Steam and mainstream publishers often engage in classic skimming pricing, start and work their way down to nearly free. We're currently at the point where so many games are at pocket money prices that there seems to be little incentive for gamers to actually buy at the top end of the price range, indie games aren't driving this the mainstream publishers and distributors are, but the indie developers have very little choice but to participate else they face being priced out the market. The problem as far as I see it is that the race to the bottom starts very quickly; Super Meat Boy for instance was released on the PC at around £12 but within three months had reduced it's price to a quarter in a Steam sale to £3. Anyone who did actually buy at full price did so either because of their anticipation of the title or their good will towards indie developers, much of that goodwill could be eroded by deep discounts so soon after release, some people who purchased at full may have not even played the game yet. It's one thing to gain new customers by deep discount it's another to have people who will pay full price feel cheated.

I'm reasonably competent at my job and managed to persuade the managers at the company that they liked their infrastructure to be on. I used to get stressed when there was an electrical storm, the infrastructure I inherited couldn't cope with a power outage, blip or heat wave. Now we've put all the necessary in place I can sleep soundly and I can leave it unattended apart from backups for a couple of weeks, safe in the knowledge there's another guy an hour away who know's how to sort it out if someone drives into the Aircon unit or there's a complete power blackout.

Perhaps when you've been in a situation where the fundamentals are just not there it's puts the rest of it into perspective.

Absolutely you need to define the policy before you go out and purchase a product. The majority of the policy iso9001 policy doucments for my company were held on a plain old file server until someone thought sharepoint was a good idea. In both Sharepoint and file server the permissions are restricted to editing by 'gatekeepers' only, the advantage of Sharepoint is simply that it fronts out onto the web and therefore much more convenient to access externally.

The Conserative party seem to have en masse abstained only 9 of their members even thought it was important enough to actually vote, with 4 for and 5 against. This is blantant electioneering on their part, it is now difficult to tell their position on the subject and shows complete contempt for one of the most important issues presented to parliament in the 'washout' and the people they represent. My MP David Davis voted against and this leaves my confounded, although he has a good grasp of the issues around liberty and freedom of speech in the UK he will vote in to government a party that clearly does not have the grasp on the political issues or is even willing to actually represent their constituents opinions in parliament.

Lord Clement Jones has replied to critism of the ammendment
http://www.libdemvoice.org/digital-economy-bill-web-blocking-lib-dems-18165.html

To sum up he argues that; this is only an addition to existing power of copyright holders in the UK and simply clarifies their role in the process.

I do think he misses the point however that this ammendment puts emphasis on the ISPs which provide any service that can access this material rather than those which host the material. It's one step closer to to a great firewall of the UK, I think this has been missed by commentators who have compared it to the DMCA and the vitriol in their critcism has somewhat distorted the issue.

Although they don't use the same language many writing in the Guardian hold the same opinion as the Daily Mail of ID cards, cctv, and the police state. If both of these papers they're probably right, indeed you'll struggle to find many sources in the British media that agree with the government's tightening burgeoning arsenal of powers and technology it is using against it's own citizens. A sign that we're not quite living in a police state just yet and it's up to us vote for a party in next spring's election that will reel in some of these powers. As much as it pains me to say it; vote anyone but Labour even the Tories would do.

We've all heard stories of old Windows 95/98 computers running a "business critical" function on obscure software using even obscurer hardware. We've surely going to see this in infinitely larger proportions once XP starts pushing up daises, sure if you're lucky and driver model doesn't count out your device then Windows 7 might play ball but beyond Windows 7; emulation of XP might well become patchy. ReactOS if successful could provide a patched up-to-date OS for legacy applications / hardware and although it'll never be up with the latest hotness from Microsoft could also provide a very stable and familiar corporate desktop for many organisations, who let's face it are afraid of technological progress.

Pulseaudio should be taken outside and shot. I too thought we'd put the troubles behind us but on upgrading to 9.10 I found everything and gone completely to pot again with no audio at all. ALSA at least plays sound but the start up sounds don't quite chime correctly, now I know at some point I'll want to get the thing working again because Pulseaudio has some useful features. However I do have to wonder if Ubuntu's priorities right at all, I shouldn't have to dive into config files and command-line just to get sound working. Please Canonical just get sound working for everyone, once that's done you can worry about the positioning and colour of the notification dialogue.

Oink is not up and runnning as Ellis' computer equipment was taken as evidence by the police and returned with the hard drives returned. It's amazing to think that Oink pulled in so much money from donations, a site like that could be quite lucrative for the record industry if they found a way to legitmise the business model. But alas only pirates and certain indie record labels will ever get sharing music.

Perhaps it's an experience thing, rather than any sort of trend. I guess I count as part of the so called 'net generation' and I used to multi-task a lot; instant messaging, blogging, playing games, studying etc all at the same time. Around the time I was at university my behaviour changed, I think mainly because I didn't want to screw up my degree. To me some of the observations made in the original article sound like the naivety of youth rather than anything actually heavy weight. They demand instant responses because they are impatient and immature, they use instant messaging because they want instant responses.

It would be interesting to see what previous studies on information behaviour has found, I'm pretty sure I read studies with similar results but they were focused on the 'Net generation'.

No the first challenge was to post as many pictures of cats and biscuit recipes as possible to the cloud as possible. This challenge is still underway, by the time it has been completed everyone will have forgotten what the fuss over 'cloud computing' was all about and moved on to the next big IT craze and not actually implement any sound long term businesses in the 'cloud'.

Such is the power of IT marketing, ooooooooo look a pretty flower...

We already have a number of MVNOs in the UK (we had them before the EU started to promote them); Tesco and Virgin spring to mind but the question remains whether they are having a significant effect on the market, they don't seem to have taken a significant market share just yet. If the merger is let through it may well be on the back of mandatory provision (rate + terms) for MVNO by the merged company.

In 2007 we had 71 million handsets in the UK and the BBC think that the combined company would have 37% market share. It doesn't look like this would be classed as a monopoly however we could be well on our way to a cartel with only O2 and Vodafone in position to be competitive with the new merged company and 3 basically tied to the new company because of their extensive Network sharing with T-Mobile.

Both the EU and UK (Competition Commission and/or Ofcom) regulators will be paying a great deal of attention to the merger, given the high barriers of entry to the market place (i.e. it's not really possible) and the low number of competitors.

The bbc created specific version for the iplayer adapted to the older version of flash on the Wii. I'm sure the bbc iplayer programmers are retreating to their coding den right this minute to get an update together...

I honestly can't believe this article is even being discussed, there is absolutely no substance in the story at all. It's typical a typical Daily Fail story, when there's nothing to hate make something up. It's so ridiculously easy to spot, here's a quick checklist.

The 'idea' is so clearly unworkable and they provide so few details as to how it might be function to leave it entirely up to the imagination of the reader as to how it might work.

The opposition MP they quote isn't even talking about the non-existent proposal, he's talking about something only tenuously related to the issue at hand.

The non-political expert in this case from Google appears completely bemused by the story.

There's absolutely no quotes from a minister, ruling party mp, or government advisor with any clout in the area and to top that the low ranking spokesman who put their looney tunes story to flatly denied it. Then of course he would deny it, he works for the government they're all in on the conspiracy to tax is into oblivion.

The run a story like this everyday if even half of them were true; I'd be taxed 110% of my income.