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VampiricHoshi

Listed below are comments made by VampiricHoshi between Thursday, 2nd April 2009 and Monday, 20th July 2009.

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Is it time for a UK space agency? 5:57pm on 20 Jul 2009 Gordon Brown as well as countless PM's before him continue to make claims on how Britain leads in certain fields, how he intends Britain to lead in others, yet at the end of the day our own nation's development and progression is so thwarted by backwards systems, needlessly difficult bureaucracy and frankly confusing decision making that all of these councils, governing bodies, health and safety authorities, departments conglomerates and schemes are counter productive and result, largely, in the opposite of their intent.

Should we have a Space Agency over the current setup? Yes, without a doubt. Regardless of funding increases it quite clearly simplifies the entire process and should, therefore, simplify the deployment of it's budget. The fact that it would also be a singular governing agency also simplifies it's relationship with the MOD which is a partnership that often tends to go forgotten.

As for the name? I think "BSA" would likely get the most votes because of it's simplicity but I rather like the sound of "BASA" (British Aeronautical Space Agency) or better yet "BASE" (British Agency for Space Exploration) or perhaps "BASED" (British Agency for Space Exploration and Development) ... I could go on :)
Music industry v Technology 5:34pm on 06 Jul 2009 Unbilievably stupid.

Unless someone is making money, or preventing the potential of the copyright-protected material from earning money (i.e. you download it illigialy and give it to a friend therefore preventing two sales) then quite frankly the actual copyright should be irrilevant.

If I want to stand in the street and start playing music then there should not be any law to prevent me from doing so, so long as I am not making money from it. The second I open a guitar case and start accepting donations is when the copyright should be in-breach.

Unfortunately this isn't just a case of the music industry attempting to flex its wrinkled liver-spot-smeered muscles, its a reflection of America's sue culture. When you have one of the richest countries in the world completly dominated by laywers this sort of thing is hardly that surprising.
Can Digital Britain top the league? 10:01pm on 19 Jun 2009 @30 point to where I made any mention of an "amazing Virgin service". I merely referred to the fact that Virgin is in the process of rolling out a 100mbs service which looks probable to, because of this service, place the UK at the top of Europe because it would result in a greater share of its populace being able to use a higher speed.

I think perhaps the word "refuse" in regards to Virgin laying extra cable is a poor choice of words or at least is dependant on regions. My area is cable-accessable but areas for many of my friends are not, and in contacting both Telewest prior to Virgin's take over and now Virgin Media, the response from the cable company has simply been this:

Start a petition from residents of your area and if there is enough evidence that a business model is viable we will lay the cable.

You are flaunting an awful lot of hate at a company for not spending money to lay cable, but if the area you live in is prodominantly a high BT and Sky region then why would a cable company risk millions, hundreds of millions or even billions laying cable and building street boxes that will go un-used? Virgin are clearly not going to do that unless there is evidence they can capitlise from it. As it stands, it was not the cable companies by-and-large that laid much of the fibre optics network that currently exists in the first place; it was a consortium owned predominantly by BT who still own much of that network and demand a levy for extending it - yet another reason for any cable company to be reluctant to dig more cable and yet another reason why BT are choking the country's progress.

BT on the other hand own the manopoly on broadband in the UK and on telecoms in the UK. There is not a single region of the country where BT does not stand to capitilise from laying the cables yet are unwilling to pay the price and instead want it to be footed by the tax payer.

Whether that is the fault of the Torries is rather irrelevant, the fact still remains that it is BT that has the final word to say in Britain's digital progression and right now the word is simply "give me money".
Piracy: Did someone blink? 8:11pm on 18 Jun 2009 Perhaps my ballmark of 50gb was a little old-school, but my point still remains.

The targets are the people that are downloading entire series, entire films, entire games, entire operating systems and other software, entire albums, on a daily or even hourly basis as aposed to those who download and share perhaps 1-6 albums a month.

You are always going to get illegal downloads while the net is so open ended, but there ARE things that can be done to curb the people that are doing it to extremes.

But at the end of the day, as others have elluded to, this is less an issue about the actual act of piracy and more an issue of an utterly broken business model both in music and in software and video where prices are more than 60% higher than they should be. But quite frankly while record labels continue to earn millions off a single artist that simply is not going to change unless a big label becomes ballsey enough to almost completly drop their comission from an artist's work and instead charge the artist a fee based on the level of publication the label does - you know, the thing they are actually supposed to be in business to do. But of course that just means labels will start charging ludicrous sums of money to artists to keep their big swanky houses and bling.

How can you truly fix a fundamentaly corrupt system while those who made it corrupt in the first place continue to run it?
Battle of the smartphones 6:34pm on 18 Jun 2009 I love gadgets perhaps more so even than the mighty Steven Fry, but I have never bought into the iPhone (or iPod for that matter) and have absolutely no intentions to buy Nokia's N97 or any other smart phone either.

The simple rationale behind my decision is that I believe the phone industry has it backwards. I don't want a "phone that can do everything", I want whatever the primary device I use to also act as a phone.

What do I mean by that?

Well drop the notion of a smart phone and instead pickup the notion of something like the PSP or DS having a true phone function to it; especialy the PSP considering the PSP's hardware is far more capable than an iPhone and less than half the price - the only real advantages to the iPhone, besides the "phone" part, being the touch-screen and motion sensors - which are hardly revolotinary and will no-doubt see their way to Sony and Nintendo's next incarnations (yes the DS already has the touchscreen part nailed down).

If that isn't enough of a reason, there is also the ludicrously calculated price. For the cost of an iPhone or an N97 I can buy an entire 15" laptop. Why on earth is a mobile phone the same price as a fully fledged laptop? Ok they can surf the net, ok they can run apps, but they can't even do those things better than a PSP at less than half the price.

Are we really to believe it costs over £200 to add 3gs and touchscreen technologies to a phone? I really find that hard to believe.

At the end of the day I look at the iPhone and most other smart phones and see companies racking in £200+ in profit from a single device that should really cost less than £200 total.
Can Digital Britain top the league? 6:16pm on 18 Jun 2009 The vast majority of the issues and reasons why broadband is still in such an awful state here in the UK ultimately comes down to BT.

BT owns the copper lines. BT owns the phone exchanges. BT even owns quite a substantial amount of the cable optic fibre network and it is BT who are unwilling to front the cash to upgrade these things that they own, the things that no one else can pheasably pay to upgrade as they are property of BT, and in so doing continue to stunt the growth of the UK's phone and internet capabilities.

How can you get round all that? Simply put you can't. Its too little too late. The smart thing would have been to take the exchanges away from BT, at least partialy, and allow direct competition of phone line technology rather than BT's total monopolisation on the exchange and copper services. But if you tried that now you'd likely find it will just result in a heap of exchanges simply getting shut down and further hurt and stunt the growth of broadband in this country.

Unfortunately we are now suffering the results of: A. Allowing BT's monopoly to continue despite weak attempts by the government to dismantle it, and B. A country smothered in concrete where digging up and laying new cables its a multi-billion-pound project even though there is less ground to cover than countrys like Australia who are able to supply fibre to larger stretches of land for a cheaper price.

Lead the World? Not a chance. Japan and South Korea would ensure that could never be the case. Lead Europe and the US? That is very much achievable and Virgin's 100mbs proposals for late '09 early '10 would certainly place us up there. But BT's utter lack of commital will realy prevent that from happening.

Get rid of BT is what I say.
Piracy: Did someone blink? 4:23pm on 16 Jun 2009 @42 the issue isn't the overal amount of file sharers. Small-time file sharers, the ones that perhaps download a few tracks or maybe a few albumns every few months, which likely make up a large amount of the overal file sharers, like #41 for example, are not the problem and they by-and-large are not the ones recieving letters.

The file sharers that ARE the problem, the ones that are costing businesses a lot of money including the ISP's themselves, are the ones download 50gb and more worth of music, movies and TV content. THESE are the people that are causing the issues and these are the people that DO NOT spend a penny on the things they are downloading.

Unfortunately this is a situation where a minority are so brutaly abusing file sharing that they have resulted in what may others have been largely ignored to what is now being considered serious piracy not just by record labels but by governments. The only way you can prevent these people from what they are doing, without somehow removing file sharing entirely which is utterly impossible, is to take the measures Virgin and other ISP's are starting to take.

Will innocent people get caught in the middle? Most likely, but how else are these people going to be tackled?

Once again I am not, and neither are Virgin, talking about small-time file sharers. They and I are referring to those that are downloading ridiculously large amounts of data monthly.
Piracy: Did someone blink? 11:20am on 16 Jun 2009 I have to say I see an awful lot of people here critising this decision making rather silly comments and claiming "this is the end of virgin for me" and the like.

Seriously, what difference does this really make? Virgin have said specificaly that they aren't going to do anything different. They are ALREADY sending letters out to file sharers and are ALREADY threatening to temorarily suspend accounts for those who chose to ignore the warning letters on multiple attempts of communication.

Quite frankly I applaud this effort. We are not talking about people transfering music from their own CD collection to another one of their devices here. We are talking about people that never owned said music getting it for free. It doesn't matter how old that music is, why should they be allowed to have it without paying a penny for it? Even if its a Beetles record that you purchased back in 1966 at least you PURCHASED it.

As to poster #5 who claims that file sharers buy "10 times more than anyone else" I question if he even knows who/what these file sharers are, because I can certainly garuntee they pay 10 times LESS than everyone else. They do not buy DVD's, they do not pay subsription to TV chanels, they do not buy music ablums. They download the lot for free. That has to stop, that is clearly what Virgin are striving to do.
Is the web's amateur hour over? 2:11pm on 05 Jun 2009 It seems to me, as is typicaly the case, that it;s the big corporations and businesses that charge ludicrous amounts of money that tend to complain about "amatuers taking over", especialy in regards to web design.

To really emphasize this point, some of you may remember about 5 years ago Michal Jackson getting his website completly re-designed and it cost many many thousands of dollars to design and build it and all he got was a blank white page with a logo and his signature.

And in response to #5, maybe the net was better before all the networking struck but personaly, both as a web designer and a web surfer myself, I would take today's web over the aweful pages made in Microsoft Word anyday.

I love gadgets, and I love websites where people have gone to the trouble to make it interesting to browse and not just offer interesting information.

Is web 2.0 really all about networking? I personaly don't think it is. In my opinion, web 2.0 is about the browser technology becoming advanced enough, largely through the now commonly introduced Flash applications, that a web page is completly interactive and not reminiscent of a boring 2 diemnsional broadsheet page glued onto a monitor screen.
Why PlayStation 2 still matters 11:24am on 02 Apr 2009 To clarify some points here:

1. Backward compatability for the PS3 is only concerning PS2 titles. All PS1 titles are compatible with the PS3 - litteraly all of them. Likewise they are also compatible with the PSP; you can play ALL PS1 games on your PSP via remote play. Some might have glitches and some crash occasionaly, as you would expect from any emulation.

2. Backward compatability was actually "removed" before the euro 60gb version. The American consoles had a compatability chip installed into the machine, as where euro 60gb models used software emulation to achieve the same results. The software support was not continued in the newer models, but because it is simply software and not hardware, there is a good chance it will get added via a firmware update in the future.

@7 sorry my friend but you will find I am correct. You are confusing the extra cost of developing a game for an additional platform as aposed to the cost between developing a game for the 360 or developing a game for the PS3.

If you make a game, and then port it between different consoles, you are obviously paying extra development costs for each console you port it over too. But if you develope a game for the PS3, as it stands right now with the latest dev tools for the PS3, there isn't much of a difference in cost anymore.

Additionaly, because the game gets released on the PS2 and/or Wii does not signify that MS have not paid money to ensure it does not get released on the PS3.

There are now only really three reasons why the 360 will have a game released that the PS3 does not gain:

1. MS pays for rights
2. The company can only afford to port to the game to a select number of consoles and therefore chose the primary console that will likely gain the most sales (360 has sold more consoles therefore should theoreticaly generate more sales)
3. Its made by a company who exclusively make games for the Microsoft

Now if you were discussing the cost of developing a PSP game as aposed to a nintendo DS game then you'd have a case for an argument - but then comparing those two consoles is like saying its cheaper to make a Wii game over a PS3 or 360 as there is an obviously high level of power difference between them.

Point here is that the talk about how its harder, and more expensive, to a develop a PS3 game as aposed to a 360 game are no longer the case which companies like EA have already said, which is why 9/10 games that are released on either console are then released on the other.

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