Posts by Aldous

Re: How about

there are even better all in ones then the Pi that can work as general purpose web browsers\word processors etc. Not as cheap but they are out there and have more features then the Pi which is restricted by being deliberately cheap

a few years back the starting salary for a grad was something like 22k. Then they were moaning as to why they could get no talent when most of the big companies pay a lot more for there grad schemes, didn't need to rubber glove check your history or require leaving your morals at the door

Re: Shoreditch again?

You forgot to add a running twitter commentary across the bottom and an option to have your favorite youtuber provide live commentary. Then you factor in "If you want Dr Who to escape from the daleks tweet #teamDoctor" else you get shown a dalek curb stomping whoever they have playing Dr Who this week.

The grad scheme pays about 10k les then the equivalent from the big tech companies which also have the advantage of not needing a full rubber glove security check and doing dubious acts to "protect"people.

The only thing GCHQ has going for it is the security clearance which is hard to get otherwise. They are expecting the top of the pile but paying bottom of the pile wages.

Re: Legendary?

He has made plenty of genuinely good games on paper. Actually delivered on what he said? ummmm Populous?

The guys smart and he has made good games but ffs he needs to shut his mouth when he is promising super awesome feature X, even though the game has gone gold and its still not written...

Re: Oh, so....

Also any wargame and any CIV style game as after all we took over 2/3rds of the planet at the end of a rifle at one point. Chuck in SimCity style games as all the EU countries did a lot of building to go along with the colonizing.

Lets see football,rugby,F1, MotoGP and cricket are covered in the UK & EU by large fan bases so thats culturally significant. Flight sims are in as aviation is a big field for Europe and shaped our culture (by importing it from the USA and flying people out to places), anything with boats is also a big one.

Right whats left? Driving games should be fine, hard to argue EU manufacturers have not had an impact on culture. Anything involving crime should also be fine as the way that is handled impacts a country's culture significantly. Sci-fi, Horror etc all EU members have some form of home grown scene.

Erm there has got to be genre's it doesn't apply to but surely you can twist anything into being "culturally significant" when you kind of need that anyway to have a market for the game in the first place? Even "South American Taxi Driver Simulator 2014" would sell within the EU (but the link for funding is a bit tenuous)

Re: As Terry Pratchett said

The difference is you can get done for doing it to traditional stocks but as BTC is unregulated its a free for all. Then you add the echo chamber effect of day traders and forums and you get the pogoing price.

Re: Some African countries are overflowing with unemployed university graduates

Nothing wrong with more people going to uni the problem comes when unis create courses that should not exist and be funded to the same level as STEM (which tend to be costly) subjects. For STEM subjects funding at MSc level was not available but my uni had a funded scholarship for "Queer Studies in the Arts" (yes that really was the title). Throw in some vocational type courses that are becoming academic courses and a smattering of real world useless degrees and you have the current problems.

Now doing a real world useless degree is fine, nothing against that. The expectation set though was that you get a degree then you get a good job. This is true to a point in some subjects but outside of academia others really are not in demand and academia has lots of competition and crap wages. So your average 2:1 Fine Arts graduate ends up working at Starbucks because they did nothing else but the degree because after all the degree guaranteed a job.

It was Tony Blair apeing Thatcher's "buying council houses to turn people Tory" moment.

Re: There is at least one other possibility...

Pretty sure anywhere that could land a 777 beyond a flat bit of desert would have at least a phone line. Let alone a "hotel" would have one and TV's for the passengers to phone home after seeing the media storm.

The absence of this happening means at the very least the passengers and non pilot crew are unfortunately likely to be dead. Good luck trying to keep 200 people of different nationalities from trying mobiles or running away (assuming it landed).

Re: So what you're saying here

nope, the vast majority of bitcoin miners plug their device in, run cgminer and leave alone. It is no different to installing a game and requires no crypto knowledge.

Only a few people are actually writing software or building hardware and these tend to be the people that are already doing it. i.e electronics engineers and security students.

Re: Speaking of "Worth", 100,000 downloads bring in $250,000 for 3D-gun printer maker

Read your own linked article:

"Wilson, who leads the 3D-printed gun group Defense Distributed, signed a quarter-million dollar deal with Simon & Schuster’s Gallery imprint in December to write a non-fiction book chronicling his quest to create the first fully 3D-printable lethal weapon."

The money is for a book about building the gun, not the plans. The plan's were available free so there would be no point in selling them. This is like Linus Torvalds publishing an autobiography and people claiming he is selling Linux discs

Re: Being conned much?

What are you bibbling on about?

There was no pre-mine with bitcoin. Any ALTcoin that try's that is quickly ignored and left for dead.

Your arguments about value are just insane, if you want a crude answer to where the value was look at Silkroad. Then add in Humble Bundle, Overstock.com and various small businesses that sold items for BTC.

Anyway i'm off to the secret lizard people meeting, remember sheeple don't use google to find out basic facts before posting!

Shooting Welshmen with a longbow

It may still be on the books but it is illegal as it is superseded by the murder laws. That is how English law works, there is no great rule book and that is it, but instead a great big rule book and a shed load of case law. Most of these old laws that people claim still exist are like this (London cabs and bails of hay etc), sure they were never repealed but they have been superseded by newer laws that cover the area

English Law is all about the interpretation for example it is very hard to get someone convicted for stealing a car as to be classed as stealing you need to have stolen it with the aim of permanently depriving the rightful owner of their property. If you steal a car and joyride it, then dump it you have not permanently deprived them of it and therefore cannot be charged with theft. You can be charged with Taking Without Owners Consent (TWOC) which is why car thefts are charged as TWOC's and not theft.

Re: I have been looking into ...

Unless they have kick ass ATI graphics card it is a wasted effort . The difficulty is so high on Bitcoin only ASIC based machines are feasible. Other Altcoins mostly rely on Scrypt which needs GPU's to be useful.

Primecoin is an exception as it can be mined by CPU's only at the moment but it is near worthless and will likely be buried under all the other clone coins. Also you need a lot of CPU power to be remotely profitable which is why its a botnet owners wet dream.

Re: Do it for real . . .

What about license transfer? It was recommended to me to go to the US and learn somewhere with good weather then transfer across?

Re: Wot ?

Some people get paniced purely at the thought of nuclear power let alone power from warheads! that's like having dynamite in a coal plant we are all doomed! can't we just build more windmills and live in mudhuts and be happy

Re: Im going to be rich!

only if you stick a BT label on it!

The starter of that thread was also claiming the arrest was fake and that it is all a big scam orchestrated by the silk road admins. Chances are he also believes they used the money to pull of 9/11 using there time portal !

Thing is with these things the keyboard was the computer. So you would have a serious branding issue if you used a standalone keyboard like we do today.

The key covering on a chiclet type keyboard sounds like a nifty workaround for cheapness though!

Re: statistics

Meh its better than giving Steve Bong and co a load of money to piss away on cloning instagram.

The whole Silicon Roundabout really shows how stupid and narrow minded the politico's are about the world outside of London (AKA Here Be Dragons). Lets start a new Silicon Valley, now where to put the funding:

* The F1 belt and its associated tech businesses?

* Wokingham and others

* Somewhere not normally tapped for this sort of thing (Cornwall, Wales?)

* London!!!!!!!

Because if there is surely one place in the uk that will never get redeveloped unless there is some incentive it is London, not like the place is super expensive and short of space or anything ( which usually guarantee's some form of private redevelopment)

Re: The guy is one of the few Legends in IT

yeah screw that hippie. Look at that cloth wearing Gandhi guy, look how silly he looks non violent resistance must be stupid because he looks silly.

You are going to have a pretty limited life if you judge people purely by looks alone. Good luck with that.

If you are not paying a fee for a service

...then you are the fee or alternatively TANSTAAFL

Don't like it, don't use it. Targeted ad's are there so that facebook et all can run their DC's etc. Doesn't make them right but you (currently) have a choice to avoid using these services, it's not mandatory to post your every action live using whatever wifi is available.

Re: Watching with interest

The dumbing down happens not because of the platform but because of the market economics. It costs a shed load to get a game certified by Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo and you have to jump through many hoops every time you do an update.

In contrast anyone can write and distribute a PC game. This means that it is commercially viable to make "Hammond Organ Simulator 2013" on PC as you can make a profit on 1000 sales but for a console game to even break even against the costs of certification and dev kit you need an established market.

Comparing consoles to PC's in terms of intelligence is like comparing film to a book. Any wingnut with a pen and paper can write a book but you need more kit to make a film. Now the intelligence of the average user on the other hand is a completely different matter.

Re: Fixed it

Can we amend Godwin's law to say NSA as well as Nazi? Since Snowden (because before then the NSA did not exist obviously) not a single thread in anything IT related can happen without someone mentioning the NSA.

Re: The science behind Doctor Who?

Not to mention:

Spitfires IN SPAAACCCEEEE (complete with spinning prop's no less)

Titanic IN SPAAAAACCCEEEE

Victorian's IN SPAAAAAACCEEEE

Sharks IN SPAAAA.....wait, IN THE SKY

Gave up on it a long time ago, if its not stupid stuff like the above its "timey-wimey" nonsense. Dr Who has been turned into purely a kids show.

P.S Empty Cassandra frame action figure!

Re: Simplify!

They tried that, didn't work, look up Esperanto. The future will be dominated by the most common language used by business AKA English.

PinYin is the main simplification and its what the kids start with. It's not uncommon for mandarin speakers to not know all of the 3000 odd common characters. Also the tones are not quite as essential people think, its contextual as well.

Re: The least of its problems

25GBP was their problem.

Ethernet is super cheap, Wifi not so much. Also Ethernet is universal worldwide Wifi has different power levels/channels depending on region so it would have been a real pain having to produce more and get appropriate certification approval (they had approval issues with the current model)

Re: XP versus Windows 7 versus Vista

Xp was pretty stable when Vista was released. Vista needed much more ram and cpu horsepower then microsoft said. This lead to a load of low end pc's sold as vista ready when they were not. VIsta was buggy and a resource hog for a long time so most people skipped it and stuck at xp.

When 7 came out it took the good bits of vista and xp and ended up with a decent version of windows. MS seem to alternate:

win95 (good)

win98(ok)

Windows ME (kill with fire)

Windows xp (good)

Windows vista (crap)

Windows 7 (good)

Windows 8 (fuck you this is a PC not a tablet)