Posts by Adam

Blizzard: Game designers aren't Shakespeare

Their biggest mistake

4 years + of content.

Increase your levelling speed significantly.

Most dungeons you don't even go into when levelling no.

So you hit 80 and none of the 55 old instances/raids are of any use to you.

It would be nice, post patch 3.1, to focus on making the old content relevant to all those level 80s.

Give me Heroic Shadow Fang Keep. Update all the TBC heroics to be a challenge for level 80s.

Basically Blizzard are not keeping their old content relevant to their player base when they have mechanisms in place to make it happen.

Apple bans App Store heartbreak chatter

Android may or may not be great

Currently the release of the G1 has it locked to a particular network. Android also needs you to have a gmail account to synchronise (iirc). In effect a lot of the fancy stuff doesn't work unless you buy into Google. Not ideal for a business user.

The quality of the G1 is also suspect. Apparently it's very 'plasticy' and feels cheap.

However this is v1. It may simply be a case that the applications need to be written and a key to me buying one is being able to buy an unlocked one but I will buy one.

At the moment I look at this as their 'beta'.

We shall see where this all goes. What it will do is make Apple, but I've already gone as far as getting the sdk http://code.google.com/android/ and seeing what I can do.

Microsoft's IE 8 puts giant web hole on notice

Best before dates.

I think one of the major issues can be quite simply solved.

Browsers need a "best before". After a certain date, they should only allow restricted use without checking for an update.

Cable broadband shines in Virgin Media Q2

Throttling is good

Contention ratios of 50:1 are common for home users. So your p2p network could be affecting my speed. If you choose to bugger off to another ISP because VM are slowing your connection down, FANTASTIC.

Blighty's electro-supercar 2.0 uncloaked today

The one thing missing

OOOOh look how fast it is...but nothing about the range.

You would think they would try and come up with the Ford Focus of the electric car world, not some pathetic excuse for an eco-friendly penis extention.

Software engineer builds straw house for £4k

Price very wrong...

The material costs may have been around £4000 but the labour costs have been factored out of the equation. Looking at the site, there appears to have been 2 people at a minimum working on the house at any one time and they would need to be experienced 'chippies' to be able to get this right. So 20 months = 80k? (Probably more but lets give them the benefit of doubt here). I would be nice to actually have a figure on the amount of labour involved.

However I do applaud them for what they have done. I do wonder though if they could have gotten away with buying/making a log cabin to a similar standard in a much shorted time. Particularly using the newer twin walled log cabin designs out there.

I do realise this was an exercise in using traditional methods here, but if you are prepared to slap in a velux window, then you might as well go the whole hog and build/buy in a log cabin kit and put the whole thing up in a weekend :)

Adobe reports record revenue in Q3

Price differences between the US and other countries helps.

As an example in the US Adobe sells Fireworks for $299, in the UK £299 exc VAT. That is a phenomenal 100% mark-up for a downloadable product.

For the CS3 suite the difference in price between the US and European prices is around $1000 more and a similar story can be found across it's other product ranges (e;g. Coldfusion).

Adobe's world pricing is a complete joke and encourages users to circumvent paying local taxes (VAT) . It is cheaper to fly to America, buy there and fly back.

I believe Adobe has been reported to the European Commission for it's pricing policy, but Adobe have a policy of pricing to what the local market can handle. In this case us non-us individuals apparently can handle being fleeced.

Adam