Posts by Maxson

'F-CK YOU GOOGLE+' ukelele missy scoops BIG WAD of $$ - for Google

Re: yea google F*ck you

It's almost like you can't put your g+ full name as whatever you like. I'm fairly certain they don't request a copy of your birth certificate to sign up so uh...just don't put your real name?

Sony Xperia Tablet Z: Our new top Android ten-incher

The only problem I can see with it is that it's still as expensive as an iPad. There's no brand strength in android for 10 inch tablets and the 7 inch tablet market is covered by the Nexus 7 and a few other more established brands - not to mention that a big portion of the 7 inch market that's taken up by the "look at the size of my fucking phone" crowd of new 5.5"+ phones like the Galaxy Note series.

So if you don't have the brand strength, you kind of need to incentivise the purchase with a lower price (this is exactly why the 7 inch android market is doing so well, Nexus 7, Kindle Fire and a few others are priced far below their competition).

The way to be the best seller isn't to produce the absolute nicest product, it's to produce a product that does everything the customer wants at the lowest price while still keeping performance bearable.

Oh, Sony, you big tease: Mystery PlayStation reveal date set

My New TV still has a coaxial aerial port and several SCART ports, and what it doesn't have a Chinese ebay seller will always be able to provide a converter for. Unless you reckon China and online sales are going away too.

There's plenty of gaming pensioners who only started in their old age, so I can very much see me still being a gamer in 50-70 years, health permitting..

Re: Fiar use policy?

There's a greater chance of David Icke admitting he's full of shit than there is of 3d 4k resolution games that even run at 30FPS on the next Playstation or Xbox (Unless the game is as graphically complex as Bit.Trip.runner). The graphics card will at best be about as powerful as a Radeon HD 7850. Nothing to sniff at but not something that will run Skyrim in 3d at 4k resolution at 60FPS.

Apple iPad Mini 8in tablet review

Reads like a "Top Gear" Review

Much like Clarkson saying he loves a crap car because of something he feels in his trousers rather than his head, the vreview basically admits that it's overpriced and underspecced but says "I love it anyway"

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

Re: A major omission

TF2 is kind of a shame, it was so astonishingly well balanced and now it's just a bunch of random shit. I no longer can expect a soldier to have a rocket launcher, he probably has a laser rifle. Still good fun, but weird as fuck.

Left 4 Dead, why haven't I played that more? It's marvellous it really is.

Re: Fallout

Fallout 3 and NV are crap shooters but strong RPGs, Fallout 1 & 2 aren't shooters at all.

GTA is a THIRD person shooter. While GTA has certainly inspired something (Open world games set in big cities, games where you're a criminal) I don't think it can claim to be a landmark FPS ;p

Re: I've played 4 of those

There's a certain way to play Crysis that makes it a lot more fun; be gung ho as all hell, you'll soon get much better at quickly managing your suit, speed sprinting, switching to strength, shattering a guy's head with your gun butt, swiching to armour, shooting down his two squad mates, taking cover, going into stealth and picking off the last 2 guards before they know what's going on. It's fantastic fun when you learn to pull it off.

Sadly the fiddliness of the controls in Crysis makes it hard to learn to do this and and that just realdsto wandering around hiding in stealth mode, shooting 1 guy then going back to stealth for a while.

Facebook won't pull unmarked police plates page

Re: Reverse tactics

If I were to guess, I'd say motorists are the most interested in this, so they know when they can and can't speed.

Re: Reverse tactics

Well strictly speaking "Perverting the course of justice" by making it harder for undercover police to do their jobs. I'd like to avoid a 1984 style situation of the authorities always watching but I'm fairly sure that police surveillance of potential criminals is not the same as Big Brother watching.

EARTH was a BAKING LIFELESS DESERT for 5 MILLION years

Re: body temperature in mammals

If external temperatures were that much higher, we'd have difficulty losing heat and probably all die of overheating. You see this effect in people with lower constitution when it gets a bit hot in Britain, now imagine it being twice that hot and even the thick skinned and well hydrated are going to be struggling.

But it's been covered below by someone who knows a bit more than me as to why we remain that hot (and how close we are to disaster) a dangerously high fever is only about 6 degrees C above what we comfortably tick along at.

Microsoft Surface: Designed to win, priced to fail

Why is the cover ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS? They could seriously help their marketing by making it a tonne cheaper, there's no way the materials cost is even a quarter of that, I'd be amazed if it costs even $10 to make.

I know economics is a thing, and the whole point is to make shit as cheaply as possible and sell them for as much as possible but jesus christ. $100 (even worse, £100 for us over here) is astronomically high for a cover with a little keyboard built into it.

Organic food offers basically no health benefit, boffins find

Re: Not sure...

If you think non-organic food will make you grow tits, then you are a tit.

Growing tits on men is pretty much caused by body fat. The reason more men have tits these days? A higher proportion of the population is fatter than it was in the past.

Brummie plod cuffed in Facebook troll hunt

While that's true with trolls, an above comment mentioned the full extent of what this trolling entailed. It was of a level that constitues harassment, which is a bit worse than being a team killing prickend in Counter Strike.

Ubisoft: 'Vast majority of PC gamers are PIRATES'

That's slightly dramatic as it's not a root kit, and even the recent problem with it wasn't a root kit. It is however, shitty software that's yet another wannabe Steam.

Re: Ludicrous misuse of maths

Sorry, I copied and pasted that from a comment I made elsewhere....the 0.87 million is sales for Anno 2070 and the 0.36 million is for the Latest Assassin's creed.

Ludicrous misuse of maths

.87 Million and 0.36 million respectively, I believe that doesn’t include digital sales though (VALVe don’t release steam sales stats)

So 17.4 million retail boxes of anno and 7.2 million PC retail boxes of AssCreedRev they were expecting.

Bear in mind that AssCreedRev shipped (not actually sold at retail, only sold to vendors) only 7 million copies across all platforms, he’s talking out of his arse as Consoles are much less commonly pirated on and bigger markets for derivative sequel-a-year crap

Goldeneye

I must be...

The only person who doesn't revere this game as a classic. I loved it back in the day, but it's actually quite shit in a lot of ways.

BOFH: Our Excel-lent new boss and the diagram plan

It was interesting to see an open threat to do something rather than skipping straight to a mishap. BOFH gone soft in his old age?

Radio hams unite to fight off new powerline comms standard

If the power is out, then the HAM radio wouldn't be intefered with by a device that requires power to transmit, surely?

In my honest opinion, Powerline adapters have a long way to go yet anyway, I keep considering them as a viable alternative to running cables around the house or Wireless but the tech isn't quite there. It's an asshole move, but if the tech could be there, then I really don't care about HAM Radio.

Ten... console games you may have missed

I think everyone played that....

As a list of titles you might not have played, there's a bloody good reason for most of them (they're crap).

I highly recommend The Witcher 2 if you haven't got a PC with the grunt for it but do have a console though!

I hate to be that guy, but £2k is phenomenally expensive, even for a brand new extremely high spec gaming PC if you build it yourself.

£600 will do for a good gaming PC. I realise that's still a lot of money, but I'm posting in the interests of accuracy, not sanity. My current machine was about £1300 in total, but it'll last me 4-5 years unless I get the itch to be a bit childish and go spunk more cash on it.

Khronos Group updates OpenGL and OpenCL graphics standards

I'm under the impression that DirectX has some functions that OpenGL does now have, can anyone give me the broad strokes of what OpenGL is missing?

I'm all for open platforms but as a "hardcore" gamer, I'm more interested in seeing graphical technology move on than taking a step back to widen the market. Unless OpenGL becomes so popular that the standard moves on a lot quicker. I'm happy with DirectX, and I'm happy using Windows as my gaming OS. I'm also happy to jump ship if the experience is as good.

Oz regulator tells telly-makers to mind their language

Re: A victory for common sense.

Tell me about it, I boguth a £400 TV and the Wireless adapter for it is £80, thankfully I have no use for watching youtube and iplayer on my TV, there's a PC plugged into it.

Valve: Games run FASTER on Linux than Windows

Re: Technical question, why does FPS > 60 matter?

The human eye being "happy" with 24 FPS is a fallacy, we don't see in frames, but if we did, the theoretical limit would be more like 220 FPS, if you can't see the difference between 24 and 60 FPS you might be retarded.

24 FPS means that you get a new frame every 41.66666666(recurring) milliseconds, which is over double the average person's reaction time. which means that you can literally miss your opportunity to react at that frame rate, this is pretty important at a competitive gaming level.

I find that anything lower than 50 frames per second looks wrong to me, having been a PC gamer for years.

What the other guy said though, if you can do so much at 300 FPS, then it can be literally translated to doing 5 times as much at 60FPS, or at least 3 times as much at 100 FPS, which I would consider fine at a competitive level.

Re: Steam Linux?

Now that IS a good idea, though whether they have the expertise to write a whoe Distro. I'd love to see VALVe take this on because they've a penchant for doing things correctly.

This can potentially be pretty important.

On the one hand, VALVe are the undisputed kings of PC gaming right now, they have influence, and steam being a ground for Linux versions of games will make more developers create working Linux versions.

On the other hand, the source engine is considered outdated by this point and in terms of graphically intensive games, Unreal Engine is still the big thing (and unreal Engine 4 probably will be the next big thing) so it's going to require UE4 working well in OpenGL to make any massive switch (note: I'm unsure on what exactly is going on with UE3 in terms of openGL compatability, or UE4, I'm a gamer, not a games artist, I've no idea how well these engines run in Open GL, just that when UE3 came out, it was a DirectX 9 Engine).

It would be interesting if the next big console used OpenGL, as that would drive more development to OpenGL, meaning better PC ports too.

UK judges quietly declare text chat can be obscene

...Yes 50 Shades of Grey *IS* legal?

What a world.

Motorola’s next Razr ‘leaks’ online

I like the back

It looks grippy and easy to hold but then I don't really care what the back of the phone looks like because funnily enough, I'd be looking at the front of it most often.

That said, I won't be replacing my phone for at least another 8 months, so by then it'll probably be painfully obsolete, regardless of how good it is.

Smutty books strip Harry Potter of Amazon crown

Good Lord

I hate to be "that guy" but....Literature is dead.

I've not read it, I've read some of the hilarious exerpt pages that float about online and it really is like a 14 year old wrote both sides of some bad cybr sex.

Move over Raspberry Pi, give kids a Radio Ham Pi - minister

Re: Radio?

Radio doesn't just mean AM/FM

And this isn't a suggestion to learn "how radio works" (not compeltely anyway) It's to learn about electrical engineering, something that's fucking hard (a lot harder than general computing for most people).

There's a massive lack of actual hard skills taught at school level in this country which means kids don't start learning the basics of stuff until later life unless they're hobbyists.

I really wish I'd been taught more about electrical engineering as a kid, instead we got a PCB and got told to solder some bits onto it, this didn't really teach me much outside of "You are bad at soldering".

Apple MacBook Pro 13in

The annoying part is he didn't state what settings the game was at...not that Far Cry 2 is a modern game.

Android games console scheme nets $2.5m

Re: I still think

That's a good point, but there's nothing new or interesting coming out for the PS2, ever, and Ouya is a LOT more powerful than Sony's nigh immortal ridged box (what were those ridges for anyway? Very 80s HiFi styled for a very late 90 product).

I don't really want to defend Ouya too much as while I love it as a concept, I'm fairly sure it's doomed to fail as a business. "more powerful than other console" and "a great original idea" is not a surefire sign of ubiquity, the GP32 and it's successors already tried being a massively more powerful, open source handheld and that didn't go too well. Now I admit that the GP32 (and Co.) were pricier than the alternative, but I'm not sure price is enough to sway people.

Seems to be priced for "$99, why the hell not at that price?"

My hand keeps hovering over the button to pay $99 now and get the console on release, purely because this thing is priced the same amount as 6 hours or so on Canal Street with the other half (I am a prolific drinks buyer and consumate gentleman so I mostly pay for everything, so I actually make out pretty well only spending ~£60 in that time).

But I have a few concerns.

It's fabulously hard to become a successful hardware manufacturer today. There's a reason SEGA essentially died, why Atari's last successful console was like 30 years ago when their last console was about 15 years ago. It's because they didn't sell that well. Even with the kickstarter preorders they're looking at an install base of 40,000. Which is sweet fuck all. It won't entice any big developers. Likely this means it'll be stuck with ports of mobile phone games and a few bones thrown by some smaller indies. That's fine for the Ouya guys, they might be able to sustain this and make their money from it. But it'll die quite quickly

Bear in mind that of that $2.5m, $1,774,733 is literally preorders for the console, and a big chunk of the remainder is a small (sub 1000) number wealthy(ish) people (In fact, at levels lower than the preorder level, the kickstarter has only provided about $22,000).

I also worry that they're dangerously close to offering more consoles than they can have made, their initial backer "preorder" was 1000 consoles, which sold in minutes, so they added 5000 more, then another 5000, then another 10,000. Failing to deliver on this could fairly massively damage all the goodwill gained from making somethign unique, interesting and open source.

Ouya is the kind of thing that gets a cult following, and things like that can be successful, but I think they need to shoot for a higher install base than "cult", or developers won't be interested. Lack of developers leads to the install base not growing as people become disinterested, leads to lack of developer interest leads to....etc.

I'm starting to suspect that the initial buzz for Ouya has already peaked on Kickstarter, don't expect to see it make 2.5 million in a day again, or even 1.5 million, I think everyone who wants to know or cares to know about Ouya probably already knows and probably has already backed (give or take a few, give or take double or even triple the amount of the current backers, it's still too small an install base).

Smartphone-wielding Obamaniacs trounce Romney in poll

Hm, I'm not sure the reasoning of "It's because mobile advertising works!" Is the true reason for these metrics, more likely that younger "cooler" people prefer Obama and are more likely to own smartphones, which is very clearly reflected in their figures for people past retirement age reversing the trend provided by the total figures.

Smells a lot like the data was prepared by a mobile ads company.

Retina MacBook Pro nukes Apple's green credentials

Will anyone actually care?

From my experience of environmental types (especially environmental types who own Apple products), this won't make much of a difference. Environmentalism is a massive bandwagon and very few people in on it are really that interested in it if it inconveniences them.

Just because It's not the ONLY thing they do, doesn't make it something they don't do.

For instance, some men like to touch themselves, some have jobs, some do both.

But calling a Bank Manager a wanker doesn't mean all he does is touch himself.

So calling them a Foxconn rebrander or marketeer doesn't mean all they do is rebrand foxconn kit.

WTF is... WiGig

Re: More importantly...

I'll be glad when WiGig comes as the name will make sense at least...The pedant in me is furious at the term "WiFi" as the "Fi" stands for nothing. WiFi is literally named that because it rhymes with HiFi :(

Google Nexus 7 Android tablet

Re: Not a real alternative

Thanks for the Tip, I'll be changing my Address on Amazon US to one in Oregon.

Please remember to add 20% VAT to the price after conversion from dollars to pounds. You'll likely be charged a 20% VAT cost on import which will bring it up to £180, add shipping cost and you're likely paying over £200.

Personally, I'm waiting till it's actually released, I'd like to see some end user reviews. There's things a normal person will point out that even the most scathing journos will let slide. Plus I'd like a definitive answer on whether the USB port can host an SD card like some people are saying.

Burnt Samsung Galaxy S III singed by external source, probe reveals

Re: 'Dave 126 Rule 2

In my experience of this, you're more or less right. So long as you stop it running power through it ASAP.

I've managed to save keyboards and whole laptops from coffee spills by yanking the power and the battery and actually cleaning the circuit board with clean water then drying throughly. Not always an option on newfangled tiny integrated devices that're held together by adhesives but laptops don't need to die due to coffee.

Google plants rainbow flag in anti-gay countries

Re: Gay wars

A potential fight to win the "pink pound"?

And I thought they were all just trying to be nice guys.

Forget Ultrabooks and Win 8 - only fondleslabs can save us now

Just out of interest...

...Is there usually upward motion around the launch of say a new MS OS or several years after said launch as more companies come to the new OS (it being unwise to be an early adopter in corporate environments)?

I've been around for a few rollouts, but they typically involved putting Win7 on the existing hardware.

I'm interested to know as I've only a limited knowledge of whether this actually impacts hardware sales and if, therefore, some of the workstation/desktop slump is to do with the fact there hasn't been a new OS to buy new hardware for for a while now. Is part of this normal course as the latest windows reaches market saturation?

Ten... alien invasions

Word has it that...

...Spieberg walked all over the existing material and took a big steaming shite on it too.

Europe's prang-phone-in-every-car to cost €5m per life saved

Re: Nanny state...

How about a button and a speaker that, upon detection asks you to press the button in the next minute to avoid the automated call? That way, if you're incapacitated the call is made, if you're not, you press a button.

See, how that wasn't rocket surgery.

Darwin alarmed by six-legged mutant cane toad

Given the problems these little bastards cause, they should re-release the 6 legged one if it makes it more clumsy and keep capturing healthy ones in hopes that this bad mutation continues and it slows the toads down in general.

Brits get to fondle Google Nexus 7 slab in just a fortnight

Re: Interesting little device

I'm confused...the "dock" you linked is just a charging stand it seems, however you can still use the standard "dock connector" the micro USB one, there's a choice of one or the other, see? So while there is a proprietary dock connector, there's also a STANDARD one too.

Re: $49 for 8GB

I'm a real bastard for wanting a lot of files on a device so I can access them, say a whole series of Family Guy to watch while in several long journeys without going back to my storage at home....nope, won't fit on 8 gig. and I don't want to pay £40 for 8 gig more storage so a £13 32GB micro SDHC card would've done me fine.

Re: $249 = £159

$199 is the £159 version.

$199 = £128

£128*1.2 to adjust for VAT = £153

A 23% (20% due to VAT) or so price difference between UK and US is pretty fucking great compared to most things where it's 40-60%

Depending on your state in America, you'll pay sales tax there too, which can bring the price in some places in the US for the 8GB version to $230 or so.

Good deal, shame about the lack of card slot. I'd happily pay £10-20 more for a card slot on it than £40 for another 8GB of storage built in.