Delicious LiveJournal Links for 8-19-2010

[andrewducker]

• Let the cake hunt resume! (Portal 2 Gets Release Date - February 9th)
  (tags: portal games EpicWin)
• Last US combat brigade exits Iraq.
  (tags: iraq military war)
• Israeli groups run courses on Zionist Wikiepdia Editing
  (tags: wikipedia propaganda israel politics)
• This article contains some interesting stats about the recession, differing gender effects, education and employment.
  (tags: recession gender education employment uk)
• My favourite reaction to the naked /covered in blood photo of the True Blood stars.
  (tags: trueblood funny comic)
• The Tragic Death of Practically Everything
  (tags: funny technology geek)
• Study Shows Birth Dates, School Enrollment Dates Affect ADHD Diagnosis Rates
  (tags: children medicine psychology adhd)
• The True Blood stars naked and covered in blood. If, y'know, you like that kind of thing.
  (tags: trueblood photography nsfw naked)
• A public service announcement concerning Fozzie Bear.
  (tags: muppets spelling funny)
• People have NO BLOODY IDEA about saving energy
  (tags: environment energy green electricity)
• 54% of people who use streaming services such as Spotify have stopped downloading music illegally.
  (tags: spotify music internet)
• Seven Revenue and Customs staff have been sacked for deliberately under-paying benefits to ethnic minorities.
  (tags: government racism bureaucracy)
• Redundancies At Real Time Worlds - a developer talks about what happened
  (tags: development games)

Comments

[supergee.livejournal.com]

I am sure a number of people believe that Wikipedia is already a tool of Zionist editing.

Redundancies At Real Time Worlds - a developer talks about what happened

[princealbert.livejournal.com]

I have to take issue with the writers criticism of RTWs beta testing.
We also made the error of not releasing fixes externally to many of the issues early beta testers were picking up, keeping the fixes on internal builds, I presume to lessen the load on QA.

As an experienced tester, I expect to be on the same build as all the other testers. Bugs are found and reported in, they go into the queue and get fixed in the main builds. Reports for bugs now fixed in the latest build are ignored. But all the beta testing for that period is done on a level playing field.

This simply meant that to early beta testers, it looked as though we were never bothering to fix the issues they found, when in fact, they were being fixed, simply being deployed back into beta very infrequently. This lesson was eventually learnt, but only after we’d pissed off a large number of early-adopters.

Its a beta. It comes with disclaimers in BIG LETTERS telling you this is the case. You want to play the stable product then wait for release, if you cant wait and want to be at the head table with the newest toys accept the fact its full of thousands of bugs.

Personally I think RTW screwed up by aiming for the PC market with what essentially is a console game.

But the whole games industry has to change in one major way. Subcontract. Learn from the movie industry.

A producer should contract out the major pieces of a project to several specialised companies and bring it together in house.

Ironically the strongest part of APB proves this point, as the customisation features were bought in.

[broin.livejournal.com]

The Guardian article was _terrible_. There was bugger all flow between the point the writer wanted to make, the statistics, and her assertions. I agree that apprencticeships are undervalued, but eesh, she took a rotten route to get there.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, it's not a good article, it just has some interesting stats in there.

[broin.livejournal.com]

Thank goodness! I wondered if you were drinking at work again.

[marrog.livejournal.com]

That TB Rolling Stone cover would be better if it wasn't so heavily airbrushed. I mean, Jesus, you'd think if you covered them in blood it would lessen the ability to make them look like Aryan aliens, but apparently not. Moyer's arm is particularly ridiculous.

[andrewducker]

I saw people complaining about Bill's head too.

[dapperscavenger.livejournal.com]

Personally my favourite reaction was this: http://i.imgur.com/aFJvR.jpg

:p *amused*

[andrewducker]

That's awesome!

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

> People have NO BLOODY IDEA about saving energy

The majority of people I know -- including, I'll bet, you -- should be switching off or sleeping their computers when not in front of them.

[andrewducker]

My laptop is set to sleep when I close the lid, and does so all thetime I'm not using it.

My desktop at home is currently hibernated, and will remain so until I get home tonight (and hibernates again overnight)

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

Not bad :)

My laptop I usually switch off if I'm not using it, though lately I confess I've been sleeping it if I'm in a hurry.

[andrewducker]

Looking around the room at the moment, the Virgin box and Wii are both on standby - which means they're sucking up some power, if not large amounts. The TV likewise. Julie's left the Amp on overnight, and I must find out if it uses much power when it's not actually playing music. Laser printer is off, and her laptop is off though, so I suspect our power drain is quite low.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

They do say the number of gadgets on standby adds up over time and households. It's amazing how many dinky lights you see in people's living rooms.

[andrewducker]

I bought a power-drain measuring thingy recently. I shall try plugging it in and see what the power drain is like!

[0olong.livejournal.com]

Adds up to what, though? I imagine there are still some gadgets around that use significant (if not large) amounts of power, but five machines using 1W of power each add up to 0.12 kWh per day. A kettle running at 3kW will use up that much energy in 2.4 minutes! Unless these figures are way off, I'm not persuaded that I should be worrying about leaving things on standby just now.

And that's before we even start to take into account that all the energy from idling appliances, leaked as heat, effectively subtracts from the energy we put into heating our homes for several months of the year...

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

I would actually turn off various electronic items that were usually on (not even on standby) when staying over on the sofa in Andy's front room, in years past :-)

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

The stats about Spotify are relatively useless unless you know whether those people were prolific illegal downloaders beforehand.

[andrewducker]

It specifically talks about people downloading less. Clicking through to the report there's the sentence "Over half of respondents (54%) say that streaming causes them not to download music illegally anymore." - the "anymore" bit indicating that they had done before.

Pretty much all of the spotify users I know are the kinds of people who were downloading music like crazy before they could get it on demand. Of course, that's pure anecdote.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

Someone who downloads a few tracks now and then but was still buying physical music (for example, me) is different from someone who serially downloads/shares entire decades-long discographies at the drop of a hat.

The former switching to Spotify is a win for Spotify but isn't a big deal as far as Stopping The Sinister Scourge Of Music Piracy And Thus Saving The Industry. The latter, on the other hand, would be.

Ironically, I hadn't realised how easy it was to buy mp3s before using spotify (and using whatever service they link to for purchases, and then Amazon). I'd only heard the horror stories associated with sites of dubious legality, shitty drm or crappy software. No one had ever said "Hey, these other sites are fine for buying mp3s. Possibly, of course, this is because I knew few people who bought mp3s.

[andrewducker]

Yup, I'd like to see stats on how much downloading decreased too.

I stopped downloading stuff that I could get legally once Play started selling MP3s. Before that there didn't seem to be anywhere decent in the UK. I think the only stuff I've downloaded illegally recently has been The Beatles, because they still haven't entered the 21st century.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

I really quite like Amazon's mp3 downloader thing.

I've ripped music from Youtube, because a few things are incredibly difficult to find on MP3 legally or illegally (mostly very obscure late 80s and early 90s pop)