DISQUS

bizarre indeed. thanks for the heads up dan. first off i thought you found my england match review was weird. :-) then again the game was.

Will take the time out to watch the video and it will be good to get an expert impression. What will be intersting is whether the slant will be consumer or enterprise focused.

At home I use both, I 2 Mac's and I think 5 PC's (of various flavours) all doing slightly different jobs. 'Horses for courses' is my attitude.'

The Lord works in mysterious ways Daniel. I certainly do hope that the Pontiff has an army of developers working studiously in San Pietro (actually they're probably what actually down in St. Peter's tomb) recoding Sims 2: Pope for Vista and making sure it doesn't need 'God rights' to run. Ooh..

I uninstalled the Beta Catalyst drivers for my ageing ATI 9700 Pro and went with the raw Vista ones and I've noticed no difference in performance. Although everything I try to play on my Vista PC that uses DirectX 9 says "are you mental? don't you realise these drivers are out of date!?". All being well come the end of the month when Vista (or 'Wista' as I imagine Chekov from Star Trek saying it) is released to the public most of these drivers will be finalised.

Now where did I put the rosary beeds?

Surely someone can't have taken the Transporter films seriously. Apparently a friend of mine is sort of related to Jason Statham and when he was dating Kelly Brook he made up a great rumour that they would have their wedding reception at our local pub!

The again my friends tend to be 'bullshitters' to say the least. Another friend tried to convince me when I was at school that his Uncle had a jet pack.

Points or recognition based systems have been a popular way of getting people to share information or get involved in activities for a good while. Forums on the Web have used points and rankings for postings for a long time. Some people achieve a new title because of the number of posts submitted. TechRepublic used a points based system in its Q&A approach. All of this gives them a status and recognition in the community which is what Xbox Live points are all about.

Achievements are cool, especially with gamers as as they confirm or deny l33t status, just as having the best items and level in WoW shows how good you are (apart from those people that buy them).

What I wonder about is whether the achievements and points will be only a symbol of recognition or whether I will be able to use them for something like getting earlier access to Betas or other goodies.

Fascinating stuff. I asked Microsoft themselves if social bookmarking for the Enterprise was something they were looking into. 'Maybe in Office 14' was the response pretty much. This product looks very interesting. As long as it can integrate into existing corporate portals, SharePoint, SAP, etc. then it would be something that I'm sure would be of interest. Organisations I've worked with/for typically struggle with getting users to add metadata to documents, store then in the right place and plan to have the information categorised in taxonomy. Social bookmarking - providing it is unobtrusive and not much of a chore - for the average user who is not really versed with Flickr, del.icio.us etc, might still find this product a bit of a mystery. Anything that helps find relevant information is great, although in the past 'clever' solutions from companies like Autonomy and Lotus have been very expensive and still require a certain amount of user added meta-data. Increasingly what corporate employees do outside of work influences what they expect to do inside of work (and the blurring continues) but I wouldn't expect this to be something that incumbent organisations take to very quickly. A good step in the right direction though.

Well I saw the film the other day and thoroughly enjoyed it. Craig was the bruising but convincing Bond I expected. Having enjoyed Matt Damon's Jason Bourne I wanted to see Bond be a bit more 'realistic' in terms of both stature, physique and technique. Strong, yet vulnerable to poison (aren't we all?). I'm glad he didn't actually sleep with the first girl and just seemed to 'want to get the job done'. It simply made me like the character more than the 'shagaminute' fest the last films had become. Yes it was long, (made worse by the fact that I'd drunk quite a bit before going in!) but as you say I think it all had merit.

The product placement was probably the only bit that annoyed me. How much stuff needed a Sony badge on it? Rolex watch? Of course not! But we've grown to accept this.

Robert, providing you can 'make a career' of blogging I'd say it's more important to have a job than to blog. You might disagree because of your support for this medium. My blog has been blocked by my employer (it was categorised by a web filtering system we use under 'Games') but I have no plans to leave my employer just because I cannot blog in the day. I can go home an do that.

Ooh. Gods. 'Into the wonderful'.... Thing is I played most of these on the Amiga. So unless the insert workbench disk animation comes up before you start the game it wont feel like real nostalgia for me. :-)

It poses some interesting questions about why there is so much argument over Blue-ray vs. HD-DVD if downloads will ultimately be the way that movies are distributed. I'm sure Microsoft, Google and Amazon don't realy give a toss which format wins if they can still sell the movies or the technology to distribute / play them via the direct route of the Internet. Bravo Amazon, bravo Apple.. pity we always have to wait for these things when we're in Europe. :-)

That's the key isn't it? The untapped market. Gaming is coming of age. Board games aren't completely dead but were a 'family' existence. Blimey, even my Mum used to play Escape from Colditz with us when we were kids.

Computer and console gaming needs to break into that era. The backlash against 'unsociable' gaming will only increase unless someone makes gaming really fun and 'for al the family' like Nintendo have done in the past and appear to be continuing into the future.

Look at how arcade games have evolved? Shoot stuff, jump over stuff, drive stuff, fly stuff. Shoot stuff with others.. rince repeat. Then dance stuff, play musical instrument stuff, maybe even cook stuff. The tennis demo from Nintendo at E3 was marvellous. Nothing really new (and why do the new controllers remind me of paddles?) but exciting nonetheless. It's good, it's a bit different and it breaks the comfort zone of just bringing bloody sequels out! Games, movies, TV it's all freakin' sequels. My god brand has got a lot to answer for. Think Different! for crying out loud.. :-)

Anyway. Nintendo and Apple rock..

The 'infinite' scroll bar still needs some work. Currently it's a bit alien in concept and paging has been the favoured technique. I don't like thw way that the scrollbar keeps 'jumping' when you scroll to the bottom. That definitely needs some work.

However, the concept is good and if it means that more people are delving into the deeper search results then fine. Does this imply though that Live.com search is not as good at finding relevant content than Google? Therefore some way of getting people to look at the extended search results was needed?

Digg was in last month's copy of Business 2.0 magazine which covered latest Web 2.0 sites and how the influence of Amazon recommendations, eBay rating etc.. defined by the user / customer group is changing how businesses approach the web.

Writely also got a mention. As did zimbra..