Prat
What a prat. Sitting in Cambridge whining about how Oxford gets all the attention...
253 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009
What a crock of bullshit from Ubisoft. 7% of people will spend £30 on a game and 7% will also spend 20p on an outfit so we might as well focus on the 20ps. I find the 7% figure quite unlikely in the first-place, Ubisoft flog themselves very heavily on Steam and I imagine would do well as a consequence.
I'm afraid I can't agree with Andrew here... there are lots of people I know who don't program because quite honestly they have no idea what it is and who's knowledge of it sits somewhere between thinking it's 0s and 1s and knowing it has a lot of curly brackets but who would potentially have been great at it and could have had a career in it if they'd only been given the opportunity.
I'm lucky enough to be a programmer because I had a dad who always knew that computers were a good career to go into despite being technically inept. A lot of people have never had this start and that is the job of the education system, to introduce people to concepts and ideas that otherwise they might never have come across.
Let's not pretend that we're talking about showing kids some HTML... we did a bit of HTML at school along with a large dose of Microsoft Frontpage. This is about teaching kids some programming, showing them that it's something they can do if they have a logical disciplined brain. There are plenty of kids who are good at Maths but know they don't want a pure mathematical career and we should nurture their desire by showing them how they can use mathematical concepts to do cool things.
First of all, Mass Effect 3 does not feature "multi-player". It features co-op.
Secondly, this game looks way better than Skyrim... whilst Skyrim was very good at providing nice vistas the actual textures when up close were incredibly poor. The Unreal Engine currently looks amazing and is really fine-tuned... unlike Skyrim there's no dodgy edge logic or things floating about/unrealistic physics.
I'm not sure the content of this article is 100% true as I'm a Be user and haven't had any problems with iPlayer and neither have most others I know. I was under the impression this problem was IP specific? I imagine different IP blocks are taking different routings and some were never hitting Akamai in the first place. This is also backed up by the fact that the issue doesn't seem to have affected O2 users despite them using the same network infrastructure.
Personally, I think IP should only be enforceable if the company are actively making use of it and making it available at a reasonable cost... a lot of people who torrent do so because it's the most convenient way of acquiring content.
What I'm really saying is the following:
Games Developers - 1. don't use restrictive DRM that blocks valid users, 2. don't charge twice as much for an online purchase as it costs on physical media.
Musicians - ensure your music is on services such as Spotify; if you don't want it being listened to for free, then make it premium only.
TV/Films - You all need to get together and make sure people can actually license all of your content. I'd love to use LoveFilm or Netflix but I'm not going to pay for a 60% experience where I still need to torrent or not watch the other 40%.
I know some will argue that companies own IP and therefore if they don't want it available online then that's their right but I personally don't think they can complain that people are using it online for free when they don't even offer it online.