Posts by M Gale

Re: It could have been worse

Don't know why you've been downvoted. The vast majority that Labour enjoyed is probably half the reason we're in this shit.

No opposition. At all.

Re: Make voting compulsory.

No.

Re: App Store

"- there is no central store where people can go look for your apps"

You mean the Internet? Or one of the walled gardens where your app is buried under 400,000 others? A "central store" is not an advantage here.

"- users must have a PayPal account or go through all the pain of entering credit card details, their address, phone number etc..."

No more of a bind than creating a Play Store, Apple, or Steam account? I already mentioned Steam by the way.. that's the water-vapour based malware from the previous post. And what about people who don't want to create an account and for whom tapping in a card number is sufficient?

Some people do not want one-click wallet depletion thankyou.

"- there's no way to push out updates"

You're going to put all of that effort into a game and not build in a patching mechanism? Plenty of others do.

"I don't think it's any surprise that the Apple and Android AppStores have been so successful for developers and customers "

So has the PC.

"and I just don't get why MS hasn't followed suit"

Because there's no need for it, unless you're turning a PC into a locked-down games console, which Microsoft seem to be trying hard to do with Windows 8.

Re: App Store

"Why didn't they add an App Store?! So us independent devs could easily sell stuff for the first time ever on Windows."

Erm, web host and a paypal merchant account? I hear Valve have this distribution thingumijigger too, something about water vapour, if you don't mind requiring a malware installation in order to use the games.

Or maybe you want something like this?

Though I still don't see what the problem is with a web host and a paypal account.

Re: Shift-3?

"it's not a special character. it's just option-3 instead of shift-3"

That means it's a special character. Just like the Euro symbol currently is on most UK keyboards. If you need to perform some arcane sequence of tapping on the magic glyphs, it's a special character.

"it's not windows having to type a whole series of numbers to get a Euro symbol"

You mean ctrl+alt+4? See above about arcane sequences. They're easy... if you know them.

Re: Shift-3?

A friend of mine has a Macbook with a similar US-style keyboard layout. He wanted me to do a quick web page for him. Then I start trying to put #rrggbb colour codes in.

Hash key? What hash key?

Apparently that's a "special character" on a Macbook. Grr.

Re: He sounded quite plausible...

"It's got about as much future as Ubuntu-mobile and that Mozilla Javascript abomination."

Oh I don't know. If it offers something better than Android, like a permissions system that works, then it might take off. Samsung ain't no two-bit player, and they can play the same "long game" as Microsoft, too.

Re: If it ain't broke, don't...

"Google could turn around at any point and say "sorry, we're not doing OEMs now".

Google don't have a choice as to whether you use Android or not. They agreed to that much when they released it under the GPL.

If Google suddenly did an Apple, I think you'd find a very well-stocked alternative to the Play store springing up practically overnight.

Re: Games are never realistic

"Again, a "realistic" FPS would be so damn boring nobody would buy it."

The Arma (previously Operation Flashpoint before some kind of kerfuffle over naming rights) series? Your character gets shot, he's probably dead. If he's not dead, he's rolling around on the floor screaming for help. If your medic gets shot on the way over, or if you both get shot while he tries to manhandle you to a safe spot.. well, too bad. Yeah, the medic isn't a miracle worker either. You'll never get fully healed by magic, though you might be able to stand up and sort-of-maybe aim the gun. Which in the case of an arm injury will wobble all over the place and cause all kinds of flashing red "this hurt like hell" warnings when you pull the trigger and it recoils practically straight up.

Oh, and plinking tanks with small arms fire will not steadily reduce their health to popping level. You need a sodding big rocket launcher for that, and even then you need a really good aim.

I wouldn't call it boring. Nintendo-Hard perhaps.

Re: Stupid

I'm sure WW2 veterans are united in their anger at the Medal of Honour franchise.

Or not.

Re: fixed it

"Take away their income and you'll end up pushing them back towards only releasing on IOS."

You mean income from the adverts I will never click on, which will never send any cost-per-click money to Google or their Adwords partners? That income?

Advert blocking is a quite blunt but necessary demonstration of the end-user's likelihood to ever purchase what is being advertised. Personally I think the developers of apps that are on my devices, have gotten more money from me via paid-for apps than they will ever get via advertising. Especially the ones with permission-creep that get uninstalled the moment they start asking for all that bullshit (yes Rovio, I'm looking at you).

Now what was that about iOS, now with iAds?

"What on earth are we coming to when a court flat out says it doesn't trust a large (supposedly responsible) corporation."

I and plenty of others have mentioned this already but it bears repeating:

A public limited company (or corporation if you like American-speak) is legally bound to be a psychopath, placing money above all other priorities including human decency. The original idea of a corporation may not have been like this. The original "incorporated company" was limited in what it could do and what other companies it could buy, and stakeholders (not shareholders) were partly responsible for what the company did in their name.

After a couple of centuries of lawyering in order to get more power than the original laws dictated, the modern corporation is far removed from the original.

What amazes me is that they were ever trusted to begin with.

Also the movie "The Corporation" is a good intro for people who don't know the history. It makes for depressing viewing. Nice if you're in a "fuck the world" mood.

(El Reg editors: The movie makers don't care if people copy and paste the movie around, though you can buy it for £2.49 if you like. Please don't delete me.)

Re: Billy Bob Gates and Microsoft

Oh I don't know. Both of them seem to be doing quite spiffingly well at the moment, assuming that the suicidal plunge towards everything-is-a-phone is arrested at some point.

Re: NiMH

LiPo batteries are still very much a fire risk, and require charging and use via a kid-gloves treatment.

That said, I notice that LiPo batteries do tend to be used in heavy-current-draw situations. They are usually rated between 15C and 30C discharge rate.

Wouldn't want to short one, though.

Re: Maybe a friendly prirate has come up with a "Fix" for it.

"But sometimes a 3rd party software update is the only way to get the software working properly."

Too damned right.

Especially when the DVD case mentions absolutely nothing about requiring a not-necessarily-existant Internet connection in order to work.

I'm looking at you, BI Studios. I've been playing Arma and Arma 2 since it was called Operation Flashpoint. I have the full X Anniversary edition now, on top of two copies of the original, all paid for. You have multiple purchases out of me. I thought you'd managed to resist the tendency of game dev firms to infect peoples' computers with malware, hence the £30 purchase of Carrier Command. Ironically, the DRM remover was virus free and works very well.

You won't be getting any more money though. In fact you're lucky I didn't get a refund AND keep the cracked game copy. Shop says no refunds on PC games? I say Trade Descriptions Act.

Re: a rock and a hard place

Query: What difference does it make if your player is called "Ryan Giggs", or "Ronnie Biggs"?

Re: Soo...

I wouldn't say they were heroes.

They just had some actual competition from Digital Research, which they soon killed off by rather more foul means than fair.

Not a lot has changed since then.

Re: 2013 blows almost as much as WinH8TE

I also have to wonder how well these start-menu replacements will work when Microsoft change something and the whole lot needs to be reprogrammed again?

You don't have that issue with Linux. A program wants one desktop environment but you're running another? No problem, it'll just drag in the libraries it needs and work nicely. The OS and UI are separated.

Windows just doesn't work like that. That a 3rd party hack might kludge its way around the problem (for now) is immaterial. Windows is a bloody expensive piece of software, and the people who make it can't even be bothered to keep the start menu from Windows 7, maybe even improve it to Gmome/KDE levels of excellence (yes, KDE's start menu categories are better than Windows 7's dump-it-all-in-an-alphabetical-list approach, even if 7's automatic quicklist is quite nice), despite ever-mounting evidence that People Want It Back.

All to try and make 2013 the Year of Windows on the Fondle Toy.

Sorry to go a little Eadonesque here, but: FAIL. FAIL. And a thousand times, ^FAIL!