Posts by Timmay 258 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Dec 2011
Your first point; you're bitching about Microsoft because the non-Microsoft games developers don't include split-screen gaming in their games? I've just checked my 16 Xbox 360 games, and 11 of them do allow split-screen gaming, so I'm not sure what games you have.
Your second point about gaming in the same household is a valid one, though I thought some games did allow LAN-multiplayer gaming. However, I do that so rarely nowadays I can't recall whether that's still common.
Dear God, reading the comments so far I feel like I've wandered into a BBC Have Your Say section at the bottom of a mildly controversial story.
You have one comment saying black is white, gets 20 upvotes, 2 downvotes, the following reply says no way man, white is totally black, gets 25 upvotes and 4 downvotes. Are you people just agreeing to ALL the shit that's being spouted in here, is that what happens on Fridays??
For the record, I'm probably on the pro-side of fracking and stuff, but this story suggests that you'd have to dig hard to find sites which mention that Cuadrilla is only searching for oil, and is only going to use conventional drilling, and then fails to mention any of those hard to find sources.
I've dug into it, and I can see that Cuadrilla said they're only looking for oil, but actually it seems they haven't ruled out using fracking if necessary - if the Guardian story below is anything to go by:
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/aug/02/balcombe-oil-drilling-begins-fracking-protests
I'm not overly informed in this area, so maybe when applying for a licence, you can only be licensed for a specific method?
I'd love to bait the anti-frackers, but without solid sources contradicting what they're saying, that's a bit hard.
Are countries really allowed to have a say in who can and can't use the international flight tracks over them?
Known criminals must travel these routes all the time, traversing countries they're wanted in, but I always thought so long as you don't set foot in that country you were fine...?
You have to set the cap at a figure higher than the cost of any reasonable eventuality, to catch the 0.01% of weird circumstances you might encounter - yeah, £10k sounds like a lot, but as fun as it is to criticise people's/corporate's/committee's thinking, people aren't stupid and there was probably reasoning behind it.
As for the surplus, it says in the article - "Cash left over goes back to the operators"
>Power to weight restriction like they have on bikes would be good.
Well, some people are just going to want to go fast and overtake everything no matter what - overtaking is a damn sight easier and safer in something with decent power than your typical teen's 1.0 Vauxhall Corsa, weighed down with fake body kit and undercar lighting.
You just showed you didn't understand it fully - the intention is this compression would be used only on the server side, and the decompression is no more taxing than existing algorithms (the same in fact), so unless you're running your servers on batteries, this would not affect battery life in any way.
While I agree with the general gist of this article, I can't stand the continued trolling of the old "but with 4G you'd use your data allowance within minutes!" line - what is it with this assumption that on 3G you use data when you have to, bit by bit, but as soon as you have a 4G connection, whoa, I'm gonna go off and download the whole internet to my handset in minutes...
Erm, no. Sure, if the extra speed (but let's face it, it's not revolutionary speeds compared to what the best 3G connections can manage) means you want to start running bittorrent over your mobile connection, or downloading Linux distributions to your handset, then you're gonna have the same problem you did on 3G, you'll just hit those problems just quicker.
The point of 4G (and I'm not a massive fan, having just signed up to another 18 month 3G plan, but I'd have it for free, thanks) is that you can do what you did before, but quicker. You use a gig or two a month currently? You'll use a gig or two on 4G, maybe a touch more because you can work quicker, but everything will happen quicker*.
* Supposedly it'll happen quicker, though I maintain for most things we do on mobiles/tablets, will we really notice that 0.2 second page load improvement?
As have been repeated above, maybe people just don't care about SUPER-fast mobile internet that much, and simple plain old "fast" mobile internet suffices? I consider myself quite a heavy mobile internet user, but only on my phone, so I can't think of anything I do on there which would really benefit from the faster speed (and higher cost). Maybe if I was tethering my laptop......
The other thing I don't get about EE/Orange/T-Mobile is, given they're the same company now, how I was able to get a new contract with T-Mobile with almost-unlimited everything and free Xperia Z, for £12 less per month than I could get a comparatively limited Orange contract, with a non-free Xperia Z.
Why aren't they offering comparative contracts and deals now?
I hope the trademark investigation process into this goes something like this:
1. Type the trademark being applied for (Python) into any good search engine.
2. See 187,000,000 results.
3. "Hmm, that's a popular word, looks like it's some programming language thing..."
4. Search on "Python programming language"
5. "Hmm, 15,000,000 results"
6. Reach for the "REJECTED" stamp.......
Anyone else noticed that in all the videos we've seen of this, neither pedestrians or drivers seem at all fazed by the sight of a massive fireball screaming across the sky.
In the vid here in the story, couple of people shuffling across the road, briefly glance up at it, carry on shuffling. And while I don't speak Russian, the people in the car seem extremely calm, no raised voices screaming "какого хрена это?!?!?!?!?!"
Dave? You mean Top Gear TV, right?
Don't get me wrong, I love Top Gear, and when I was on Freeview, Dave was one of my most watched channels, so I thought I would miss it when switching to Freesat a few years ago, but actually, there's only so many Top Gear repeats one can watch. I'd love it to be on Freesat, but it's not a factor anymore.
"It still seems ludicrously expensive to me for what is, after all, two connectors and some wire."
Yeah, and I don't know why this iPad is so expensive - after all, all it is is a load of metal, plastic, bit of silicon, all mashed together into a rectangle with rounded corners.
You're all getting tied up in definitions - if you want to take the pedantism to the extreme, by the definition quoted, you could call anything on the internet "cloud computing", because it all uses hardware and software resources/services over the internet. In fact, The Register is a cloud provider*, because we're using their hardware and software, which provide a service to us over the internet.
* it isn't, it's a fecking website
iTunes and the App Store itself, by definition, are stores. Yes, you can stream films from one or the other, or iCloud, or whatever it's called these days, but that isn't the "cloud" in the way most people who actually know about IT think of it. I agree it's a wooly definition, and actually I don't like the whole term/concept - it's giving a fancy name to stuff we've really done for years, but in a less marketable way.
If you can't guarantee you'll be able to keep the same prices for the length of my contract, I can't guarantee my ability to keep paying it.
2 years may be "a very long time" in the communications market (though when it comes to suppliers, I'd bet they all negotiate longer term deals, so I'd dispute that somewhat), but it's not like a mobile provider's customers ALL join at once, and so that company is left unable to do ANYTHING for the rest of the period - their customers join (and leave) every day, so just make any increases apply to NEW customers.
"I also had to install an amplifier and use the higher-grade co-ax cable. The jump in picture quality from the aerial upgrade was obvious"
Ah yes, that old Monster Cables trick - with better cables and a stronger signal, the 1's and 0's are even higher quality 1's and 0's = better picture quality! Ummm......
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