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Comment Re:Woot! (Score 1) 92

by Spottywot (#46611931) Attached to: UK To Finally Legalize Ripping CDs and DVDs

The 85% who thought it wasn't illegal to make a backup were correct as it isn't illegal to do so. However, it was a copyright infringement to do so. So you have something you are entitled to do that is also illegal. Since your consumer rights trump a civil misdemeanour (never tested, but your rights are inviolable) no one wanted the hassle of upholdng that law.

So you agree with me then?

Comment Re:Notice this part (Score 1) 92

by Spottywot (#46611391) Attached to: UK To Finally Legalize Ripping CDs and DVDs

I'm sure no one has been stopped at copying media for personal use for a long time, but there's also this part in the end of the summary:

Besides the new private copying rights, the upcoming amendments will also broaden people’s fair use rights. For example, people no longer have to ask permission to quote from or parody the work of others, such as a news report or a book, as long as it’s “fair dealing” and the source is recognized.

That actually is good news, haven't read the details yet, but on the face of it a really positive move. Must check to see what this is designed to distract us from...

Comment Re:Irony (Score 1) 238

by Spottywot (#46190235) Attached to: CERN Wants a New Particle Collider Three Times Larger Than the LHC
I agree completely, hopefully it works and we can all carry on as normal, unfortunately I think Dice have spent too much money on this to let it go. We will be sold out to the advertisers like every other free site on the web. The monetization of everything eventually fucks everything. There will be no safe harbour anywhere for long until either the nature of humanity changes, or the nature of the economy does. I know which one of those is more likely, but even that is a long hard road that no-one wants to take the first steps down at the moment.

Comment Re:Where is the opinion survey ? (Score 1) 2219

by Spottywot (#46180447) Attached to: Slashdot Tries Something New; Audience Responds!
I was directed to the beta site the other day on a work computer and I honestly thought I had been directed to the mobile site, and I only put up with the mobile site because it's too much hassle to load up the full site every single time. I've been there once since on purpose just to see if it really was that terrible, and frankly yes it is. If your attempt to appeal to a wider audience drives away your estabished, core audience-who by the way are your content creators- you are doing it very very wrong.

Submission + - AMD To release Mantle drivers today. Battlefield 4 patch released. (hexus.net)

Submitted by Spottywot
Spottywot writes: While there were some reports flying around about further delays of the Battlefield 4 Mantle patch it has been delivered on time today by DICE. The necessary AMD Catalyst 14.1 beta drivers — to get Mantle optimisations to work — are yet to be released publically but are expected to be available later today.

Johan Andersson, one of the Technical Directors in the Frostbite team, said about the update: "Battlefield 4 on PC is already quite heavily optimized using DirectX 11 and DirectX 11.1, but with Mantle we are able to go even further: we’ve significantly reduced CPU cost in our rendering, efficiently parallelized it over multiple CPU cores and reduced overhead in many areas." Andersson added that the best performance gains are observed when a game is bottlenecked by the CPU "which can be quite common even on high-end machines".
DICE did a "couple of benchmarks" using Battlefield 4 on a variety of configurations. With an AMD A10-7850K 'Kaveri' APU Mantle provides a 14 per cent improvement, on a system with an AMD FX-8350 and Radeon 7970 Mantle provides a 25 per cent boost, while on an Intel Core i7-3970x Extreme system with 2x AMD Radeon R9 290x cards a huge 58 per cent performance increase was observed.

Comment Re:Barrier to prevent a crash (Score 1) 296

Unfortunately Microsoft seem to be looking to looking to emulate Apple by taking a cut on every piece of software released for the platform, and raising the barriers for entry for indie developers in the process.

How is an entry barrier necessarily unfortunate? Entry barriers exist for a large part to prevent conditions like those that led to the 1983 crash.

It's quite simple, the market for computer games was very naive back then, people believed hyperbolic quotes on the back of games, and the misleading screenshots and cover art. We are now dealing with at least 2 generations of tech savvy consumers, and poor games simply won't sell, it's not like poor releases can taint the industry anymore on the same scale as the early days of cheap computing. Barriers to entry enforced by dominating entities such as Microsoft just mean that they get to define the playing field to suit themselves, whereas more competition means the playing field has more of a chance of being defined by the consumer or developer.

Comment Re: Explain (Score 1) 296

Unfortunately Microsoft seem to be looking to looking to emulate Apple by taking a cut on every piece of software released for the platform, and raising the barriers for entry for indie developers in the process. I think that the competition for their traditional gaming market by players such as Steam has the potential to persuade Microsoft not to backtrack on their previous business model. Either we get what we have been used to as gamers and developers from Microsoft, or we have a new place to go which is based on Linux. I really don't see the problem here.

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