Posts by George Flecknell

UK game-development degrees not up to snuff, claims industry

You sir are an ass

"My tax dollar,er pound, is spent letting a bunch of long haired pot smoking yobs spend 3-4 years in a subsidised pub, do a bit of programming (not difficult, I do it most days) and then sell out to some US company for a few million. And none of it comes back to the tax payer (or specifically me)."

Wake up. Students pay their own way. Perhaps you were deliberately trying to sound like a foolish bigot in your post but you should be aware that the government dont subsidise students anymore. We get loans and then have to pay them off with inflated interest thus helping keep you in your over-mortgaged home.

If the games industry wants to attract graduates maybe they should try and support those with academic skills and no industry skills. I retrained from a science degree to a computing degree at the same time as working (and paying tax) achieveing the highest possible grade. Similarly to Rob Lyon I went to the uk game conference last year and was told that I shouldnt even bother with the game industry if I couldnt write low level C++ and a complete game engine.

I'm not that bothered. I dont want to work for another bloated, backward, corporate monster anymore anyway. They wan't new blood because they want to steal their ideas. Make them sign a non-disclosure agreement. (see terms of contract saying all inventions at work belong to the company). My advice to all is, write as much of a game as you can yourself, get help from friends and forum users and ignore the computer game companies. Release it yourself and do it your way.

MSI Wind Windows XP Edition sub-notebook

Shenanigans!

Now I'm sure the words "Bargain basement price" were mentioned in the article blurb. What exactly is bargain basement about £329. Lets not forget that it might be small but it cant do half of what a real laptop does and it is the same price as an entry level pentium model.

This is not an article its an advertisment!

Why are sub-notebooks not at sub price!!! I wouldnt pay mopre than £150 for one.

The music biz's digital flops - a short history

Its over

The cat has been out of the bag now for many years. If you dont have "that" album then someone else will. All music released up to this point IS now freely available, whether it's FTP, HTTP or simply people swapping drives. It might be illegal but it's rife.

If all the major P2P services closed overnight, there would still be a million private sites hosting music and already many thousands of people with hard drives bursting with pirate material. The internet isn't required for that to spread, a simple USB flash drive or iPod will do.

The major problem faced by the record labels now is that they have created a climate where the single song is king. There is a twofold effect here:

1) Musicians aiming only to make successful unit-shifting songs and miss the trick of becoming artists, capable of deep and complex albums. A single song is unlikely to get played too many times by a listener and hence the band will not create a sense of identity or instill any loyalty in the listener. Hence, consumer interest dwindles.

2) Single sales (eg: from iTunes) generate far less revenue than physical album sales. An mp3 has no tangible physical reward for the consumer(cant be waved in the faces of friends, or lovingly rediscovered in a cd case). Less value attachment to product = profit level declines.

Up to this point in time, record companies may as well kiss goodbye to revenue generation on previous releases (for aforementioned reasons). Current and future music is really going to have to drive sales. Their big struggle is going to be how to generate interest in new artists with no fan base, very small repertoires and diminished consumer interest and value attachment to their product.

I enjoyed your article. Thanks.

Evil steve because he killed the album. The great big rotter.

MSI's 10in Eee PC rival priced up in UK

A wind up surely

A SUB notebook for a notebook price. What on earth is the idea here. Why can we not buy a celeron laptop for 150 quid. Ah! I know. It's because the marketing/price model has been manipulated by adding a range of super pricey laptop alternatives.

Why not have sub-notebook 100 - 200 quid

Entry level laptop 250 - 350 quid

Expensive laptop 350+

Silly silly silly.

3rd Space FPS gaming vest

Rather a waste of time.

This vest heightens the gamer's experience with respect to body blows at the expense of (for example) headshots. Illogical.

Man wields soldering iron, welds eight new devices into Eee PC

The sad truth is...

that the added functionality makes it a far more attractive proposition.

Online gamer murders rival clan member

Just a thought for all those games=violence oddballs

Probably worth ending war before banning computer games.

Academics slam Java

Dinosaur frenzy

Robert Dewar and Edmond Schonberg of New York University are clearly fools. Everyone is taught as they learn Java that it is ia severely limited language in some respects. As people that claim they are academics they are doing nothing to further the cause of students who have moved across disciplines to Java and have found it any easy route into learning development skills.

Such elitist nonsense is typical these days. I am a science grad who is retraining in development- Java has been an easy starting point for me. On my own I have gone on to fill in the holes in my geometry, algebra and low level language skils.

These people are clearly thinking only of furthering their own cause by promoting their own languages of choice. Unfortunately other people listen to them.

Nvidia rolls out 'tri-SLI'

Madness

Being sick of paying through the nose for "necessary" hardware upgrades I have sided with the PS3. I havn't looked back. This is complete tomfoolery. Game prettiness "so what!" realistic physics "gimme gimme!"

Dreaded Blue Screen of Death mars some Leopard installs

Oh really

"Caused by associating with Intel Chips? "

- Do you know what a computer is? Are you from past?

PC buyers: 'Vista Capable' machines weren't Vista capable

Marketing foolishness

If Microsoft were suitably proud of Vista Home Basic, why was it not marketed as THE Vista release with all the additional versions advertised as pro-packages and add-ons? The XP model worked fine. The only features appearing on XP Pro over and above Home edition are only really necessary for proffessionals.

Most new machines I have set-up in the last few months shipped with Vista Home (not ordered by me!). Each also came with an Upgrade disc. Microsft know that all they need to do to fuel the need to constantly upgrade in the home enthusiast market is to introduce a new OS. Theyre all bound to upgrade later. Home users are getting used to upgrading hardware by increments, so why not software?

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