Posts by Greg J Preece

Ten Linux apps you must install

When we've finished arguing over what grok means...

I concur with a lot of this list, except for Shutter and the quick-search doodah, mainly because equivalent tools come as part of KDE. All the little gadgets in KDE don't seem like much, and then you try to use something else. It's that moment in Windows when you hit print screen, expecting KSnapshot, and nothing happens, that you start cursing and wanting your old environment back.

And that's what I love about Linux: proper computing innovation, rather than re-packaging something and calling the design innovative.

Apple said to have let the name of the next OS X cat out of the bag

Re: Snarf

Wilykit and Wilykat?

</too_many_cartoons>

Re: Lynx → Linux

...I believe that's the accepted practice...

Nah, the accepted practice is to deliberately alter the appearance of what you're claiming is a copy to make it look like a copy, then sue based on that. So you'd just write Lynx with an i.

Re: I'll switch to OSX

Ubuntu meanwhile prepares to release Raring Ringtail. Oh dear.

That would be the same Ubuntu who previously released 10.04, better known as Lynx. Huh...

Judge confirms Google's miserly $22.5m Safari privacy FTC payout

Re: February 2014??

They said they would have the cookies disabled on users' machines by then. I'm thinking that the cookies will naturally expire at the beginning of 2014 or something like that, and they'll delete them when they see them between now and then.

Just a guess, but possible.

Black Ops 2 takes HALF A BEELLION DOLLARS in just ONE DAY

A "your mum" retort? Really? Actually, given the age of a lot of CoD players, why am I surprised?

Re: Bo-ring.

If you don't like it, quit crying about it and buy Serious Sam or Painkiller. No-one's forcing you to play COD.

For a COD fan, you sure don't seem to be aware that Soap isn't in Black Ops...

Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 game review

That sounds a bit hard to balance. I imagine some loadouts will be nerfed in short order.

Re: Really?

You enjoy the single player on these bags of shite? What's wrong with you?

I enjoy flying helicopters upriver machine gunning people to death while listening to Jimi Hendrix. You act as if that were odd somehow. And you're not honestly going to try and tell me CoD4 had shit single-player, are you?

I'm not interested in the multiplayer, mainly because of the player base. I prefer to play solid co-op games online. Killing Floor is a good example because it forces the players to work together, rather than act like dicks and hurl obscenities at each other all night.

I'll be buying it when it comes down in price a bit. No interest in the multiplayer but I've yet to play a CoD single player campaign I didn't enjoy (or love). And despite being able to call the original BLOPS storyline miles in advance, I enjoyed the game way more than MW2, which just got silly trying to outdo itself. The Vietnam level in BLOPS was all kinds of awesome.

I do like the branching idea, too. That sounds like it could be fun.

The series isn't perfect, and I personally wish they'd tell the 360 to piss off and make a newer engine (never gonna happen), but given the previous games I'll still be checking this out.

Nintendo Wii U set to out-sell predecessor at launch

Re: Shooting game gun

I want to try one

Credit where it's due, it's a very well put together piece of kit. Relatively comfortable, ambidextrous, lots of buttons. Downsides are that it's pretty costly, the buttons can't be dynamically reassigned and with both controllers in it can be a little front-heavy on the balance. I still use it though. It's great for games like House of the Dead.

The downside is the Move itself, which in some games behaves itself and in some games is an absolute shit (Do not buy Dead Space Extraction on Move. Get the Wii version if you want to play it. Shaky aim, but no drift.)

a friend with one is no. 421 in the world

On Time Crisis 4, I was number 7 at one point. ;-) Think I might still have the fastest international time.

Re: Consoles are losing their lustre for me

Keyboard and mouse is much easier to use for FPS games and much more accurate, yes. A gamepad is also superior in that same sense to a steering wheel and pedals.

I have a 360 pad and a steering wheel for my PC. :-p

My argument wasn't that KB/M is better for all games, but that calling it archaic is really dumb, when a KB/M player can run rings around anyone on anything else.

It's 2012. Video gaming is well over 30 years old. Shooting games should have their own equivalent of wheel and pedals. The nearest we have is the pointing device supplied with the Wii. It was more involving and more challenging. It will also still be used on the Wii U.

As a high-level light-gun gamer (I would call myself hardcore but I'd sound about 13) I can't tell you the number of times it's been previously done, or how shockingly bad the Wiimote is at it compared to just about anything else. If there's one thing I can do, it's aim, and playing gun games on the Wii makes me feel like I have Parkinsons.

Yeah, the day when we have steam on Linux.

Eh? Sorry, didn't follow that. Anyway, I play across console and PC, and I get treated better on PC. Your savvy console gamer needs to follow feeds to find games cheap. Your average PC gamer gets the game ten quid cheaper in the first place, and if they wait as little as a month or two, gets it for a huge discount online. (I bought Max Payne 3 back in the summer for a tenner new, and got the new Spec Ops for five quid.)

And then you get your console game home, and find that it needs online validation, and a local installation (which on a 5400rpm laptop drive takes around 6 weeks), and then it needs a mandatory patch or six, and you start to think: isn't this how PC games used to be before we improved things?

Re: No must buys here

The Wiimote was also a pointing device, like a mouse.

Except that it was shit, or are we forgetting the Motion + (that then never got used in-game because developers would be excluding customers)?

FPS games were more challenging...using the Wiimote

A control input makes a game harder to play, and that's a good thing to you?

Re: Outdated by what?

New gamers arriving on the scene, as they hit the right age to ask for a console for Xmas, aren't going to care so much. There aren't many games that are not rehashes anyway or don't pull their ideas from the Golden era in the 1980s.

Aaaah, so we shouldn't try? We should buy the Wii U because all games are shit anyway? As a gamer, get lost. As for the "new gamers" argument, gaming is the largest entertainment industry on Earth. I am willing to bet that there are way more existing gamers than new ones.

Ironically, the the most powerful tech we have, is used to play the same old games over and over on the PC, just at a higher resolution, seemingly more lifelike graphics and higher frame rate.

So utterly stupid I barely know how to respond to it. Are you honestly trying to tell me that Doom and FEAR are the same, because they're both in the same genre? How about Condemned? Exactly the same, just different graphics? Did they all pull their ideas from the golden age (which for PC games was in the late 90s - the 80s golden era refers to arcades)? It's increasingly obvious you don't know the first thing about games.

You talk about the Xbox 360 offering more

I never mentioned it.

I wonder how many kids simply just put a Disc in and play in the traditional way? Using controllers that have their DNA at Nintendo. Not to mention the old school gamers who only want to do just that.

Are you planning on approaching a point? Or should I get comfortable?

Nintendo SNES and the first Playstation on their releases, were out of date according to your logic

Are you drunk, or just trolling? The SNES entered a 16-bit generation as a 16-bit console with new games. The Playstation came into the fifth generation with equivalent specs and a great library. How exactly do these compare to what I said before? The equivalent would have been a company releasing several incrementally upgraded consoles with poor game suppo- oh, wait...Sega. Yeah, and how did that generation end for Sega again?

To not be out of date, Nintendo would have to use a i7 3960X and GTX690.

Putting aside the fact that your specs are drivel, if it's so impossible, how come their competitors are designing said machines?

Most importantly, what control system would be used to play the games?

The control input for a game should be competent, and increase immersion. Beyond that, who cares? The control input is the least important part of why a game is fun. The gimmicks put out by Ninty in recent years fail on both points. Constantly removing your hands from the controls to piss around, or flailing around with a Wiimote that doesn't work properly increases the gap between thought and action, reducing immersion. Read that last sentence a few times so it sinks in.

300 $US

First result on Amazon is £300. Nice try. Sure, that's the premium pack, but try using all their oh-so-amazing new features (read: a half-competent online service) for any length of time with only 8GB on board. Download one decent game and you're done. I downloaded 10GB on my PS3 today alone. And the non-premium pack? £250. The 500GB PS3 costs less and does more.

It's not far off half the price of an iphone. Cheaper than an ipad. Cheaper than a Surface PC. Cheaper than an average TV set. All things kids will be getting for Christmas and birthday presents.

And all things that aren't consoles. Just because it's cheaper than something Apple makes doesn't mean it's cheap. See above.

You also realise Microsoft's Xbox division has barely made any money from it's hardware?

You realise that's intentional? (And ignores a teeny tiny $1bn manufacturing fault.) No, of course you don't. Because you clearly don't know the first thing about the gaming market.

Re: Consoles are losing their lustre for me

Back to the PC for archaic and un-involving Keyboard/Mouse gaming

You mean back to the PC for cheaper games, better consumer rights, no online passes, easier distribution, better sales, etc, etc, etc? Man, how archaic.

And yes, I'll bite. K/M combo > thumbsticks.

Re: No must buys here

Can't believe we've had to wait so long for this type of advance. Watch the other 2 big players copy Nintendo once again, but cater for gamers with egos.

I love how your entire argument comes down to ego. Oh most humble one, am I allowed to criticise the Wii if I also own a PS3? Because I do, and I'll tell you straight up which one gathers dust. You know why I didn't like the Wii? The games were crap. I can't even list 20 that I thought were fun, let alone original.

The game I enjoyed playing most on the Wii was Eternal Darkness, a GameCube game ( so a Wii game, basically). The graphics look like hell these days, but I don't care. It is not a game that would have been improved in any way by adding a touchscreen

I couldn't give a rat's ass about graphics, but touchscreen controls are shite 99% of the time. No, really, they are. I know you think they're amazing and futuristic in some fashion, but they really suck. Watch this week's Jimquisition first for a summary of why. That's not the kind of "innovation" I want.

Re: Outdated by what?

how can *custom* hardware that's been designed with certain tasks in mind, at a low price point, be out of date, lol.

How is £300 a low price point? And stating that technology can't be outdated because technology advances? Ummm....you realise how stupid that is, right? There was a time when my PC could only display 2 colours, but I still expect my current (7 year old) machine to be able to run Crysis as a bare minimum.

It's outdated because for far less than the money being asked you can buy something that does more, from the previous generation of consoles. It's also outdated because half the initial launch lineup is games that came out in that previous generation, games that are a year or two old.

They're launching a console with last generation's hardware (which they last did at the £130 mark), but they're also launching it with last generation's games. You don't think that's outdated?

Still don't think I'm going to buy one. More than twice the price of the predecessor, yet still outdated the moment it lands. And I've played the same Zelda and Mario remakes enough times, thanks. There was a brief moment, when Namco announced Tank! Tank! Tank! for the U, that I considered it, but it passed quickly. Might get one next year when everyone's stopped caring about it, like I did last time.

The Wii did eventually give itself reason to exist, but man did it take a while. It did have the first ever console ports of Ghost Squad, Gunblade and LA Machineguns, plus the best House of the Dead game ever made, but outside of the arcade stuff, I'm really struggling to think of a game on the Wii that I enjoyed. Sin and Punishment? Hell, that was an N64 virtual console download!

35 US states petition for secession – on White House website

Re: Excuse me, I must...

Indeed, and the petition site has the usual get-out clause that all government petition sites do; we don't have to respond if we don't want to.

How many of the petitions on the UK gov site have actually resulted in action? Same as any other attempt at real democracy, I'm guessing.

Man, 19, cuffed after burning Remembrance poppy pic is Facebooked

Re: Over the top

I don;t want to see this guy imprisoned, but hope he can at least learn about the suffering so many went through for his freedom.

Can he "learn" the mandated level of misty-eyed sentiment without being arrested? Because it's kind of ironic banging on about his freedoms right after arresting him for exercising his freedoms.

One in four don't clean their stinky old browsers - especially Firefoxers

Re: Really?

I was surprised at that, too. To be honest, I'd rather have a slightly outdated browser than give Google the ability to silently install stuff onto my machine...

Re: The reason firefox users don't upgrade

Ah, this FUD again. You're right though, I can't count the number of extensions I've had break since they moved to Jetpack & the faster release cycle.

Because there were no breakages to count.

Does this have anything to do with the grumpy subset of Firefox users still utterly convinced that the UI completely changed in some irreversible fashion in Firefox 4? I still hear people whining about how the interface "constantly changes" when mine still looks exactly like Firefox 3.

Changing the subject completely, those browser stats seem a bit out of whack - is that stats for Kaspersky's customer base? I seem to remember IE being much higher in the global user stats. Then again, with the differing methodologies and arguing going on, there's always someone willing to argue that x browser is dead and y browser now reigns supreme.

Apple engineers 'pay no attention to anyone's patents', court told

Re: "ignore all patents ... "

So Apple are no better or worse than anyone else.

Except for that whole "massive hypocrites" part.

Twitter survives election after Ruby-to-Java move

Next time we get one of those really predictable Java-bashing threads, I'm going to point people here. </smug_mode>

Microsoft and Skype to axe world's most popular IM client early 2013

Re: Folk still using IM clients?

IRC still is pretty big , its just that your average man on the street doesn't know about it. But in certain circles its huge. And the fact that its still pretty command line text based is actually the appeal to a lot of people - it keeps anyone non tech savvy well away from it.

Amen to that. After pretty much every other IM network got invaded by the newbies back when AOL discs were being handed out in PC World, IRC managed to stay "pure" by being bloody inpenetrable no non-nerds. I actually have an IRC session open on the other monitor right now, and you can still make any idle channel sing by popping out a few choice Monty Python quotes.

Not sure about IM being dead to be honest. Pretty much everyone I know uses some form of IM system daily; even my retired dad has chatted to me on FB. SMS and IM are slowly going to merge together, I reckon (see the new mobile spec being bandied around the other day).

And bear in mind, the FB chat that everyone has "moved" to is essentially the same system underneath. You can talk to Facebook's chat servers via XMPP, just like you can with WLM and Google Talk.

Apple tries to add Galaxy Note, Jelly Bean to patent slapfest

Stylus - how 90's. I'd rather use a finger I can't lose. What next a slide out keyboard.

My phone has both, and they're both very useful, thanks. I can touch type on my phone's 'board. Ten quid says it functions better than your touchscreen one.

Re: Pathetic..

Too many people assume it's ok for others to come along and copy Apple stuff

They're saying that Jelly Bean is copied from their stuff? Two words: notification tray.

In the loop: how Halo defined a new decade of first-person shooters

Re: WASD sucks

Marathon, back in the day (also the real pioneer of the health-shield system, no surprise there, same guys as "combat evolved") taught me to use the mouse with my left hand, and use the arrow keys for movement (left and right arrow for strafing, not turning). To this day I won't play a game that doesn't allow this.

Already ranted about Future Shock twice on this thread, but I still use its A-SHIFT-ZX control setup to this day. Works like WASD but has much better placement and spacing for my massive hands.

Re: Erm...

Even bought the expansion pack which let you board a nuclear submarine.

I bought SkyNET and I did enjoy it, and while it improved the game engine, the atmosphere suffered. Too many movie references/easter eggs (did you find the one where you could make dancers appear on the floor in Tech Noir?). The levels were still bitchin' though. Chasing that convoy along the highway in a jeep with a pintle-mount laser cannon was awesome, in a way games haven't replicated since.

Re: Erm...

The Chief’s dual health system was a pioneering step too. The decision to have shields and health separately governed might be a largely standard occurrence now, but it was anything but back when Halo: Combat Evolved was making its debut.

Again, Future Shock did this in '95. Keep up, guys.

Re: Erm...

Terminator Future Shock (1995)

Greatest fucking game ever. Now, if you want to talk about a revolutionary FPS, lets talk about Future Shock!

*First ever mouse-look FPS (no, Quake fans, shut up)

*Driving stages

*Flying HK stages

*3D modelled enemies

*HUGE levels, open-air, walk into any building

*Frigging awesome weapons (and more than 2 of them at a time)

*Atmosphere and story that put even modern shooters to shame

And what did Halo bring to the party?

*Shit PC FPS games had been doing for years.

Halo only gets such praise and fanboy creaming because the console cowboys had never played anything even remotely resembling a proper FPS before. Get over yourselves.

Apple's poisonous Touch silently kills the GNOMEs of Linux Forest

Re: Gnome 3 is maligned. Gnome3 is a new interface that has great potential

But gradually, I realized that I could have a favourites bar, with our most used applications, and use the facilities in Gnome3 or Unity to present a list of applications matching some partial phrase I enter on the keyboard. (More than likely, in a later release, we will be able to speak the phrase and get to our program.)

This is why I like KDE. It already has all that additional functionality, but can work either as a traditional menu-driven desktop, a widget-based searchy desktop, or a hybrid of the two. If you want to configure it to death, you can get rid of the taskbar and menu panels entirely. However you want to work, it can be set up that way.

There is a potential upside to this. Perhaps now certain application developers - I am looking at YOU, Mozilla and Oracle - will stop developing their stuff primarily to work with Gnome. I like using Netbeans, but I don't like the lag that gets added when running it under KDE.

I left Gnome behind years ago. The app suite was too immature, there were large chunks of functionality that were simply missing, and the apps that were there had a surprising number of bugs. I moved to KDE and got a much more feature-rich desktop. The widgets and apps that I needed were available, functional and highly customisable. Pick pretty much any task and compare the common Gnome app with the KDE one, and the KDE ones are usually far superior.

Slideshow: A History of First-person Shooters in 20 Games

Tribes!

Always overlooked, never bettered. Love that frickin' game.

I get that you were putting the firsts of each series in, but I'd have overridden that with Half Life, where the sequel is completely superior not only to its predecessor, but to everything else too.

And the inclusion of Halo is as predictable as it is dull. And Goldeneye? Come on.

Naughty-step Apple buries court-ordered apology with JavaScript

Re: Just another attempt

Mandated popover?

Not only would it work, but it would make their web design people cry...

Fuck yeah! Let's see the judge mandate a GeoCities template, with animated gifs, and the entire apology in a slow-moving, blinking <marguee> tag, with the "click to enter" link right at the end.

Virgin close to releasing long-delayed TiVo app

Soooooooooo anything for the legions of us that don't own iPads?

UK iPad Mini FRENZY: Queues stretch SEVERAL FEET from till

Re: I've got one - and its beautiful

Meh - The queues where healthy in Central London yesterday

There's photographic evidence earlier in this thread that would contradict that. The rest of your post is just fanboy guff.

Re: It actually kind of makes sense...

Surely if you have an iPad and an iPhone then you already have the smaller, almost equally powerful version?

Re: Hmm

I'm surprised people still buy the original black and white kindles - of course I appreciate most books are black and white but these days do you not prefer COLOUR?

A colour e-ink would be nice, sure, but given the choice of reading on an LCD or an e-ink, I'll choose the latter. They're about a billion times better for the job, plus have insanely lower power requirements, so the readers last longer than 10 hours.

Re: Apple: "You MUST have Retinal display!"

I didn't get an iPad mini but a Kindle HD Fire. Nice but still not as good as the company iPad I had in a past job.

Errrr....aren't those two things at massively different price points?

KDE 'annoys the hell of' Linus Torvalds

Re: If Linus doesn't like KDE4's "configurability" that much ...

I really don't get why he's complaining. Sure, I can see why locking the widgets by default might be preferable if you're new to things, but being able to configure the shit out of KDE is why I love it!

Want that web video to run in an overlay while you work? Drop the window border, set it to always on top, and assign it to all desktops. Perfect! Want to group two completely unrelated windows together? Why not! Want to configure everything to the absolute nth degree? Of course you do, you installed KDE!

Lab mice drown in their THOUSANDS as Hurricane Sandy fills NYU basement

Re: Further proof that scientists don't care

I hope those responsible are brought to court for animal cruelty.

I hope that you contract diabetes and refuse insulin.

Halo 4 game review

It was a fairly decent story, I'll grant you. I did feel like I'd heard it before, though. Two warring sides unearth ancient uber-powerful bad guys, eh?

And *thank you* for the Pillar of Autumn. I'd forgotten about how stupid that level was. I was thinking of fighting the Flood, myself. When I went into the 9th copy-pasted room, I nearly rage quit the game.

Oooh, I see the fanboys are out in force today. Sorry guys, but the original was crap. The guns looked like they were made by Fisher Price, the physics was dodgy, the enemies were thick as pigshit and pretty repetitive, and the ending was padded to an almost insulting degree.

The environments were quite cool in places, mind. Having previously read Ringworld (which they clearly ripped off were inspired by) it was pretty sweet to look up and see the ring above you, but as a game it was dull as ditch water. Only remembered because it was good...for a console FPS. That's a pretty low bar.

Re: Halo for me has always been

I dont think the graphics have changed much at all in the last three releases!

....because they have to make it fit onto the 360. ;-) Every CoD game is still DirectX 9, and I wish they would just tell the 360 to f**k off and make the new one DX10 or even DX11. But that would require a development cycle longer than Activision will allow.

Re: You forgot to mention

Try turning the difficulty up from moron level...

So your answer to "the game hasn't enough content" is "artificially pad it out"? Have you ever worked on Devil May Cry? Or, indeed, the original Halo (the end of which was unbelievably padded)?