Indeed, characters like Boris the Blade from Guy Ritchie's Snatch could supply the weapons instead of a Guns 'n' Ammo on the street corner, and more heavy duty weaponry could always be liberated from the military later in the game. Actually the idea of everyone being armed with slightly shoddy sawn-off shotguns instead of AR-15's makes it sound a bit more edgy and fun - especially if there's a chance of your gun back-firing during a bank raid, etc.
We already know that, and the first GTA was set in Liberty City, but it was still a massively different gaming experience to see it in full 3D for the first time in GTA III and then overhauled for GTA IV. A lot of us have been waiting for similar treatment for the London version for years, now. If this brings it any closer then that's still a good thing in many eyes.
I'd be keen on seeing how they could implement the congestion charge into the game. Especially in the early parts where you're generally short on cash - somehow beating pedestrians and prostitutes to death for their spare change to pay the fee doesn't seem to promote quite the image of Britishness I would guess the law is aiming at.
On that note, a game involving binge drinking, violence, knife crime, teenage pregnancy, police brutality and political corruption would definitely promote "Britishness" at the moment, but I can't see Our Glorious Leaders giving it the official stamp of approval...
It would also be a massive PITA if you wanted to track usage over a certain period of time, or the variation between seasons, or year-on-year usage, a service like this makes such data storage and calculations much more efficient (sure, we could all store the data and do the calculations and draw the graphs ourselves but it's much more efficient if a handful of people have already done this and then provide a tool to let everyone else benefit from their labours).
Reading this, I figured Google were setting up the most ridiculously elaborate burglary scheme ever. They've cased the outside of your house with Google Earth, maps and street view. They know you've bought a big shiny new plasma TV via your search history and Google pay, and they even know where it's located in your house because of the Youtube video you posted of your sweet media setup. They also see you've been looking at holidays and now suddenly they can tell your electricity usage has dropped indicating you're away from home...
Then why is it still called "concrete".
Steel reinforced concrete is called "rebar" or just "concrete." Why should fiber reinforced not carry the same name? You could always call it "fibar."
"Fibar" would just get confused with "normal" concrete which, when in a collapsed state, is referred to by the scientific term "FUBAR".
Ditto, and it doesn't look too practical as a gaming table either. 2" of clearance, so let's hope you're not using scenery or models that don't fit or you're immediately $8.5k down the drain, and the recessed play area means you're pretty much out of luck if you need to get down to have a model's eye view for LOS-based games. Add to that the fact that it looks entirely impractical for use as a table (unless it's purely decorative, in which case if you have the space to leave a huge table out just for decoration, you probably have space to leave your game set up anyway) and suddenly it's clear why there are so few pictures of people using this for either purpose on the site. Nice idea.
Yes you're right, Apple's products tend to be aspirational while Microsoft's are generally sold on the basis of being functional. That's not to say everything Apple does is amazing or everything MS does just works, quite often that's not the case but nevertheless this seems to be the image both companies project, so it's bizarre that MS seem constantly attracted to this idea of being like Apple. They don't need to be, they've demonstrated they can be financially successful without the glamour, but it seems to be something they crave.
I worked for a big travel company a few years ago which very much dealt with the "bucket and spade brigade", i.e. cheap family holidays to tourist hotspots. The customers generally knew what they were getting and were satisfied with it, but the people at the top seemed to be constantly embarassed by the fact that their main offerings were considered low brow and were always trying to force the company down the route of appearing to offer luxury, aspirational holidays. Of course, this didn't fool the people who really wanted luxury holidays, it just had the effect of discouraging their actual customers. MS's approach here seems very much the same to me, they're not going to wow the natural iPhone customers over to their platform, they'll more likely just annoy their core customers. You'd think they might have learned this lesson already with the Zune, which by all accounts is a great little PMP, but just tried too hard to be "cool", who can forget the promises of Ballmer squirting at you?
I think I'm leaning towards Android too. I'd love to have an iPhone if they'd fix the main bugbears I have with it, simply because it's what my other half uses and I have my eye on a B&W Zeppelin Mini dock that we can both use. I could live without the fully open platform if they gave us flash and a decent camera, so I'll probably wait and see what they say come summer - if the iPhone 4 or whatever it's called by that time can fix these niggles, they'll probably get my custom out of sheer convenience, if not I have to say the likes of the Nexus or the HTC Legend are very tempting right now even without the bonus of the open platform.
It's a bit disingenuous to say they're completely unrelated. They both share a common ancestor in C, and JavaScript borrows heavily from Java syntax (same reserved keywords, similar naming conventions, some JavaScript objects such as Math() were pretty much ripped directly from the first iteration of Java). IIRC, even the name isn't a coincidence but was part of a deal with Netscape to bundle JRE with their browser (I seem to remember prior to that JavaScript was called Mocha or something similar).
Sure they are a world apart now, but to say they're completely unrelated is just as wrong as it would be to assume they are in any way the same thing. Apes and men are a world apart but they're still related (well, if you rule out creationism, which I am doing in the case of JavaScript as no deity could be that cruel).
So long as it's only insecure on jailbroken phones, MS have perfect deniability - I think they'd take that, it really depends where they see their market, as gatekeepers for content or as OS providers. Sure, they'll want to do both, but to some extent they're counter productive (people would rather have an open OS which runs counter to the gatekeeper walled garden approach) so they'll probably opt for somewhere in between (a walled garden but not too difficult to jailbreak the phone).
Depends on the purpose, really. As the basis for your OS, the number of writes might be an issue, but for general user data it's less so. I can see a trend developing in smaller hard drives to carry the heavy loads while data which doesn't require constant access is pushed onto increasingly larger SSD, and of course the move away from desktops to laptops and notebooks will drive this forward too.
Having said that, for home media servers it's not unusual to have several TB of linked hard drives, until SSD can even come close on both size and price, the humble hard drive should be safe for a while longer.
Actually, meant as a joke but perhaps not without a grain of truth. We know, for instance, that the renaissance period was when the trend to more realistic artistic interpretations really began to gain momentum. Can we automatically assume that the scale of the heads in paintings from the middle ages weren't slightly oversized?
I wonder if the women will be ordered to lose - I can imagine if they were playing a lot they'd get pretty good at the games and if some guy with low self esteem keeps getting his butt handed to him by a girl he's paying for the privilege, he's not going to be too pleased... well, not unless getting his butt handed to him by a girl is "his thing" of course!
Not to defend this scheme in any way but I would guess the mechanism will be that one signs up via a website to pay for the service (somehow I can't see MS letting people spend Microsoft points on this), so I would assume that it's no worse than an age restricted web site on that front and you'll need to have a credit card to get access anyway.
The irony is that burning oil and coal for the last 25 years has probably left the environment much worse off than if everyone had thrown up nuclear reactors in the 80's. Sure, the greens would object to burning coal and oil too, but sometimes you have to compromise and accept the lesser of two evils.
I'm more than happy to tolerate ads if it supports my continued free access to some great web content and services. To be honest, I pretty much never notice them anyway so if the site owner benefits from them being there and I don't suffer any detriment, that's a true win-win situation (I've never blocked/. ads for the same reason, even though they kindly give me the option to disable them, I'm happy enough with the service they provide). If, however, I was similarly infected by visiting a reputable site I'd seriously rethink that policy. Google got so big on the back of offering very basic, minimal intrusion advertising so why do we need yet more dancing monkeys when they're a possible threat to my security?
You could conceivably stop all flash and scripted ads though. Sure there have been cases in the past of people exploiting image formats but they're all pretty well locked down now, if you can't get your message across with images and text then you can't expect your audience to be too sympathetic when your flashy advert allows the bad men to infect their PCs.
I wonder if a better system would be something similar to the car scrappage scheme - take your old system in and you get a discount off the new system (or avoid tax on it or something) with the added bonus that if the equipment is repairable it could be used for good causes, going to schools or projects in poorer countries or local charities in need of IT or something. I guess the problem is this stimulates cash out of the system as most electronics manufaturers are oversees, but if you put more money in the pockets of technicians, the chances are they're going to just go buy gadgets with it anyway.
What would be interesting is if manufacturers were required by law to specify what they considered to be a reasonable lifespan for their products. I wonder how many would claim that just over a year is the natural point for their device to break if that information was available to consumers. Claim too short a time and your customers will flock elsewhere or demand lower prices, too long a time and you'll be eating up the support costs unless you make sure your quality is unquestionable. I like a law with a nice iornic twist.
Yeah, over here the only time we think of the children is when we worry that the group of them drinking alcopops by the subway will beat us up for our spare change.
I wonder if the school did any consultation with parents before making this move. I can see two immediate affects outside of school - firstly the morning commute might be a little easier for everyone else (yay) but on the downside a lot of kids come from families where both parents work, so this is likely to cause some inconvenience. I can see a lot of parents just dropping the kids off before 9am anyway and the kids having to hang around bored for an hour.
I wonder if the same would be true in reverse, that after a couple of years starting at 10, if they switch the time back to 9 they'd get another short term boost, or if the kids are consciously making the effort to allow the experiment to succeed because they prefer the result.
Slashdot Mirror
Driving like Jeremy Clarkson in some of his more manic modes would be fun, too.
Instead of pressing the left stick activating the car's horn, it could cause your character to shout, at full volume, "POWWWWERRRR!!"
Indeed, characters like Boris the Blade from Guy Ritchie's Snatch could supply the weapons instead of a Guns 'n' Ammo on the street corner, and more heavy duty weaponry could always be liberated from the military later in the game. Actually the idea of everyone being armed with slightly shoddy sawn-off shotguns instead of AR-15's makes it sound a bit more edgy and fun - especially if there's a chance of your gun back-firing during a bank raid, etc.
We already know that, and the first GTA was set in Liberty City, but it was still a massively different gaming experience to see it in full 3D for the first time in GTA III and then overhauled for GTA IV. A lot of us have been waiting for similar treatment for the London version for years, now. If this brings it any closer then that's still a good thing in many eyes.
I'd be keen on seeing how they could implement the congestion charge into the game. Especially in the early parts where you're generally short on cash - somehow beating pedestrians and prostitutes to death for their spare change to pay the fee doesn't seem to promote quite the image of Britishness I would guess the law is aiming at.
On that note, a game involving binge drinking, violence, knife crime, teenage pregnancy, police brutality and political corruption would definitely promote "Britishness" at the moment, but I can't see Our Glorious Leaders giving it the official stamp of approval...
It would also be a massive PITA if you wanted to track usage over a certain period of time, or the variation between seasons, or year-on-year usage, a service like this makes such data storage and calculations much more efficient (sure, we could all store the data and do the calculations and draw the graphs ourselves but it's much more efficient if a handful of people have already done this and then provide a tool to let everyone else benefit from their labours).
Reading this, I figured Google were setting up the most ridiculously elaborate burglary scheme ever. They've cased the outside of your house with Google Earth, maps and street view. They know you've bought a big shiny new plasma TV via your search history and Google pay, and they even know where it's located in your house because of the Youtube video you posted of your sweet media setup. They also see you've been looking at holidays and now suddenly they can tell your electricity usage has dropped indicating you're away from home...
Then why is it still called "concrete". Steel reinforced concrete is called "rebar" or just "concrete." Why should fiber reinforced not carry the same name? You could always call it "fibar."
"Fibar" would just get confused with "normal" concrete which, when in a collapsed state, is referred to by the scientific term "FUBAR".
Ditto, and it doesn't look too practical as a gaming table either. 2" of clearance, so let's hope you're not using scenery or models that don't fit or you're immediately $8.5k down the drain, and the recessed play area means you're pretty much out of luck if you need to get down to have a model's eye view for LOS-based games. Add to that the fact that it looks entirely impractical for use as a table (unless it's purely decorative, in which case if you have the space to leave a huge table out just for decoration, you probably have space to leave your game set up anyway) and suddenly it's clear why there are so few pictures of people using this for either purpose on the site. Nice idea.
Yes you're right, Apple's products tend to be aspirational while Microsoft's are generally sold on the basis of being functional. That's not to say everything Apple does is amazing or everything MS does just works, quite often that's not the case but nevertheless this seems to be the image both companies project, so it's bizarre that MS seem constantly attracted to this idea of being like Apple. They don't need to be, they've demonstrated they can be financially successful without the glamour, but it seems to be something they crave.
I worked for a big travel company a few years ago which very much dealt with the "bucket and spade brigade", i.e. cheap family holidays to tourist hotspots. The customers generally knew what they were getting and were satisfied with it, but the people at the top seemed to be constantly embarassed by the fact that their main offerings were considered low brow and were always trying to force the company down the route of appearing to offer luxury, aspirational holidays. Of course, this didn't fool the people who really wanted luxury holidays, it just had the effect of discouraging their actual customers. MS's approach here seems very much the same to me, they're not going to wow the natural iPhone customers over to their platform, they'll more likely just annoy their core customers. You'd think they might have learned this lesson already with the Zune, which by all accounts is a great little PMP, but just tried too hard to be "cool", who can forget the promises of Ballmer squirting at you?
I think I'm leaning towards Android too. I'd love to have an iPhone if they'd fix the main bugbears I have with it, simply because it's what my other half uses and I have my eye on a B&W Zeppelin Mini dock that we can both use. I could live without the fully open platform if they gave us flash and a decent camera, so I'll probably wait and see what they say come summer - if the iPhone 4 or whatever it's called by that time can fix these niggles, they'll probably get my custom out of sheer convenience, if not I have to say the likes of the Nexus or the HTC Legend are very tempting right now even without the bonus of the open platform.
It's a bit disingenuous to say they're completely unrelated. They both share a common ancestor in C, and JavaScript borrows heavily from Java syntax (same reserved keywords, similar naming conventions, some JavaScript objects such as Math() were pretty much ripped directly from the first iteration of Java). IIRC, even the name isn't a coincidence but was part of a deal with Netscape to bundle JRE with their browser (I seem to remember prior to that JavaScript was called Mocha or something similar).
Sure they are a world apart now, but to say they're completely unrelated is just as wrong as it would be to assume they are in any way the same thing. Apes and men are a world apart but they're still related (well, if you rule out creationism, which I am doing in the case of JavaScript as no deity could be that cruel).
So long as it's only insecure on jailbroken phones, MS have perfect deniability - I think they'd take that, it really depends where they see their market, as gatekeepers for content or as OS providers. Sure, they'll want to do both, but to some extent they're counter productive (people would rather have an open OS which runs counter to the gatekeeper walled garden approach) so they'll probably opt for somewhere in between (a walled garden but not too difficult to jailbreak the phone).
Depends on the purpose, really. As the basis for your OS, the number of writes might be an issue, but for general user data it's less so. I can see a trend developing in smaller hard drives to carry the heavy loads while data which doesn't require constant access is pushed onto increasingly larger SSD, and of course the move away from desktops to laptops and notebooks will drive this forward too.
Having said that, for home media servers it's not unusual to have several TB of linked hard drives, until SSD can even come close on both size and price, the humble hard drive should be safe for a while longer.
Actually, meant as a joke but perhaps not without a grain of truth. We know, for instance, that the renaissance period was when the trend to more realistic artistic interpretations really began to gain momentum. Can we automatically assume that the scale of the heads in paintings from the middle ages weren't slightly oversized?
I wonder if the women will be ordered to lose - I can imagine if they were playing a lot they'd get pretty good at the games and if some guy with low self esteem keeps getting his butt handed to him by a girl he's paying for the privilege, he's not going to be too pleased... well, not unless getting his butt handed to him by a girl is "his thing" of course!
Not to defend this scheme in any way but I would guess the mechanism will be that one signs up via a website to pay for the service (somehow I can't see MS letting people spend Microsoft points on this), so I would assume that it's no worse than an age restricted web site on that front and you'll need to have a credit card to get access anyway.
The irony is that burning oil and coal for the last 25 years has probably left the environment much worse off than if everyone had thrown up nuclear reactors in the 80's. Sure, the greens would object to burning coal and oil too, but sometimes you have to compromise and accept the lesser of two evils.
I'm more than happy to tolerate ads if it supports my continued free access to some great web content and services. To be honest, I pretty much never notice them anyway so if the site owner benefits from them being there and I don't suffer any detriment, that's a true win-win situation (I've never blocked /. ads for the same reason, even though they kindly give me the option to disable them, I'm happy enough with the service they provide). If, however, I was similarly infected by visiting a reputable site I'd seriously rethink that policy. Google got so big on the back of offering very basic, minimal intrusion advertising so why do we need yet more dancing monkeys when they're a possible threat to my security?
You could conceivably stop all flash and scripted ads though. Sure there have been cases in the past of people exploiting image formats but they're all pretty well locked down now, if you can't get your message across with images and text then you can't expect your audience to be too sympathetic when your flashy advert allows the bad men to infect their PCs.
I wonder if a better system would be something similar to the car scrappage scheme - take your old system in and you get a discount off the new system (or avoid tax on it or something) with the added bonus that if the equipment is repairable it could be used for good causes, going to schools or projects in poorer countries or local charities in need of IT or something. I guess the problem is this stimulates cash out of the system as most electronics manufaturers are oversees, but if you put more money in the pockets of technicians, the chances are they're going to just go buy gadgets with it anyway.
What would be interesting is if manufacturers were required by law to specify what they considered to be a reasonable lifespan for their products. I wonder how many would claim that just over a year is the natural point for their device to break if that information was available to consumers. Claim too short a time and your customers will flock elsewhere or demand lower prices, too long a time and you'll be eating up the support costs unless you make sure your quality is unquestionable. I like a law with a nice iornic twist.
You're not thinking laterally. Use the same bus and just insist every high schooler has an elementary schooler on their lap.
Yeah, over here the only time we think of the children is when we worry that the group of them drinking alcopops by the subway will beat us up for our spare change.
I wonder if the school did any consultation with parents before making this move. I can see two immediate affects outside of school - firstly the morning commute might be a little easier for everyone else (yay) but on the downside a lot of kids come from families where both parents work, so this is likely to cause some inconvenience. I can see a lot of parents just dropping the kids off before 9am anyway and the kids having to hang around bored for an hour.
I wonder if the same would be true in reverse, that after a couple of years starting at 10, if they switch the time back to 9 they'd get another short term boost, or if the kids are consciously making the effort to allow the experiment to succeed because they prefer the result.