I imagine it will just fly past the front door,
and drop a "you were out" card on the step.
1555 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Apr 2010
Sets like this are model-building to a pattern, yes, but that's the point - you want to build a Saturn V, but don't have all the bits you need, nor the time/money to collect them all (nor, perhaps, the necessary skill).
Doesn't matter, as once you've built the model shown on the box, you (or, more likely, your children) can smash it apart again and have lots of interesting pieces to work with - just because they're specialised pieces for building a rocket, doesn't mean they can't be turned into something else (e.g. skeleton legs make for an excellent balustrade).
How does learning to code on BASIC compare to something like Scratch - are today's kids put off by the flashing cursor? For example, my eldest was somewhat disappointed to find that Python was just a text editor, compared to the rich environment of drag-&-droppables that Scratch provides, although he quickly picked up the basics of Java when it was presented as a game (making robots move about and fight, or something).
More please, Reg writers!
From Ofcom:
Average UK Download Speeds (% Improvement vs Prior Report)
* February 2015 = 22.8Mbps (+21.93%)
* October 2014 = 18.7Mbps (+5.06%)
* April 2014 = 17.8Mbps (+21.09%)
* August 2013 = 14.7Mbps (+22.50%)
* March 2013 = 12Mbps (+34%)
Anyone care to speculate how many homes get below average speeds? I get 30Mbps, at home, and Netflix regularly craps out on me.
Weren't the problems with the original Nexus 7 to do with it being made using cheap flash RAM? Mine was getting a bit ropey on KitKat, and was an unusable mess with Lollipop, but reformatting the internals to f2fs and picking an android distro that supported it (started out with SlimKat, which was rather buggy, settled on Cyanogen which has been great) has brought my Nexus 7 back to life. OK, I'm on KitKat, not Lollipop or Mashmallow, but it's running really well, and so I don't need to worry about replacing it for a good while yet (unlike a PC, I can't just pop it open and upgrade the components!).
This is the trouble with watching these things as an adult. I watched in the company of 3 under 9s: 1 fled to his bed as soon as the first ghost was revealed, 1 had her head tucked under a rug any time an eyeless spook appeared, and the other was sent to bed, filled with concern over The Doctor's fate ("He's not really a ghost, is he Daddy? Why hasn't he regenerated?"). I'd say this hit just the right note of terror for the kids (Daleks and Cybermen will never be scary to today's kids, but that's not to say that they can't enjoy seeing The Doctor defeat them time and again).
Kicking myself for not spotting the glasses/wifi/farady goof, but I was too busy enjoying the episode to notice! Enjoying an episode of Doctor Who? Not something I got to do during the previous series, so I hope the current one can keep it up.
Very much this. I got Netflix, thinking I'd use it for films, but it's pretty rubbish for that (just as Lovefilm was), but rather good for TV. OK, there are gaps, and sometimes only entire series are missing, but I get to watch things that I wouldn't bother buying the boxset for (most TV boxsets I've bought get watched once and forgotten about), and I can drop it once I've watched what I want.
DVDs are down in price, and £5-£10 is a fair price for something I'll watch more than once. Blu-Rays can take a hike, though (not least because my PC has no Blu-Ray drive, and thus I can't get them onto the NAS).
Argos are one of those businesses that can easily strike you as utterly pointless (when I was a teenager, I assumed they'd be gone by the time I'd grown up), until they happen to be just what you need (since I grew up, bought a house and had kids, I find Argos to be incredibly useful).
Being able to order, pay and collect on the same/following day is really bloody useful.
My kids went mad for the cartoons they started adding on to the games, but have never found the games themselves to be all that engaging. They're all but grown out of it now, but I don't doubt that kids a few years younger will be pestering their parents to take them to the film. With any luck, that ought to be the end of the franchise, but I suppose the extra hype will push it along for a few more years.
At least Moshi Monsters are on the way out.
I've bought all sort of bits from ebuyer, over the years, to the point where they're always the first place I check for anything tech related. Their couriers are a bit ropey, but the one return I had to make went off smoothly.
Still, it always pays to shop around. Can't see why they'd want a high street presence, although I'm sure it would draw me in from time to time (probably just for a browse!).
HD was pretty much a waste of time for any sensibly sized TV. HD is a little sharper and brighter, but not so much that it's worth paying the extra for. Ever notice that the Freeview EPG relegates the HD versions of channels to the hinterlands? It's almost certain that everyone is merrily watching the SD broadcasts on their HD tellies, and they don't care.
UHD will surely be a big hit with the mugs who think their TV needs to be the size of a wall, though - I'm sure the SD Freeview signals will look great when blown up to 50 or more inches.
That's a very interesting and highly laudable approach - treatment/rehabilitation should always be preferred over retribution. I do have to wonder what happens to the victim of abuse, in cases where the perpetrator confesses his crime to his doctor, though.
In the case of reddit, I suppose they need to draw make a distinction between openly discussing a criminal acts and inciting others to commit them.
Glad you like your WiiU, Steve, but I must take issue with a few of your points:
4. WiiU games work properly at launch instead of requiring massive day zero critical patches
Not entirely true. Of the half dozen WiiU games that we own, only 1 has not gone online and downloaded stuff on its first run (it's a console, I expect all of the games to work out of the box - the kids certainly don't want to sit there and watch a progress bar fill up).
5. Lack of third party support is a blessing not a curse [...] no gamer would ever buy one of these 'games'
"Third party" doesn't have to mean shovelware. I certainly enjoyed Arkham City on the WiiU, and I don't think that was developed by Nintendo.
7. There's no fees for online WiiU gaming, Splatoon + all it's dlc has been free
All the Splatoon extras might be free, but this isn't true of, say, Mario Kart. I can't say I was particularly put out by paying for the extra tracks/karts/characters, but there's no point in pretending that Nintendo are just giving this stuff away. They'd like you to by some amiibos, too. Still, it is nice that there's no charge for the privilege of online play.
9. Most games for the WiiU are half the price
High street prices are around the £40 mark for new releases. I do hope PS4/Xbone players aren't paying the best part of £100 for their games?
I don't think it's offensive to the dead to consider the fortunes of the company he was running.
I would agree with this, but I picked up a copies of Nintendoland and Marion Party 10 recently, and the kids went ape for them (so did I, if I'm honest*). I think the real tragedy is that only Nintendo have any idea what the gamepad / wiimote+nunchuck can be good for, hence the lack of 3rd party titles.
*Was playing the Metroid game with my eldest, the other night, and it played like I wish the Wii had - smooth control with the nunchuck, and aiming with the wiimote actually worked (used MotionPlus, I think, which should have been there from the start). Really well done, just a shame it's relegated to a minigame.
The fact that Splatoon doesn't have 4 (or 5) player local multiplayer speaks volumes as to how underpowered the WiiU is, though - it'd be on my "must have" list, otherwise.
Oh, and Dan55 is spot on about media player functionality. Our old Wii was hacked to play DVDs and stream across the network (although it wasn't particularly good at this), which was a real boon. Sony recognised the value of this when the PS2 came out (DVD playback was a major selling point), but Nintendo don't. OK, there's Amazon Prime / Netflix as standard, but no chance of any other media player getting added to it, so it'll never be the entertainment hub that it should have been - a real missed opportunity (and the presence of the TV remote functionality of the gamepad suggests that it had occurred to someone at Nintendo).
in a sane world, you'd be able to buy the device of your choosing, then buy the books from the stores of your choosing. If, say, Sony were to restrict their Blu-Ray players to only play films from their own studio, everyone would think them mad.
As a side note, I've put a few books on my android tablet, and found Adobe Digital Editions to be a steaming heap of poo.
was that he'd been taking photos using the Google Photos app, which was automatically saving them to Google's cloud, which was as he expected, but then he uninstalled the Google Photos app and assumed that this would take the cloud backup element of the app with it. Which it didn't, and so photos taken with a different app (maybe the stock Android app, maybe whatever Samsung had foisted upon him) were still being backed up by the remnant of the Google Photos app.
I've never used the Google Photos app, although it is installed on my Moto G (just seen the pinwheel icon in the app tray), but a check of the Google Settings shows no entry for Google Photos, so I'll (naïvely) assume it's not slurping my pics. I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that if you go to the bother of uninstalling an app, it uninstalls completely?
I've always been quite proud of the fact that we don't generally* allow summary executions, over here.
*Yes, the police are authorised to shoot to kill in certain circumstances, but arrest, conviction and rehabilitation are the general aim. Granted, we've yet to perfect the rehabilitation element. And the conviction element. And the arrest element. Still preferable to having petty criminals shot to death in the streets, though.
I've not been given an NFC card, yet, but I'd assumed that I'd be able to just move my wallet towards the contactless payment terminal, without bothering to take the card out - does it not work like that? Obviously this wouldn't work with multiple contactless cards in one wallet, or one of the metal enclosures that the paranoid have, but I've seen plenty of people who keep their credit card in a holder with their mobile, too.