Yes, the thing that bothers me most about all this though is the fact that the US seems to basically own GCHQ. We already had the story about how the US paid money for access to intelligence and influence on GCHQ but the fact that Snowden was able to pilfer some highly sensitive documents from the NSA about GCHQ is worrying.
Don't get me wrong, I'm absolutely glad Snowden did what he did but our intelligence services are way too close to and way too open with the US.
It's pretty clear what was meant now when David Milliband said our courts couldn't be allowed to demand our intelligence services show evidence about their involvement in extraordinary rendition because it would harm our relationship with US intelligence services - it seems they are part of US intelligence services. The irony now is that it was NSA incompetence that got our intelligence data leaked but you don't see our government condemning the US for that incompetence and threatening them to pull out and stop giving them intel do you? This is why our country has such a reputation as being America's lapdog and it stinks.
I hadn't actually heard of it, but I had a quick glance at the article you linked and saw "David Blunkett" which told me everything I needed to know as to why it failed:)
But they're not differentiating on hardware like Samsung did and that's exactly the point.
That's like saying Windows Phone 8 didn't differentiate because it's doing shit. Obviously it's very fucking different to Android and very much differentiates but differentiating to the extreme isn't a guarantee of success either. Samsung get it just right by providing quality hardware that people want. That's all the differentiation you need and it's a thing Nokia and Blackberry could do because their hardware is already decent quality and different enough, they just need an OS to go with it that people want.
If differentiating via OS is the key as people like you seem to think it is then why are Blackberry, Nokia, and the Firefox phones all failing? Why are the only guys with increasing market share the ones making Android devices? Differentiating via OS doesn't work, that's not opinion, it's cold hard fact demonstrated by the sales statistics showing the only people growing marketshare are the ones who go Android.
"Wow, not even a little bit. The two are dramatically different in just about every respect."
This simply tells me you haven't even seen either Blackberry's latest OS or Android since version 4. Blackberry have even gone as far to copy common icons such as the 3 dots for menus and so forth. Many other UI elements are exact copies of Android.
Sure it's very different under the hood but that's not what I'm talking about here because that's not what users see, I'm talking about the fact the UI is a poor clone of vanilla Android 4 with a few ideas stolen from iOS too.
"Ignoring the "unparalleled" hyperbole, for the moment, do you honestly think they'd have done better had Elop gone with Android?"
It's not hyperbole, how many other tech companies with a stable bottom line have managed to lose quite the reputation and marketshare Nokia has over the last decade? Yes it would have gone better if they'd gone Android, in fact, there were millions of ex-Nokia fans like me just waiting to buy a Nokia if they had gone with a decent OS rather than something no one gives a shit about like WP8. I still have fond memories of my old Nokia phones and I'd have loved nothing more than the quality of Nokia devices with an OS like Android and I am one of many millions in this regard. If you're from the US it's possible you don't get this because your cellphone market was utterly backwards before the iPhone but most of Europe, Africa, and Asia had some kind of Nokia device and they lost all of that by going WP8, they wouldn't have if they'd gone Android, or possibly even a renewed focus on MeeGo. Symbian was just too rusty, and no one wanted WP.
"Do you think Elop's infamous restructuring was "just because"? It was, at the time, a necessary effort to save the ailing company."
No it was absolutely necesssary. The problem is that Elop wasn't the person to do it and a focus on WP8 wasn't the way to go. Both these things were done to make Nokia an easy cheap takeover for Microsoft, Android was the easiest path for it to stay a strong independent company, just like Samsung.
I agree this whole situation stinks pretty badly. It seems pretty clear cut that Elop went in to reduce Nokia's value so Microsoft could buy it cheap and hire him back.
But can anyone from Finland confirm to me what the feelings are about this in Finland? Has your government not considered an investigation into how utterly dodgy this deal was? Given that it was the destruction of one of Finland's greatest success stories I'm surprised your country hasn't blocked the sale and looked at pushing criminal charges against Elop. Is there much more about this in Finnish news? are there any investigations there into how dodgy this whole situation that made thousands of Fins lose their jobs is?
It's the new insult, and the problem is it's come about because Slashdot has had a few shill accounts- there used to be a guy who first-posted attacking Google with a brand new account with no account history and instant +5.
A Slashdot admin also confirmed to me at least one incident of someone with a pro-Apple bias having multiple accounts set up as mod point bots though I suspect this was more desperate fanboy than professional shill. The admins here do remove mod privileges on reports of such abuse of the system though, though I suspect that's futile as there's not much they can do about people just creating even more accounts.
But as usual people have taken it too far, Slashdot's paranoia crowd have decided anyone who disagrees with them is a shill.
I've personally been accused of being a shill for the NSA, Microsoft, Google, Apple and Sony in the last 6 months alone.
But if only they knew. For me it's way worse than being a shill, I work in the financial services and banking sector.
I find Sheffield quite an interesting city now, given how hard it was hit during the Thatcher era and such it's certainly done a good job of picking itself up.
The city has really modernised and is far nicer than many others in the region (Leeds). There are still bits that need work but for the most part it's clean, modern, with nice gardens and parks to eat in dispersed around the centre and there always seems to be something going on.
I believe it's still the UK's 4th largest city and apparently something like 80% of it's economy is built up of small business. Many IT firms there especially have a very startup like feel to them and I wouldn't be surprised given the sheer quantity of small startups and the amount of innovation that's being attempted that over the next decade or two we don't see some major new tech companies emerge out of Sheffield. I wouldn't go so far as to suggest it's anything like silicon valley but it's certainly one of the most entrepreneurial cities in the UK that I've encountered.
I find many people there are motivated individuals in general, I has a lot of nice places to eat and drink so has a decent night life and social culture in that respect. It has a lot of clubs especially related to science like topics such as astronomy and chemistry that you see much less of in other UK cities too which is a sign both of the will of people there to get off their arses and organise things and the entrepreneurial spirit.
And it's funny, because despite living within about 20 miles of Sheffield for 15 years I'd only been into the city centre once, normally if I was going into a large city centre it would've been Leeds because well, it's the 3rd biggest city in the UK and it has a reputation as being a great big city.
But after doing a contract for a year in Sheffield last year I discovered this rather fantastic city right on my door step and all the things mentioned above. Now I tend to look on Leeds as a dirty boring shit hole in contrast.
Sheffield is a city that's genuinely pleasantly surprised me and I believe because of it's positive traits it will not simply be a city with an interesting history, but also a city with an interesting future.
I've been a PC gamer all my life but when I got a 360 I didn't find it too hard getting used to the controls even playing competitive online multiplayer. It's certainly different to playing an FPS with a keyboard and mouse but I'm not convinced it's worse - certainly I know for a fact that I have as much fun.
That did change somewhat though when I got a PS3 as well, I just don't get on with the PS3 controller, even little things like the fact the thumb sticks have a convex top make it less comfortable. I find it doesn't help that a lot of games use the bumper to shoot which makes me wonder why on earth you have triggers? Triggers feel far more natural for firing a gun for obvious reasons. I do actually look like a complete amateur trying to play FPS games on the PS3 no matter how long I spend trying to get used to it.
I suspect different people are used to different things, and I suspect different people can and can't get used to different things. If I get a PS4 it'll be primarily for slower paced games for the reasons you cite coupled with the fact I hate Playstation controllers, but judging by the XBox One controller I'll still be able to enjoy FPS games on that just as I do on the PC.
But I do use my systems for different things anyway, I'm quite content playing things like Battlefield, GTA, CoD and Halo on my 360, whilst I'll use my PC for things like Diablo, Wargame, and Minecraft. My PS3 is generally for things like Uncharted and LBP. I suspect little will change next console generation with me using the Xbox One and the PS4 for the same sorts of games I currently use my 360 and PS3 if the controllers aren't drastically different and my PC for RTS's, MMOs and so forth.
Saints Row peaked at 2 and went downhill from there. It really just got too silly after that but I guess it depends what you like, I don't mind sci-fi but if I'm going to get sci-fi I expect it to be done properly a-la Crackdown and Crackdown 2, but the problem with Saints 3 is it didn't know what it wanted to be, it couldn't figure out if it was classic gang banging GTA style fun like Saints 2 and GTA or if it was a sci-fi game. Saints 4 seems to have made the evolution to full sci-fi so at least it's figured out what it is but I still don't find it as fun as Saints 2, or as sci-fi from the start games like Crackdown.
But for what it's worth GTA5 is actually excellent. I was a little underwhelmed by 4 (even on the consoles without the PC glitches I wasn't keen), the aiming system was frustrating, the physics were buggy and the storyline/missions weren't overly exciting.
GTA5 seems to fix all that, it seems to solve all those problems and the result is a nice well polished game that's an awful lot of fun. You do have the freedom to play and solve missions in different ways.
Definitely my favourite "crime simulators" as the press seems to be now calling them since 2005 have been Saints 2 and GTA5. They're well above the rest, though I admit there are other open world games that aren't of the crime genre I like just as much - I actually really enjoyed Mercenairies 2 when I played it through coop with a friend, and Just Cause 2 was fantastic.
Not sure what you're referring to but that's partially what the OU is and it's been successful (though see my other post on this story to see why I'm not so keen on the OU nowadays).
You can do an MSc in say, Mathematics, with the OU for about £3500 still I believe. Other topics are higher, like £9,000 or so for computing I think but it depends what you want.
Agreed, I did one of my degrees with them and was considering doing another but in the last few years that quality has gone from declining, to freefall.
They've gotten rid of important courses, sometimes amalgamating them- IIRC Number Theory, Graph Theory and one or two others at level 3 have now been squeezed all into a single (albeit 60 instead of 30 point course). The fact they've done this alone means they can't possibly cover these topics to the degree they used to.
It never used to be perfect, I remember seeing course materials a friend was studying (M263 IIRC) where they'd made up a programming language and created their own tool to execute it which struck me as nonsensical when they could've used plenty of other perfectly good languages out there both saving the uni time in not having to develop the new language and execution environment and helping the students by teaching them a real actual language rather than something they'd made up and was used only by them for that course.
Similarly I remember seeing their database course material where they for some god unknown reason also created their own ERD style which was basically crows foot but with the optional/mandatory specifier placed at the opposite entity to classic crows foot notation.
All this pales in comparison to the idiocy they're proceeding with now however. The problem is they already had the well funded OpenLearn years ago and that seemed to go absolutely nowhere and I'd almost argue was pretty much abandoned by them.
If it weren't for the fact there were 20 or so other unis involved I'd predict this to be a flop. Hopefully the other unis can carry the OU on this one because I wouldn't have faith on them pulling it off themselves nowadays.
But I thought quite tellingly it was interesting that both Oxford and Cambridge decided to keep the fuck away.
"That argument's been around for years. It hasn't improved with age. Becoming a me-too player in a crowded market while simultaneously cutting off the few remaining advantages you have over the competition does not sound like a recipe for success!"
Right, and the "me too" argument has been around just as long. The difference is that Android is still growing marketshare and Samsung has proven what a joke the "me too" argument is by differentiating to the point of becoming the largest cellphone manufacturer around and possibly even the most profitable.
But worse, that argument looks even more stupid due to the fact that Blackberry's latest OS is very much a "me too" clone of Android, but because it's not Android it doesn't have any of the benefits like all the support Android has due to it's popularity. Blackberry's answer to not becoming a "me too" Android player was to become a "me too" Android player in the worst possible way? By simply copying Android badly instead of just using Android? Great lot of good that's done them.
The fact is "me too" makes sense if you've got the ability to differentiate yourself with hardware and additional software - Blackberry does. It's hardware is (well, was) very different to what else is on the market and lots of people like it still. They could also trivially integrate Android with their business tools like BIS and have that as a differentiator too.
Nokia should've gone to Android using it's excellent hardware as a differentiator, it didn't and now it's lost it's marketshare, lost all it's talent, been ripped up and sold off to Microsoft. Choosing WP8 instead of Android to "differentiate" itself was probably the worst business decision made this entire century in the tech industry due to the difference in relevance and success of Nokia before and after. The decline in value and worth of Nokia is almost unparalleled to any other tech company. Blackberry, if it has any sense, will avoid making the same mistake, because even if the "me too" argument had any validity it'd still be better to be a "me too" in the Android market than a joke and a failure in general like Nokia became and Blackberry is on it's path to becoming.
Why do people always assume shareholders are involved?
Even if shareholders are involved why is this necessarily going to change anything?
I've seen people see the same thing about Google, it's as if they're blissfully unaware of the fact that even now Larry and Sergei have the majority of voting stock so still have a final say over what the company does. That means doing what "shareholders" want in Google's case still ultimately means doing what the two guys who founded the company want.
Sometimes being a corporation just means more money to do things more professional by providing additional services that subsidise the core. If they're going to start offering support contracts to companies so they can hire staff to handle that whilst the core staff work on continuing to develop it then what's the problem? It means they can now do it full time rather than as a hobby around a full time job they have to do to live off.
I still can't believe that Redhat and SUSE exist. I mean, how can they go and make commercial Linux companies when they didn't write it?
Seriously though, you seem to be making the assumption a lot of people do that if it's FOSS and other contributors are involved that you can't build a commercial company on that.
That's simply not true, and if anything commercial companies built on FOSS actually drive FOSS software to be more professional, better looked after, and better maintained whilst also giving corporations the comfort of support contracts and so forth.
Because UK public sector contracts are usually written and decided by an old boys club whose knowledge is about as relevant to today's computing as Julius Ceasar's might have been.
Honestly, they choose monolithic because they only know monolithic and because all their procedure documents and project management standards only cater to monolithic.
There's very little young blood in UK public sector, and equally few older folks who know what they're on about. The problem is that it offers insanely good pensions so most people in management positions are just the people who have been there a while and wont leave because they're waiting it out until their gold plated retirement.
Every now and then you find a public sector IT department led by someone old and experienced who genuinely has a passion for IT and has as such kept uptodate and those are the few areas that have those rare IT successes, but I suspect they make up 5% of public sector in the UK at best.
"Isn't the British government supposed to have created the friggin' world standard for proper service management of IT projects?"
Yes. That's the problem.
Meanwhile everyone else that doesn't waste their time with ITIL because they instead just hired competent staff who don't need to be told the obvious or forced to follow some rigid process even where it makes no sense to do so for the sake of compliance gets on just fine.
The other problem is ineptitude in public sector contract negotiation.
Public sector seems to not factor in penalties for companies failing to deliver on time and on spec, and in fact incentivise failure.
There was a good example in one of the Navy's new ship contracts, it might even be the new carriers, or the Type 45s, where the project overran in terms of costs beyond initial estimates and so the government just gave them more money.
Public sector is the only place I've ever heard of this happening, in private sector you produce a contract with a fixed price and if the vendor can't deliver to that price then it's tough fucking shit, they have to bear the cost of it and accept a loss on the project as a result.
If that means BAE or whoever footing a £2bn bill for their project overrun on the carriers then tough. It'll make them think twice about giving more realistic cost estimates in future.
But because none of that happens, companies are now systematic in exploiting it. They put forward a cost for the project, and then say they have an overrun by overinflating staffing costs, material costs and so forth and just up the price and government pays them it seemingly without any question.
You even see it in the G4S contract where government still paid them at least some of the money (still on the order of 10s of millions) even though they failed to provide the necessary staff they were supposed to and the Army had to be called in to do the job. Again, with sensible contract negotiation government should not have had to pay them a penny at this point, failure to deliver should've resulted in complete recouping of costs because of breach of contract on their behalf and possibly even damages for having to make alternative arrangements.
Until they sort of contract negotiation in public sector this will keep happening. Whilst there's no reason for companies not to fail, or not to budget overrun, then they will fail to deliver, and budget overrun where it's profitable for them to do so. The problem is that this doesn't happen and companies get favourable contracts because the people signing the contracts on the government side often went to school with (or whatever) the people at the top of the companies bidding for the contracts and are old friends so are more interested in helping a friend than serving the tax payer.
A high profile bankruptcy resulting from costs incurred from poor project planning in a major public sector contract would hurt the tax payer but it's exactly what needs to happen to stop the tax payer being hurt even more in the long run by dissuading companies from doing a shit job, or trying to scam the tax payer.
"and patients are being asked for permission to make their records available on the system."
Did that bit even ever work? I got asked and said no, but hospitals/doctors since I moved house and changed doctors a couple of times (the first one I changed to was shit so I changed again) all seem to have instant access to my records.
I always assumed from then on that even though they asked that even if you said no they still didn't pay any attention to it and stuck your records on anyway.
Serious aside on that though, bit of a conspiracy theory, but here's a thought.
In the early 00s in the UK connections were getting faster and broadband cheaper and bandwidth more available. Then suddenly, mid-decade things seemed to reverse, ISPs started throttling and capping to slower speeds than we used to have.
Looking at the history of this it seems to somewhat coincide with GCHQ/NSA's snooping programs.
What if the NSA/GCHQ were actually stifling growth of bandwidth availability because their spying programs couldn't cope with collection of the constant increases of data?
I suspect not, I suspect my original theory that ISPs just got ever more greedy charging more for less is still the most valid explanation, but at this point I wouldn't put anything past the NSA/GCHQ including holding growth of the internet back so that they could continue to mine it.
"I think you've got Blizzard's motivations all wrong there."
I suspect not as it was one of the cited reasons by them for it's introduction in the first place. In fact, I think there was even a Slashdot article on exactly that aspect of it.
"My conclusion is that unless the loot patch, that is supposed to coincide with the AH removal, is perfectly balanced they will just be pushing all of the trading business to third party businesses again or kill the trading aspect of the game because no one will need to bother trading."
That's assuming you can still trade and that everything doesn't just become account bound.
"Without the subsidies I would expect prices on smart[phones to come down to a point where consumers don't mind the price tag."
Possibly, but the devices would also be lower in spec too. In fact, Google and Apple might not have even bothered entering the market because the margins would be much slimmer also so not worth the risk for them. We'd still be living in a RIM and Nokia Series 60 world.
Possibly a US thing but did you factor in the price of the contract?
Here in the UK if you factor in a sim free but otherwise equivalent contract you don't really save much, if anything by buying outright. I just do it myself because I don't like being tied to a cell phone provider for 2 years whose service could get shitty.
Just picked the Galaxy S4 at Vodafone for example, cheapest contract is £33 +£19 one off payment so that's £811 over 2 years. Device is £420 up front. The equivalent sim contract that comes with it would be the £15 one (and that actually offers you slightly less), so that's £360 over 2 years, so you save £31 buying it outright + buying a sim free contract. Certainly you'd pay more in credit card interest here in the UK, even if you got a 0% interest for 18 months card and only paid interest for 6 months.
Erm. I'm not American. You'd think my post further up about being from the UK would give that away.
"I expect that the actual evidence of healthier cellphone markets existing in places with unlocked phones is not enough to convince you? The fact that places where the consumer isn't locked into a network actually benefit the consumer have better service and lower costs? "
What are you on about? Have you actually been following this discussion? Even in markets where cellphones aren't locked you still have cellphone subsidies. The two things don't have to come together.
"Okay, how about this - you really think that all service providers foot the upfront costs of the phone? Hell, no!"
Hell yes. That's exactly how it works here in the UK. Phone companies aren't poor, none of them are so desperate that they have to use banks to cough up the cash upfront. There's literally no benefit to them doing so either as it creates a costly middle man for them who'd want their cut.
FWIW in the UK, subsidised phones are also not really any more expensive than buying outright so your theory about paying more makes no sense here. Perhaps that's precisely because it doesn't work as you say here and there is no banking middle man.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, the thing that bothers me most about all this though is the fact that the US seems to basically own GCHQ. We already had the story about how the US paid money for access to intelligence and influence on GCHQ but the fact that Snowden was able to pilfer some highly sensitive documents from the NSA about GCHQ is worrying.
Don't get me wrong, I'm absolutely glad Snowden did what he did but our intelligence services are way too close to and way too open with the US.
It's pretty clear what was meant now when David Milliband said our courts couldn't be allowed to demand our intelligence services show evidence about their involvement in extraordinary rendition because it would harm our relationship with US intelligence services - it seems they are part of US intelligence services. The irony now is that it was NSA incompetence that got our intelligence data leaked but you don't see our government condemning the US for that incompetence and threatening them to pull out and stop giving them intel do you? This is why our country has such a reputation as being America's lapdog and it stinks.
I hadn't actually heard of it, but I had a quick glance at the article you linked and saw "David Blunkett" which told me everything I needed to know as to why it failed :)
"Tell that to HTC, Motorola, LG, ..."
But they're not differentiating on hardware like Samsung did and that's exactly the point.
That's like saying Windows Phone 8 didn't differentiate because it's doing shit. Obviously it's very fucking different to Android and very much differentiates but differentiating to the extreme isn't a guarantee of success either. Samsung get it just right by providing quality hardware that people want. That's all the differentiation you need and it's a thing Nokia and Blackberry could do because their hardware is already decent quality and different enough, they just need an OS to go with it that people want.
If differentiating via OS is the key as people like you seem to think it is then why are Blackberry, Nokia, and the Firefox phones all failing? Why are the only guys with increasing market share the ones making Android devices? Differentiating via OS doesn't work, that's not opinion, it's cold hard fact demonstrated by the sales statistics showing the only people growing marketshare are the ones who go Android.
"Wow, not even a little bit. The two are dramatically different in just about every respect."
This simply tells me you haven't even seen either Blackberry's latest OS or Android since version 4. Blackberry have even gone as far to copy common icons such as the 3 dots for menus and so forth. Many other UI elements are exact copies of Android.
Sure it's very different under the hood but that's not what I'm talking about here because that's not what users see, I'm talking about the fact the UI is a poor clone of vanilla Android 4 with a few ideas stolen from iOS too.
"Ignoring the "unparalleled" hyperbole, for the moment, do you honestly think they'd have done better had Elop gone with Android?"
It's not hyperbole, how many other tech companies with a stable bottom line have managed to lose quite the reputation and marketshare Nokia has over the last decade? Yes it would have gone better if they'd gone Android, in fact, there were millions of ex-Nokia fans like me just waiting to buy a Nokia if they had gone with a decent OS rather than something no one gives a shit about like WP8. I still have fond memories of my old Nokia phones and I'd have loved nothing more than the quality of Nokia devices with an OS like Android and I am one of many millions in this regard. If you're from the US it's possible you don't get this because your cellphone market was utterly backwards before the iPhone but most of Europe, Africa, and Asia had some kind of Nokia device and they lost all of that by going WP8, they wouldn't have if they'd gone Android, or possibly even a renewed focus on MeeGo. Symbian was just too rusty, and no one wanted WP.
"Do you think Elop's infamous restructuring was "just because"? It was, at the time, a necessary effort to save the ailing company."
No it was absolutely necesssary. The problem is that Elop wasn't the person to do it and a focus on WP8 wasn't the way to go. Both these things were done to make Nokia an easy cheap takeover for Microsoft, Android was the easiest path for it to stay a strong independent company, just like Samsung.
I agree this whole situation stinks pretty badly. It seems pretty clear cut that Elop went in to reduce Nokia's value so Microsoft could buy it cheap and hire him back.
But can anyone from Finland confirm to me what the feelings are about this in Finland? Has your government not considered an investigation into how utterly dodgy this deal was? Given that it was the destruction of one of Finland's greatest success stories I'm surprised your country hasn't blocked the sale and looked at pushing criminal charges against Elop. Is there much more about this in Finnish news? are there any investigations there into how dodgy this whole situation that made thousands of Fins lose their jobs is?
It's the new insult, and the problem is it's come about because Slashdot has had a few shill accounts- there used to be a guy who first-posted attacking Google with a brand new account with no account history and instant +5.
A Slashdot admin also confirmed to me at least one incident of someone with a pro-Apple bias having multiple accounts set up as mod point bots though I suspect this was more desperate fanboy than professional shill. The admins here do remove mod privileges on reports of such abuse of the system though, though I suspect that's futile as there's not much they can do about people just creating even more accounts.
But as usual people have taken it too far, Slashdot's paranoia crowd have decided anyone who disagrees with them is a shill.
I've personally been accused of being a shill for the NSA, Microsoft, Google, Apple and Sony in the last 6 months alone.
But if only they knew. For me it's way worse than being a shill, I work in the financial services and banking sector.
It works both ways though, cinemas aren't charities either and take their share also.
I find Sheffield quite an interesting city now, given how hard it was hit during the Thatcher era and such it's certainly done a good job of picking itself up.
The city has really modernised and is far nicer than many others in the region (Leeds). There are still bits that need work but for the most part it's clean, modern, with nice gardens and parks to eat in dispersed around the centre and there always seems to be something going on.
I believe it's still the UK's 4th largest city and apparently something like 80% of it's economy is built up of small business. Many IT firms there especially have a very startup like feel to them and I wouldn't be surprised given the sheer quantity of small startups and the amount of innovation that's being attempted that over the next decade or two we don't see some major new tech companies emerge out of Sheffield. I wouldn't go so far as to suggest it's anything like silicon valley but it's certainly one of the most entrepreneurial cities in the UK that I've encountered.
I find many people there are motivated individuals in general, I has a lot of nice places to eat and drink so has a decent night life and social culture in that respect. It has a lot of clubs especially related to science like topics such as astronomy and chemistry that you see much less of in other UK cities too which is a sign both of the will of people there to get off their arses and organise things and the entrepreneurial spirit.
And it's funny, because despite living within about 20 miles of Sheffield for 15 years I'd only been into the city centre once, normally if I was going into a large city centre it would've been Leeds because well, it's the 3rd biggest city in the UK and it has a reputation as being a great big city.
But after doing a contract for a year in Sheffield last year I discovered this rather fantastic city right on my door step and all the things mentioned above. Now I tend to look on Leeds as a dirty boring shit hole in contrast.
Sheffield is a city that's genuinely pleasantly surprised me and I believe because of it's positive traits it will not simply be a city with an interesting history, but also a city with an interesting future.
If it's any consolation that's only about 20 miles from where I reside and I still have no idea what the fuck it is on about.
I've been a PC gamer all my life but when I got a 360 I didn't find it too hard getting used to the controls even playing competitive online multiplayer. It's certainly different to playing an FPS with a keyboard and mouse but I'm not convinced it's worse - certainly I know for a fact that I have as much fun.
That did change somewhat though when I got a PS3 as well, I just don't get on with the PS3 controller, even little things like the fact the thumb sticks have a convex top make it less comfortable. I find it doesn't help that a lot of games use the bumper to shoot which makes me wonder why on earth you have triggers? Triggers feel far more natural for firing a gun for obvious reasons. I do actually look like a complete amateur trying to play FPS games on the PS3 no matter how long I spend trying to get used to it.
I suspect different people are used to different things, and I suspect different people can and can't get used to different things. If I get a PS4 it'll be primarily for slower paced games for the reasons you cite coupled with the fact I hate Playstation controllers, but judging by the XBox One controller I'll still be able to enjoy FPS games on that just as I do on the PC.
But I do use my systems for different things anyway, I'm quite content playing things like Battlefield, GTA, CoD and Halo on my 360, whilst I'll use my PC for things like Diablo, Wargame, and Minecraft. My PS3 is generally for things like Uncharted and LBP. I suspect little will change next console generation with me using the Xbox One and the PS4 for the same sorts of games I currently use my 360 and PS3 if the controllers aren't drastically different and my PC for RTS's, MMOs and so forth.
Saints Row peaked at 2 and went downhill from there. It really just got too silly after that but I guess it depends what you like, I don't mind sci-fi but if I'm going to get sci-fi I expect it to be done properly a-la Crackdown and Crackdown 2, but the problem with Saints 3 is it didn't know what it wanted to be, it couldn't figure out if it was classic gang banging GTA style fun like Saints 2 and GTA or if it was a sci-fi game. Saints 4 seems to have made the evolution to full sci-fi so at least it's figured out what it is but I still don't find it as fun as Saints 2, or as sci-fi from the start games like Crackdown.
But for what it's worth GTA5 is actually excellent. I was a little underwhelmed by 4 (even on the consoles without the PC glitches I wasn't keen), the aiming system was frustrating, the physics were buggy and the storyline/missions weren't overly exciting.
GTA5 seems to fix all that, it seems to solve all those problems and the result is a nice well polished game that's an awful lot of fun. You do have the freedom to play and solve missions in different ways.
Definitely my favourite "crime simulators" as the press seems to be now calling them since 2005 have been Saints 2 and GTA5. They're well above the rest, though I admit there are other open world games that aren't of the crime genre I like just as much - I actually really enjoyed Mercenairies 2 when I played it through coop with a friend, and Just Cause 2 was fantastic.
I don't think it's that, I think it's simply that most people know they're not interesting to the NSA so simply do not give a shit.
I think there's nothing more complex to it than that.
Not sure what you're referring to but that's partially what the OU is and it's been successful (though see my other post on this story to see why I'm not so keen on the OU nowadays).
You can do an MSc in say, Mathematics, with the OU for about £3500 still I believe. Other topics are higher, like £9,000 or so for computing I think but it depends what you want.
Agreed, I did one of my degrees with them and was considering doing another but in the last few years that quality has gone from declining, to freefall.
They've gotten rid of important courses, sometimes amalgamating them- IIRC Number Theory, Graph Theory and one or two others at level 3 have now been squeezed all into a single (albeit 60 instead of 30 point course). The fact they've done this alone means they can't possibly cover these topics to the degree they used to.
It never used to be perfect, I remember seeing course materials a friend was studying (M263 IIRC) where they'd made up a programming language and created their own tool to execute it which struck me as nonsensical when they could've used plenty of other perfectly good languages out there both saving the uni time in not having to develop the new language and execution environment and helping the students by teaching them a real actual language rather than something they'd made up and was used only by them for that course.
Similarly I remember seeing their database course material where they for some god unknown reason also created their own ERD style which was basically crows foot but with the optional/mandatory specifier placed at the opposite entity to classic crows foot notation.
All this pales in comparison to the idiocy they're proceeding with now however. The problem is they already had the well funded OpenLearn years ago and that seemed to go absolutely nowhere and I'd almost argue was pretty much abandoned by them.
If it weren't for the fact there were 20 or so other unis involved I'd predict this to be a flop. Hopefully the other unis can carry the OU on this one because I wouldn't have faith on them pulling it off themselves nowadays.
But I thought quite tellingly it was interesting that both Oxford and Cambridge decided to keep the fuck away.
"That argument's been around for years. It hasn't improved with age. Becoming a me-too player in a crowded market while simultaneously cutting off the few remaining advantages you have over the competition does not sound like a recipe for success!"
Right, and the "me too" argument has been around just as long. The difference is that Android is still growing marketshare and Samsung has proven what a joke the "me too" argument is by differentiating to the point of becoming the largest cellphone manufacturer around and possibly even the most profitable.
But worse, that argument looks even more stupid due to the fact that Blackberry's latest OS is very much a "me too" clone of Android, but because it's not Android it doesn't have any of the benefits like all the support Android has due to it's popularity. Blackberry's answer to not becoming a "me too" Android player was to become a "me too" Android player in the worst possible way? By simply copying Android badly instead of just using Android? Great lot of good that's done them.
The fact is "me too" makes sense if you've got the ability to differentiate yourself with hardware and additional software - Blackberry does. It's hardware is (well, was) very different to what else is on the market and lots of people like it still. They could also trivially integrate Android with their business tools like BIS and have that as a differentiator too.
Nokia should've gone to Android using it's excellent hardware as a differentiator, it didn't and now it's lost it's marketshare, lost all it's talent, been ripped up and sold off to Microsoft. Choosing WP8 instead of Android to "differentiate" itself was probably the worst business decision made this entire century in the tech industry due to the difference in relevance and success of Nokia before and after. The decline in value and worth of Nokia is almost unparalleled to any other tech company. Blackberry, if it has any sense, will avoid making the same mistake, because even if the "me too" argument had any validity it'd still be better to be a "me too" in the Android market than a joke and a failure in general like Nokia became and Blackberry is on it's path to becoming.
Why do people always assume shareholders are involved?
Even if shareholders are involved why is this necessarily going to change anything?
I've seen people see the same thing about Google, it's as if they're blissfully unaware of the fact that even now Larry and Sergei have the majority of voting stock so still have a final say over what the company does. That means doing what "shareholders" want in Google's case still ultimately means doing what the two guys who founded the company want.
Sometimes being a corporation just means more money to do things more professional by providing additional services that subsidise the core. If they're going to start offering support contracts to companies so they can hire staff to handle that whilst the core staff work on continuing to develop it then what's the problem? It means they can now do it full time rather than as a hobby around a full time job they have to do to live off.
I know it's shocking.
I still can't believe that Redhat and SUSE exist. I mean, how can they go and make commercial Linux companies when they didn't write it?
Seriously though, you seem to be making the assumption a lot of people do that if it's FOSS and other contributors are involved that you can't build a commercial company on that.
That's simply not true, and if anything commercial companies built on FOSS actually drive FOSS software to be more professional, better looked after, and better maintained whilst also giving corporations the comfort of support contracts and so forth.
Because UK public sector contracts are usually written and decided by an old boys club whose knowledge is about as relevant to today's computing as Julius Ceasar's might have been.
Honestly, they choose monolithic because they only know monolithic and because all their procedure documents and project management standards only cater to monolithic.
There's very little young blood in UK public sector, and equally few older folks who know what they're on about. The problem is that it offers insanely good pensions so most people in management positions are just the people who have been there a while and wont leave because they're waiting it out until their gold plated retirement.
Every now and then you find a public sector IT department led by someone old and experienced who genuinely has a passion for IT and has as such kept uptodate and those are the few areas that have those rare IT successes, but I suspect they make up 5% of public sector in the UK at best.
"Isn't the British government supposed to have created the friggin' world standard for proper service management of IT projects?"
Yes. That's the problem.
Meanwhile everyone else that doesn't waste their time with ITIL because they instead just hired competent staff who don't need to be told the obvious or forced to follow some rigid process even where it makes no sense to do so for the sake of compliance gets on just fine.
The other problem is ineptitude in public sector contract negotiation.
Public sector seems to not factor in penalties for companies failing to deliver on time and on spec, and in fact incentivise failure.
There was a good example in one of the Navy's new ship contracts, it might even be the new carriers, or the Type 45s, where the project overran in terms of costs beyond initial estimates and so the government just gave them more money.
Public sector is the only place I've ever heard of this happening, in private sector you produce a contract with a fixed price and if the vendor can't deliver to that price then it's tough fucking shit, they have to bear the cost of it and accept a loss on the project as a result.
If that means BAE or whoever footing a £2bn bill for their project overrun on the carriers then tough. It'll make them think twice about giving more realistic cost estimates in future.
But because none of that happens, companies are now systematic in exploiting it. They put forward a cost for the project, and then say they have an overrun by overinflating staffing costs, material costs and so forth and just up the price and government pays them it seemingly without any question.
You even see it in the G4S contract where government still paid them at least some of the money (still on the order of 10s of millions) even though they failed to provide the necessary staff they were supposed to and the Army had to be called in to do the job. Again, with sensible contract negotiation government should not have had to pay them a penny at this point, failure to deliver should've resulted in complete recouping of costs because of breach of contract on their behalf and possibly even damages for having to make alternative arrangements.
Until they sort of contract negotiation in public sector this will keep happening. Whilst there's no reason for companies not to fail, or not to budget overrun, then they will fail to deliver, and budget overrun where it's profitable for them to do so. The problem is that this doesn't happen and companies get favourable contracts because the people signing the contracts on the government side often went to school with (or whatever) the people at the top of the companies bidding for the contracts and are old friends so are more interested in helping a friend than serving the tax payer.
A high profile bankruptcy resulting from costs incurred from poor project planning in a major public sector contract would hurt the tax payer but it's exactly what needs to happen to stop the tax payer being hurt even more in the long run by dissuading companies from doing a shit job, or trying to scam the tax payer.
"and patients are being asked for permission to make their records available on the system."
Did that bit even ever work? I got asked and said no, but hospitals/doctors since I moved house and changed doctors a couple of times (the first one I changed to was shit so I changed again) all seem to have instant access to my records.
I always assumed from then on that even though they asked that even if you said no they still didn't pay any attention to it and stuck your records on anyway.
Serious aside on that though, bit of a conspiracy theory, but here's a thought.
In the early 00s in the UK connections were getting faster and broadband cheaper and bandwidth more available. Then suddenly, mid-decade things seemed to reverse, ISPs started throttling and capping to slower speeds than we used to have.
Looking at the history of this it seems to somewhat coincide with GCHQ/NSA's snooping programs.
What if the NSA/GCHQ were actually stifling growth of bandwidth availability because their spying programs couldn't cope with collection of the constant increases of data?
I suspect not, I suspect my original theory that ISPs just got ever more greedy charging more for less is still the most valid explanation, but at this point I wouldn't put anything past the NSA/GCHQ including holding growth of the internet back so that they could continue to mine it.
"I think you've got Blizzard's motivations all wrong there."
I suspect not as it was one of the cited reasons by them for it's introduction in the first place. In fact, I think there was even a Slashdot article on exactly that aspect of it.
"My conclusion is that unless the loot patch, that is supposed to coincide with the AH removal, is perfectly balanced they will just be pushing all of the trading business to third party businesses again or kill the trading aspect of the game because no one will need to bother trading."
That's assuming you can still trade and that everything doesn't just become account bound.
"In other words, they trick consumers into paying well more than they believe a smartphone is worth to them by making it appear cheaper?"
Sounds like that must be a US thing. See my post here for how it works in the UK:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4227219&cid=44900189
"Without the subsidies I would expect prices on smart[phones to come down to a point where consumers don't mind the price tag."
Possibly, but the devices would also be lower in spec too. In fact, Google and Apple might not have even bothered entering the market because the margins would be much slimmer also so not worth the risk for them. We'd still be living in a RIM and Nokia Series 60 world.
Possibly a US thing but did you factor in the price of the contract?
Here in the UK if you factor in a sim free but otherwise equivalent contract you don't really save much, if anything by buying outright. I just do it myself because I don't like being tied to a cell phone provider for 2 years whose service could get shitty.
Just picked the Galaxy S4 at Vodafone for example, cheapest contract is £33 +£19 one off payment so that's £811 over 2 years. Device is £420 up front. The equivalent sim contract that comes with it would be the £15 one (and that actually offers you slightly less), so that's £360 over 2 years, so you save £31 buying it outright + buying a sim free contract. Certainly you'd pay more in credit card interest here in the UK, even if you got a 0% interest for 18 months card and only paid interest for 6 months.
"You americans crack me up, you really do :)"
Erm. I'm not American. You'd think my post further up about being from the UK would give that away.
"I expect that the actual evidence of healthier cellphone markets existing in places with unlocked phones is not enough to convince you? The fact that places where the consumer isn't locked into a network actually benefit the consumer have better service and lower costs? "
What are you on about? Have you actually been following this discussion? Even in markets where cellphones aren't locked you still have cellphone subsidies. The two things don't have to come together.
"Okay, how about this - you really think that all service providers foot the upfront costs of the phone? Hell, no!"
Hell yes. That's exactly how it works here in the UK. Phone companies aren't poor, none of them are so desperate that they have to use banks to cough up the cash upfront. There's literally no benefit to them doing so either as it creates a costly middle man for them who'd want their cut.
FWIW in the UK, subsidised phones are also not really any more expensive than buying outright so your theory about paying more makes no sense here. Perhaps that's precisely because it doesn't work as you say here and there is no banking middle man.