Posts by Andy Worth 594 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Aug 2007
I'll go with you on that one, if you market a power brick separate to the console, you can hardly blame people for wanting to hide it out of the way as it looks ugly as sin. Although who knows what he had stuck on top of it which may have held the heat in more.
Still at least his console won't suffer the RROD now. :)
I disagree - it won't be worse than useless, it'd still be effective for recording programmes while out or asleep. After all, if you're in and want to watch a programme, you could always stop playing the game for a half-hour.
That said, it would be a handy feature.
As for a text chat client running in the background of games, great....I'll finally be able to see a thousand kiddies exclaiming "1337!" and "pwn3d!" while playing. I really can't wait.
Actually I forsee a situation like in "I am Legend" or "28 Days Later". People eat genetically engineered meat, contract strange body-changing illness, lose all social etiquette and start eating each other.
As for PETA, well you have to say that deriding anyone who eats the meat from animals but then pumping your veins full of a medicine developed through years of testing on animals is more than a little hypocritical.
.....that Hitachi drives basically are the one and the same with the old Deathstar ones. They bought the business, which would include the dev teams, the manufacturing plants and everything else - so any problems with the IBM disks would transfer along with the name.
I remember someone from IBM releasing a comment to the effect that the Deathstar disks (desktop ones) were only designed to be used for 8 hours a day in response to complaints about the mammoth failure rates. This was basically instead of admitting that they had a problem.
Thankfully I never had one, but when I used to attend/help at LAN gaming parties, I remember a particular period where you could almost guarantee one or two Deathstar drives biting the dust in any single LAN weekend.
Sorry, but your post makes no sense at all. I'm not sure how long you've been using a computer with XP, but you seem to state facts that prove nothing.
"XP today is responsive, stable, and you would be hard-pressed to find hardware for which native drivers were not available for it. Moreover, any software released in the last five or so years runs under it."
Well duh, most hardware AND software in use today has been developed SINCE the release of XP. As XP was released in late 2001, it would have been pretty stupid for any developer to write software for windows platforms (in the last 5 years) without including XP compatibility.
"In contrast, Vista today is slow, buggy, and it suffers from a dearth of native hardware drivers. Furthermore, your current favorite programs might not run or run only in "compatibility mode."
And the "Application Compatibility Toolkit" for XP was designed for what exactly? I remember many a "happy" time trying to get old legacy Win98 apps running on XP at first. As for drivers, sorry to tell you that XP was exactly the same to begin with, with plenty of fun testing which 98/2000 drivers would work properly (not many) or waiting for either manufacturers or third-parties to release compatible drivers.
"In short, in the Windows familty, the choice is not between XP at one year and Vista at one year. Rather, it's between a mature OS and one that, for all practical purposes, is still in beta."
Take that sentence, change "XP" for either Win 98 or Win 2k (98 more for gamers, 2k more for corporates) and then swap "Vista" for XP and I've heard it all before.
I will agree that by the time SP1 was released for XP, it was already a much more functional OS, but then it was much more popular than Vista at the time. This gave the people writing the drivers and applications more of an incentive to make their apps/devices compatible with the OS.
Vista is like the unloved, unwashed child sitting in the corner with no friends. It could grow up to be something amazing, but the likelihood is that it'll always be the one sitting in the corner examining its own bogeys.
What some (and I mean SOME) people seem to be forgetting is that XP was slated as being resource hungry in a similar manner when it first appeared as well. I was heavily involved in LAN gaming at the time, and remember lord knows how many people trying to run XP on older boxes and being horrified at how slow it was compared to 98 (as not many people used 2k for gaming, and ME was a non-event).
I'm not making excuses for all of Vista's ills, but it's been built to cater for the most up-to-date systems, with the ability to disable some of the additional options to make it more bearable on lower end systems.
I also remember all the compatibility issues with drivers while hardware manufacturers try and figure out how to code for the new OS. It was the same with XP, and some older hardware, frankly, may never have compatible drivers because it's simply not worth the company putting money into coding for obselete hardware.
That said, it could become another ME, which was pretty much universally hated.
"hard to fault it as a device of inanity"
No it isn't, it's incredibly easy, considering this is perhaps one of the most pointless innovations I've heard of. So I can check what tracks have been selected on the jukebox from my mobile.....so if any Britney Spears in on the queue, I can go to a different pub?
Wow, sorry, let me close my mouth which has slipped open in awe.......
This sounds about as interesting as having my toenails ritually removed with a pair of pliers while dipping the bleeding toes into a large bucket of salt.
Honestly, talk about gameplay, this sounds like it is completely lacking - just wave your arm around in the air and the music might have some sort of loose relationship to the speed which you wave at. The movement detection of the controllers doesn't work well with fast movements, so it'd probably be quite a random result.
I think this will definitely make the top ten list of "Games that make you look like a twat when you play", along with dance mats, eyetoy camera games and a few others.
Sorry, but I think you're a little misled in your beliefs. The Wii isn't sold on its games, it is sold on its control system, even the adverts for the games can often show you that. Unfortunately while the games are very playable, they are also very short-lived in their interest. It is sold on its novelty value, and "home-multiplayer" fun.
Then there's the fact that the Wii is aimed at a different market, the non-typical gamer. These are people who buy proportionately less games than your typical console gamer. Most people I know who own more than one console (say a 360 plus a Wii) play mostly on their 360 and only bring out the Wii for family parties and the like.
It's also well publicised that Sony certainly were making a loss on the PS3 (not sure if they still do), but planned to make their gains through the sale of Blu-Ray's and games. Then of course, quite a few people are NOW buying the PS3 because it is also a very functional Blu-Ray player, and cheaper than standalone players of the same quality.
In fact, I think this is the main point - that half of the intention of the PS3 was to market their Blu-Ray format - which obviously worked fairly well considering it has beaten HD-DVD to death now. So we should hardly be surprised when the recent updates concentrate on improving the Blu-Ray experience.
I'm not having a bash at the Wii, it's very good at what it does, but it's best not to confuse it as having the same aims or market as the other "big two".
*hits his buzzer*
I saw the 'buzz-phrase' of the moment - "iphone killer"....despite used in the context that this phone is NOT really an iphone killer, it still amazes me that people choose to refer to every new phone that appears with some sort of reference to the phrase.
Honestly, is it just that someone gets royalities every time the phrase is used?
"Sure, they're in PR and think we're all nerds (which I'm not, I don't even own an iPod!), but they're in PR and we know they're all arseholes, so it balances out."
That just made me LOL and nearly spit out my coffee. But how true is it? PR people are generally paid to "sell" their company/product/service using whatever means they can, even using the bullshit applicator quite liberally. I remember being told never to trust anyone who works in marketing or PR, because they are so used to talking crap, you can never tell when they are being honest.
All of the people slating Nokia for referring to their phone as an iPhone killer.....read again and this time do it with your eyes open. The author of the story was the only one referring to it in that way, although it does seem pretty obvious that it is aiming at the iPhone directly.
Now I'm not a fan of Apple because of their exorbitant prices (rather than disliking the technology itself), and I really don't get on well with the Nokia phone UI's in general. However, I'll still be interested to see what they come up with, purely from a technogeek perspective.
So, O2 are the sole marketers of the iPhone in the UK and also choose to heavily restrict speeds on their 3G network (which iPhones as we know do not have). Does this seem like somewhat less of a coincidence to anyone else, rather a marketing trick to make the iPhone connection look much better in comparison?
Makes me glad that I moved away from O2 in 2007, although that was to do with some utterly shocking customer service I received from them rather than any technical issue.
I have nothing against girl geeks, the more women we get in tech support the better as far as I'm concerned.
@matt - I sympathise with you, having had to completely rebuild my girlfriends laptop due to the amount of crap and spyware on it (not to mention the 40 Gig of unfinished Emule downloads). Thankfully though she has learnt from that, at least for now.
"Given Phorm's history (as 121Media) I wouldn't trust them not to profile my data even if I *was* opted out. The only way to be sure you're not being spied on by Phorm is to use an ISP that has nothing to do with them."
Actually, the only way to be REALLY sure would be not to use the web at all, given their history in malware and hidden "bundled" installs.
As long as it is specific opt-in (i.e. you have to physically tick the box yourself rather then forget to untick one that is left already ticked) then I don't see it as a problem. So few people will bother to opt-in that it'll die a death before very long.
"Archaeologists today don't fit their theories to the facts, they fit their facts to their theories."
Gawd how bloody true that is....Sadly I can't claim a degree in the subject, but I've spent plenty of time on the various discovery/history channels baffled by how they reach their conclusions.
For example I watched something the other day where they were trying to prove that Sodom "slid" into the Dead Sea. They made a mock-up of the geological conditions on a model and then stuck it in what was basically a massive centrifuge. The loose "ground" surface was supposed to slide along the clay underneath but it all simply sank a bit, and none of their mock "buildings" fell down. However, they claimed it as a success and a proof to their theory, even though it was blindingly obvious that it hadn't done what they were expecting (they even said as much, and then said "but it still proves we're right" - or words to that effect).
That's not the only one, just the most recent example, but I could apply the same to things shown about Egypt, ancient Greece and the like.
It's like me saying my car is really sturdy because it's all in one piece, followed by a wheel falling off, and then me saying "that just proves how sturdy it is because it came off in one piece".
"Although useful in raising security awareness in general and, more specifically, demonstrating that most systems can still be hacked even when fully patched, the contest doesn't show the aggregate risk of each OS/application suite. I'd wager that Mac OS X still presents lower exposure overall than Vista SP1, all things considered."
Uh and how did you come to that decision exactly, seen as you didn't appear to mention the "things" that you considered to come to your conclusion? To be honest, that sounds like that sort of line that I feed a manager to leave them confused enough not to argue, without actually stating any facts.
Oh and @ Ronny Cook - don't Adobe own Flash now rather than Macromedia?
Blu-ray's are shiny, flash cards are not - and people like shiny things.
Seriously though, I don't think flash-stored movies will ever be anything other than a niche. I think people have it the wrong way round - it's not BR that will be the "next minidisc" but movies on Flash. It's going to be a couple of years before the technology is there to affordably store HD on a flash card (notice the "affordable" word) by which time Blu-Ray, now the lone physical HD media format, will have built up a good strong user base and a massive library of titles.
People like the physical media of DVD/Blu-Ray, the fancy packaging and such. Flash cards just don't have the same "presence" and I don't think they'll be in a position to complete unless they can offer something major that BR/DVD cannot. BR writers and players will, by then, be significantly cheaper in price (as well as the media probably) and I just don't see flash offering anything significantly "better".
Of course, it's just my opinion and I might be wrong.
....they do look very nice and the whole system looks quite neat. As suggested though it's a real shame that all you can really use them for is playing games, as the Wii doesn't play DVD's.
Sorry but for me it's a waste of money and you'd be better off spending a little bit more and getting a proper sound system through which you can use your console, dvd player and whatever else you have.
I can't remember which piece of software it was, but I do remember actually scanning a EULA when installing something before. It basically started normally then part-way through the legalese it said something along the lines of "ahh no-one ever reads these things anyway" and started talking about a load of random crap.
Anyway, as TeeCee says, just because one EULA is declared invalid wouldn't affect any others.
I think it was in an episode of Grange Hill where the entire class began quietly humming at random, just loud enough to be heard but not pinpointed, well we used to do that in my school. Of course as soon as the teacher directed their attention towards you, you stopped and another 3 or 4 people started elsewhere. It's basically impossible to work out where the noise is coming from.
Like someone else mentioned though, kids instinctively home in on the weak to pick on, so the one teacher who ot most of this was the one who ended up storming out of a lesson in tears. Of course, then in came the head of Maths and we all got a right roasting but it was fun anyway.
I'm happy to see that the comments here don't blame the teachers for the decline in behavioural standards (as too often is the case) as teachers are so restricted in how they can discipline children that effectively their hands are tied. Besides which, it shouldn't REALLY be the schools that are responsible for teaching kids respect and discipline, merely enforcing lessons already taught by the parents (or not it seems).
The problem is that too many parents either
a) Don't care
or
b) Believe too strongly in the books which tell you that you shouldn't discipline your children but should let them learn for themselves
Every single parent I know personally who went for option b) (3 or 4 families) ended up with kids who have serious difficulties coping with authority figures. I'm not saying people should beat their kids to within an inch of their lives, but I don't believe you can really teach the value of right and wrong without strong discipline. It doesn't have to be a smack, but taking away something they value like a phone or games console when they misbehave can work too.
"Go on, fill in a form, with lies, put it in a draw for a month, and then try and remember what you wrote."
Or rather if you are fraudulently applying for a passport, take a copy of said form full of lies and upon being called for interview, vigorously swot up on what you had written previously before attending.
I'm sorry, but it doesn't take a really good spy type to do that, only someone with a very basic level of intelligence. You would certainly expect those people who are applying for false passports on behalf of others to have figured it out by now, or in fact by 5 minutes after the new process was announced.
While I sympathise with those who will lose their jobs, I can hardly say that it's a surprise given that Motorola make perhaps the worst phones on the market. They were once the "top of the pile" back a couple of decades ago but fell behind by releasing phones with poor features and interfaces, concentrating solely on "fashion". I know hardly anyone who uses a Motorola and most people seem to regard them as very poor phones, even those who work in the industry.
They've attempted to redress the balance more recently, with their most recent releases having an updated (and thankfully slightly more intuitive) interface but it's very hard to get the mud off a name. There are too many good phones on the market to bother with the poor ones.
Sadly I doubt this will be the last of the job cuts, unless they pull their finger out.
Well I think you'll find that it's a measure of the society we live in. Kids have always needed mental stimulation to get the best out of their learning. Over the years, the things that interest kids happens to change, and if this persuades kids to pick up and learn then surely it's a good thing?
Personally I think the larger problem lies with society itself. More and more children are completely uneducated upon starting school, with a growing group of the population seemingly uninterested in their children. Then in other groups, people shy away from any form of discipline and then wonder why children don't learn the difference between right and wrong, or at least the consequences of doing the latter.
Most "bad" kids have their chances ruined before they ever reach school. Ask a primary school teacher - the difference between a child that was encouraged to learn by their parents (pre-school) and one that was not can be huge.
Unfortunately there also is a tactic of perhaps the "least intelligent" among us to have more kids as a means to gain more benefits. Which makes this the fastest growing section of the population.
I just don't think people should look to teachers as the root cause of education issues in every case. But then that'd mean people had to look to themselves for responsibility, and we all know how bad people in general are about accepting blame.
It's one of these horses everyone can leap on so it looks like they care about/are doing something about the environment, when in truth as Slaine mentions (in greater detail in fact) there are much broader and more effective measures that need to be looked into. Businesses are the area that really need to be focussed on, given that they massively outweigh domestic power requirements.
As for a direct example of power output, let's look at the figures as an example in my particular case.
My LCD TV reportedly draws 138Wh when in use and 0.4Wh in standby mode. I would estimate that I use it for at least 2 hours a day, so one whole week of standby mode uses only 62 Watts of power.....less than a half-hour of normal usage.
Perhaps the government/legislators would waste less of everyone's time and money if they persuaded people to get away from the TV more often? By getting me away from my TV set for one hour a week, they save over twice the energy that they would by persuading me to leave my TV off standby.
The whole thing just looks like a smokescreen to avoid the bigger picture.
The only thing you'd lose when playing Manhunt 2 is however many minutes you bother to play it for before falling asleep. You can never get that time back you know?
"A normal sociable person who plays such a game for a few hours a week won't be affected. A person who has no friends, stops in and plays games all the time might be affected."
Your argument lacks any kind of reasoning. I used to (I stress 'used' to) be a hardcore gamer and as you delicately put, stopped in and had no friends (offline anyway) but was never tempted by games I played to replicate my actions in real life. The simple fact is that I am not mentally unhinged, so I have no difficulty separating games (or for that matter tv/film) from reality.
The type you refer to are the same type of people who send death threats to actors playing certain characters in soaps, because they hold them responsible for the actions of their character. The people who cannot separate one world from another because their brain is incapable of doing so.
It's basically the standard argument that people use to blame tv/film/games for all of societies violent problems, but the simple and unavoidable fact is that the problems we have in society are a lot more serious and complicated.
Not that I disagree about Manhunt 2, but for different reasons. I'd simply like it to disappear on the basis that it will be rubbish, which in fact it probably will very soon after release.
I don't know where you get your "facts" from, but XP will quite happily fit into a 4GB partition along with Office and some small basic apps (like Adobe Reader for example). Of course, you won't have much room for anything else, but then it's not designed for gaming or file storage is it?
Of course, it WILL probably completely screw itself over within weeks if you actually use it, just because of all the nice space that XP consumes over the time you use it, unless you stay on top of "clean-up" type maintenance.
But it's because we are starved of decent ladies in our day-to-day jobs that we become so intrigued by the slightest flash of flesh. It's a vicious circle.....honest.
I do however agree with Phil that she probably look better on a slightly fuzzy and not particularly close-up camera shot. Soft focus I think they call it :)
Steve, but you're missing two MAJOR points in your anti-feminist rant.
1) There's a big difference between doing it in your own home and in the middle of a street/in front of your work colleagues etc. If you want to boff your vacuum cleaner at home then by all means go ahead but I don't want to see you doing it. If I wanted to see shit like that I'd pay to go watch a show. In fact, having sex in public with a real woman would involve both parties being arrested for public indecency, so where's the unfairness there?
2) Most men, if they saw a woman pleasuring herself in public, far from calling the police, would probably stand and watch for as long as they thought they could get away with it.
Sex with inanimate objects may be guilt-free, pleasurable and without ties after the "act", but it's still best kept behind closed doors.
Sorry, I'm just wondering, considering all the pissing and moaning that went on about China deciding what its people could and could not look at on the web - and it appears that the U.S. government are doing exactly the same thing?
Pot....kettle...black....anyone?
Actually that's an interesting comparison to make, as "the guide" and wiki seem to share many comparable features. A claim to know everything about everything would be the first, and main comparison - you put almost anything into Wiki and get a result, regardless of accuracy.
I do also wonder sometimes if there is any alternate motive as wiki-bashing seems to be a daily (if not twice-daily) subject at the moment. Not that I'm defending Wiki or indeed Jimbo, but we already know Wiki is like a cult - user comments on many previous stories said exactly the same thing - so this is hardly "new" information. I think we're all pretty much in agreement that Jimbo Wales is a nobhead.
I'm just saying that further stories explaining "Why Wiki is bad" are kind of flogging a horse that is long dead and beginning to decompose.
Yes....your attitude really helps fortify the stereotypes people make about how Americans don't know or don't care about anything outside of their own borders.
If you want to talk numbers, at least talk about the right ones. North America (the continent) is estimated to have a population of 340 Million people as of July 2007. Europe on the other hand in the same year had an estimated population of 801 million people. So I have a feeling that whatever your own views, the U.S. companies producing internationally sold equipment would miss the European buyers very much indeed.
So surely in order to start snooping on everyone they'll have to make a contract change, which it is "assumed" you accept by continuing to use the service? If they do this then you have the option to freely get out of your contract without any charges (it's a clause in most contracts like this that if the terms are changed, you can opt out freely).
Personally I'm happy NOT to be with any of these ISP's. I sign up to the TPS and MPS so I don't get junk mail or "marketing" (i.e. telesales) calls, and all they are doing is exploiting their customers to find other ways of spewing out garbage "targeted" ads at them. Like the "targeted" advertising that arrived offering my dad life insurance 6 months after he had died for example......
They still don't seem to get that if most people WANT something online, they already know how to search for it.
So the Grammar Nazi who wrote the mail to El Reg, does he actually realise that at the bottom of his own mail he thanks himself? I also wonder if he refuses to acknowledge any word that was "accepted" by the English language since the beginning of the 20th century. New words come, meanings of existing words change and develop over time.
There might even be a day that "innit" appears in the Oxford English Dictionary.
And honestly, if you get so excited by a misuse of a word, I think you need to look at your life and wonder why you bother.
Did he slip and fall, and his dick landed in the open nozzle of the vacuum cleaner? After all you hear that excuse thrown around quite a bit when you hear about the stories of people getting "stuck" and having to go to hospital.
As for the practice of cleaning your pants by hoovering your cock being "normal" in Poland, well it would explain why my Polish girlfriend hates hoovering so much! Perhaps she feels I just "don't understand her customs", so maybe if I strip off she'll pick up the hoover and get to work.
And there would be the next interesting excuse at the hospital....."and how exactly did you get stuck Mr Worth?".............."Well.....it's all to do with a Polish custom...."
Sorry, I just had to quote.....
"With his post, Wales also says that none of this should affect the trust you have in him or his encyclopedia. "I care deeply about the integrity of Wikipedia, and take very seriously my responsibilities as a Member of the Board and as a member of the Wikipedia community. I would never knowingly do anything to compromise that trust.""
Does anyone actually HAVE any trust in Wikipedia any more? I was under the impression that it was little better than an online cult these days, run by its "SS" admins.
"Matching a CLI against a name in a lookup table is IMO an obvious thing to do."
Well, that is true now but then everything seems obvious when it's been done for the best part of 20 years.
I do agree that this guy is just trying to screw some money out of Apple, but then to be fair, if we're all honest I think most of us here would do the same given the chance....or if not Apple then Microsoft. Some people seem to think that his patent was frivolous, but then no more so than Apple's own (or in fact 200 of them....) for this one device.
It reminds me of that advert, for Audi I think it is, where they say their A6 has basically 4 times as many patents as the space shuttle, or something like that. the problem is that almost every one of the 6000+ patents they "filed" for that car are a load of pointless bollocks (and quite a lot probably got rejected).
"The minimun spec for Windows XP is a 233 MHz processor with 64MB Ram. Would ANYONE even think of installing XP on something like that? (Note to self: find 233 processor and 64 MB RAM)"
Believe it or not, where I work there WERE a few machines almost that slow that had XP put on them when the migration was first done. I think in fact the slowest was a Celeron 400Mhz. None of them were using 64MB of RAM though........
I don't get what MS are up to (aside from TRYING to pimp Vista to more people). Telling everyone the minimum spec is lower won't actually make it run any less like crap. Vista IS basically the most effective way of slowing down even a good PC, and I still see it being a long time before many companies adopt it, which is the only way MS will make the big money from it.
Sure, XP WAS slower than its predecessors and designed for faster processors, but you could still run it quite happily on a medium spec PC out at the time it was released (without having to turn off all of the effects).
.....Before someone comes along and says that an XBox 360 cluster would do the job better. I was actually surprised not to find a comment in the first 5 when I read them.
And for the price, I doubt he could make a better cluster, at least for the purpose HE needs. Of course it's a theoretical simulation of an event using equations and constants that are no more than guesswork in the first place, so the validity (and usefulness) of the results is questionable to say the least.
Either way, I wish him luck :)
Sorry, but that statement is the business equivalent of saying "Oh well he looked like he was going to jump off the cliff, so I did it first". Admitting you can be led into mistakes so easily?
I'd love to meet the guy who made the decision and make moves to look like I was going to throw my wallet at him - just to see if he'd take the first move and throw his wallet at me first :)
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
