Interesting how popular Costco are there. We have them in the UK and it's a VERY exclusive club, you have to either own a business or work for the government before they'll even think about letting you shop there.

Well I was going to say the Europe/London zone as that'd be more accurate, but actually doing away with moving the clocks back and forth an hour would be quite handy...

There'd be a lot of fuss for a while over 2pm in one zone being afternoon and in another zone being early morning...

Suppose we could use Swatch Internet Time (remember that?)

Indeed. Our silly American friends and their habit of naming things differently :D

And my definition is basically 1st September as despite any official (and complicated) definitions I consider the seasons to be March/April/May, June/July/August, September/October/November and December/January/February

Seems to work out well - think it was the 1st that I first had to wear a coat again.

But you also get summery days, like today.

Sort of like QWERTY touch typing, but without any sort of structure

It's more like my fingers learned it over 25 years.

fucking hell, if we've pretty much given up on space, commercialise it. That will get us out there!

(I'm serious)

o_o

Well, it explains why Slashdot has always been so Pro-Apple!

Kidding about coincidences aside, best wishes to Rob. That parting message got to me a lot more than the Steve Jobs thing (and I'm an Apple fan), particularly the thing about us all being nerds together. *salute*

1997... it seems like yesterday. I feel so old!

Generally there are the good 2G networks that have rather lackluster 3G networks (O2, Vodafone)
And vice versa (The others)

But T-Mobile uses 3's 3G network (which I consider easily the best) and a combined T-Mobile+Orange 2G network (not as good as Vodafone's 2G coverage but really not bad at all). Seems a really good all-rounder. And they have nice modern Twitter based support where they actually answer you.

This.

I get annoyed when people use, shall we say, "creative interpretation" to claim that video games cause violence... whilst it's nice to balance it out with the opposite, it'd be kind of hypocritical to support this method of jumping to conclusions just because it's suddenly in our favour.

Perhaps a move to re-releasing classics will prove more fruitful than high development cost MMORPGs?

Isn't that pretty much all they've been doing tons of already?

But they keep insisting on remaking crap like FF2j.

What they should probably do is something like
1) Remake Final Fantasy VII
2) ????
3) Profit!

People have been screaming and shouting for an FFVII remake for 10+ years. There are people who would sell their souls to Sony for a remake of that game. Yet they're absolutely adamant that it's never going to happen. There's a market here waiting to give them full high-end retail prices for a game that is already done and just needs a graphical revamp.. take the money!!

I think there are quite a few who wouldn't mind a remake of VI either.

It's all well and good saving an FFVII remake for a "special occasion" but that's never going to happen if S-E go bankrupt.

Either that or go back to making *new* FFs that don't suck. For that they'll probably need Sakaguchi back (preferably Uematsu too)

Natty is actually a Cheetah because it's copying Tiger :)

Only 11 more Ubuntu releases then they'll be at Zealous Zebra and in need a new naming convention...

With all this backlash, it'd be incredibly short-sighted of Canonical not to AT LEAST significantly improve Unity - enough to tame the hatred it's garnered.

Sticking to their decisions won't do them much good if everyone has moved on to some other highly compatible Debian derivative as an easier alternative to tweaking their apt sources to some unofficial GNOME repository and trying to maintain it as an option.

Also, they tend to do these "usability studies" where they conclude feature X was only used by 5% of the users, and feature Y by 3%, so it must be OK to sacrifice them on the altar of simplicity. But everyone has a different X or Y they use, so eventually this hurts _everybody_.

Best argument I've heard for Alternative Vote yet!
(/uk_current_affairs)

I don't see how Unity is even simple. If all you want to do is web browse, sure - it's easy enough to see Firefox on the copy of OSX's Dock (if you know to look for the Firefox icon - I guess many would be looking for a blue 'e'?)

When you want to look for other applications it took ME - a computer user of about 25 years - a while to figure out that you had to find the "other applications" icon then use this almost-hidden little drop-down in the top-right to choose a category of application and show a list. It's AWFUL.

I'll wait for Canonical to copy OS X Lion (they're only up to Tiger so far but they're trying hard to copy Apple, bless them) - that has an iPad-style launcher, which while not as intuitive as the Start Menu from 1995, is still a lot more intuitive than Unity's launching system.