Posts by Captain Underpants

Re: I'm confused

Nah, mate, not everything on the Wii sucks.

No More Heroes 1 & 2, Red Steel 1 & 2, Blazing Angels, the Shaun White games (World Stage, Road Trip & Skateboarding), Need For Speed: The Run, House Of The Dead: Overkill, Ghost Squad, Madworld....

That's 12 games off the top of my head which are all excellent rather than the kiddie fare you imagine. And not a Nintendo property amongst 'em.

I would imagine the same can be said of the PS3 or XBox 360. If you wanted to pick a fight with the Wii, you'd be better off arguing that it doesn't get anywhere near as many decent indie games on the store, though I think the range of games available on the virtual console goes some way to make up for that.

All platforms have good and sucky games. If you're going to be a mug and not look for the pearls, well, don't be surprised if you end up elbow-deep in pigshit.

Re: I'm confused

"Consoles are always loss leaders"

Well, yeah, except when they're not. The Wii's been profitable since day one, not to mention having a much wider appeal for most of its lifespan than other consoles (despite its blatant limitations compared to its rivals). Besides which, the whole "loss leader" thing relies on racking up enough sales to be able to get developers on board paying licence fees. If the Wii managed to get not only greater uptake than its rivals in its first five years on sale but also to turn a profit all the while, it would be a very very stupid idea indeed to not try and learn from how Nintendo achieved that while Sony achieved pretty much the opposite.

As for the PS3 being profitable - that appears to be on a per-unit basis. They're a long way away from having made up the enormous hole into which they dug themselves to try and make sure Blu-Ray became the new standard for optical media.

Re: Appallingly bad design?

@DayDragon:

Convention is that you cite publications, on the basis that this allows the reader to look up the reference for themselves. Outside of a dissertation, most stuff an undergraduate writes is highly unlikely to see publication. Citing it, therefore, is rather problematic. And given that a substantial amount of marking in universities is not done by the individual who sets the work, you also cannot assume that the person marking your essay will have easy access to a complete set of your previous essay submissions.

Now, I think we'll both agree that someone setting essays or problem sets that can be correctly answered in large part by reusing answers submitted for previous essay questions or problem sets is clearly Doing It Wrong.

And yes, if you've been told specifically at the start of your course that reuse of material you have written is not allowed, then you have to re-write it. That's not always the case, though.

Outside of what you might call "training" for The Real World, I don't see the point in enforcing a "cite or rewrite" rule on students who are in practice unable to usefully cite their previous work.

Re: The 11 Euro Alternative

@Cantennas are easy and powerful

1) They don't have a warranty, so any notion of this being feasible for schools is right out. Publicly funded educational institutes are restricted in what they can buy and where they can buy from, and procurement frameworks require that they try to account for full-lifecycle-costing by incorporating a warranty into the purchase. You *cannot* get that with second hand equipment of the sort you're espousing.

2) Second hand desktops are huge and power inefficient compared to the Pi.

3) As for the issues re: cases - this is only a given for the first round developer preview units. If you can read, go to the FAQ at http://www.raspberrypi.org/faqs and you'll realise that when the education release goes ahead, cases will be available at the time of purchase.

The thing about hardware tinkering is that getting kids in a class to go soldering circuits on old desktops is unlikely to be allowed in a lot of schools, whereas if you're talking about being able to use Arduino-like connectors from GPIO ports it's a lot more feasible. Not to mention that such learning is more likely to be successful when every kid in the class can have their own unit to tinker with rather than gathering around to watch teacher do it on the one sample unit they've got.

Without good teachers, this initiative will fail. But your conviction that small, cheap, decent hardware that can be used for a variety of things won't help get kids interested in computing (or to make ICT classes more interesting for those teachers who know or learn their stuff) is at odds with reality.

I work for a university and know a number of teachers working in both primary and secondary schools, and the general concensus in the academic world is that the Pi is a good idea and will have a positive impact. What's your basis for being so convinced it's a terrible idea?

Re: The 11 Euro Alternative

@Cantennas are easy and powerful

Are you a second-hand computer salesdroid or something? You seem heavily invested in pointing out that nobody wants or needs a Pi, despite the evidence otherwise.

It's very nice of you to point out that I could bid on an 11 euro desktop (that's ancient and broken), but unfortunately, the disadvantages of such a machine over something like the Pi include:

1) No warranty - the Pi, as a new device, will be subject to warranty provision. Ancient second-hand electronic crapware will not.

2) Modest power overhead - I wouldn't want to know how much power is lost to leaky capacitors and a horrendously inefficient 10-year-old PSU, even when doing moderate amounts of work

3) Being the size of a full minitower desktop (vs being around the size of a GameBoy Advance).

Here's an example for you - if I want to build a small network for experimenting and learning, I can buy 5 cheapy ancient desktops (for £50-75, hope they all work, run them all off the mains, find somewhere to put them when they're running that doesn't constitute a fire hazard, and hope I don't have to take out a loan for the spike in power usage.

Or I could spend ~£150 on 5 Pis, at which point I've got the same hardware power only in a form factor that will fit in my desk drawer if I don't have storage space. Hell, you could mount them on a piece of wood the size of a hardback book without difficulty. And they're under warranty, so if one of 'em breaks I can get it replaced.

Please don't misunderstand me - if someone has an old desktop lying around they can (and IMO should) reuse it, even if doing so means giving it to someone else who has need for it. But there are many folks who don't have an old desktop lying around whose needs would better be met by the Pi. It is entirely possible for both options to be valid, you know.

Re: Blah blah blah

Wait, you think that school pupils with internet access (on a site like El Reg that occasionally features NSFW content and practically mandates a hilarious innuendo-laden writing style, at least for headlines) are going to be seeing smut-tastic words like "wank" for the first time in my comment above?

Oh, it is to laugh :D

So Colin, if I believe that a legitimate response to Your Post Espousing Highest-Order Bellendery is to set your house on fire, that's ok and I'm welcome to pop around with a jerry can of petrol and some matches?

If he wants to protest, he's welcome to engage the community and draw attention through lawful means. Instead, he was a massive knob about an issue which will never directly affect him in the same way as it affected the women whose identities and information he threatened to release, so %^&* him, let him serve his time. (If you want to argue that it will affect him directly, I'd like to see the evidence showing how likely it is that he'll ever have to cope with an unplanned pregnancy. Bollockery about "what about my rights as a potential dad" won't make the cut, I'm afraid.)

None of us get to pick and choose which laws we will follow, hence he gets a paddlin' for doing something he evidently knew was naughty.

Oh, and you may find it helpful to note that resorting to emotive language and behaviour while attempting to talk about debate will tend to diminish the validity your argument.

@Dig

I have 5 machines (one of them dual-booting) in the house, 4 of which are used for gaming with Steam on different accounts. 2 games consoles. Windows updates x 5 + OS X updates * 1 + Netflix + Steam + Bittorrent (mostly legitimately free music from various chiptune artists out there, occasionally also games from the Humble Indie Bundles, software from Sourceforge, or films/tv from the likes of Vodo) + occasional commercial software purchases/trials + regular Linux ISO downloads + Youtube/Vimeo + emusic account = a %^&*load of network traffic.

I pay for the top-level service from Virgin because I know that's what my usage pattern needs. Until these ridiculous new terms were introduced, that was fine. Now I'm in a situation where even if I can do it during what they call daytime hours, buying one new game on Steam and installing it puts me over my usage limit (every big new release I've bought since Portal 2 has been a 10GB+ download, and that's before we start about downloads on different accounts - and no I couldn't be arsed with manually copying files between machines, that's why I was paying for the fat pipe from Virgin).

If they don't understand why an uber-fast connection with stupid "fair use" limits is pointless, $%^& 'em. Why on earth would I want 120MBit broadband if the data caps are such that I'll barely have started using it before I get throttled?

Re: Sounds fantastic.

@Paul

No mate, blow that out of your arse.

If you're paying for one of the higher-tier services specifically because you know your gaming purchases need a high-bandwidth connection, this move is bellendery of the worst sort. I have no problem paying for a premium product or service, but it has to actually *be* a premium product or service, not a middle-tier offering wearing lipstick and fishnets.

Of course, it shouldn't be a surprise that once again a British ISP is playing the game of selling high bandwidth connections it later realises it can't provide...

Re: Ho hum

@ekithump

So what you're saying is "hey, buy the triple-play pack" (where part of the point is that you're paying for an *additional* feature) and then *don't use the feature you've paid for* because once again, it turns out the big studio thinking on this was bellend-like?

No %^&*ing thank you, I'll stick to not buying the stupid %^&*ing "triple play" packs and not buying into their ridiculous idea of what I want. Time-limited access to a streaming-only DRM laden digital copy is not, and never will be, an adequate substitute for a digital copy of the film, presented as a file with no DRM or time limitations .This offering is basically swapping out the idea of a triple-play where you're given a file with a triple-play where you stream the file. It's still time-limited and DRM laden, and therefore pointless crap.

The horse has not only bolted, but at this point evolved into a beyond-human-intelligence space-faring species whose equine roots are not unlike the dinosuar roots of contemporary avians. If the film industry doesn't want to accept this, it's their problem.

If they want us onside, they know what we would like the opportunity to pay for - DRM-free files, with no time limitations. The music industry has understood this, why the $%^& can't the film industry grasp it?