional Half Life. However, this suggestion requires some nerve on Dallas Dickinson's part because it's never worked - training has been broken since release 3+ months ago, they just can't be bothered to fix it (and it's broken for every single user, in a game that's as complex as PlanetSide (and few people realise the depth) it's really hurting the gameworld).
The worst thing about the bug management is they litteraly don't seem to have CVS or RCS in place! They can fix a bug, then introduce a new patch a few weeks later, and bang, the bug is back. This is happened a few times and is really annoying, it's now common to see 'X bug is back since Y patch' posts on the forums.
They introduced a Capture the Flag idea, to which almost everyone said in unison 'No, don't do that, we can play CTF for free, we want a proper warfare game, leave it alone, just tweak the existing gameplay, don't give us CTF WE DON'T WANT THAT.', they conducted numerous user instigated polls (using free online poll services) on the forum and results were always in the region of 100 against, 20 'For or Unsure', but they went adhead and did it anyway after vast amounts of moaning. It was supposed to bring the battle out into the field (and stop it being just around bases).
Of the minority that wanted it, they primarily defended it by saying it WASN'T capture the flag. Then the developers went and used a Flag icon and SOE started calling it CTF in interviews.
The problem with it is firstly, certainly IMO, there was no serious problem with battles not being out in the field (I've had many great battles out in the field, not just around bases), secondly it's a complete flop as it's entirely failed to bring the battle out into the field! You just grab the flag and 'run' (usually as a passanger in a vehicle driven by someone else). That's it, no battle in the field, the 'battles' are still taking place in the bases because you can 'decontruct' the 'flag' (aka the 'LLU') by re-securing the base, which is what people do (after all if a think is being driven away from you and has a head start, it's difficult to catch up with it, so why bother if you can just re-securing a single room in the base?).
My third issue with it (as many users, including myself, suggested was *perfectly fucking obvious from day one*, pardon my French) is that any idiot can pick up the LLU and run away with it. This *FREQUENTLY* happens, some idiot will pick it up and run in the wrong direction. The maps are 8k accross, idiots just ignore messages and and go in the opposite direction, dispite a *giant flashing line* telling them where to go, and constant popup messages informing them where they need to be. There is a timer on the 'flag' and this idoiocy can negate the work of a hundred people or more who have worked together for 20+ min to capture the damn base in the first place. Of course, now you can't trust the idiot who get's the 'flag' so people frequently team kill for it and fight ov
They doomed items of crap that you will find as rare and very expensive collectors items on eBay in about 20 years time.
The Nokia abomination will only be bought by fuckwits, and those with exceptionally rose tinted glasses.
The current range of Palm and PocketPC based devices, including hybrid 'smart phones', are already better than this device - they can clock up twice the frame rates at a higher resolution.
Nokia slagged of Gameboy Advance players as part of their marketing hype - who in the name of sweet Jebus on a bike are they trying to market to?
You know this, but I'm going to say it again:
YOU TAKE THE BATTERY OUT TO CHANGE GAMES.
THAT. IS. RETARDED.
As for the phantom, yeah big fuckoff PC's retagged as 'consoles' but with DRM, that's what the industry wants. Just look how successful the XBox i....oh, wait. I haven't played any games on my XBox in months, let alone bought any software for it. I was starting to wonder if they were still *making* software. I actually got so board of waiting for Midtown Madness 3 to come out (having really liked the first two) that I shelved the entire console, and was apathetic when it was released because after looking at all the damn movies and screen shots for 6 months I felt like I'd played the game already.
The XBox is a superb console, but it's struggling. And that's with Microsoft behind it, remember they are the marketing geniuses that manage to sell us second rate criminally overpriced software year after year, and they are still struggling in the console market despite clearly having the best hardware going.
I bought a new PC with a Radeon 9700 Pro recently because I couldn't find any new software I wanted to play for my XBox or GameCube. AFAICT, the ONLY console platform with new software being released is the Gameboy advance as far as I can tell (and most of them are tedious sequels - e.g. Advance Wars 2, or ports of older games, Final Fight, Street Fighter Super Ninja Mega Turbo Speed III Ultimate Movie Edition). There are quite a few good Japanese import GC title's around, but I gave my GameCube away a while ago following being devastated by the tedious pixel perfect tedious jumping filler experience that was the obviously rushed to market game known as 'Super Mario Sunshine'.
The Phantom doesn't have a hope in hell. It's going to lose someone a LOT of money, and you've have to be irresponsibly optimistic to think you could make it a success. You need a huge, vast, marketing campaign to convince a sceptical Playstation hugging public to part with their cash and you need really good games.
Phantom investors deserve to go completely bankcrupt and have their familes forced to live in garages, they been warned, I have no sympathy for their blinding greed.
AH, but they Government have already said it wouldn't stop Asylum seekers (though they keep flipping back to it, because they have so few reasons why it would be a good idea to impliment ID cards).
All legal citizens in the UK have National Insurance cards (like US Social Security cards), which have a unique key on the front. You could simply send that key into a central database which keeps your details on file. Which is what the smart cards are going to do anyway (it's not as if the cards are going to contain all of your actual medical history, just a pointer to it so a computer can retrieve it from a central database).
That makes NEW ID CARDS POINTLESS! We already have compulsory unique identifing 'serial numbers'! Only a fuckwit of the higest order could fail to think that ID cards would be 'more useful' in stoping bogus asylum seekers!
ID cards would add no new meaningful functionality and would cost us millions.
If they introduce an smart card that you can use in place of cash payments, allows you to access your medical data, your empolyment history, your front door key, your work pass then I'm interested, as it is, it's just a pointless exercise.
The ONLY, ONLY useful thing it provides is a handy form of Photo ID for those who don't have a passport or driving license. Big deal. Not orth several million pounds of tax payers money by any streach of the imagination.
The US now uses it's Social Security card as an effective 'national ID card', there is no reason why we couldn't do the same gradually over time, just make them in to smart cards for new recipients (and possibly those that request them) so you can ultimately do cryptographic authentication with them for say permitting access to medical or empoyment data (not that the government will have their heads screwed on enough for this, the UK government AWLAYS award contracts to the lease competent bidder as far as IT contracts are go, though the Open.gov.uk web site approach seems to have gone reasonably well...).
Err, no. It's not 'nonsense' to suggest what the parent poster did, it's accurate as it's exactly what they've been doing for the last several years and is by and large entirely what they are continuing to do.
Even Conservatives are not behind the Tory party right now.
Your 100% crackers if you think The Sun are behind the every more right leaning Tory party. The Sun may be right wing, but then so are New Labour.
I'd also add that The Sun's 'traditional' position is simply whatever one Newscorp tells them to take.
Slashdot Mirror
To be fair, seeing as this game was origionally FOR the Macintosh by an origionally Macintosh only developer (ala the Marathon series) it's a bit more like buying a GameCube and complaining that Metriod never get's released for it.
In this respect it's fair to bitch at Bungie for misleading people, particularly since they said for years that it would get released for Mac OS at the same time as the PC version, even post-Microsoft buyout. It's now clear that's a big fat lie. Good game most disappointed in them for that one though, they have enjoyed the benifits of hyping *rabid* fans, a lot of whom are pissed off now, being Mac users who got shafted.
Not overly impressed with the Gearbox PC conversion I must admit, it's a shoddy straight port, not an elegant one to be proud of - dispite the DX9 effects it fails to actually take advantage of PC hardware when it should have had a re-worked engine (and the netcode is worse than X-Box over the Internet with X-Box GW ffs! It's netlag all the way, I'm sticking with my hundreds-of-players-at-once PlanetSide thanks), but it's still nice to play the game again with a mouse. Lan games should still be fun.
I'd note that Gearbox were doing Counter-Strike: Condition Zero but they stopped mysteriously and it was handed to Ritual Entertainment in mid development and no reason was given by them for this. That's probably just as well (though graphically it looks alright I'm a little disappointed in it too from what I've seen).
I think GearBox can make a passible follow up (e.g. they are reasonable modders - see BlueShift, Opposing Force) but I'm not sure after playing Halo they really did a great job in this port. It's passible, but it's not anywhere near as technically impressive as the origional.
I quite agree, Eolas are a much worse evil in this instance (though I'm sure they do not seem themselves that way, they no doubt belive they are heros of some kind), I was so disgusted I sent them the following email...
To: info@eolas.com
Date: Tue Oct 07, 2003 03:09:36 PM BST
Subject: Congratulations on your lawsuit
I would like to congratulate you on managing to successfully sue Microsoft and still manage to be seen as a despicable bunch of malevolent malcontents by the public at large (including industry professionals).
By exploiting the US legal and patent system and it's weaknesses (in particular it's notorious inability to deal with technical software cases) and infecting the rest of the world with your insipid patent claim (which is an insult to everybody with any knowledge of browsers, plugins, going as far back as the original inspiration for Tim Berners-Lee, Bill Atkinson's HyperCard) you have made the web a less pleasant experience, and you haven't actually contributed anything new to the concept of software plugins (those of us who remember HyperCards XCMD's are more than aware of that, even if the US patent office and the courts were not).
I'm sure your all convincing yourselves you've 'slain a giant' and that you are trying to re-enforce that opinion among yourselves for your own benefit, even though the rest of the world is largely telling you otherwise, most vocally. I'm sure you will casually disregard the voices you do not wish to hear.
Many people (those working for free in the open source world, as well as plugin developers and commercial software developers and web content maintainers) will now have to spend many man years working on an alternative non-patent-infringing format so they can be sure to remain free from your legal shenanigans. This is time that they could have spent working on other free an open software for the benefit of everyone (or who knows, even at the park, or at home with their families!). Not to mention all the end users that will be effected by this and who will have to now spend time downloading, installing and working around 'fixes' that will be necessary in the wake of your decision to sue.
In your own special way, you have truly made the world a worse place to live in.
Congratulations.
--
OMG, how is this even news?!
a ll2_burnett_big.jpg
Clouds reflect sun light, and sometimes they look funny.
that fireball is much brighter than the light reflected off a cloud could be.
Look at the follow up picture, it's a cloud, reflecting the setting sun. This is the follow up picture, taken a minute after the first:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0310/fireb
If you think that's a 'fireball in the sky' then your in need of psychiatric attention.
"Atlantic Records has an opportunity with this because this technology is not copyable, it's not downloadable, it's not swappable."
A-ha, a-hahaha, ouch, my sides - it hurts! Make it stop, make it stop! Ahaha.....
If it's not copyable, that surely must mean they are making every copy by hand (from scratch?)! Wow, that's some busy backrooms you've got there! These things must cost hundreds of dollars each!
Some comments ;)
/still/ looks (and feels) like a complete stinker in comparison!
3- The original Need For Speed was good, because you could drive on a 'beautiful course'.
Yes, with wide open roads, which all made for great gameplay.
4- The current Neef For Speed has over the top scenery, and is so impressive with visuals that it doesn't look real.
No it's not as good (nor as it done as well) because it's got crappy low resolution graphics and god awful frame rates (at least on the console versions) and the handling is inferior. MSR was released ~April 2001 and the latest NFS
Many (and I would suggest most) gamers like games with freedom of movement, where you can just drive around or walk around aimlessly if you want.
Morrowind, Driver and Midtown madness are good examples of open games (in the case of Driver, you can choose just to cruise around for fun) with GTA (original right through to VC) being the ultimate examples of just how much players enjoy freedom from objectives. Games like Sim City (along with more main stream 'god games') are similar in that they are free, open and not simply driven by narrow hit or miss objectives.
The biggest bug bear people had with the otherwise excellent MSR, and it's descendant Gotham Racing, was that it didn't have a 'free drive' mode, which I think backs this up.
I certainly want freedom of self determination in the games I play (and I think this accounts for a great deal of the popularity of games like EQ and SWG), but personally I don't mind some games being complex to get into if it's warranted by the design (e.g. Jane's awesome Apache Longbow simulator, took days to really get to grips with, excellent fun once you got the hang of it), not just because the developers were too stupid/lazy to think of any better ways of doing things.
I think 'greater accessibility' and 'more freedom' is what gamers are looking for and is all this gamer really wants.
I don't think they would lie about having low population on the servers.
/they/ need to play anything, and they know that managers like 'results', and managers typically push for visible results right away.
/look/ productive, but I've found it can pay dividends back in a year and a half, because you'll don't end up having to spend another year re-writing the game to fix all the bugs in the second year.
I think the last thing they would want would to admit was that the user figures were falling - I'm sure they'd much rather admit to a number of bugs that need addressing. This is probably just a convienent time to help remove some of the duped money/items.
It amazing though, so many of these titles have obviously been designed very badly indeed, or in some cases not at all - the developers have just sat down and started churning out code without any thought as to how to write it efficently and securely. I am still stunned by this, and I think impatiant unprofessional developers and poor managers are to blame. Some developers don't see why
In my experience, you should sit down and discuss plan this sort of software for about 3-6 months before you even write any code (and after that have regular meetings to dicuss tweaks to the design that become apparent once you start putting the basic API's in place). To be effective, it should be a proper discussion, between the developers, with no domination by any one developer and no large egos involved (apart from by the 'lead developer', where firm decisions need to be made one way or another).
I know it can seem wasteful to have people sitting around talking and making charts for 6 months, and it might not
I've found, with 6 months planning and a year of development you can achive the same as in 2 years worth of simple 'plunge in head first' development, because you don't have to waste lots of time bug fixing and traking down problems and re-writing significant bits of code.
The only disadvantage with the planning stage is that it you are 6 months later to market, but I think having a product that is twice as 'mature' is much better in the long haul (and if your in it to build a stable product, which you should be - as even if you plan on a quick sale, you can't always count on one right away - then it just makes much more sense to be later to market in many instances, even if you have competitors hot on your heels, customers will soon get tired of them if they have a poor quality product).
I'd be interested to hear other developers/project managers experiences...
Bloody hell, that's scary!
If they need NAV, I'l seriously worried!, eek!
Hehe, actually I live near Canning Town (Royal Victoria Doc) but this one was outside the UGC Cinema, near Canary Wharf (so v. close by).
;)
Maybe the network in that area was FUBARd
The funny part is that many people never notice the blackouts other than newscasts or neighbours complaining because they live off-grid already.
I take issue with that. I don't see how you can claim 'Many' people live off the grid, at least by any reasonable definition of the word many.
Even enthusiasts with a tendency to drastically over estimate put the figure at 0.01% of the US population (again, that's a conscious over estimate, based on rounded up figures!). Figures in the rest of the western world aren't even nearly that high (and it's only that high in the USA because you have such a poorly regulated market - especially in places like California where viable alternatives happen to be avalible to those in California, who are uniquely wealthy enough to be able to afford the 20,000 USD to install a system in the first place).
Solar power, wind power, and if you have a fast creek running through your backyard, hydroelectric..
Solar power is not a viable solution in most of the world (it's just not reliable enough, even with very expensive Solar panels running at the giddy heights of 20% efficiency). It's not even a viable solution in most parts of the USA (though it's a fine solution for those in states such as California, Texas, or Florida).
Small Scale Wind Power, apart from being even less reliable, very noisy and an eyesore (promoting NIMBYim), is even less efficient. I think off shore managed Wind Farms are a great idea, personal Wind Farms are unworkable and entirely undesirable.
And as for personal Hydroelectric, it's entirely irrelevant as the number of people who have a 'fast [running] creek' in their backyard is infinitesimal and statistically irrelevant in this context (it makes no difference if they were all off grid, particularly when you think of how they are dispersed across the grid).
The first step is to reduce your consumption.. turn OFF your computer when not in use... (bla bla it hurt's you computer, costs more to start it up, and all the other idiotic lies that have spread through the years... NO it does not do ANY damage to your pc to turn it off
It does cause significantly more wear and tear on your PC when you turn it off and on (and shortens it's lifespan, particularly of components like CPU, PSU and Graphics Card fans and most significantly of Hard Disks, but I see someone else has already pointed that out.
replace all lighting with Compact flouresent lamps
The best I can say about that is it's ill thought out advice spread by people who haven't take the time to work out scientifically the amount of resources actually being used (based on real world usage patterns).
Lights in Living rooms, Kitchens and/or study rooms tend to have lights that are on for extended periods of time and you can benefit from fluorescent lamps (in terms of electricity used and cost to run). But lights which are only normally used briefly for short periods, such as in a Bathroom or Hallways, Utility Rooms or Bedrooms are far better being off being traditional bulbs. They use far less electricity that way.
It's a catch 22 we need power for our luxuries and toys like computers, tv, Air conditioning.... but they are the cause of the power woes
Well I'm still getting over that you think Air Conditioning and Computers are luxuries and 'toys' but I find the suggestion that they are the cause of power supply problems (or even a 'catch 22') boggling.
The problem in the USA is incompetent government management at Federal and State level (and voters that put up with it, and people to apathetic to do anything about it.). Italy also has a problem with virtually all of it's national infrastructure, but it's drastically worse because they have had appalling mismanagement for years (not to mention they elected a crook to run the country).
Other western countries don't have the same problem and you shouldn't confuse problems in the US with the rest of the world (though it
Yeah we've had them for 6+ years (surprised this is news to others). I've seen them BSOD, ask for a login, and the one round the corner from me had a DHCP expiry/conflit alert on it for 3 months. You'd think SOMEONE would be arsed to fix it!
(Still worked though, but it put other people off using it, meaning I didn't have to queue to use it).
Lots of them are color and have shockwave flash type intro's.
The underground here in London (well, really DLR, the Docklands Light Railway) has ticket machines that run OS/2, apparently in French or German though (definately not English!). They often die at early hours of the morning (~6) until rebooted remotely.
Both are good monitoring packages, it's up to personal preference really.
Actually Nagios is a lot more powerful that BB (which really doesn't do all that much), and aisde from that Big Brother is not 'free' (often people just don't bother to read the Terms and Conditions and think it's free).
You can use BB with no charge to monitor certain systems, but if you provide certain types of services you are required to by a license, and these days most medium and large ISP's fall under this category.
Big Brother is amazingly basic, I don't understand why people get so excited about it (I could re-write it in a day, and I'm far from a rocket scientist). Nagios, in contrast, is a full network and service monitoring system, and would have been much more useful in this instance and you could have used it to more easily identify the source of the incoming traffic.
What I care about is when I suffer from the Slashdot effect (transposing of letters when I type)
Transposing letters is not (and never has been) the 'Slashdot effect'.
Doom 3 this year looks doubtful, Activision certainly don't expect to ship it till 2004, though they have said it is in the hands of ID Software.
I would make business sense to not have them clash and get released at the same time, so I expect Doom 3 won't ship this year, but in the first quarter of next (unless they aim for Christmas, though I can't see it being much of a 'Chirstmas Title', what with the evil-scary-hell-spawned-zombies that make you want to turn all the lights on and hide under the sink with a big kitchen knife).
As impressive as HL2's physics/environment engine (and use of DX9) clearly is, Doom 3 is still going to have the edge in rendering jaw-dropping indoor environments with stupid amounts of eye candy, so at least it won't look 'aged' or suffer from the later release date.
Australian sentencing seems to be quite leniant by US standards. It seems to me to be very similar to the UK. In the UK (and I suspect in Australia too) there is much pressure on over crowed prisions.
/still/ exececutes people for a start, which is entirely despicable in my book, and I find it US police are excessively authoritarian, though I do like the idea of elected high ranking police officals) but quite frankly building more prison space was a simple, logical idea. It worked too! - Crime was brought down. He was 100% spot on in building more prisons.
Interestingly enough, this was a problem in the US when GWB came to power, so, duh, he though, we need to build a lot more prisions (a very GWB solution).
I'm not a fan of the US Justice System (it
It's not because prison re-habilitates people that 'more prisons' work (most people go on to reoffend), and it's not that it's a deterrent (statistically, term lengths have very little impact because criminals don't expect to get caught). it's just that so crime is commited by the same group of poeple. If you keep them (a tiny minority) locked up, then they are not going around commiting crimes, so the crime rate falls. It's really that simple.
Of course in the long term you need improved education and social services too, so you can socially engineer the populace so they are less included to mug/rape/murder each other, but you need to 'keep the loonies of the grass' in the mean time - you can't have them running around in the street commiting drive bys and GTA.
IMO, this is what we need to do in the UK, more prisions and less 'lighter sentences beacause the prisons are overcrowed!'. We also badly need a 3 strikes and your out rule IMO. I am fed up with serial car jackers, burgalers and murders who get light sentences (out after 8 years for rape and murder, for example), only to re-offend. I mean, FFS, if the have been arrested for burglary/assault/car theft 10 times already what the fuck are they doing out of jail already?
Take the case of Tony Martin, who was sentanced to jail for life for shooting dead a burglar on his own land (there were two burglars who had come to steal from him, Tony Martin was alone in a remote house in the country). Tony Martin's sentance was reduced to 5 years on appeal (though he was refused early release), but most interesting point about the whole affair was:
The burgler who died had already been in court 28 times for crimes including theft, fraud, offences against property and public disorder. His accomplice was even worse and had 34 criminal convictions for the same types of offences!
There is no way either of these two should have been walking around the streets, it's just incompotence on the part of our justice system. The judges responsible *should* have been named and shamed and forced to resign. They are clearly not fit to serve. In this respect, the US legal system certainly works better than ours because sentancing is harsher in cases like this.
Oh, and get this - the wounded buglar (33 year old Brendon Fearon) is suing Tony Martin for 'loss of earnings', despite currently being in jail on an 18 month sentance for dealing heroin. The fact that he even has a chance of winning should disturb us all...
The funny thing is, the whole business of judges handing down light sentences so as not to further over crowd prisions really pisses the police in the UK off as well, they know that if they arrest someone and hand the case over to the CPS (Criminal Prosecution Service) to handle, they are easily back on the streets and commit crimes again because the judge will invariably go lightly on them and the whole exercise will just end up being a complete waste of police and CPS time as well of course of money.
This is off topic but as a Londoner I feel strongly about it (and for the record, I don't think any adult in jail should have access to a games console unless they are, for example, in a minimum security facility, in which case it's not really relevent if they have access to violent games or not, because volient criminals and those likely to re-offend should not be in minium security jails (IMO)).
But I digress. On beggers...
You same the very same people year after year at places like Oxford Circus, going their way down the tube asking for money and stinking up the carrage and pestering people for money.
I keep running into these fuckers, they are quite happy to pick fights and shout out 'Cunt!' and 'Motherfucker!' at members of the public just because they don't hand over cash to them. I'm fed up with it and would like to see the lot of them doing hard labour, jail or the army. They are NOT simply nice people on the inside. They are NOT all down on their luck. Some of them (most of them, being relatively fit, young, 20-30 year olds) are violent, drug addicted, criminals who will quite happily rob you at knife point if they think they will get away with it. By these people a sandwich (suckered!) and they will very often *throw it at you!* and ask for money, not food (I've seen this happen more than once, and usually accompanied by swearing). Please, if you visit London, don't give money or food or ANY sympathy to these scum, some of us have to live with them. DO buy a copy of the Big Issue however - it provides gainful employment while rasing money for the homeless, it's quite respectable.
Some of these people are mentally ill and need to be cared for, most of the ones I see just need a swift kick up the arse to get in line with the rest of society and stop leeching of the state (to which we pay such high taxes in the UK), stinking up the city, putting off visitors and getting in the way (and being abusive to, and commiting crimes against) tax paying residents. I consider myself left wing, but I still strongly think people have a duty to the state.
There are LOTS of options in country like the UK, who's state employs more people in heath care and social services then any other government in Europe (dispite us not having the largest area, or the largest population), it even has more employees than any other *company* in Europe. Our state apparatus is a sociallist legacy, and very extensive.
Our homeless housing projects are by and large excellent. There are plenty of hostels in the UK, with beds that go empty every night. The waiting list is about 2 weeks (max) for a perminant place. There is no shorting of housing, but to see the same people, month after month, year after year, you wouldn't think it. A one bedroomed flat in London will easily set you back 1,500 USD a month, that's what people on the streets in London say they want, well no, tough shit, go and live somewhere else, they can get a job, work hard and come back in a few years and pay for one themselves - they have no right to expect the state to put them up for gratis in what is the 3rd most expensive city in the world.
If your living on the streets for years in a country like the UK (which, for those who don't know, has a huge excess of housing in the north). In many cities in Scotland the council *advertise* hosing vacancies ('Contact us, get council housing, no waiting list!') in reasonable areas. I had a friend, a young fit ~22 year old single white male with no dependants, who was employed and quite happily living at home apply to the council for housing (it's cheaper, he was curious to see if he could get anything), and got council housing within the *week*. He must have been the lowest priority canidate, and he still got something right away, he's know bought the house from the council because he liked it so much (and they have too many, so are trying to sell them off).
I bought a Scottish drunk in north London breakfast in a cafe and asked him how long he had been in London (I refused t
Seriously, I think you just struck on what will now be my leading comment when telling people about this. I personally think the RIAA is just going for the first ones they could find. It's still a really wild internet out there and the actual users within their grasp is probably a lot smaller than they are letting on.
I think you're spot on. I've read about a couple of people they are after now, they both seemed to have been subcribed to the same site.
It sounds a lot like a recent crackdown on child pornography that the police did in the UK. They just stumbled across a single site in the US, and got all the user subscription details for that site and then went door to door and then claimed it was a 'big investigation', even though it clearly wasn't.
I think all they have done is found a list of subscribers to a single web site or service and decided to go down the list of users.
This is because the head Planetside programmer, John Ratcliff, has a very low opinion of non-Windows users. His view is that all Linux users are code thieves and software pirates, because anyone who uses a free operating system is unwilling to pay for any other software either. (As near as I can remember those were his exact words.)
Interesting post all round, cheers.
As a paying PlanetSide subscriber (a MMOG FPS), I find SOE distinctly user hostile and not to be trusted.
I'm not by any streach of the imagination a 'whinger' on the boards, but they constantly give misinformation, are not aware of bugs that virtually every user knows about and has been aware of for months (like doors that don't open [makeing capturing a base impossible, which is kind of the point of the game], your character being killed for no reason if you jump in certain areas of the game world [and then taking over 5 minutes to 'reset'], map exploits to allow several users to overload and crash the server [which, after 3 months, was 'kludged', it's still exploitable, but it's more difficult now]).
An example of the behavior displayed by them:
The current (new) Producer Dallas Dickinson, when asked in an interview, says by way of a reply that new players should familerise themself with the game world using the training levels provided. This idea sadly, is a joke. 'Training' levels have been quite standard fare since at least the origional Half Life. However, this suggestion requires some nerve on Dallas Dickinson's part because it's never worked - training has been broken since release 3+ months ago, they just can't be bothered to fix it (and it's broken for every single user, in a game that's as complex as PlanetSide (and few people realise the depth) it's really hurting the gameworld).
The worst thing about the bug management is they litteraly don't seem to have CVS or RCS in place! They can fix a bug, then introduce a new patch a few weeks later, and bang, the bug is back. This is happened a few times and is really annoying, it's now common to see 'X bug is back since Y patch' posts on the forums.
They introduced a Capture the Flag idea, to which almost everyone said in unison 'No, don't do that, we can play CTF for free, we want a proper warfare game, leave it alone, just tweak the existing gameplay, don't give us CTF WE DON'T WANT THAT.', they conducted numerous user instigated polls (using free online poll services) on the forum and results were always in the region of 100 against, 20 'For or Unsure', but they went adhead and did it anyway after vast amounts of moaning. It was supposed to bring the battle out into the field (and stop it being just around bases).
Of the minority that wanted it, they primarily defended it by saying it WASN'T capture the flag. Then the developers went and used a Flag icon and SOE started calling it CTF in interviews.
The problem with it is firstly, certainly IMO, there was no serious problem with battles not being out in the field (I've had many great battles out in the field, not just around bases), secondly it's a complete flop as it's entirely failed to bring the battle out into the field! You just grab the flag and 'run' (usually as a passanger in a vehicle driven by someone else). That's it, no battle in the field, the 'battles' are still taking place in the bases because you can 'decontruct' the 'flag' (aka the 'LLU') by re-securing the base, which is what people do (after all if a think is being driven away from you and has a head start, it's difficult to catch up with it, so why bother if you can just re-securing a single room in the base?).
My third issue with it (as many users, including myself, suggested was *perfectly fucking obvious from day one*, pardon my French) is that any idiot can pick up the LLU and run away with it. This *FREQUENTLY* happens, some idiot will pick it up and run in the wrong direction. The maps are 8k accross, idiots just ignore messages and and go in the opposite direction, dispite a *giant flashing line* telling them where to go, and constant popup messages informing them where they need to be. There is a timer on the 'flag' and this idoiocy can negate the work of a hundred people or more who have worked together for 20+ min to capture the damn base in the first place. Of course, now you can't trust the idiot who get's the 'flag' so people frequently team kill for it and fight ov
I'd add to this that if your thinking of a GeForce FX 5600 Ultra, you'd actually be better with a Radeon 9600 IMO.
Should someone show up to my office, I'm required by EMTALA to see them. It is a crime not to. I do not get paid for this.
The federal government forces me to work for no pay. That's slavery, folks.
You are a moron.
The EMTALA ONLY, and I really mean ONLY, applies if YOUR hospital has deliberately CHOSEN to TAKE MONEY to participate in such a scheme.
Hopitals are GIVEN MONEY if they CHOOSE to participate, they DO NOT have to participate if they do not want to.
I'm not American and I don't work in a medical facility (nor am I in the legal profession) and if I know that, you should are hell should.
Your right, I've ordered company equipment from Dell with Red Hat Linux, and that was at 3-4 years ago.
They doomed items of crap that you will find as rare and very expensive collectors items on eBay in about 20 years time.
The Nokia abomination will only be bought by fuckwits, and those with exceptionally rose tinted glasses.
The current range of Palm and PocketPC based devices, including hybrid 'smart phones', are already better than this device - they can clock up twice the frame rates at a higher resolution.
Nokia slagged of Gameboy Advance players as part of their marketing hype - who in the name of sweet Jebus on a bike are they trying to market to?
You know this, but I'm going to say it again:
YOU TAKE THE BATTERY OUT TO CHANGE GAMES.
THAT. IS. RETARDED.
As for the phantom, yeah big fuckoff PC's retagged as 'consoles' but with DRM, that's what the industry wants. Just look how successful the XBox i....oh, wait. I haven't played any games on my XBox in months, let alone bought any software for it. I was starting to wonder if they were still *making* software. I actually got so board of waiting for Midtown Madness 3 to come out (having really liked the first two) that I shelved the entire console, and was apathetic when it was released because after looking at all the damn movies and screen shots for 6 months I felt like I'd played the game already.
The XBox is a superb console, but it's struggling. And that's with Microsoft behind it, remember they are the marketing geniuses that manage to sell us second rate criminally overpriced software year after year, and they are still struggling in the console market despite clearly having the best hardware going.
I bought a new PC with a Radeon 9700 Pro recently because I couldn't find any new software I wanted to play for my XBox or GameCube. AFAICT, the ONLY console platform with new software being released is the Gameboy advance as far as I can tell (and most of them are tedious sequels - e.g. Advance Wars 2, or ports of older games, Final Fight, Street Fighter Super Ninja Mega Turbo Speed III Ultimate Movie Edition). There are quite a few good Japanese import GC title's around, but I gave my GameCube away a while ago following being devastated by the tedious pixel perfect tedious jumping filler experience that was the obviously rushed to market game known as 'Super Mario Sunshine'.
The Phantom doesn't have a hope in hell. It's going to lose someone a LOT of money, and you've have to be irresponsibly optimistic to think you could make it a success. You need a huge, vast, marketing campaign to convince a sceptical Playstation hugging public to part with their cash and you need really good games.
Phantom investors deserve to go completely bankcrupt and have their familes forced to live in garages, they been warned, I have no sympathy for their blinding greed.
AH, but they Government have already said it wouldn't stop Asylum seekers (though they keep flipping back to it, because they have so few reasons why it would be a good idea to impliment ID cards).
All legal citizens in the UK have National Insurance cards (like US Social Security cards), which have a unique key on the front. You could simply send that key into a central database which keeps your details on file. Which is what the smart cards are going to do anyway (it's not as if the cards are going to contain all of your actual medical history, just a pointer to it so a computer can retrieve it from a central database).
That makes NEW ID CARDS POINTLESS! We already have compulsory unique identifing 'serial numbers'! Only a fuckwit of the higest order could fail to think that ID cards would be 'more useful' in stoping bogus asylum seekers!
ID cards would add no new meaningful functionality and would cost us millions.
If they introduce an smart card that you can use in place of cash payments, allows you to access your medical data, your empolyment history, your front door key, your work pass then I'm interested, as it is, it's just a pointless exercise.
The ONLY, ONLY useful thing it provides is a handy form of Photo ID for those who don't have a passport or driving license. Big deal. Not orth several million pounds of tax payers money by any streach of the imagination.
The US now uses it's Social Security card as an effective 'national ID card', there is no reason why we couldn't do the same gradually over time, just make them in to smart cards for new recipients (and possibly those that request them) so you can ultimately do cryptographic authentication with them for say permitting access to medical or empoyment data (not that the government will have their heads screwed on enough for this, the UK government AWLAYS award contracts to the lease competent bidder as far as IT contracts are go, though the Open.gov.uk web site approach seems to have gone reasonably well...).
Err, no. It's not 'nonsense' to suggest what the parent poster did, it's accurate as it's exactly what they've been doing for the last several years and is by and large entirely what they are continuing to do.
Even Conservatives are not behind the Tory party right now.
Your 100% crackers if you think The Sun are behind the every more right leaning Tory party. The Sun may be right wing, but then so are New Labour.
I'd also add that The Sun's 'traditional' position is simply whatever one Newscorp tells them to take.
Where's your proof?
Erm, you can't always prove something was hoax, trying would obviously be an exercise in futiity in many cases ('as any fule kno').
You can however use that organ called the brain to make a rational judgement about the likely hood if it being real.
If this doesn't set your bogon detector to maximum altert, you need a new one.