Recently I put the Windows 7 RC on my home machine and thought I would try out Opera since it people keep trying to sell it on speed/etc...
I have no idea if the latest version of windows causes it some problems but my impressions haven't been good. It's slower than IE 8 to use, doesn't look as pretty and has some bizare page loading bug. A good example is going to www.hotmail.com once you've signed in the page never appears to completely load (this occurs every time and even after I've tried giving it several minutes) and I have to click the stop button before enough icons magically appear for me to get to my inbox menu.
Forcing such limiters is daft, a while back I was driving a Mercedes A Class (horrible car BTW*) and it came with a speed limiter of a different sort. You could set a maximum speed on it and then unless you put your foot down the car would only ever do the speed you'd set into it. After driving it for 4 hours I was pretty good at switching between motorway and residential limits. I found it very easy to stick to speed limits but could quite happily go faster if I wished.
I honestly think this sort of device should be pushed into the car market as its considerably better than cruise control and it helps alot with residential/motorway driving.
*the only way I could get the mercedes to handle was to use the hand brake and as I understand it that breaks the controls which stop the car from falling over. Secondly the automatic gear box sucked horribly, by taking direct control of what gear I was in I got much better MPG (5 MPG more)and acceleration out of the thing. The speed limiter was the saving grace, it took the need to concentrate on my speed away.
If an ISP offered a completely legal P2P/Download service with movies/tv shows/music on it AND you got to keep the stuff after you'd subscribed (basically no DRM) I'd happily pay £25 a month for that service.
I already use the BBC iPlayer pretty heavily because its easy and legit.
The study found seven countries with piracy rates of 90 percent or higher: Georgia, Bangladesh, Armenia, Zimbabwe, Sri Landa, Azerbaijan and Moldova.
Why is the BSA even surveying countries which recently had a major war, are having battles with rebels or are suffering hyper inflation to the point their economy is broken? Is a surprise that people pirate in such conditions? Shouldn't there be some acceptance that in a country where physical property is hard to come by/keep that people ignore intangible property?
Roughly speaking the firm takes an estimate of the amount of computers shipped to individual companies, takes a further estimate of what software should be on those machines, and compares that, not to exact software sales, but to interviews with software vendors.
I don't see how such data gathering methods can give a legitimate support either, I don't think such sloppy researching would pass any scientific rigour, combine that with a test group of 6000 out of a supposed 6 billion and you8 don't have anything actually useful to go by. Its like setting up a small niche website and then estimating world web browser usage based on adding up the monthly percentages of visits from each browser.
There are people who will never pay the full price for your product, they are the people who bought dvd's from a man in the pub before the internet. The issue isn't how to force them to actually buy your product but how to get to the people who want to buy your product but can't.
Virgin Media tried doing this and got shot down by the media companies over licensing issues I believe ISPA is arguing for a simplification of licensing laws which is the right way to go.
I think the forced change piracy placed upon the Music business was a good idea. But the fact those companies are still managing to shoot themselves in the foot is impressive. I can buy a Killers album (CD) on Play.com for £5.99 or I can buy the MP3's off of Play.com for.... £6.49. I buy most of my films once they hit the £7 or lower price range (usually take about 3 months). I bet when the UK does get film downloads they will cost more (and won't go down after 3 months) and will be DRM'd to hell.
Re:Frankly, I was disappointed
on
Reviews: Star Trek
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Just to counter your comment on the science.
Most of the series were logial in their application of science, transporters were limited by sensor range, warp drive worked based on real world theories of FTL (disproven recently), they used terms like dark matter and protons/gravitons/etc.. correctly and alot of the phonemon mentioned exist as theoretical ideas.
The film seemed to ignore science, we had "red matter", "lightening storms in space" aparently a ship can survive being in the middle of a black hole for a couple of minutes with no problems. Transporters can work over infinite distances, and little logical errors abounded. During their trip out they make a point of saving it will take three minutes, yet a more advanced ship from the future seems to make the same journey in a day.
I liked the movie but between saying f*** you to the ten years of star trek tv shows I grew up with and the complete inattention to the science or sticking with rules the film creates just annoyed the hell out of me. I'd rather they let the whole franchise have fizzled out than that film.
No the film had bigger problems than that, but your right the sudden huge promotion for someone so inexpearenced was weird.
How about for a Science fiction film they kept the science lingo at a level 9 year olds wouldn't struggle with. I don't mind films being light on science lingo but this film went too far the other way with its "Lightening Storm in SPACE!".
How about the way it created and then imediatley discarded "laws", one minute you hear about how you can't transport more than 100 miles and the next it feels like they can do it over light years. How about making a point of saying a trip takes 3 minutes and yet somehow they beat someone else doing the reverse trip after detouring for a day.
I can forgive a remake for changing the rules and perhaps redeveloping characters like Battlestar did. But this film's ignored rules that it made up, the only show I know that is inept enough to do that is Yo-gi-oh.
I think I finally understand the disapointment people felt when they saw Matrix Reloaded. I'm not a trekkie or trekker or whatever I goto the cinema regularly to enjoy good storytelling and I'm so upset because half an hour with the script pre production could have easily fixed most of the problems.
Do you not find that depressing? I know how to strip down a rebuild my super bike, I can repair lawn mowers, build furniture, I'm gonna have a look at an old LCD and see if its fixable. Sure I can do none of these things to the same standard as a craftman. But I understand the principles and can get things done when needed.
I've never understood this desire by the "average" person not to take any interest in what they spend their money on and use everyday. I recently spent £700 on a TV, before I did that I spent a month (occasional hour here, anouther there) researching TV's finding out what the contrast ratio meant, sound options, refresh rates, etc.. I took time to go to a couple of different shops and look at various TV's and see which one's I thought were better.
Doing this and taking the time to learn doesn't take much time at all, I probably spent more time going to the gym in the last month than wondering about TV's (I only go twice a week). I did it because I wanted a decent TV and after going to a Currys and Comet and being told alot of information which was obviously incorrect I decided to learn rather than be ripped off. This seeming happyness in willfull ignorance has always depressed me, does it not you?
Out of curiosity did the machine have an onboard graphics card? When Vista was launched I noticed alot of hardware manufacturers selling machines (laptops in particular) with 512MB of ram and 128MB Intel on board graphics cards. That in effect meant the machines had 384MB of ram.
When XP was launched on board graphics cards were 16MB at most (more often 4MB). When the manufactures did that they were selling machines which had 92% of the recommended ram. When Manufactures sold Vista machines they were selling them with 60% of the minimum required ram. In modern terms its the equivilent of running XP on 48MB's of ram. Possible but makes the system seem like a bloated piece of rubbish.
I honestly think most of Vista's perception problems were caused by manufacturer's being stingy on their hardware and lazy in writing their drivers.
It's not what they changed but the non-sense application writers have done. realMyst is a great game but there were alot of fudges written into it so it barely functions in windows xp, Discworld 2 is anouther example and alot of game installers were written to an inordinate amount of information to a Win 9x registry which they can't do in Vista/7. Currently I use Virtual PC with a mix of Win98/WinXp virtual drives to play these older games.
No Spiderman 3 sucked for entirely different reasons. The following thoughts occured while I was bored stiff in the cinema watching it.
If you take out the whole Harry forgetting his memory and the Harry/Mary Jane subplot you could have saved 40 minutes of the movie which have been put to good use.
Secondly the film spent ages trying to be a poor romantic drama in places. Its supposed to be a cartoon adventure film, in depth emotional interaction is over the top you could have halved the romantic stuff and still told a reasonable story. As it stands it half an attempt and appreciated by nobody.
The basic story was good but the actual sub plots and direction sucked horribly. Because of the above two things they had zero time to develop any of the bad guys.
I'd take exception to this, when I was a student/child with little disposible income I often copied games/films. As I've grown up and my disposible incomes increased I now only own legitimnate copies. When I turned 19/20 I spent alot of my income in insuring everything I owned was legitimate, from making sure I only had XP installed on one machine to locating the original C&C game. I gave up when it was impossible to locate certain games and when certain albums were over £25 to purchase from HMV/Virgin Megastore.
I didn't do it because I feared getting prosecuted or anything else, I did it because I loved a certain film, song or game. Rather than treating people like criminals (which is why I don't own Red Alert 3 despite really wanting it) media companies need to relax their copyright attitudes and take time encouraging the above viewpoint.
I've always thought public consensus of a law was integral to that law. If people don't believe a law is just, they'll ignore it. If you criminalise enough people over things they don't consider wrong you erode respect for all laws.
In the UK it's illegal to rip CD's to your MP3 player and yet I'm betting 99% of the MP3 players in the UK have ripped music on them. By criminalising CD ripping you cause people to lose respect for the law, in this case when your average citizen finds out they instantly see it as the fault of the stupid record companies. Which in turn makes it easier to "steal" from those same "greedy" companies.
In comparison most people hate speed camera's but they agree with the idea of having a speed limit and sticking roughly to it. Heck even when I got caught speeding recently my outrage wasn't about getting the speeding ticket but because Dorset/Somerset's police attitudes towards bikers (which borders on harassment) annoyed me. As for doing 40MPH in a 30, well I should have stuck to the limit.
I believe you can have unpopular laws like speed limits but people understand the need for them and so they work. On the other hand people don't understand copyright and its application these days.
The media companies have been so hell bent on treating all customers like criminals and subtracting value, that people see them as an evil faceless corporation (see Slashdots view on Microsoft) and that makes it ok to take from them. This particular ruling has probably done more harm to the Media companies cause then anything they've done. Just go to the BBC's Have your Say section (or any newspapers) and 99% of the comments are against the media companies and how laws can be bought. The sheer amount of effort required to force these companies to provide the customer what they want has annoyed a lot of people.
I believe in copyright, I'm a software engineer I've worked on a variety of TDL and UXV applications and know how expensive and difficult it is make good software. But software/media analogies aren't perfect, if my company didn't keep improving their software and adding new capability to it another competitor would get the future sales. With music/movies you could make one great movie and people will still buy it even if new movies come out. Which is the big difference between software and media.
I honestly hope that in time politicians release than reducing the copyright length to something closer to twenty years (I'd prefer ten) and decriminalising non-commercial copyright, will be in the best interest for everyone. Since it would help maintain respect for law and encourage more media.
As for the internet age stopping the big blockbusters and the current pop stars, I can only hope. Hollywood has fallen into the same black hole as games, where more special effects are the equivalent of adding more polygons. At a certain point it adds nothing new and the fixation often means more important things are forgotten.
I've used Vista since it was released and for the most part I do think its a good operating system (Ubuntu's still not there for me). But the difference between Vista and 7 is similar to the difference between 2000/Xp. The Beta felt faster than XP/Vista/Ubuntu the new taskbar is alot like Office 2007's GUI in that when you first use it all you can think is "How crap is this?" but after a week you find yourself cringing to go back to the old method. They've cleaned up the entire interface and it feels like a group of developers got to sit down and go through everything that annoyed them about Vista and get rid of it (purely an impression). Oh and virtual folders are a brilliant idea, I could keep all of my music/videos on my main storage drive and use virtual folders to display them in my My Music/My Videos folders.
I think your going to far, if you think about games like GTA/HL2, they have alot of bystanders/objects in them. Rather than rebuild everything from scratch don't be afraid to pull common assets from previous titles and build even more assets for the new game.
The next episode of Half Life 2 will probably have character assets form the original game in it and have new ones. Most game companies seem determined to create a new game engine and completley new game engine for every single game.
You realise that since XP Sp2 windows has been pretty much rock solid, the only time Vista has managed to crash on me was when I first installed it onto a machine with dodgey ram. Once readyboost filled that area of the ram up the machine would crash.
I realise I'm just feeding a karma whore but considering every man and his dog has been raving about how much quicker Windows 7 and there are articles on how to get it working on an Asus EEE pc. You must have had your heard in the sand.
While repealing the human rights act sounds horrific, I can support it as long as its replaced with something better.
The Human rights act has been used by criminals to sue people for injuries they incurred trying to rob them and is heavily abused by rejected asulym seekers to delay their removal, the whole school girl demanding to wearing speacial clothing in school and by much of the PC brigade to supress the majority. Having actually read it I think it would be a lot easier to tear the thing up and start out using the old act as a guide rather than try and patch the issues in the current one.
SUV's and cars in general are no where near as large as SUV's in America. In a recent business trip to Australia I worked with Americans and Australians and rented what I thought were some massive solon cars (everyone was larger than a Ford Mondeo). I spent much of my time mocking the Australians for having such large poor handling with large engines but underpowered. The Americans kept asking why cars like the Toyota Camry, Ford Explorer were so much smaller in Australia.
Those cars weren't bad on fuel consumption getting between 30 to 35 MPG, but considering the Australian road system (65MPH speed limit and heavy inforcement in Victoria at least) having a 3 litre V8 engine (which couldn't pull the skin of a rice pudding) seemed a massive waste. Things like the smaller Focus's, Fiesta's and Astra's should have been a lot more popular.
I'd have to disagree, I've been with BAE Systems for a 18 months now (not the standard graduate scheme I'll admit) in that time they've sent me to MIRA race track to support a UGV trial and then to Australia to support a UGV and UAV demonstration.
I'll admit out of my graddie group of 14 none of the others have done anything close to that, but that project mostly involved BAE graduates from accross the UK. My expectations were to be stuck on testing for months, not to be sent to Australia for 6 weeks to provide full customer support. When I compare my job of the last 18 months to Uni, the jobs been alot more fun and I've also learnt alot more.
Personnally I think it's tied to the almost purely two party system we have. For the last fifty years we've only really had Tories or Labour in power. Its created career politicans, people like Brown have never had a real job. They studied political science and only swam in politcal circles. This has created a disconnect between them and reality. They now know enough to manipulate the majority of the populations opinion by using terms like "terrorisim" and do rather than caring about the people their key interest is in maintain their jobs and increasing their power. At the end of their career they safely retire to the city or some pointless diplomatic job.
Look at todays front page BBC news story, Labour have reduced the teacher training from a year to 6 months because of the massive lay offs occuring within the "City" (the very words of this mornings BBC reporter). Both major political parties constantly worked to improve things in the "City". When Tony Blair quit he was given the job of an ambassador. Think of the recent outrage MP's showed when police searched an MP office without a warrent (bearing in mind an MP's office is a public space and you don't need a warrent).
The only way I can see to end the cycle is to knock the wind out of the Conservative and Labour. In my area the major opposition are Liberal Democrats so I will be voting for them and trying to convince my friends/family to vote whatever their next most major opposition (be it green, lib dem, UKIP). Hopefully if enough people do something similar we can shake those politcians up enough they'll reconnect.
A more logical approach would be to say if music/game/film conterfitting are directly funding organised crime (terrorisim is organised crime). Then logically stopping music/game/film conterfitting needs to take top priority (since Terrorism is bad and we really want to detain people for 48 days). If the movie/music/game industries are selling at their optimum price point then those buying the conterfits could be considered a lost cause. Leaving two options:
[b]1.[/b] Forcing the involved industries to produce lower media by a law or some tax/redistribution system. This would effectivily lower the supply price to the point where those who would buy conterfit
[b]2.[/b]Or the simplier option of legalising personal non-profit copying, there by taking away the criminal elements revenue stream and encouraging the media industry to add value to their products, so people actually want to buy them.
I've heard this arguement I've helped in a few podcasts and had the opportunity to use a few people's music they produced.
You can make radio quality podcasts with nothing more than a decent (£50) microphone and audacity, I've met a few student "Audio Engineers" who had similar feelings. I personnally have found that to be a load of bunk. Have a listen to their latest podcast (I left the project over a year ago but a quick listen to the latest does prove my point). http://www.thecaverntoday.org/?go=pod37 .
Ignoring the content of the linked podcast I would really love to know what a recording studio would add to that podcast (technically). I accept a few people are using cheap microphones but otherwise I don't see what value is added by a recording studio. The only "advantage" I could see (from a quick glance at wikipedia) is that care has been put into the accoustics of a room. After spending half an hour googling and coming accross a stunningly large amount of "gold plated plugs" audiophil non-sense(having a copper cable and gold plug increase's noise as the signal transfers between the medium because of the differing input/output impediance) I've picked up that doing it properly is something most people could learn and it isn't that much more expensive than actual sound proofing.
I think you've missed the GP's point. I've met a number of (admittedly teenage) lesbians (and a couple of gay men) who seem to treat their sexual orientation as their primary defining personality feature. It's worse than a lot of other obsessions because they often seem to need to mention it at every available opportunity and try to challenge you with it. If someone's lesbian/gay I don't really care, once you get past the whole "lesbians + me" lesbian fantasy and the "asses to the walls" homophobia a persons sexual orientation isn't a big deal.
It's wrong to ban someone just because they put "I'm a lesbian" in their profile, but I can see banning someone who is constantly forcing this on other people (like the type of person above) because that other person is irritating others with it. I have also met a man hating lesbian stereo-type, someone who might go on a game and start slagging off men in a fashion no better than trolls should be treated as a troll, regardless if their topic is about computers, cars, tv, music, sexual orientation, race or religion.
Your reaction is precisely what has gone wrong with our overly PC western society, the American "Don't ask, don't tell policy" is wrong as it forces people to hide an important part of their life that they shouldn't have to. But going to the other extreme and hiding behind that reason is far more annoying to those around you, my motorcycle is highly important to me and a fundamental part of who I am but I don't introduce myself as "I'm Steve the motorcyclist". Nor do I feel the need to troll about cars. If I did most people would consider me strange (at best) and irritating at worse. In this case unless Microsoft profiles include a sexual orientation section you have to ask why anyone would care and why a person would feel the need to put the information in there, I certainly don't feel the need to write "Straight" in my online profiles.
Reading the blog it seems (from knowing only her side) that other player's homophobia has caused this issue and she really is a victim. The fact Microsoft has come down on the homophobes side is very worrying and some sort of action needs to start to get this corrected. She deserves an apology from Microsoft and the people who have been attacking her need to be banned.
I can understand the need for such technology and even how it will help. What I don't understand is the choice of device, if cost is really a factor then a COTS HTC Touch or something similar would be far cheaper, if you were dealing with large enough volumes you could problem mount/design a standard Windows Mobile ARM 9 kit inside your own shell (cutting down weight and giving you exactly what you need).
This is a interesting modification of a consumer device but part of me feels that there would be better and cheaper solutions which wouldn't leave you subject to Apple's DRM'd iPhone. To my knowledge the iPhone only allows web applications, are they really that much easier to program for when compared to the Symbian/Windows Mobile/Embedded Linux platforms?
Slashdot Mirror
Recently I put the Windows 7 RC on my home machine and thought I would try out Opera since it people keep trying to sell it on speed/etc...
I have no idea if the latest version of windows causes it some problems but my impressions haven't been good. It's slower than IE 8 to use, doesn't look as pretty and has some bizare page loading bug. A good example is going to www.hotmail.com once you've signed in the page never appears to completely load (this occurs every time and even after I've tried giving it several minutes) and I have to click the stop button before enough icons magically appear for me to get to my inbox menu.
Forcing such limiters is daft, a while back I was driving a Mercedes A Class (horrible car BTW*) and it came with a speed limiter of a different sort. You could set a maximum speed on it and then unless you put your foot down the car would only ever do the speed you'd set into it. After driving it for 4 hours I was pretty good at switching between motorway and residential limits. I found it very easy to stick to speed limits but could quite happily go faster if I wished.
I honestly think this sort of device should be pushed into the car market as its considerably better than cruise control and it helps alot with residential/motorway driving.
*the only way I could get the mercedes to handle was to use the hand brake and as I understand it that breaks the controls which stop the car from falling over. Secondly the automatic gear box sucked horribly, by taking direct control of what gear I was in I got much better MPG (5 MPG more)and acceleration out of the thing. The speed limiter was the saving grace, it took the need to concentrate on my speed away.
If an ISP offered a completely legal P2P/Download service with movies/tv shows/music on it AND you got to keep the stuff after you'd subscribed (basically no DRM) I'd happily pay £25 a month for that service.
I already use the BBC iPlayer pretty heavily because its easy and legit.
The study found seven countries with piracy rates of 90 percent or higher: Georgia, Bangladesh, Armenia, Zimbabwe, Sri Landa, Azerbaijan and Moldova.
Why is the BSA even surveying countries which recently had a major war, are having battles with rebels or are suffering hyper inflation to the point their economy is broken? Is a surprise that people pirate in such conditions? Shouldn't there be some acceptance that in a country where physical property is hard to come by/keep that people ignore intangible property?
Roughly speaking the firm takes an estimate of the amount of computers shipped to individual companies, takes a further estimate of what software should be on those machines, and compares that, not to exact software sales, but to interviews with software vendors.
I don't see how such data gathering methods can give a legitimate support either, I don't think such sloppy researching would pass any scientific rigour, combine that with a test group of 6000 out of a supposed 6 billion and you8 don't have anything actually useful to go by. Its like setting up a small niche website and then estimating world web browser usage based on adding up the monthly percentages of visits from each browser.
There are people who will never pay the full price for your product, they are the people who bought dvd's from a man in the pub before the internet. The issue isn't how to force them to actually buy your product but how to get to the people who want to buy your product but can't.
Virgin Media tried doing this and got shot down by the media companies over licensing issues I believe ISPA is arguing for a simplification of licensing laws which is the right way to go.
I think the forced change piracy placed upon the Music business was a good idea. But the fact those companies are still managing to shoot themselves in the foot is impressive. I can buy a Killers album (CD) on Play.com for £5.99 or I can buy the MP3's off of Play.com for.... £6.49. I buy most of my films once they hit the £7 or lower price range (usually take about 3 months). I bet when the UK does get film downloads they will cost more (and won't go down after 3 months) and will be DRM'd to hell.
Just to counter your comment on the science.
Most of the series were logial in their application of science, transporters were limited by sensor range, warp drive worked based on real world theories of FTL (disproven recently), they used terms like dark matter and protons/gravitons/etc.. correctly and alot of the phonemon mentioned exist as theoretical ideas.
The film seemed to ignore science, we had "red matter", "lightening storms in space" aparently a ship can survive being in the middle of a black hole for a couple of minutes with no problems. Transporters can work over infinite distances, and little logical errors abounded. During their trip out they make a point of saving it will take three minutes, yet a more advanced ship from the future seems to make the same journey in a day.
I liked the movie but between saying f*** you to the ten years of star trek tv shows I grew up with and the complete inattention to the science or sticking with rules the film creates just annoyed the hell out of me. I'd rather they let the whole franchise have fizzled out than that film.
No the film had bigger problems than that, but your right the sudden huge promotion for someone so inexpearenced was weird.
How about for a Science fiction film they kept the science lingo at a level 9 year olds wouldn't struggle with. I don't mind films being light on science lingo but this film went too far the other way with its "Lightening Storm in SPACE!".
How about the way it created and then imediatley discarded "laws", one minute you hear about how you can't transport more than 100 miles and the next it feels like they can do it over light years. How about making a point of saying a trip takes 3 minutes and yet somehow they beat someone else doing the reverse trip after detouring for a day.
I can forgive a remake for changing the rules and perhaps redeveloping characters like Battlestar did. But this film's ignored rules that it made up, the only show I know that is inept enough to do that is Yo-gi-oh.
I think I finally understand the disapointment people felt when they saw Matrix Reloaded. I'm not a trekkie or trekker or whatever I goto the cinema regularly to enjoy good storytelling and I'm so upset because half an hour with the script pre production could have easily fixed most of the problems.
Do you not find that depressing? I know how to strip down a rebuild my super bike, I can repair lawn mowers, build furniture, I'm gonna have a look at an old LCD and see if its fixable. Sure I can do none of these things to the same standard as a craftman. But I understand the principles and can get things done when needed.
I've never understood this desire by the "average" person not to take any interest in what they spend their money on and use everyday. I recently spent £700 on a TV, before I did that I spent a month (occasional hour here, anouther there) researching TV's finding out what the contrast ratio meant, sound options, refresh rates, etc.. I took time to go to a couple of different shops and look at various TV's and see which one's I thought were better.
Doing this and taking the time to learn doesn't take much time at all, I probably spent more time going to the gym in the last month than wondering about TV's (I only go twice a week). I did it because I wanted a decent TV and after going to a Currys and Comet and being told alot of information which was obviously incorrect I decided to learn rather than be ripped off. This seeming happyness in willfull ignorance has always depressed me, does it not you?
Out of curiosity did the machine have an onboard graphics card? When Vista was launched I noticed alot of hardware manufacturers selling machines (laptops in particular) with 512MB of ram and 128MB Intel on board graphics cards. That in effect meant the machines had 384MB of ram.
When XP was launched on board graphics cards were 16MB at most (more often 4MB). When the manufactures did that they were selling machines which had 92% of the recommended ram. When Manufactures sold Vista machines they were selling them with 60% of the minimum required ram. In modern terms its the equivilent of running XP on 48MB's of ram. Possible but makes the system seem like a bloated piece of rubbish.
I honestly think most of Vista's perception problems were caused by manufacturer's being stingy on their hardware and lazy in writing their drivers.
It's not what they changed but the non-sense application writers have done. realMyst is a great game but there were alot of fudges written into it so it barely functions in windows xp, Discworld 2 is anouther example and alot of game installers were written to an inordinate amount of information to a Win 9x registry which they can't do in Vista/7. Currently I use Virtual PC with a mix of Win98/WinXp virtual drives to play these older games.
Ahh, You've heard of the MPAA then?
No Spiderman 3 sucked for entirely different reasons. The following thoughts occured while I was bored stiff in the cinema watching it.
If you take out the whole Harry forgetting his memory and the Harry/Mary Jane subplot you could have saved 40 minutes of the movie which have been put to good use.
Secondly the film spent ages trying to be a poor romantic drama in places. Its supposed to be a cartoon adventure film, in depth emotional interaction is over the top you could have halved the romantic stuff and still told a reasonable story. As it stands it half an attempt and appreciated by nobody.
The basic story was good but the actual sub plots and direction sucked horribly. Because of the above two things they had zero time to develop any of the bad guys.
I'd take exception to this, when I was a student/child with little disposible income I often copied games/films. As I've grown up and my disposible incomes increased I now only own legitimnate copies. When I turned 19/20 I spent alot of my income in insuring everything I owned was legitimate, from making sure I only had XP installed on one machine to locating the original C&C game. I gave up when it was impossible to locate certain games and when certain albums were over £25 to purchase from HMV/Virgin Megastore.
I didn't do it because I feared getting prosecuted or anything else, I did it because I loved a certain film, song or game. Rather than treating people like criminals (which is why I don't own Red Alert 3 despite really wanting it) media companies need to relax their copyright attitudes and take time encouraging the above viewpoint.
I've always thought public consensus of a law was integral to that law. If people don't believe a law is just, they'll ignore it. If you criminalise enough people over things they don't consider wrong you erode respect for all laws.
In the UK it's illegal to rip CD's to your MP3 player and yet I'm betting 99% of the MP3 players in the UK have ripped music on them. By criminalising CD ripping you cause people to lose respect for the law, in this case when your average citizen finds out they instantly see it as the fault of the stupid record companies. Which in turn makes it easier to "steal" from those same "greedy" companies.
In comparison most people hate speed camera's but they agree with the idea of having a speed limit and sticking roughly to it. Heck even when I got caught speeding recently my outrage wasn't about getting the speeding ticket but because Dorset/Somerset's police attitudes towards bikers (which borders on harassment) annoyed me. As for doing 40MPH in a 30, well I should have stuck to the limit.
I believe you can have unpopular laws like speed limits but people understand the need for them and so they work. On the other hand people don't understand copyright and its application these days.
The media companies have been so hell bent on treating all customers like criminals and subtracting value, that people see them as an evil faceless corporation (see Slashdots view on Microsoft) and that makes it ok to take from them. This particular ruling has probably done more harm to the Media companies cause then anything they've done. Just go to the BBC's Have your Say section (or any newspapers) and 99% of the comments are against the media companies and how laws can be bought. The sheer amount of effort required to force these companies to provide the customer what they want has annoyed a lot of people.
I believe in copyright, I'm a software engineer I've worked on a variety of TDL and UXV applications and know how expensive and difficult it is make good software. But software/media analogies aren't perfect, if my company didn't keep improving their software and adding new capability to it another competitor would get the future sales. With music/movies you could make one great movie and people will still buy it even if new movies come out. Which is the big difference between software and media.
I honestly hope that in time politicians release than reducing the copyright length to something closer to twenty years (I'd prefer ten) and decriminalising non-commercial copyright, will be in the best interest for everyone. Since it would help maintain respect for law and encourage more media.
As for the internet age stopping the big blockbusters and the current pop stars, I can only hope. Hollywood has fallen into the same black hole as games, where more special effects are the equivalent of adding more polygons. At a certain point it adds nothing new and the fixation often means more important things are forgotten.
I've used Vista since it was released and for the most part I do think its a good operating system (Ubuntu's still not there for me). But the difference between Vista and 7 is similar to the difference between 2000/Xp. The Beta felt faster than XP/Vista/Ubuntu the new taskbar is alot like Office 2007's GUI in that when you first use it all you can think is "How crap is this?" but after a week you find yourself cringing to go back to the old method. They've cleaned up the entire interface and it feels like a group of developers got to sit down and go through everything that annoyed them about Vista and get rid of it (purely an impression). Oh and virtual folders are a brilliant idea, I could keep all of my music/videos on my main storage drive and use virtual folders to display them in my My Music/My Videos folders.
It's worth the upgrade.
I think your going to far, if you think about games like GTA/HL2, they have alot of bystanders/objects in them. Rather than rebuild everything from scratch don't be afraid to pull common assets from previous titles and build even more assets for the new game.
The next episode of Half Life 2 will probably have character assets form the original game in it and have new ones. Most game companies seem determined to create a new game engine and completley new game engine for every single game.
You realise that since XP Sp2 windows has been pretty much rock solid, the only time Vista has managed to crash on me was when I first installed it onto a machine with dodgey ram. Once readyboost filled that area of the ram up the machine would crash.
I realise I'm just feeding a karma whore but considering every man and his dog has been raving about how much quicker Windows 7 and there are articles on how to get it working on an Asus EEE pc. You must have had your heard in the sand.
While repealing the human rights act sounds horrific, I can support it as long as its replaced with something better.
The Human rights act has been used by criminals to sue people for injuries they incurred trying to rob them and is heavily abused by rejected asulym seekers to delay their removal, the whole school girl demanding to wearing speacial clothing in school and by much of the PC brigade to supress the majority. Having actually read it I think it would be a lot easier to tear the thing up and start out using the old act as a guide rather than try and patch the issues in the current one.
SUV's and cars in general are no where near as large as SUV's in America. In a recent business trip to Australia I worked with Americans and Australians and rented what I thought were some massive solon cars (everyone was larger than a Ford Mondeo). I spent much of my time mocking the Australians for having such large poor handling with large engines but underpowered. The Americans kept asking why cars like the Toyota Camry, Ford Explorer were so much smaller in Australia.
Those cars weren't bad on fuel consumption getting between 30 to 35 MPG, but considering the Australian road system (65MPH speed limit and heavy inforcement in Victoria at least) having a 3 litre V8 engine (which couldn't pull the skin of a rice pudding) seemed a massive waste. Things like the smaller Focus's, Fiesta's and Astra's should have been a lot more popular.
I'd have to disagree, I've been with BAE Systems for a 18 months now (not the standard graduate scheme I'll admit) in that time they've sent me to MIRA race track to support a UGV trial and then to Australia to support a UGV and UAV demonstration.
I'll admit out of my graddie group of 14 none of the others have done anything close to that, but that project mostly involved BAE graduates from accross the UK. My expectations were to be stuck on testing for months, not to be sent to Australia for 6 weeks to provide full customer support. When I compare my job of the last 18 months to Uni, the jobs been alot more fun and I've also learnt alot more.
Personnally I think it's tied to the almost purely two party system we have. For the last fifty years we've only really had Tories or Labour in power. Its created career politicans, people like Brown have never had a real job. They studied political science and only swam in politcal circles. This has created a disconnect between them and reality. They now know enough to manipulate the majority of the populations opinion by using terms like "terrorisim" and do rather than caring about the people their key interest is in maintain their jobs and increasing their power. At the end of their career they safely retire to the city or some pointless diplomatic job.
Look at todays front page BBC news story, Labour have reduced the teacher training from a year to 6 months because of the massive lay offs occuring within the "City" (the very words of this mornings BBC reporter). Both major political parties constantly worked to improve things in the "City". When Tony Blair quit he was given the job of an ambassador. Think of the recent outrage MP's showed when police searched an MP office without a warrent (bearing in mind an MP's office is a public space and you don't need a warrent).
The only way I can see to end the cycle is to knock the wind out of the Conservative and Labour. In my area the major opposition are Liberal Democrats so I will be voting for them and trying to convince my friends/family to vote whatever their next most major opposition (be it green, lib dem, UKIP). Hopefully if enough people do something similar we can shake those politcians up enough they'll reconnect.
A more logical approach would be to say if music/game/film conterfitting are directly funding organised crime (terrorisim is organised crime). Then logically stopping music/game/film conterfitting needs to take top priority (since Terrorism is bad and we really want to detain people for 48 days). If the movie/music/game industries are selling at their optimum price point then those buying the conterfits could be considered a lost cause. Leaving two options:
[b]1.[/b] Forcing the involved industries to produce lower media by a law or some tax/redistribution system. This would effectivily lower the supply price to the point where those who would buy conterfit
[b]2.[/b]Or the simplier option of legalising personal non-profit copying, there by taking away the criminal elements revenue stream and encouraging the media industry to add value to their products, so people actually want to buy them.
I've heard this arguement I've helped in a few podcasts and had the opportunity to use a few people's music they produced.
You can make radio quality podcasts with nothing more than a decent (£50) microphone and audacity, I've met a few student "Audio Engineers" who had similar feelings. I personnally have found that to be a load of bunk. Have a listen to their latest podcast (I left the project over a year ago but a quick listen to the latest does prove my point). http://www.thecaverntoday.org/?go=pod37 .
Ignoring the content of the linked podcast I would really love to know what a recording studio would add to that podcast (technically). I accept a few people are using cheap microphones but otherwise I don't see what value is added by a recording studio. The only "advantage" I could see (from a quick glance at wikipedia) is that care has been put into the accoustics of a room. After spending half an hour googling and coming accross a stunningly large amount of "gold plated plugs" audiophil non-sense(having a copper cable and gold plug increase's noise as the signal transfers between the medium because of the differing input/output impediance) I've picked up that doing it properly is something most people could learn and it isn't that much more expensive than actual sound proofing.
I think you've missed the GP's point. I've met a number of (admittedly teenage) lesbians (and a couple of gay men) who seem to treat their sexual orientation as their primary defining personality feature. It's worse than a lot of other obsessions because they often seem to need to mention it at every available opportunity and try to challenge you with it. If someone's lesbian/gay I don't really care, once you get past the whole "lesbians + me" lesbian fantasy and the "asses to the walls" homophobia a persons sexual orientation isn't a big deal.
It's wrong to ban someone just because they put "I'm a lesbian" in their profile, but I can see banning someone who is constantly forcing this on other people (like the type of person above) because that other person is irritating others with it. I have also met a man hating lesbian stereo-type, someone who might go on a game and start slagging off men in a fashion no better than trolls should be treated as a troll, regardless if their topic is about computers, cars, tv, music, sexual orientation, race or religion.
Your reaction is precisely what has gone wrong with our overly PC western society, the American "Don't ask, don't tell policy" is wrong as it forces people to hide an important part of their life that they shouldn't have to. But going to the other extreme and hiding behind that reason is far more annoying to those around you, my motorcycle is highly important to me and a fundamental part of who I am but I don't introduce myself as "I'm Steve the motorcyclist". Nor do I feel the need to troll about cars. If I did most people would consider me strange (at best) and irritating at worse. In this case unless Microsoft profiles include a sexual orientation section you have to ask why anyone would care and why a person would feel the need to put the information in there, I certainly don't feel the need to write "Straight" in my online profiles.
Reading the blog it seems (from knowing only her side) that other player's homophobia has caused this issue and she really is a victim. The fact Microsoft has come down on the homophobes side is very worrying and some sort of action needs to start to get this corrected. She deserves an apology from Microsoft and the people who have been attacking her need to be banned.
I can understand the need for such technology and even how it will help. What I don't understand is the choice of device, if cost is really a factor then a COTS HTC Touch or something similar would be far cheaper, if you were dealing with large enough volumes you could problem mount/design a standard Windows Mobile ARM 9 kit inside your own shell (cutting down weight and giving you exactly what you need).
This is a interesting modification of a consumer device but part of me feels that there would be better and cheaper solutions which wouldn't leave you subject to Apple's DRM'd iPhone. To my knowledge the iPhone only allows web applications, are they really that much easier to program for when compared to the Symbian/Windows Mobile/Embedded Linux platforms?