"We can't have a clause that says once you touch code, we don't help you because we do charge large amounts"
OK. Companies want to do ONE THING. Make money. The more the better. If you let people dick up your code and your about the only people that can fix it you can charge them a hefty day rate to go in and tinker.
These are mission critical systems, so the company is held to ransom. They have to pay. You 'give' them the software but charge them a shitload to fix it back up occassionally.
Most of these companies would happily fold if the revenues enabled the, normally, three or four owners to retire next year - so they aren't overly concerned about keeping the client sweet for 5 years.
This is a business model I believe we will see more of, but because it only effects a few hundred users in each case we'll never see this stuff on the news a la MS.
Most people can hardly DRIVE safely, let alone fly. Many pilot schemes are ongoing to bring computer assistance to the commuter, but recent work shows that the more assistance is provided the less alert the driver is. This greatly reduces their ability to take appropriate actions in an emergency.
The same would occur with flight. Even if your on board computer worked out your route, taking in your GPS, weather information from ground and satelites etc... and stopped you doing anything 'stupid' it will crash, or a bit of freaky weather would kick up, and you'd be ASLEEP practically.
I am aware of a number of medium sized software developers producing specialist systems for specific industries, who are considering 'going open' and charging solely for deployment and support. I come into contact with these systems pretty regularly through my work - and usually call the company to ifnd out what their plans are as much through noseyness as need.
They are considering it for a pretty simple reason - giving software away, and making it open so the client doesn't HAVE to buy your service agreement, gives the client great confidence in YOUR confidence in the quality of your service.
Most users of such systems understand that the service component of the charge is the 'expensive' part anyway. By going open source a company can relaunch, give away the software and offer 'as you need it' support at rates likely to undercut the opposition.
Open means customisable, which opens up another potential revenue stream to the producing company.
It also lets the pain in the arse customers do some modifications themselves. One or two of these can account for 60-90% of ongoing support effort for some of these companies.
You don't have to go 'open source' to follow this business model, but its a great shorthand, and a great differentiator. Anyone work in a firm thinking of following this route?
I couldn't agree more. Beyond the simple pleasure of hitting GO and playing within 30 seconds, theres the fact that all the NON techie people I know remember the Sega and Atari machines with fondness and stil use them, whereas they found the PC they bought soon started crashing, having problems with speed, and new games wouldn't work.
I think Nintendo have got the market sussed. I've got a DVD player - I dont need another. I'd bet most people are in the same boat - especially in a family setting where Dad wants to watch his work out DVDs and little Jimmy wants to play a game having it all happen in one machine sucks.
Remember - the world doesn't all live alone!
The Nintendo machine seems to be a TV game, rather than a next gen console to most people. This makes it MORE appealing, not less. And the wee plumber is so cute! And Yoshi! dont forget the power of Yoshi!
I would suggest you do a little reading into the situation in Africa before making these 'good aids / bad aids' statements.
The majority of people in Africa over the past 10 years have not been aware that HIV exists, let alone how to prevent infection. The fault lies with their governments of the day, and the international community, for not educating them. Many of these governments are non-democratic and only retain power through the support of Shell, BP, the Diamond cartels, and other Western businesses. These in turn are supported by the Western governments.
Spend a couple of days reading into this and then tell me that its 'their own fault'.
We can spend BILLIONS of dollars in anticipation of a POSSIBLE smallpox attack, or spend those exact same billions of dollars on a project GUARANTEED to save millions of lives.
The HIV epidemic in Africa is putting whole territories in danger of having an average age under 20 as often more than 60% of adults are HIV positive. The US and UK based drug companies and governments aren't doing anything about this - they have the drugs to slow the spread of HIV right now - they choose not to use them.
Spending this money on treating HIV in Africa will prevent many millions of infections over the next 10, 20 and hundred years. That is no exageration - just type HIV, Africa, Epidemic, Statistics into Google and see what you get!
I vote for the safe bet. Smallpox won't happen - it MIGHT, but HIV already IS. Do you splint the fat guys broken leg or lecture him about his diet?
Sorry for getting political - but this does 'matter'
Some scientists in the UK have tested rooms with high incidences of 'spooky occurences' for noise, magnetics and such. They find that InfraSound, low frequency sound, is very often present.
They also found that this can resonate in your eyes. This makes you see grey patches - i.e. ghosts.
Most fans wont create infra sound - but your CASE might!
There was an interesting piece in the New Scientist about the Mars Society. I'll dig out the reference tonight if anyone wants it.
The thing that stuck out in my mind was a single line.
"One wonders if genuine Astronauts would leave their dirty dishes lying in the sink all day"
That kind of detail allows the world to treat the Mars Society as a bunch of big kids playing in the desert. It certainly lowered my expectations of their 'work' actually proving fruitful. One assumes they would be on best behaviour with Journos around... imagine what they do when their not there!
They hand you tissue? Whats the tissue for? Who pays them? Or are they just bored? I REALLY need to go to Japan before they get all assimilated into the western way - it sounds better every time I hear anything about it.
Warning - this is not a flame from a FREE FREE FREE guy. This is just a thought!
At school, aged... 13, we were watching movies in English class with Tits and Bums in them. It was most amusing for us young chaps! Generally they were Shakespeare works, one Lady McBeth stands out in my mind.. mmmm... naked literary babes. ANYWAY Didn't harm us a bit. Within 5 minutes we just got used to it and took it as read that mad Miss Smith let us watch ladie films.
A HISTORY teacher should be teaching the following through examples:
Censorship is bad.
Prohibition is bad.
Democracy is good.
Don't mess with the kids.
We are all cleverer than our parents, our kids are cleverer than us - they can handle more than we could.
And if they can't - just lock em up for life - plenty more where they came from!
Yeah - thats too much. I get access to the excellent New Scientist website archives by subscribing to the magazine. If I had to pay extra for the NS website I... wouldn't. But I use it a fair bit, its a better site than most. And I STILL wouldn't pay for it. I pay what - £100 a year for the magazine.
The chances of me paying 0.001 bucks a page is minimal, unless I get to look at it first to see if I want to view it. Even then its doubtful.
Anyway I only ever visit/. and bbc.co.uk unless I actually need to DO SOMETHING! And neither of them will EVER charge!
"when it will be able to fetch things you ask for"
'OI - ASIMO - GET ME A BEER! - A COLD ONE! - FRENCH! - A 1664 BRUN!'
Asimo wanders to the fridge, finds it empty, goes down to the shops with your CC and picks up a few cold beers, and a bag of nuts, and a magazine. He pays at the counter, leaning forward as though being a little unstable, and wanders back. It wanders through to the kitchen, finds all the glasses are dirty, washes up, pours you a nice cold beer and brings it through to you. It tells you that the chick in the off licence was wearing 'that blue shirt' and makes a lewd hand action. It then dumps a close up video of 'that blue top' to your machine. And presents the nuts. You never thought of the nuts, but you do actually quite fancy some nuts.
should Apple marketing be pushing these to non-Apple users?
Yes. They should. They are pretty. PC users don't often get to have a bit of pretty hardware on their desks. This is VERY pretty. Then all their other stuff will look cruddy and they'll feel the itch to buy an apple machine just to have it look pretty.
Its also pretty good technically... but hey - pretty wins every time huh?
As soon as those tiny musical chips were cheap enough they appeared in kids books, then in birthday cards, then in well... anything.
The opportunities to make kids books light up are huge here - I'll stake 20 quid that thats the first implementation of this available in your average supermarket!
Okay! Have a look at http://www.nintendogamecube.com - Nintendo themselves speak about the decision to base the GameCube on technical Requirements, not technical Possibilities.
The requirements are to provide developers with the tools required to develop gameplay focussed games. The tools required, sadly, by most PC games developers seems to be a huge polygon count and 100+ FPS.
Nintendo style games. I think most gamers will have a notion of what this means. When you play a Nintendo game it somehow feels different. Its like playing something by Sonic Team on Sega.
You may not have played enough Nintendo games to get this... but from NES, Gameboy through to N64 and GameCube there are certain constants which are more improtant than plumbers.
For that to be the dumbest thing you read all day you mustn't read a lot!;-)
And in the, assuredly long time you're going to spend ruminating over that dilemma, there will be thousands of others that take one of the many fine off the shelf offerings, meet 90% of what you seem to really want here, and they'll be able to get on with their lives without a second thought. Might I suggest relaxing & trying to do the same?
Surely this isn't in the spirit of the analy retentive puritanical/.er!! Why settle for 90%?
We're not talking about functionality here - we're talking about fetish. We're talking about obsession, compulsion, and personality disorders!
Its like having a model railway - its a way of avoiding your woman by spending untold hours online and in the garage making tiny, but observable, changes to a train, hedge, track, motherboard, skin which REALLY matter to you, but are incomprehensibly pointless to the rest of the world. You dont have to watch endless soaps and listen to her bitching about work mates - AND you get a new toy sometime!
In many ways its like art. The pursuit of perfection is always worthwhile if it matters to you. Who cares if it doens't matter to anyone else. If he gets it right he could be using this machine for 20 years. Text is text. A bit of effort is well worthwhile.
Applause to this guy! The spirit of the shed in action.
Its all about the games. The GameCube is a TV Game - it says so on the box. Its built to enable Nintendo style games to be written easily. This - to me - makes it a thousand times more attractive than the PS2 or Xbox, both of which are pretty much PCs with bits missing. CPU speed etc doesn't come into it - give it 6 months and the PS2 / Xbox 'numbers' will be laughable compared to a £800 PC from PC World - the GameCube will still rock! Why?
Ah - the warm feeling looking forward to Mario Kart Cubed! Show me a PC game that comes CLOSE to the purity of Mario Kart and I'll sell my Nintendo shares - until that far distant day there'll be a nintendo cluttering up my living room floor!
Can we really point at companies that failed and say "they were stupid"?
I would say no. I started up a small company back in 1997 to 'exploit the power of the web' for businesses. The projects we took on without exception saved or made money for our clients. We turned away projects like 'its a website where people check if the weather suits a stretch of river for fishing - we'll make money on ad revenue' and 'its a way for people to buy and sell crap - and we'll charge 10%' because we knew that either they wouldn't work or eBay got there first. The stuff we did was streamlining business processes, increasing connectivity of staff, basic stuff, not sexy, but it worked and they got back 2 or 3 bucks a year for every buck spent.
But we had to think about it - and it wasn't obvious - and if 'sell crap' had turned into a $20Billion company within 12 months we'd have looked like prize twats!
The number of times I said 'just because the CVs buy the idea doesn't mean anyone will buy the damn thing in the real world - your not allowed to just take the CV money and go home you know!'
We got lucky, a lot of people didn't - but they thought they did at the time. Books like this are necessary, but they need to name the companies so we can look em up and see what really went wrong.
My own view of Globalisation can be put quite simply.
It is the tendancy for people in all parts of the world to aspire to the same things, to buy, wear, eat and produce the same things. No longer do the dutch wear clogs, the german wear laderhosen and the scots wear kilts - we all wear Nikes and Levis. How long until the Afghans, the Eskimos, and those funny looking people in Wales will follow suit?
It is the tendancy for a single dominant brand of shoe, bread, chocolate, baby food to be available, and market leading in every corner of the world. It is nowhere near as much fun to visit a French hypermarche now as it was 10 years ago - so many of the brands are the same.
This is neither a good or a bad thing - it is just a thing. If everyone ends up eating McDonalds then its a bad thing, because I don't like McDonalds. If everyone ends up eating good pizza from a wood burning oven its a good thing, because thats what I like.
I concur! Personally I hope video games aren't art. Many a good movie has been tarnished when I later found out that it was an 'art piece'.
As soon as video games become art we get 'video games artists' clamouring for public money to let them 'express themselves' and we start to be pressurised by the Sundays into liking 'art games' instead of Quake or Mario Kart 5.
But hey, if it stops them banning blood, nazi themes, and anything 'crude' in games lets call it art! If Damien Hirst can get away with it why shouldn't Id.
I've spent more nights than I care to remember out with my little red torch looking for leonids, taurids, younameitids with minimal success.
My best exerience was a chance aurora a couple of years ago - huge pulsing green, red blue, white for about an hour - amazing. Didn't see more than half a dozen meteors though!
Hopefully next weekend will be better. Hopefully.
What we need is an email / SMS service that will inform us if its turning out good - so we can leap from bed and have a squiz out the window!
Now THERES an/. make money idea! start charging us for heavenly activity warnings - I'd pay $20 a year for that kind of service!
Slashdot Mirror
"We can't have a clause that says once you touch code, we don't help you because we do charge large amounts"
OK. Companies want to do ONE THING. Make money. The more the better. If you let people dick up your code and your about the only people that can fix it you can charge them a hefty day rate to go in and tinker.
These are mission critical systems, so the company is held to ransom. They have to pay. You 'give' them the software but charge them a shitload to fix it back up occassionally.
Most of these companies would happily fold if the revenues enabled the, normally, three or four owners to retire next year - so they aren't overly concerned about keeping the client sweet for 5 years.
This is a business model I believe we will see more of, but because it only effects a few hundred users in each case we'll never see this stuff on the news a la MS.
Most people can hardly DRIVE safely, let alone fly. Many pilot schemes are ongoing to bring computer assistance to the commuter, but recent work shows that the more assistance is provided the less alert the driver is. This greatly reduces their ability to take appropriate actions in an emergency.
The same would occur with flight. Even if your on board computer worked out your route, taking in your GPS, weather information from ground and satelites etc... and stopped you doing anything 'stupid' it will crash, or a bit of freaky weather would kick up, and you'd be ASLEEP practically.
I am aware of a number of medium sized software developers producing specialist systems for specific industries, who are considering 'going open' and charging solely for deployment and support. I come into contact with these systems pretty regularly through my work - and usually call the company to ifnd out what their plans are as much through noseyness as need.
They are considering it for a pretty simple reason - giving software away, and making it open so the client doesn't HAVE to buy your service agreement, gives the client great confidence in YOUR confidence in the quality of your service.
Most users of such systems understand that the service component of the charge is the 'expensive' part anyway. By going open source a company can relaunch, give away the software and offer 'as you need it' support at rates likely to undercut the opposition.
Open means customisable, which opens up another potential revenue stream to the producing company.
It also lets the pain in the arse customers do some modifications themselves. One or two of these can account for 60-90% of ongoing support effort for some of these companies.
You don't have to go 'open source' to follow this business model, but its a great shorthand, and a great differentiator. Anyone work in a firm thinking of following this route?
I couldn't agree more. Beyond the simple pleasure of hitting GO and playing within 30 seconds, theres the fact that all the NON techie people I know remember the Sega and Atari machines with fondness and stil use them, whereas they found the PC they bought soon started crashing, having problems with speed, and new games wouldn't work.
I think Nintendo have got the market sussed. I've got a DVD player - I dont need another. I'd bet most people are in the same boat - especially in a family setting where Dad wants to watch his work out DVDs and little Jimmy wants to play a game having it all happen in one machine sucks.
Remember - the world doesn't all live alone!
The Nintendo machine seems to be a TV game, rather than a next gen console to most people. This makes it MORE appealing, not less. And the wee plumber is so cute! And Yoshi! dont forget the power of Yoshi!
I would suggest you do a little reading into the situation in Africa before making these 'good aids / bad aids' statements.
The majority of people in Africa over the past 10 years have not been aware that HIV exists, let alone how to prevent infection. The fault lies with their governments of the day, and the international community, for not educating them. Many of these governments are non-democratic and only retain power through the support of Shell, BP, the Diamond cartels, and other Western businesses. These in turn are supported by the Western governments.
Spend a couple of days reading into this and then tell me that its 'their own fault'.
We can spend BILLIONS of dollars in anticipation of a POSSIBLE smallpox attack, or spend those exact same billions of dollars on a project GUARANTEED to save millions of lives.
The HIV epidemic in Africa is putting whole territories in danger of having an average age under 20 as often more than 60% of adults are HIV positive. The US and UK based drug companies and governments aren't doing anything about this - they have the drugs to slow the spread of HIV right now - they choose not to use them.
Spending this money on treating HIV in Africa will prevent many millions of infections over the next 10, 20 and hundred years. That is no exageration - just type HIV, Africa, Epidemic, Statistics into Google and see what you get!
I vote for the safe bet. Smallpox won't happen - it MIGHT, but HIV already IS. Do you splint the fat guys broken leg or lecture him about his diet?
Sorry for getting political - but this does 'matter'
This isn't bull - its.. well, possible.
Some scientists in the UK have tested rooms with high incidences of 'spooky occurences' for noise, magnetics and such. They find that InfraSound, low frequency sound, is very often present.
They also found that this can resonate in your eyes. This makes you see grey patches - i.e. ghosts.
Most fans wont create infra sound - but your CASE might!
There was an interesting piece in the New Scientist about the Mars Society. I'll dig out the reference tonight if anyone wants it.
The thing that stuck out in my mind was a single line.
"One wonders if genuine Astronauts would leave their dirty dishes lying in the sink all day"
That kind of detail allows the world to treat the Mars Society as a bunch of big kids playing in the desert. It certainly lowered my expectations of their 'work' actually proving fruitful. One assumes they would be on best behaviour with Journos around... imagine what they do when their not there!
They hand you tissue? Whats the tissue for? Who pays them? Or are they just bored? I REALLY need to go to Japan before they get all assimilated into the western way - it sounds better every time I hear anything about it.
Must get that Learn Japanese in 7 days book!
My wife is a highschool history teacher
Warning - this is not a flame from a FREE FREE FREE guy. This is just a thought!
At school, aged... 13, we were watching movies in English class with Tits and Bums in them. It was most amusing for us young chaps! Generally they were Shakespeare works, one Lady McBeth stands out in my mind.. mmmm... naked literary babes. ANYWAY Didn't harm us a bit. Within 5 minutes we just got used to it and took it as read that mad Miss Smith let us watch ladie films.
A HISTORY teacher should be teaching the following through examples:
Censorship is bad.
Prohibition is bad.
Democracy is good.
Don't mess with the kids.
We are all cleverer than our parents, our kids are cleverer than us - they can handle more than we could.
And if they can't - just lock em up for life - plenty more where they came from!
but in a month that's $60 bucks
... wouldn't. But I use it a fair bit, its a better site than most. And I STILL wouldn't pay for it. I pay what - £100 a year for the magazine.
/. and bbc.co.uk unless I actually need to DO SOMETHING! And neither of them will EVER charge!
Yeah - thats too much. I get access to the excellent New Scientist website archives by subscribing to the magazine. If I had to pay extra for the NS website I
The chances of me paying 0.001 bucks a page is minimal, unless I get to look at it first to see if I want to view it. Even then its doubtful.
Anyway I only ever visit
"IBM Japan is paying over $166,000 a year for Asimo to be a receptionist? "
Seriously guys - what will all those pretty but stupid chicks do if robots get all the cushy receptionists jobs??
They cant ALL become PAs!
"when it will be able to fetch things you ask for"
'OI - ASIMO - GET ME A BEER! - A COLD ONE! - FRENCH! - A 1664 BRUN!'
Asimo wanders to the fridge, finds it empty, goes down to the shops with your CC and picks up a few cold beers, and a bag of nuts, and a magazine. He pays at the counter, leaning forward as though being a little unstable, and wanders back. It wanders through to the kitchen, finds all the glasses are dirty, washes up, pours you a nice cold beer and brings it through to you. It tells you that the chick in the off licence was wearing 'that blue shirt' and makes a lewd hand action. It then dumps a close up video of 'that blue top' to your machine. And presents the nuts. You never thought of the nuts, but you do actually quite fancy some nuts.
Ahhhh Heaven!
should Apple marketing be pushing these to non-Apple users?
Yes. They should. They are pretty. PC users don't often get to have a bit of pretty hardware on their desks. This is VERY pretty. Then all their other stuff will look cruddy and they'll feel the itch to buy an apple machine just to have it look pretty.
Its also pretty good technically... but hey - pretty wins every time huh?
As soon as those tiny musical chips were cheap enough they appeared in kids books, then in birthday cards, then in well... anything.
The opportunities to make kids books light up are huge here - I'll stake 20 quid that thats the first implementation of this available in your average supermarket!
how much data the European Space Agency thinks can be stored on a "PC Hard Disk" nowadays...
Just be glad they didn't say:
"Enough data to fill the Encyclopedia Brittanica 100 times over"
"If the data were printed out on A4 paper the stack would be higher than Everest - every hour!"
or other eighties versions of 'shitloads of data'
Okay! Have a look at http://www.nintendogamecube.com - Nintendo themselves speak about the decision to base the GameCube on technical Requirements, not technical Possibilities.
;-)
The requirements are to provide developers with the tools required to develop gameplay focussed games. The tools required, sadly, by most PC games developers seems to be a huge polygon count and 100+ FPS.
Nintendo style games. I think most gamers will have a notion of what this means. When you play a Nintendo game it somehow feels different. Its like playing something by Sonic Team on Sega.
You may not have played enough Nintendo games to get this... but from NES, Gameboy through to N64 and GameCube there are certain constants which are more improtant than plumbers.
For that to be the dumbest thing you read all day you mustn't read a lot!
And in the, assuredly long time you're going to spend ruminating over that dilemma, there will be thousands of others that take one of the many fine off the shelf offerings, meet 90% of what you seem to really want here, and they'll be able to get on with their lives without a second thought. Might I suggest relaxing & trying to do the same?
/.er!! Why settle for 90%?
Surely this isn't in the spirit of the analy retentive puritanical
We're not talking about functionality here - we're talking about fetish. We're talking about obsession, compulsion, and personality disorders!
Its like having a model railway - its a way of avoiding your woman by spending untold hours online and in the garage making tiny, but observable, changes to a train, hedge, track, motherboard, skin which REALLY matter to you, but are incomprehensibly pointless to the rest of the world. You dont have to watch endless soaps and listen to her bitching about work mates - AND you get a new toy sometime!
In many ways its like art. The pursuit of perfection is always worthwhile if it matters to you. Who cares if it doens't matter to anyone else. If he gets it right he could be using this machine for 20 years. Text is text. A bit of effort is well worthwhile.
Applause to this guy! The spirit of the shed in action.
Its all about the games. The GameCube is a TV Game - it says so on the box. Its built to enable Nintendo style games to be written easily. This - to me - makes it a thousand times more attractive than the PS2 or Xbox, both of which are pretty much PCs with bits missing. CPU speed etc doesn't come into it - give it 6 months and the PS2 / Xbox 'numbers' will be laughable compared to a £800 PC from PC World - the GameCube will still rock! Why?
Ah - the warm feeling looking forward to Mario Kart Cubed! Show me a PC game that comes CLOSE to the purity of Mario Kart and I'll sell my Nintendo shares - until that far distant day there'll be a nintendo cluttering up my living room floor!
Can we really point at companies that failed and say "they were stupid"?
I would say no. I started up a small company back in 1997 to 'exploit the power of the web' for businesses. The projects we took on without exception saved or made money for our clients. We turned away projects like 'its a website where people check if the weather suits a stretch of river for fishing - we'll make money on ad revenue' and 'its a way for people to buy and sell crap - and we'll charge 10%' because we knew that either they wouldn't work or eBay got there first. The stuff we did was streamlining business processes, increasing connectivity of staff, basic stuff, not sexy, but it worked and they got back 2 or 3 bucks a year for every buck spent.
But we had to think about it - and it wasn't obvious - and if 'sell crap' had turned into a $20Billion company within 12 months we'd have looked like prize twats!
The number of times I said 'just because the CVs buy the idea doesn't mean anyone will buy the damn thing in the real world - your not allowed to just take the CV money and go home you know!'
We got lucky, a lot of people didn't - but they thought they did at the time. Books like this are necessary, but they need to name the companies so we can look em up and see what really went wrong.
My own view of Globalisation can be put quite simply.
It is the tendancy for people in all parts of the world to aspire to the same things, to buy, wear, eat and produce the same things. No longer do the dutch wear clogs, the german wear laderhosen and the scots wear kilts - we all wear Nikes and Levis. How long until the Afghans, the Eskimos, and those funny looking people in Wales will follow suit?
It is the tendancy for a single dominant brand of shoe, bread, chocolate, baby food to be available, and market leading in every corner of the world. It is nowhere near as much fun to visit a French hypermarche now as it was 10 years ago - so many of the brands are the same.
This is neither a good or a bad thing - it is just a thing. If everyone ends up eating McDonalds then its a bad thing, because I don't like McDonalds. If everyone ends up eating good pizza from a wood burning oven its a good thing, because thats what I like.
The TiBook G4 has almost _EXACTLY_ the features you want
Agreed! And it looks the bizznizz aswell. It'd probably work out cheaper aswell!
This Story at the BBC is up and down like a YoYo.
BBC Radio 1 is reporting nothing at present - actually playing 'heaven is a halfpipe'!
I concur! Personally I hope video games aren't art. Many a good movie has been tarnished when I later found out that it was an 'art piece'.
As soon as video games become art we get 'video games artists' clamouring for public money to let them 'express themselves' and we start to be pressurised by the Sundays into liking 'art games' instead of Quake or Mario Kart 5.
But hey, if it stops them banning blood, nazi themes, and anything 'crude' in games lets call it art! If Damien Hirst can get away with it why shouldn't Id.
I've spent more nights than I care to remember out with my little red torch looking for leonids, taurids, younameitids with minimal success.
/. make money idea! start charging us for heavenly activity warnings - I'd pay $20 a year for that kind of service!
My best exerience was a chance aurora a couple of years ago - huge pulsing green, red blue, white for about an hour - amazing. Didn't see more than half a dozen meteors though!
Hopefully next weekend will be better. Hopefully.
What we need is an email / SMS service that will inform us if its turning out good - so we can leap from bed and have a squiz out the window!
Now THERES an