Opera Mini, Emulated. Seriously!

Without attempting to depreciate his work and Apple's importance, the Apple II was not quite as relevant in other countries. Popularizing of computers took a slightly different path in some other countries, especially the UK, so beware the generalizing statements. RIP Mr Jobs. :(

Lust for reference, you have actually tried it haven't you?

My experience was different. I gave a few demo games a go on a wee lil netbook. Worked a treat. I was very impressed with the graphics quality and lack of lag.

I was ready to slag it off, but it actually worked well. If I could afford it, I'd happily subscribe - cheaper than maintaining a big gaming PC.

Perhaps I'm missing something, but I don't see a correlation with the TV digital switchover in the states?

Different technical system, different spacing of population, different time scale, different plan of attack. Plus different population spacing even means the suitability of FM versus AM is different, plus I guess you don't, primarily, have national FM stations? Our digital radio, DAB, is a crap early failed experiment in attempting to replace our national coverage FM stations with an inferior digital system that just never quite worked even though it's had many many years to succeed and there's been a lot of money pushing people to change over. Decoding 2k (?) channels is always going to be more energy costly than decoding 2 I would have thought, and given the importance of cheap reliable tiny portable radios vs the larger expensive battery guzzling digital ones, I can't ever see it becoming a prefered system for everyday people unless they are given no choice.

We chose an early inadequate system, that's been abused and stretched beyond it's limits, implemented far too early on. Even with the codec upgrades in DAB+ I still can't see it making enough difference. It's a poor solution for a non existant problem! Xxx

PS As I type, we're entering the final stages of our TV digital switchover too - that's a whole other conversation though!

...much more efficient swap space! :) This sounds great.

I know it doesn't need to be erased in bulk, but does it need to be written in bulk, or does it have limited read or write cycles?

Ironic given IBMs role in their invention!

(TL;DR Hardcore > FPS)

They made a fortune from people who are traditionally non-gamers, they aren't stupid.

Don't assume that the kind of titles on the PS3 and XBox 360 suit *all* hardcore gamers.

There's a currently untapped market out there of console gamers who aren't especially FPS obsessed, folk who the current gen consoles have failed. Much like the way that the Wii panders to the low flying fruit of the cutesy tree, the PS3 & 360 are stuck in a an unoriginality rut. There was more gaming variation on the N64, PSX and PS2 than has been produced for the 360. Even the original XBox had a wider selection of titles (mine's still going strong as my media box, xbmc4xbox rox! :)

I've been gaming and coding since the Atari 2600. Yet I've found my purchase of a 360 to be a wee bit disappointing to be frank, as I'm not obsessed with team-based headshots the selection is a bit weak.

Halo 3 was a total pile of shit (sorry, and yes I finished it.) Oblivion was brilliant, but was just more of the same of Morrowind. Orange box was good, but I've always enjoyed the Half-Life series - exception to my FPS rule. Fallout 3 and New Vegas are addictive but just too dark and FPSy for me, plus they.re more addictive than they are fun really.

There's a few okayish Arcade games, but they.re too damned expensive for my pockets - disc based games have the advantage of dropping in price over the years and have second hand markets.

Where's the in depth original stuff?

As a older hardcore gamer I'm feeling really failed by this console generation (of consoles.) :(

J x

Just had a look...

Ah, yes! 11000 miles, measured from the centre of the earth, versus...

8000 miles measured from the surface of the earth.

At these distances, the earth's radius is not negligable! HTH.

Those figures actually don't quite add up, by 1 thousand, presumably due to the rounding up and down to nearest thousand.

That's deceptively close, 8000 miles is the diameter of the earth. This thing is only gonna miss us by an earths width!

I don't think they realised when they said "Sorry for the spam email you may have received. We have NOT sold any data" that their statement makes things more worrying... if this wasn't an authorised use, surely it can only mean an unauthorised use, i.e. hack? Given operation antisec, and that I've used their site many times to pre-pay for rooms, it's a wee bit worrying!

At least they've been pretty responsive, head office and customer services both called back quickly and took it seriously! ::Sigh::

No, no, no! You've got it arse over tit. Piles of babies is a good thing. They're a very nutricious food source, especially BBQd. :)

PS Has anyone got a spare handcart I could borrow?

I would say that science is faith with good reason.

Religious faith is faith without reason.

Yowsers. You've so put me off installing Linux again in future. Mind you, this all exemplifies why I got out of programming. Stopped being a purely logic game, stopped being fun.

Ah! Do you know what happens if you add lots of shielding to try to stop a high speed particle from causing a single bit error? :) Apparently it turns one high speed particle into a shedload of other slightly slower but still stupidly fast particles, that instead cause a shedload of bit errors. (IANARS but I knew one once, and I made the same assumption as you til he corrected me! :) )

... and for other British geeks, he was one of the folk that made the BBC Micro!