rich_tech

You can do "Friends based" groups, as long as your on a friends list you can invite each other over to your realms, also I believe you can now do cross-realm guilds if your in the same server group too

I don't care for the outlines either myself, too much like other inferior MMOs Warlock is easy, guilds are not all that necessary now because of battle.net, you can add me if you want my tag is on the other thread and the fact you can cross realm invite your friends to help you now means its a godsend. That being said - Ragnaros - plenty big queues when WoD lands ill wager, I jumped my chars off there because of that a while back when free migrations were offered.

I am one of the lucky ones here, I have had Yodel deliver my PC bits from them and was surprised that they had taken over the deliveries for them, it arrived fine for me with all the stuff to the door next day with no fuss here, Same with Hermes, I think my franchisee's for these companies are quite decent in my area. Though I feel for you with all the horror stories you hear about those companies.

I do see the point about inflation, and I understand that it really can't be overlooked, I was looking at it from a bit of a "Jaded and misty eyed" pov looking at my childhood a bit there, I always paid sub-150 for any of these consoles, I just think that in the last 8-10 years to me things have leapt up in price a fair bit now, xbox one/ps4 game prices seem horrific when I go through the supermarket aisle, esp compared to PC prices for games, Online stuff is never discounted much at all, though the console prices will no doubt come down as time wears on. I think the only way that companies like EA will stop their horrible DLC practices now is if people boycott their games, which on the whole seems to be very unlikely happening given the franchises that they have bought into now and maintain, I used to love their BF series of games, up until they refused to make BF2 work with windows 7 properly, despite people paying like I did for 3 expansion packs on top, they blatantly wanted everyone channeled into BF3 and beyond, which my PC at the time would not touch. I think I dread the inevitable in about 6/7 years time when my boy gets the console gaming bug usually because a mate has it, especially more now as you have all their favourite cartoons available in games like Disney Infinity and Skylanders, depending on the console ofc and everything is usually full of microtransactions for items. I also realise the irony in this that I am a WoW player on the PC, subscribing £8 a month for a game plus paying £35 for an expansion (Currently though they get released every 2/3 years and content in between them is not extra), theres around 7 million of us playing some sort of subscription like that for this game, (though the asian model is different and based on time rather than per month and they have severe limits on playtime from what I understand too) It is sad, you can also see though the corruption in this game seeping in with it being bought out by Activision/Vivendi, as there are now plenty of "for-sale" often limited edition vanity items in game and even paid for levelling boosts put into the game now, which Blizz banned people for in the past, but its ok to use theirs now for £40 a time. I also massively despise the fact that their "Addon" services now like Faction-Change/X-Realm Transfers have gone up in price too, considering that you are paying for an automated script to be run there with limited interactions from their agents or so it seems.

I would argue against inflation for a lot of the prices given and adjusted there, I dont think its massively relevant, were not talking a 200+ years difference on a historic product like a sack of flour, most of the products with gaming are relatively similar base prices for the unit, to me most consoles have averaged similar original prices for the system of around £200+, though it has crept up over last decade now, same for the games, I can remember top-end megadrive games being around £39 when I had mine some 20 years ago, Budget ranges only came about the PS1 from what I remember with the older games. (I personally rule out the ones that didn't make it or were always going to be ridiculous like the NeoGeo, £100 a game 16 years ago was always going to be a loser, regardless of it being an arcade game). Consoles these days are what I would consider a "Serious Purchase" for a family/home because of the costs involved, whereas before they were cheaper entry points to having them. I never go for the early adopter pricing on any of these units, though I havent bothered with a console since the Xbox/PS2, I picked both of them up reasonably when they hit £150/£130 prices and bought loads of the games off ebay second hand for them for fractions of the price. I also buy the GOTY editions too, rather than fork out for DLC, also humble bundle has helped out no end there recently on their "good" sales with getting games for the PC cheap.

I think it would be really harmful to the gaming industry to start pricing games any much higher as it is, parent's just won't go for it, it is bad enough that it's creeping up slowly and surely with each generation of consoles though. Console is higher priced than PC I find anyway, largely because of our investment in our gaming machines, rather than having a "Uniconsole" I don't know if XB1 and PS4 have taken off like their previous generations yet, I thought the opening prices were absolutely horrible, I have my doubts as to their uptake now, to me their too expensive for a console system, and along with 0 Day DLC which I think it is pretty scummy, the fact now you have "Pay for Backwards Compatibility/Old Generation Console Games" on the new platform as well, so you cant take your 360 games directly onto the XB1 is another awful turn with Console gaming.

Your no way on your own there, I hate it with a passion, Zero Day DLC is the worst of all, when you just buy a game and have to immediately shell out for things like "Map Packs" and EA are one of the worst companies for doing it. Its not enough to buy the game now, you have to buy and have the game reach around in your pockets and mug you for some more cash, usually in your own front room.

I have an iPhone 4S (A1387 I believe) running iOS 8.1 here, I didnt upgrade to 8 initially and left it on 7.1.2, because I had a scout around the web and got a feeling it would cause horrible slowdown and saw a few videos comparing the two OS which put me off bothering with it. I upgraded after 8.1 and its running "OK" albeit a little slower than previously. I did a bit of reading prior to this and have had to disable some features though to prevent it slowing down horribly - Spotlight Search is off for me on the device, its pointless anyway to index your phone I think. I also disabled the parallax background effects (the depth effects) on the phone and turned off the transparency on the device which improved the speed a fair bit on it so I am not unhappy with it. Just waiting on the new battery I have ordered for it now to rejuvenate it a bit further

From what I have tried of Windows Phones, they aren't any different to any of the other platforms really, all have good and bad points mentioned in the thread. App store was the main one for me that stopped me going to it though, it was fairly barren when I last tried it about a year ago, only the major things like FB/Twitter had apps. Shame really with the platform - its the same problem with the MS RT platform, the Nokia handsets are all fairly decent sets let down by that OS/Experience I thought, same for the tablets that are let down by RT and its app ghost town.

Good cliffhanger tonight, interesting to see it play out now (didnt want to stick spoilers in here)

I have this issue of disconnects/shaky pens or on my site at the moment, as I have lots of Promethean boards on a mixture of Serial/Serial to USB and USB connections depending on the way they were setup before I started in role. We have upgraded our site to Windows 7 64 bit here, during which I found that the USB to serial connectors aren't all compatible with 7 64 bit, the connectors suffer from having their chipsets updated or discontinued with certain versions of windows. The drivers are also lacking for the Prolific (PL-2303) and Aten (UC232A) Serial to USB connectors and using them seem to be very flaky with the drivers with the problems already subscribed even with brand new chipset USB-Serial connectors. (There is now a decent looking new 1.10 driver for the prolific brand models which seems to be very solid regardless of the chipset now I am finding with my testing so far). I have had also better success with problematic boards through changing them to a pure USB based cable instead of Serial/Serial to USB connector, I only have one board at the moment that I am monitoring now thankfully. I have also found that the new 5.9 Activdriver software won't auto start any serial connection for us, even if we turn it to Automatic it doesnt seem to hold that for either Serial or Serial to USB, so we are using 5.7 on that particular one as a workaround.

I think its some office in America I spoke to before when I did get through, think their UK PoP number puts you through to there.

I was on hold for 50 minutes when I moved our server and that move went bang, so I feel for you too there. I don't know about the use of the program as once its up, my involvement usually finished, it is horrible enough software though from what I have seen and gotten more bloated and worse as its gone along, but the License server is horrible stuff, especially when it goes wrong which I have seen happen. Also this company think its fine to release a "mid range" 7.5 version which saves in its own proprietary format just to be awkward and not offer it to the people that shelled out a lot of money for Version 7 a short while previously, absolutely horrible sales tactic I think personally.

saw this earlier, think the inventor watches the big bang theory Impressive stuff though

the email isnt important enough unless SMT are CCed in usually

I agree, at the moment its formulaic - 40 minutes of building and 10 minutes of cheaply solving stuff, its like they wont dare stretch a semi-complex plot out over a few weeks of episodes, they used to do that all the time before the reboot, nothing has neared "The end of time/Day of the doctor" episodes, their still the pinnacles for me. Liking Capaldi, hes excellent, but their still putting too much slant and emphasis onto the assistants by far, Coleman isnt bad like rory/amy but she's having too much screentime for me.

Strange decision, Its to hide the distribution download page by looks on it. Do not get why they would want to make it harder to access the MSI downloads, its a necessary evil to access them with the rate the program updates, but this is Adobe at the end of the day

Forget that, I have taken to redirecting them to use iCloud to convert them here ! We have a few 2007 Intel Core iMacs here unloved and patched to Snow Leopard the highest they can go, more of a pain that nothing in app store works or is installable when you patch them up

One company I worked for used Adobe Pagemaker 4 for ALL of its invoices on one particular machine we had, back then it was old in 2001 and also a horrible program.

I must be one of the few people that just cannot get "into" Minecraft here

Seen some quality t-shirts about the mail in my time very much NSFW though

the writing has been enjoyable the last few episodes I thought, all enjoyable stories as standalones

I believe the Stone engineer out recently to our site was using the Eurosoft PC-Check program, seemed very impressive when it was going through everything on my PC after a mobo change.

I would settle for a better website than 2 companies here, machines are decent enough, but the website is horrible when you need to download something.

I love it when people work out that stuff, like the other thread with Doom on a printer