Posts by Amazing Stace

Pope resigns months after launching social networking effort

Worries me that he thinks that strength of body is an important factor. Maybe he thinks the Pope should be more of a kicking ass and taking names role.

Apple 'dismayed' to find over 100 kids building its iDevices

in demand

Forgive me for straying from the IT angle just briefly, but surely the bigger problem at hand is that the largest population in the world (China) is stricken with such poverty that parents desperate for an extra income are faking documents to get their kids into nightmarish factory jobs?

Skype worm chats up victims - then holds PCs to ransom

How devious

So you see an obfuscated URL which is supposedly a picture of you and when you follow it, it leads to an archive, which you have to download... Still your picture might be in the archive so you open it and it contains an executable... so you run the executable and... sorry WHO is falling for this?

Work for beer, Neil Gaiman's wife tells musicians

Kickstarter isn't starting anything new

When kickstarter was originally conceived I'm fairly sure the intention was to provide funding for projects from complete newcomers.

So if a totally new musician wanted to release an album and they were sure it would sell at leat 2000 copies at £10 each but they didn't have the start up money to get them pressed and printed, they would essentially sell those 2000 copies up front and use the money from pre-sales to make the album. This was the "free copy of end product" reward that essentially turned the funding into a pre-order, and that was a brilliant idea for people who were just starting out and didn't have the capital to start what would become a creative career.

But it seems like now the model is messed up, and already established developers and creative types are using kickstarter as a promotional tool to simply mitigate risk and advertise virally, then rake in profits on top of the kickstarted funds.

It just goes to show you can't democratise anything without the big players getting their sneaky fingers in.

Kobo revamps e-reader line, intros mini model

Re: The next generation

Maybe the "Kobo Ducky"

It could float too!

The next generation

On a side note, now that we've got tech for wireless charging, wireless data transfer and solid state touch control, how long do people think it will be before we see the first 100% sealed waterproof ereader for taking to the pool?

I predict it will be called something like the Kindle Splash.

5" Screen is what we need

I was thinking of switching to a Kobo from my current eReader (Pocketbook 360) and I'm glad I didn't now, because it means i can wait for the Kobo mini.

One thing annoys me about modern tech and it's the desire of all these companies to fill our houses and bags with increasingly thin objects, I currently don't like carrying my ebook reader around because it pretty much fills the cross section fo my handbag and it means I constantly have to ensure an even distribution of other items in there. If the contents of my handbag coalesce it creates a single point of pressure for it to bend around and possibly snap.

Smaller tech is awesome, thinner tech not so much. I eagerly await a nice mobil- phone form factor ereader with the battery life offered by an eink screen.

Or to phrase it differently: SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY.

Game devs beg UK taxman: Can we pay 30% less?

Culturally British

It could steer the artistic direction of future games if this rules is strict enough.

Maybe we'll get a gritty reboot of GTA London, or even a brand new GTA Cambridge: Vice Chancellor City

Bitcoin exchange shuts after heist

I thought the whole point of bitcoins was that they were untraceable and no records were kept?

Now they're saying he's checked the records and they can trace the thief.

Texan scientists create tiny, tiny laser

Smooth on an atomic level

There's a chat-up line in there somewhere...

How to fix the broken internet economy: START HERE

Part of the problem, particularly when it comes to TV shows is that channel packages like Sky are the televisual equivalent of having to buy an album to get one song.

This is a sort of dual edged sword.

On the one hand, it means that if you want to watch just one show (lets use Game of Thrones as the examplehere) you need to buy a package, which will also pay towards content you will never ever watch, be it gameshows, sports, documentaries, whatever.

However it also means that you might be able to discover a great show which you never would have paid for up front without seeing any.

If ( like me ) you are resentful of the deluge of crap surrounding the desired content, and you don't buy into the channel, you will find out about the good shows because of the people who bought in and were then able to talk about it.

One interesting thought experiment is this: imagine Game of Thrones was made into a TV series available solely on DVD, globally, all at once. Who would drop the funds for the box set without having seen it? Where would the budget come from to make a program like that?

When you package so much content into a single price point, the successes pay for the flops. If each has to stand on its own merit, you have the same situation as movies and games where a flop can end a production studio and the big players all start to edge away from risk.

It's sort of like the Beeb. The unique way in which Sky/BBC is funded allows Sky/BBC to take risks on larger more innovative programming. The difference is you can choose to buy into Sky or not. This goes for any paid channel package, I just mention Sky because it's the first one that comes to mind. There's also Virgin Media and... um... I think that's it in the UK. Wow, only two players.

One way that these exclusive content creators can make back their investment in countries where they don't provide a channel is to arrange exclusive license deals with other channels in those local regions. Obviously the country of origin for the content producer is the first to get it but if they release globally they're reducing the possibility of license fees from 'exclusive' rights to global markets. Given that roughly the same number of people will end up buying the DVD set eventually anyway it's like a way to sell the same content many times. Like cinema releases followed by DVD releases and then TV license deals. It's all about multiple sales of the content to the same people. The content costs a lot to make, I'm not surprised they want to monetise the successes as much as possible.

Is there life after ads for St Zuck?

Re: what do you expect when

Quite.

Given that Facebook only really gives you visibility of people you already know well enough to connect to, any blanket statement about:

"The people on facebook are all _____ "

is really

"The people I know on facebook are all ______"

Which boils down to:

"My friends and acquaintances are all ______"

So you should probably think a little harder about what you're really saying. Or ... you know, get new friends.

Hands on with the Samsung Galaxy S III

Whenever I read that bit about the fact that it knows when you're looking at it, I think of Episode 2 of Black Mirror....

Grab your L-plates, flying cars of sci-fi dreams have landed

Re: Where will you land?

Wait, you FLEW to Sheffield for LUNCH!?

Sheffield has some nice restaurants but I wouldn't get a plane into the city to have a meal in the airport cafe...

Redmond revamp: Bing gets social bling

Do people really need a 3rd party website in order to ask their friends a question now?

Facebook tests paid post promotion

signal to noise?

People are already annoyed that Facebook seems insistant on showing 'top stories' over the most recent posts. If they're saying you should pay for the guarantee that a post is actually seen then what you have is a messaging sight where your message might just disappear if you don't fork out, at which point it becomes essentially useless.

Well done, Zuck. You finally gave the last few people who don't care about privacy issues a reason to leave.