Your wrong, take Half Life 2 Episode 2. When that game came out I could have all of the graphics settings turned to maximum except for Anti-Aliasing. Even with everything on minimum Anti-Aliasing would reduce the frame rate to ~22fps. With it off I would get ~50-60fps on maximum settings, I am sure there are people with graphics cards which could cope with the anti-aliasing but had only a small amount of memory so textures would need to be reduced.

The basic configuration options were arrived at for a reason, those reasons haven't diminished and to dismiss them is short sighted. Considering the amount of time it would take to extract that setting to a configuration file and the amount of time it would take to add a menu I say it's better to spend the morning in order to add the menu.

The options aren't vast there are about 9 graphical ones and around 2 seconds of playing with them will tell a user what they do. Sound is the same the only confusing one would be the PC networking options but that wasn't what the commandment was about.

Got an Xperia Play and the auto correct is driving me up the wall, I had a Nokia so I'm used to typing things in correctly but auto correct keeps changing words to the most random things. For example I typed "Haha", I could see that I had typed it correctly but auto correct had changed it to "havf".

On Android it displays a list of possible words above the keyboard, one word will be bolded if you press space the bolded word is used, if you click on any of the words above the keyboard they are used instead (includes bolded).

How many times have they told us that at top speeds the Veyron runs out of petrol in 12 minutes and the tyres go after 8 minutes. Clarkson loves that car but that particular limitation has been mentioned alot.

I ride a Suzuki GSR 600, commuting to work gets me 52MPG, holding ~70MPH for a long distance nets me around 65MPG. Blasting the throttle like they do on Top Gear gets me closer to 45MPG.

Driving/Riding vehicles differently nets different results, if Top gear tell me something got 20 MPG on their track I'd expect something like 30-35 MPG in real life. Top Gear were told by Tesla that the car would have a range of around 55 miles on the Top Gear Track. When Top Gear portrayed this with a bit of humour, Tesla get mad 2 years later? What about the BBC journalist who wanted to take an Electric BMW Mini Cooper from London to the north of England, it took him more than a week and his opinion was Electric cars just aren't ready for long distance driving. Are BMW going to sue him?

Even if Tesla do release a sensible car I'll be avoiding it, can't stand to support such pathetic companies.

Yes a completely gold cable would give improved performance over a copper counterpart. However what most shops sell is gold (plated) connectors. This will add additional input/output impedance on to your cable/amplifier/speaker, this causes the signal to degrade. In effect you spend more for a worse quality cable.

I can dig out the RF maths behind this fact if you like, in my university input/output impedance at RF frequencies was explained using gold/copper connector cable as examples.

My Uni course involved Assembly, Pascal, VHDL and C++. It forced a certain knowledge on how a computer works, I finished university 3 whole years ago and have been involved in training up new graduates for various projects. Almost all of them have only done Java in university, the result is they never understand basic concepts like pointers. Which would be fine but you need to understand pointers in order to code in Java (since it has them).

Having a basic understanding of the fundamentals is what a degree is all about, you also seem to think a person would either do technical writing or assembly. If your looking at a Software/Computer Engineering course the candidate should have done both since engineering involves everything from the design phase through to support and testing. Otherwise all the person has done is a software developer or technical writing course.

I do agree with CMU in that teaching how to write modular code is important, I love C++ but prefer Java because most old C++ projects I've worked on (and some are 15 years old) start out as modules but always turn into enormous inter-dependent blobs.Eclipse's plug-in approach seems to help keep dependencies to a minimum.

One day I'll meet this mythical knowledgeable Apple owner, it took 6 months of searching and I did finally find a nice chav* it's been six years and I've still not meet a knowledgeable Apple owner.

My criteria is simple, someone who knew to a relatively high degree a market and choose the Apple product. For example I know a number of software engineers who have bought an iPhone however if you were to mention Symbian, Palm Pre, Meego, Windows Mobile 6, Windows Phone 7, etc.. they would stare blankly at you. The Powerbook criteria is just someone who has heard of AMD Fusion or Intel Atom. You'd be amazed about the number of technical people who take no real interest when it comes to spending on gadgets.

*chav is UK talk for white trash, I dislike them intensely a friend said I was too judgemental and chavs were people too, hence the search. I had to admit I was wrong.

I can see two uses where the interfaces shown in the video would make sense.

I've noticed monitors with in built Intel Atom boards having been appearing in shops, pretty much everyone of these is touch screen. Considering the market they seem to be aiming for (basic web browsing, university desktops, etc..) bringing in the bubble designed UI would probably suit a lot of people.

The video also has a camera system setup which tracks hand movement, so you can use your hand like a mouse. I'd love to be able to interface with my media centre pc that way. My biggest announce is Windows Media Centre's interface sucks and the idea of using my fingers instead of a mouse on that PC would be cool.

Never heard of the site before today, went exploring. Found a bunch of artists I would likely never of heard of and £30 later I think I trebled whatever every artist was asking for and even then thought it was cheap. Before today I hadn't bought any music since Florence & the Machine came out.

My only criticism of the site is it doesn't seem to make finding albums by the same artist easy and doesn't provide a lit of "other people also bought..".

The ones in Tesco have EDF (Energy Supplier) logo's all over them, so I'm guessing they are. I the UK they also give references to the equivalent incandescent. We also had the slow start up problem when CFLs were first introduced around 10 years ago however none of the CFL bulbs in my home have it.

I don't understand why Americans are so against it, the bulbs are cheap, last a long time (never had one break on me), and are more efficient. The few use cases people seem to be going using are for heating but then there are more efficient means to do that.

Lower power technology is always more expensive up front but cheaper in the long run, I have alot of gadgets and yet my electricity bill is considerably lower than other single people I know.

There are chips designed to run Java Byte code as the instruction set, I've been waiting for a company to do the same for Davlik. That way you get the performance advantages of native code with none of the disadvantages.

Considering Symbian is such an OS and was open sourced I've always wondered why Google didn't take Symbian scrap the Series 60 UI and put their own in.

Why would I want to do that in Java? I'd just use a TreeSet and have the objects implement the Comparable interface.

C/C++ is faster than Java but having to re-invent the wheel all the time is what makes me prefer Java. Another good example is loading a configuration file. In Java I just create Properties object with a file path and I've got access to a configuration file. In C++ you have to mess about with streams, write your own string parser and then create a map to store everything.

I think it sums up everything wrong with Watchman, the whole film seemed to be trying to be edgy to an unnecessary degree.

What did seeing it do? The story for Dr M already showed him disconnected from reality several well aimed shots could easily show he was naked without having to see a bare ass or penis.

Its like Torchwood, Dexter or True Blood, the first time you see something edgy is cool but for example I've grown bored of the sex scenes in True Blood and skip through them. If I want to watch porn, I'll watch porn. Watchmen was edgy for edgy for edgy's sake.

The Dark Knight was far darker and adult when compared to Watchman.

I really hate this urban legend, read the wikipedia article on the Mayan Calender.

Basically they had the Tzolk'in which provided a 260 day year (13 months of 20 days) which was used to plan ceremonies and events. Because that doesn't match up with the length of the year they developed the Haab which lasts 365 days this provided 18 months consisting of 20 days, with 5 "nameless" days.

However neither of these calenders providing a way of keeping track of the year, so the mayans worked out the year by using the Tzolk'in and Haab calenders, since those dates reset every 52 years the Mayans called that a Calender Round.

The Long Count was created so dates which occurred outside of the 52 year cycle could be stated, the end of the world myth exists because 1 Bakturn consists of 144,000 days. On December 21st 2012 this bakturn cycle ends, that doesn't mean the world will end to the Mayans the end of such a cycle is a time of celebration.

In short the Mayan calender system is a giant overly complicated mess.