I'd say that's too high, my friends are huge fans of CoD and so I have played all of the call of duty's and it doesn't look like the game designer is playing the game because of the the massive problems for the game on the PS3.

My biggest issue has to do with player profiles, on modern warfare 2 importing them from anouther PS3 meant you lost the ability to earn trophies. On Black Ops you can't have multiple profiles, it simply spawns an identical version of the main account. Me and my friends like to get together and play games this aspect of CoD games sucks horribly even resistance 2 did better.

Every iteration of CoD has this problem, and Black Ops has just added the need to sit through 10 loading screens to do anything and everytime you go back to the main menu you have to run the system calibration tests. Let not forget most offline co-op games are now limited to two people for no reason. The only good thing about that game is Zombies.

I thought the Nano along with the iPhone 4 showed an Apple running out of steam.

The new nano has a small screen and I'm sure has made a lot of people go wow! But has completely lost the point of the old nano. It requires more button presses to use and forces the user to look at the screen. Most people seem to use nano's in places like the gym or the car. Adding a touch screen is a disadvantage in those locations. They would have been better off keeping the old nano form factor and increasing the storage.

Likewise the new iPhone 4 seems more what would happen if HTC designed an iPhone. The typical flare for styling present in apple devices doesn't seem to exist in that phone. It's all retinal display, megapixels, video calling, etc.. Which would be fine but the new iPhone isn't that impressive when you compare the specifications with other phones.

Then again I dislike apple products for a host of reasons. But do wonder if I'm right when some of my friends who are fan boys/girls show dislike for the iPad and Nano.

You must be in the US, in the UK wondering into my town centre I can put my hands on it in a O2 store and a Carphone Warehouse.

For an idea of it works try the N8, the interfaces are very similar however the N900 is quicker and the interface is better (think the best parts of Andriod added in). I had a quick look online and the video found here gives a pretty good impression of how it works.

The only downside is it is a heavy phone. For comparison I have a Nokia 5800 the N900 is slightly larger and noticeably heavier.

Why? BP is half American, the rig was run by Americans, the safety mechanism was turned off by Americans, the rig was built by Americans. They followed American standards, yes BP should have properly overseen matters but American Government could not stop falsey referring to BP as British Petrolium so people wouldn't think any Americans were to blame.

How did the exCEO of BP talk himself out of a job? What I saw was a bunch of politicians chase down a British CEO because it would look good with the voters. They didn't perform an inquiry but instead created a stage so they could attack him.

The cynic in me also wonders if forcing out a British CEO for the American who was in charge of the spill area, was done to protect Oil interests (like Iraq). Especially since BP owned up to the spill and have already compensated people while Exxon haven't paid a dime.

I also wonder if Americans realise how much bad will they gained from British public in doing such a thing. Personally I thought Obama's handling showed he was worse than Bush.

I don't know if a creator/god exists but the idea that it would give us higher reasoning skills and then punish us for using them scares the hell out of me.

Most parenting books would argue such behaviour is damaging for a child. Why is it suddenly ok for a creator\god?

True, but in my limited experience people who write inefficient Java code, would write inefficient C++ code and people who write bad code will write bad code in any language, there are more bad Java programmers than C++ because its easier to learn (pointers).

The most common problem I've seen with inefficient Java code is iterating through arrays and lists. That problem wouldn't go away just by using C++.

Java has things like Checkstyle, PMD, Findbugs, etc.. which are free and can be integrated into your IDE. These tools provide management metrics and force proper practices making it easier to do it right. I'd love to know of some C++ equivalents.

Java isn't that much slower than C++ these days, if you do it right Java/C++ performance is so close as to not matter.

It's also more maintainable, has better frameworks and you don't have lots of beginner/intermediate level programmers introducing memory holes left, right and center.

Saying all that I work for a company which has invested millions into Java applications. Considering how Oracle has been acting the tech leads are pushing to moving us back to C++.

Except I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft ran Coverity as part of their build process. I am surprised Google don't.

Where I work any project which is updated has a coverity run performed on it overnight. While Coverity isn't perfect and it can be confused it is a good bit of software.

I agree, I maintain all my family's computers. Some of those people are terrifying with computers.

When doing this sort of thing your doing it as a favour to them. Setup the PC so it is secure and leave basic instructions. If they can't follow them or ignore the work you've done let them pay someone to fix it. Then they start to appreciate what your doing for them, or they become happy paying someone to fix their screw ups.

You forgot Rule 34 of the internet, if you can imagine it there is porn of it

You realise that's complete non-sense right? I did Computer Engineering (think Electrical Engineering degree with a software programming module instead of digital filter module, and a software project management module instead of microwave electronics pt 2).

I choose my degree because I was uncertain if I wanted to be electrical or software, in the end I choose software because I'm good at it. Spending hours on a software problem wasn't as tedious as spending hours on a Electronics problem. Most of my friends did Electonic and Electrical Degrees and moved into robotics, antenna design, etc.. They hated software programming with a passion, I'm probably the most technology geeky one of the bunch.

People do what makes them happy, people enjoy what they are good at.

Open Office twice as fast? Are you going to try and tell me Firefox is the fastest browser as well?

My personal issue with Open Office is that it is slow to intially load and looks like something from the windows 95 era. But I always place it on a home systems as a backup to MS Office. The only time I've forced non-techy relatives to use it (because of licensing issues) they have argued with me and managed to run into bug after bug and in the end I get so fed up of being shouted and moaned at, that I bring out my dog eared copy of Microsoft Office XP and install that.

Although to give a few samples of the problems I've seen, my little sister copies images in to word before printing them most school kids do. When you reach about 20Mb's worth of images Writer crashes. My workplace makes use of excel spreadsheet as part of our process management (there are several hundred of them) they use VBA scripts and/or a lot of Excels functionality. Not a single one works in Open Office nor is there a way to do what we do in Calc. My Dad tried Calc for a full month, he has no knowledge of VBA and has built a lot of Excel Spreadsheets which function perfectly in Excel 2000 - 2010, in his month he found Calc wasn't performing operations, randomly deleted cells and crashed a lot. Since that month he went and purchased a copy of Office 2007 Standard and a VBA book because "Excel just works".

Your point about re-training costs is mute, the company I work for is going to roll out Office 2007 in 6 months, so 6 months ago they started a scheme giving every employee who wanted one a free copy of MS Office 2007. The cost of the licenses is minimal and they get to avoid training staff, to be honest I can't really see any re-training costs going from Office 2003 to Libre Office. Your arguement about formats is pure fud.

Open Office is not a replacement for Office, I would like it to be but it isn't.

It's not harder to read well written C++ code than Java, however it is easier to read badly written Java than medicore C++.

It's my one issue with C++ code, with Java our workplace has a development environment with Checkstyles, Code Formatters and analysis tools like PMD and find bugs. It makes even the new graduates code readable and fairly standard. I've never found anything like that for C\C++.

A company that deployed Phorm on its network without telling is users*, who before this data breech wern't even challenging the requests from ACS:Law and a company whose in house legal department were giving out user information unencrypted in violation of the data protection act.

Sounds a great company to show your support to, I'd be more inclined to support Talk Talk or Virgin since they actually fight to keep there customers privacy. BT and Sky are just back peddling so they don't look so bad in the media.

*European Commission has just brought legal charges against the UK government for not prosecuting BT over the privacy invasion that was Phorm.