So long as Duke Nukem Forever has been released
I don't mind.
117 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jun 2007
RAID mirroring is all well and good, but I'm also concerned about putting all my eggs in one basket WRT the device being stolen or fire damaged. Ideally I'd like to be able to buy two identical single-drive NAS units and set them up so that one is the slave/copy of the other. Whatever I copy to the master gets copied over the network to the other one (ideally using intelligence to wait until I appear to have finished copying to the master before the master starts sending to the slave). OK, so it won't be realtime, but it'll be more than good enough for most scenarios. That way I can put one backup drive in the study and the slave drive somewhere more secure or obscure in the house, in the loft or something.
Does anyone do something like this?
"Baker believes that the virtual keyboard’s full potential will only be realised if it’s integrated into every area of the iPhone that uses a keyboard, such as SMS and email, rather than developed as a standalone application. For this to happen, he requires Apple’s aid, something he described as "very difficult to get"
er.. support that isn't required to implement a different keyboard for Windows Mobile. I guess now that he's told everyone his idea, we can expect a flurry of triangular keyboards for WM. Perhaps he should have implemented it there before attempting his patent!
"At this point, Athol cop Todd Neale had the bright idea of tracking the pair using the mobile phone - a technique made possible by legislation which since 2005 "
Why is this a "bright idea"? Surely since it's been possible for over 3 years, it should be standard procedure in cases like this!
Fake news stories which are clearly spam. The spammers shoot themselves in the foot sometimes simply by overdoing it. One story on its own might seem feasible, but when you get a batch like the following, it all looks rather silly.
Nicole Kidman loses baby in miscarriage
JFK closed after bomb threat
Madonna admits to adultery
Britney in coma, feared dead
Amy Winehouse hospitalised for drug overdose
OK, so the last one is a lot more feasible...
..it's unlikely to really work once these things are everywhere because you'll never know which gantry is paired with which and they don't even really need to be paired, you could have three cameras A, B and C and it could work out your average speed between A and B, and also B and C, but also A and C.
Clearly you guys don't understand the problem. IE8 *is* standards compliant and enforces the standards as people have been bleating about. Unfortunately this means that sites that *aren't* properly compliant won't work, since they only ever worked because previous versions of IE jumped through hoops to render their stuff despite the problems with the site. If the sites can't fix their code then they're encouraged to add this tag so that IE8 will still use the old rendering engine which doesn't strictly enforce standards and does the same pre-IE8 behaviour of dealing with their bad code.
Microsoft are absolutely on the ball with this one, and they're doing totally the right thing. If you think they aren't then you probably don't understand the problem.
They should get thrown out of court unless they can prove that they actually developed and retailed a competing product. The lawsuit should represent losses that they can prove (or even explain) that they have incurred. Otherwise it's just too easy to patent squat, and simply register patents for whatever captures the imagination and in the vaguest terms possible, for a product that you've no chance or intention of ever building.
I might just go an register a patent for a "thing" that "does stuff".
"So you’d expect the latest firmware update for the console to fix the problem, right?"
I don't think I'd expect a firmware update for the hardware to fix a specific problem in a single software title, no. A software update patch perhaps, but not a console firmware update.
"Yesterday we reported one theory from Reg reader Gary who pointed out that Microsoft appears to have left key updates out of the automatic version of SP3 (316MB), given that it’s missing 238MB compared to the manual .ISO version of the service pack (554MB)."
When you download a service back from Windows Update, it only downloads that which is relevant to the machine it's being applied to. When you download an ISO which is burned to a CD and subsequently used to update all manner of different PCs, then it of course has to contain the superset of all possible updates required. Of course, for any given PC, a similar amount of the total update is applied as would be downloaded from Windows Update.
Vista is supposedly slower/bloated. It must have so much code in it to validate parameters and data over and over again as its manipulated in memory in case it gets injected with malware crafted data. Long gone are the days where you could make assumptions about the calling patterns of your methods because your methods are private and supposedly will only get called from known internal sources. Without all this checking required because of the bloody malware crims, Vista could probably run considerably faster.
"But more worrying is that when these new games stick 5Gb files onto your internal hard drive every time, it makes Sony's decision to drop the 60Gb model in favour of a 40Gb even more inexplicable than before"
The PS3 is designed such that the HDD is easily upgradable. The menus include options to backup and restore the entire thing to a USB drive and the HDD itself is behind a little plastic panel on the side and requires a single screw to remove it. My '40gb' PS3 has a 250gb hard drive in it. It really was trivial to do.
I doubt it'll be £400, unless there's more in the box than has been mentioned. It would be considerably cheaper to just buy the console and game seperately. A similar boxed bundle for Gran Turismo 5 is £290 on Amazon.
"£400 on the PS3+GTA4....Or £200 on the XBOX360+GTA4"
Heh, you could buy two 360's instead of the one PS3! Which is just as well, so you can continue playing when the first one goes RRoD...
"...and the developers say they like the 360 version better as it will have downloadable episodes".
As I understand it, the PS3 will also have downloadable episodes, but fewer because some will be financed directly by Microsoft ($50 mil apparently!!), and therefore constrained to be exclusive to the 360. I suspect the 360's exclusive stuff will arrive first too.
Of course, you also can't rule out Sony agreeing a similar deal and there ending up being PS3-only episodes too. With a HDD guaranteed to be in *every* unit (unlike the 360), and a *free* online system, the PS3 platform suits download content much better since a much higher percentage of users will be set up for it.
These things always do. It's not just Windows, it's not just PC stuff, but most software that's gone through a number of revisions over the years require more power than earlier versions which leads to bigger hardware requirements.
Just how many of you are going to be buying GTA4 for the PS2 then?
"Having played the Wii I'll admit that it is amazing, innovative and creative... for about 2 weeks. After that it's an awfully poor games console that's more of a gimmick"
He's right. The games that sell the Wii consoles are easy to pick up but as a result, they have no depth and soon lose their appeal. Sure the family all played Wii Sports on Christmas day, but how often does the unit get touched these days? The controllers, whilst innovative, introduce a level of randomness and luck that doesn't reward continuous play/practice. Remember how lame it was when a beginner could mash the buttons in Tekken and beat someone who'd played it for months? That's the Wii games all over. Wii Pro Evo looks interesting though, and has the level of practice=reward that Wii games need to introduce.
I think a stat of the number of games sold per console would be interesting. I suspect it would be quite high for the 360 (maybe average 8-10 and increasing), followed by PS3 (ave 4-5 or so and increasing), followed by the Wii (1-2 and static).
Sorry mate, but you did that "M$" thing, which means your comments instantly have no credibility whatsoever. However, to reply, there's nothing to suggest that Sony have asked BBC to do the work, quite the opposite in fact, it's that Sony want to encapsulate it themselves that BBC don't like.
"When asked to pick the three most likely actions they would take if they found a memory stick in public, 55 per cent said they would view the data"
A study was done about this a while back (I perhaps read it on The Register in the first place), where someone deliberately infected a bunch of USB pens with specially crafted malware which simply phoned home when executed. He then threw them over the fence and into the car park of various large companies. Most of them ended up being executed as a result of employees plugging them in. Almost all of them plugged them straight into their work PC too.
Personally I use TrueCrypt on my pen so if I lose it, it just appears to be broken. It's a *little* bit more hassle to use, requiring the TC software to be on each machine that needs it, but it's definitely worth it if you value the security of your data.