Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Uh, what's the problem? (Score 2) 242

And if you're a developer that does anything in a non-windows environment, you should have some sort of git account, because you should be using git.

Even if you're a Windows developer, you should have a git account and you should be using git. Even Microsoft are doing development work in the open using GitHub.

Comment Re:Jury Deliberation went something like this: (Score 1) 151

Juror 1: "If we say this patent is valid, they'll take our internet away!" Jurors: "Hell no!" Juror 1: "I guess we should shoot the breeze for a couple hours so they will think we thought hard about this."

Replace "internet" with "Facebook"

Replace "Facebook" with "Farmville"

Comment Re:Battery drain (Score 1) 64

Yeah, it's definately a battery drain as it uses GPS at regular intervals to work out where you are; however, I'm going to keep running it as long as I can as there's an outside chance that this data might be able to convince certain operators (*cough* Vodafone *cough*) that their coverage in my area is not as wonderful as they claim it is.

Comment Re:Not sure about the point (Score 1) 406

I recently discovered the joys of Subsonic; I have the Android client installed on my phone, and the iSub client on my iPod and the Subsonic server running on an old system at home. I now have a single repository for all of my music that I can access pretty much 100% of the time - if I know I'll be listening to, say, some Penguin Cafe Orchestra during the day I can select the album in the Android client and download it straight to the phone over my local WiFi before leaving home in about five seconds flat - I can even set the client to force the server to resample the files to a maximum bitrate if I'm connected via 3G. All of this means I can access whichever album/track I want to listen to out of my 500Gb (and growing) collection and store it in one place.

Comment Re:Tech Evangelist Upton Sinclair (Score 1) 609

(Upton Sinclair, if you've never heard of him, was the coinventor of the Timex Sinclair -- he's not as well remembered as Wozniak, Jobs, or Gates, but he's far more quotable.)

Clever trick for a man who died in 1968...

The quote is definitely from Upton Sinclair (the American author), but you're conflating him with Clive Sinclair

Comment Re:I haven't paid for one yet. (Score 1) 323

I've also lost download history, and really don't trust the Market to remember me through every OTA upgrade, custom ROM, and system wipe. Sorry, color me cynical, but it can't remember the free stuff.

The Market does definitely remember any purchases you make; I made the transition from an HTC Magic to an HTC Legend last year, and have flashed both devices with several ROMs in the process.

Whatever I've purchased is always listed on the My Apps tab.

User Journal

Journal Journal: c: an obstacle of our own creation? 2

I must admit that it was difficult to wrap my layman head around the idea of 'time travel'. My reading (and watching, thanks to an online friend of mine who will know who he is should he read this) involved many presentations involving metre sticks, clocks, pythagorean triangulation and space travel - or in other words, 'time dilation'. I get the concept, but there's something about the theory's point of view, if not its motivation, that bothers me.

Comment Windows Live Family Safety (Score 1) 742

My kids have Windows Live Family Safety installed on the PC that they have access to; I can remotely deny or allow access to websites and check their browsing behaviour no matter if they're using IE, FireFox or Chrome. I can even use it to restrict how much time they're spending playing games - although their machine is in the front room where both my wife and I can see what they're up to - and all Messenger friend requests have to be vetted by me.

It's not that I don't trust my kids - I do - but I don't trust the wider internet, and they're simply too young to be given unfettered access.

Comment Re:The Curse Of Real Life (Score 2, Insightful) 341

Apologies for replying to my own post, but the more I think about it something else occurs to me:

Back in my ZX Spectrum / BBC Micro gaming days, the availability of games was lower than it is now; I remember playing games to death simply because I'd spent the time and effort going down to my local WHSmith and forking over the £10.00 for a cassette. The other factor was the time and effort required simply to play the damn things; remember how long it took to actually load the game into your home micro from tape? Fiddling around with the head because the damn thing would fail to load after 10 minutes of waiting?

Nowadays, gaming is so instant and available that there isn't the compulsion to stick at a single game and see it through to completion

Comment The Curse Of Real Life (Score 4, Insightful) 341

I can't speak for anyone else, but the main reason why I rarely complete games these days is 'Real Life'; much as my disposable income has disappeared with the arrival of children, so has my disposable time. Years ago I could fritter away hours at a stretch playing Civilisation, but no more. It's very rare that a game comes along these days that I can muster the enthusiasm for to invest time and effort in to complete.

The last game that I played through from beginning to end was "Enslaved: Oddesey To The West", which was an almost perfect title for me; the overall length of the game was quite short (the whole thing was completed over a couple of evenings), the learning curve for the controls was slight and it had a character-led story that I actually wanted to see through to the end. Generally though the sequence goes something like:

  • Purchase new game and play for a few evenings when time permits
  • Real Life gets in the way and game is not booted for a few weeks
  • Arcane control system needs to be relearned
  • Plot has become lost in the mists of time
  • Cannot be bothered to retrain muscle memory / relearn the plot (such that it is), so game goes back on the shelf

GTA IV is sitting on my hard drive, barely touched - I liked what I played, but I just don't have the time to spend on it. Likewise Left 4 Dead, Mass Effect 2, Arkham Asylum and so on. It took me at least three attempts to finish Bioshock (and I'm really glad that I did), but that's one of the few exceptions. Nowadays I'm finding myself playing more and more 'casual' games (Cut The Rope, Angry Birds, Plants vs. Zombies mostly) rather than 'serious' titles - maybe after the kids leave home and before arthritis fuses my hands into impossible shapes I'll get time to play properly again.

Comment Re:Seriously? (Score 1) 391

Ditto; I absolutely loathe iTunes. When I got given an iPod Touch for my 40th a couple of months ago, I installed iTunes in a VirtualBox XP instance so I could activate the iPod without having it installing all its crud in my primary OS. Personally I use the dopisp plugin for Windows Media Player which works beautifully. I might consider trying iTunes again if it ever supported automatic folder monitoring properly as WMP does; all my music is on a shared folder on my network, and any changes are replicated in WMP almost immediately, but iTunes has no such facility.

Slashdot Top Deals

If you teach your children to like computers and to know how to gamble then they'll always be interested in something and won't come to no real harm.

Working...