Most people don't realize how far we've come until you go back and play those games. If I recall correctly, in Doom, there was no jumping, and you couldn't aim up and down. The only way to move vertically was going up small steps, which your character automatically walked up. The levels were all 2 dimensional. It didn't support rooms above other rooms.

See, for me, these are features, not limitations.

One set of directional controls. Look where you move where you shoot. That's controls I can have fun with.

FPSes went downhill as soon as Quake introduced mouselook, and haven't been able to interest me since.

*sigh*

Or just possibly I could be gently mocking yet another discussion assuming "online multiplayer" is synonymous with "gaming".

Why would I want to talk to a games console?

The sound for the game comes nicely out of the TV. If I'm gaming when other people in the house are trying to sleep or otherwise in need of quiet, I can just plug a regular pair of headphones into the TV.

If it's anything like the previous-generation BlackBerries, it's shockingly bad. We bought one for my wife on the strength of it having a physical keyboard, and waded through all the hand-over-your-password BIS nonsense. And, well... I guess it *might* work if you never ever want to look at your mail from anything other than your BB. Once the BB has decided what *its* view of your mailboxes is, good luck in having anything else you do via all your other (IMAP, webmail, whatever) clients have any relationship whatsoever to what you see or do on the BB.

Hello RIM? That's the *whole* *fucking* *point* of IMAP - the mail stays on the server, and I can get the same view of it from anywhere, not go through all the hoops we used to have to jump through to fake synchronisation on POP3 clients.

I've since disabled (or deconfigured, or otherwise turned off) the whole BB mail piece, and installed LogicMail, which I heartily recommend. It's a regular IMAP client, it makes IP connections to the mail server, and it all works Just Fine. If she leaves it running, it gets new mail notifications via IDLE. If she closes it, she doesn't get notifications, but it doesn't suck juice or network usage IDLEing. Her choice.

Actually, much of the BT set-up makes a whole lot of sense.

There *is* a natural monopoly in putting copper (or glass) in the ground or on poles, and the part of BT that does this is a distinct entity.

The parts of BT that sell everything from residential phone lines to corporate GigE circuits have to buy from the infrastructure part of BT on *exactly* the same terms as any other telecoms service provider. It's about as much of a level playing field as you're ever going to get...

The issue isn't around choosing a brand rather than generic "building blocks". The issue is that the plural of "Lego" is "Lego".

"LegOS" is an operating system for Lego Mindstorms.

May as well ask why you keep getting corrected when you insist on talking about multiple sheeps, gooses, or datas.

Many nouns referring to a group of individuals are plural in English where they are singular in American, for example band names. English is always "BandOfYourChoice *are* playing at...", never "is".

"The BBC" is debatable, I think - is it the singular Corporation, or the collection of people who make it up? I'd tend towards the latter, in the same way I'd expect (in English) to see "Apple are launching the new iThing 47 next week". I'd only really expect it to be singular when it's the object of the sentence - "the BBC was formed by SomeActOfParliament in XXXX..."

You're aware of this idea where you can have separate user accounts, even on the same computer, right?

Forget targetted ads - I don't want the same wallpaper as anyone else who uses the computer, I don't want the same icons, I don't want them in the same places, I don't want the same applications preferences.

We both use computers enough these days that I wouldn't want to share the hardware any more. Sharing the settings was rubbish in Windows 3.1 in 1993, let alone nearly 20 years later.

No, it isn't. It's easy. *Everything* is a /64 unless you have a really good reason why not. You should get at least a /56 for each site, for anything remotely "business-grade" a /48. You really don't have to care about numbers of hosts at all - start thinking in terms of what *networks* you need, how many of them, what your *subnet* addressing plan should look like...

It's not just more bits, it's a mindset-shift in how you design networks.

I like RPGs, platformers, etc and hate FPSes (brown or otherwise) and sports games, but I also *already* have far more unplayed games than I have time to play. Keeping a game I've finished to play again at some unspecified future time is a non-starter for me.

I have a Sky subscription. I already pay for Sky Atlantic (which shows Game of Thrones and a bunch of other HBO stuff).

If I've missed something because of a clash on the DVR (can only record two channels simultaneously), or fat-fingered deleting the episode I've just watched *and* the next one, or simply didn't know I wanted to watch a series until a few episodes in, or ran out of space on the DVR, damn right I'll torrent it.

As far as I'm concerned, morally if not legally, anything that's previously been broadcast to me, on a channel I have an active, paid subscription for is fair game. It's effectively getting someone else to do my time-shifting for me.

My bugbear with GURPS was that I could never find any advice on how to provide appropriate challenges for the players. I could see how to gauage the difficulty of a particular skill check for a known group of characters, but extrapolating from that to designing an adventure was beyond me, particularly if there was going to be any combat involved. It's a shame, it seemed a nice system...

Where are you getting cash from to "keep around" if not from an ATM? Life is far too short to waste any of it trying to get to a bank in the hours they condescend to open and then queue to withdraw cash...

In what way is paying for your own domain and hosting your own email not a good answer? Why is an "other than" needed?

FPS games are dull, so it's not an issue. Thankfully, some interesting games are still made for consoles as well.