Posts by Greg J Preece

Re: Love it...

Can you blame them for looking at ways to cut down on used game sales?

Um.....yes?

Re: What sort of cretin buys a Amazon Swindle anyway?

I bought a Sony reader, jailbroke it, then installed the Kindle app. Best of both worlds.

Re: Hopeless Dopes

"Fibre broadband"? No - the same old ratty coax cable that was installed as cheaply as possible in the 1960s.

"Low Cost" No - slightly cheaper in some ways than Sky, but you get less than half the service.

Yup, and while BT are better at some of that list, they're as bad or worse in others. Isn't UK broadband awesome? Virgin brought in many of the traffic rules after their buyout - perhaps after another buyout that will be re-evaluated.

Oh well, guess I'll stick with the old Civ, uh, whatever number I have.

I can confirm that not only is Civ 5 a better game, but you can play it offline to your heart's content. I recently did exactly that on a ten hour plane flight.

Re: Clowns

It is a bit odd - while El Reg has its fair share of idiots, I've never seen anything as bad as the ignorance displayed in some of these comments by quite a wide margin.

It's British people talking about potentially dodgy action taken by people who are a) foreign and b) of the type that might be described by our prince as "a bit dusky". What reaction were you expecting from Britain, exactly?

Got in before me. Just imagine a polite golf clap from me.

Re: Astonishing and nice!

We have to have it done by 2063. Someone with the right surname needs to get busy and make sure there's a lad called Zefram around at the right time.

Hey, hey, we can do without World War III, thank you very much.

Re: Very dangerous indeed

Actually, the real danger is from the UK's hysterical attitude to child protection. Simply by viewing the images, you are immediately made into a criminal worthy of registration on the sex offenders register. I doubt whether you wanted to view them or not makes much of a difference, given previous idiocy.

Re: Shame...

Shame that games these days demand split-second timing, loud irritating "music" and minimal puzzle-solving. The imagination needed to create DOTT, Sam n Max etc is sorely missed.

I want you to look up a company called Telltale Games.

And as others have said, just because Call of Duty and Halo make a lot of noise, doesn't for a second mean they're all there is out there.

Re: Really?

It's not the sort of thing you realise if you only tried Opera once back in the days of it being pay-for or having an advert banner, and even then some features we had back then have only been replicated relatively recently

This is going to astonish you, but it's possible to have used Opera and still not prefer it. No, really. No, honestly, I swear this is a thing.

Not every feature in Firefox/Chome/whatever is in Opera, and not every feature that they share is done better in Opera.

Re: 4G - what is the point...

(seeing all the withdrawal symptoms on a flight LFR->LAX recently makes me believe that a whole generation of young people are totally addicted to instant communication/gratification. The OMG, no one has liked me in what 20 minutes, I'm a complete failure.)

You again? Oh no, are all those horrid young people still offending you with their desire to use technology rather than sit and stare at the back of the seat in front?

I was recently on a flight from Heathrow to Vancouver, and given that I was in a small seat for ten hours with moaning sods like you running like scared children from my deadly, vicious, killer...sleeping cat (not a euphemism), I was very glad to have my laptop and an X-box controller with me.

My thinking went something like this:

"Hmmm....I could be a boring fuck and stare sullenly at this boring person's boring head... There's only so many hours I can code in one stretch.... I could play Blur on the laptop? Hey, look at that, the guy next to me has a controller too! TWO PLAYER! Man, am I glad I'm not a miserable old shit who'd give up making friends and enjoying himself for the sake of being a smug elitist."

Re: But

How do you do that? Warping to hyperspace?

No, silly. You re-align the deflector dish*, vent plasma from the nacelles** and, if all else fails, dump the warp core.***

*Take a shot

**Take another one

***Down the bottle

Re: There's no need for press regulation per se

For example we learned that a transgender teacher killed herself 3 months after Richard Littlejohn ran an opinion piece in the Daily Mail basically describing how this person was "selfish" and not fit to teach or be anywhere near children.

As others have said, he should be allowed to be a shit-stain, and we should be allowed to call him such in response.

Depressingly, what gives his shit-stainery the power to hurt people is the legion of knuckle-dragging fuckwits who agree with him, not his stupid little column.

Re: Glasgow central?

If there are any BT managers watching this thread, that is how business is done in these parts. Mutual self help.

Translation for managerial types: bribery. :-p

Re: pathetically dependent?

Yes, you're paying perfect attention...no Fortune 500 companies are using iPads or iPhones for business applications.

People in business spending money on shiny they don't need was covered in the article, you know. ;-)

Anyone care to guess why the Western world is rapidly being caught up by developing nations who like our own predecessors focused their attention on doing 'the thing' they did, and not on pandering to the sensitivities and paranoia of a specific group?

Errrrr...you're honestly going to blame feminism for an asserted rapid development pace in other countries? Are you kidding me?

Look, feminism (in a broad sense) has a point. There are still sexist dicks in our society, and I do still run into them. I generally refer to them as "pricks". And on the other hand, you have people like this woman who go OTT about any perceived slight, even if it wasn't directed at them, etc. I refer to those people as "pricks" also. Their gender or social alignments have little to do with it.

1 "feminist" is a prick != all feminists are therefore pricks.

Re: Defensive?

Greg - Limited range inherent in the technology aside (which I think I devoted as much copy to as was reasonable)

Major flaws aside....

And you did devote time to it - especially to blasting in advance anyone who dared criticise. If you're going to qualify a review by saying that it can only be compared to other, equally flawed products, then that's not about to convince me to swap my petrol car for an electric one. Both products are in the same marketplace, attempting to appeal to the same people; surely comparison is appropriate, not nay-saying? The global sales figures don't suck because people have been waiting for the one, true EV; they suck because EVs are more expensive and less capable than the alternatives.

If I was reviewing a new video game, but you weren't allowed to compare it to other, better made, more modern video games because it would look shit by comparison....I'd be reviewing something on a Nintendo console. OK, bad example.

Perhaps Renault should have simply handed over the keys to a half-charged car at Lisbon airport and walked away letting me try to find my own charge point in an unfamiliar city?

A real world test? Perish the thought!

A fair test would involve exactly this. OK, Renault aren't about to do that because they're pushing for favourable reviews, but if you were being objective you'd have called them on that yourself.

I like the notion of hydrogen cars, and of electric cars, but they've got to be at least equivalent to a petrol car or no-one, myself included, is going to bother. And when you flat-out insult anyone who would argue that point, you're not convincing me.

Re: Yes the Rothschild Bank and the US Federal Reserve....

Ignoring the rest of that largely irrelevant post:

The principle is pretty simple - a 10 ton iron penetrator to lead the bomb by a certain distance, on the approach; followed by a HUGE bomb that detonates as it enters the hole created by the penetrator, thus maximising the blast energy inside the asteroid.

No. This is a really terrible idea, and if you'd listened to any half-qualified astrophysicist for ten minutes you'd know why. You "blow 'er out of the sky", you create a series of smaller asteroids, which come raining down on the planet, genius.

Re: I'm gonna start up my own social network

Didn't someone actually make Twatter? I seem to recall the AUP saying that only abuse was allowed.

If the iPad UI looks dated I'd guess it is only because The Apple choose to give its competitors catch up time in order to avoid monopoly wrangles.

That's the best apologist bollocks I've read since William Lane Craig. Thanks for a Monday afternoon chuckle.

(They didn't used to be like this and they are still making plenty of money so I don't see the point.)

The point is that this was always going to happen, and those people who forgot that Google are a company, rather than their best mates, are suddenly wising up to it. Google spent a lot of money on goodwill in its earlier years so that they can abuse that position later. We got a lot of really great services from it, but there is always a price. Forget that at your peril.

Re: Tested a drivers skill...

With a passenger you can break off briefly in mid sentence to do some driving stuff and they can see why you've stopped talking. A phone call has different etiquette.

First thing I say to anyone when I pick up hands-free: "I'm driving, so bear with me." Then they know why I've suddenly stopped talking halfway through a sentence.