Barfy

Typical Pompey, can't even get a firesale right. Fancy selling good players for a lot of money with possible replacements identified. At least Saints are doing it properly, in order to stave off administration :cool:

where do you get trained for that? I want 6 weeks leave!

Bugger, can I have a job at your place then?

but how many of those days do you have to take as leave, and how many are free? For me, I'm having to take a whole 4 days a/l for my extended break

Same here, though I might hang around until about 5.30 ish just in case there's any more mince pies on offer.

My guess is it's just taking time to render the avatars, it happens whenever you move from one area to another. Bear in mind that each avatar is probably going to be customised, so each one has to be downloaded and rendered before you can see them. Add to that the fact that there could be a few hundred in the plaza alone

Those who in real life are prevented from talking to women because they are ugly, boring or have restraining orders... I'm looking forward to seeing how they make use of the movie theatre, a lot of opportunity there.

136-5 Now if we can just get rid of Yuvraj & Dhoni quickly, we might be in a strong position...

Which cartoon character is that? do you mean your avatar? You can customise that in your apartment. More stuff will come online over the next days and weeks I imagine. The bowling is good if you can get on. I haven't managed to play pool yet though.

I was quite surprised by the fact that when we set up an avatar for my girlfriend to use, she didn't get hassled too much whilst roaming around the plaza. In fact there seemed to be a few female avatars on at the time, and none of them seemed to be drawing too much attention. Most people were too busy trying out their dance moves

Getting Gambhir early on was a big wicket. He looked on fire against the Aussies recently. How long until Shah comes into the team for either Bell or Colly then?

I'm guessing as it develops, there will be 'premium content' added by Sony and third parties that you can pay for, but I believe the main content will be free.

St Marco, You are probably right, I am probably relatively clueless as to the minutiae of the global economy, and I certainly have no interest in wading through reams of data and reports that would support my case. I thoroughly admire your optimism that the electronics and games industry will be able to weather the storm of the current global economic crisis that seems to be reaching every other part of the economy (I never got the hang of optimism). I just hope that whichever clients you are advising don't suddenly find themselves in the middle of the next burst bubble. And once again I admire your devotion to the Microsoft corporation, it is truly admirable. To rebut one point you made in your essay though. I am not "on the defensive". My comments in my last reply to you were merely my (maybe naive) views on what Sony is currently doing. I happen to think that the PS3, as a piece of hardware truly, p*sses on the x-box in everything from aesthetics to potential performance, but Sony appear to have suffered on two major fronts. Firstly by trying to genuinely produce a next gen console (rather than the halfway house of the 360), and thus having to release it a year after the 360 & Wii. Now if Sony can't ride this one out and they drop the PS3 (and assuming no-one else picks it up), then I'm sure all us Sony fanboys (and girls) will come crawling back to Microsoft with our tails between our legs, and you will be truly vindicated. Now, I'm off to play CoD 5, and maybe see if there's any new content for Home.

Home is the ps3 virtual world thing, a bit like second life I guess. You can make private phone calls to other home users, there's the usual text chat so you can harass random people, there's games (ten pin bowling, pool, ps3 demos etc). There's also a (currently empty) shopping centre, and movie theatre which you can watch film trailers etc. Until tomorrow you need to have received an invite from Sony to be able to download it, but after that you should be able to download the software from the playstation store. Once it all goes fully live, I guess the content will increase as Sony and third parties start adding to it. Some of it will be free, some will cost, but most of the basic stuff is/will be free. It all looks very slick, good graphics, simple to control and move around. It definitely helps to have a fast internet connection though. Some of the content requires a fair bit of downloading. If I can work out how to take a snapshot, I'll do so later and post it.

certainly is, even the mrs enjoys it, but then again we did manage to get her avatar looking pretty much spot on (mine is two leather elbow patches away from being a librarian). Hopefully after tomorrow there'll also be something more to do than ten pin bowling and dancing to the wipeout HD trailer...

I've no idea why you dislike the ps3 so much, but I'm sure Bill Gates would be pleased with your fanatical devotion to making Sony look like a two bit newcomer to the electronics and entertainment industry.

I'd go for a SNES myself. Fifa '94 and Sensible Soccer are awesome.

At least that article provided a link to some useul information: http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/home-to-go-live-worldwide-tomorrow Home goes live tomorrow. EDIT: I just read another article on that site, and apparently 8000 (although a lot of jobs) is only 5% of the Sony workforce... and they are to be phased out over the next 2 years: http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/sony-to-axe-8000-jobs Very bad news for those affected, but hardly indicates an imminent meltdown in Sony's operations!

The only theme I downloaded was one from Pain, but I have bought a number of games (Pain, Warhawk and a couple of PS1 'classics') from the store. Just make sure PSN emails don't go in your trash folder!

I got an invite from PSN with a code to download the software. I know a couple of other people who have had the same, and the only thing we had in common was that we'd all bought stuff from the online store. I don't know if that is the criteria, or whether they are just rolling it out gradually to all users.

I've been on Home beta too, it's quite cool. Have you played the bowling yet? I even played the demo of Echochrome in the bowling alley too. I can see Home becoming a little bit addictive once it starts expanding, and it can;t be too bad as even my girlfriend wanted me to set her up a charcter to play on it!

Following on from the christmas spending thread, my mrs' dad has decided he wants to take up bee keeping, and the suggestion has been made that we should combine his birthday and christmas presents and get him a beehive. I checked with beehives-r-us but they seemed to have sold out, so does anyone have any ideas where we can buy a beehive, plus accessories (whatever they maybe :smt102 )? Or even plans to build one?

Apart from a few smaller presents for the family, the mrs and I aren't spending a lot this year (we need a new boiler next year ) but I will probably spoil my 1 year old neice as I'm told that's what uncles do :confused: For the first time in 8 years we've also decided to have christmas day to ourselves, no family rows or drunken realtives to deal with.

There were a number of reasons for me buying a PS3 (old games I still wanted play, friends who have them etc.), but the main ones for me were it's long term prospects and the fact that everything is in one system (I'm a very lazy man). I also happen to think that the PS3 looks a lot better than the 360, which although seemingly trivial is just another factor that tips the balance in favour of the PS3. To be honest I'm not really bothered what the sales figures in Japan for the last quarter were for each system. As someone pointed out above, the 360 is initially cheaper, so will sell more; simple economics really. But is it more likely that the 360 will be replaced by the next next-gen console earlier than the PS3? Right now, the only thing that interests me is how do I get better at COD5 online, what games are coming out next, and if/when will there be new Final Fantasy and Assasins Creed games.

I gave Kubuntu a try yesterday, becaus I thought it looked quite good, and it does look really good, but I just couldn't get the wireless to work. Adapter drivers were set up (Realtek 8185) and it could see my network, but it just wouldn't connect. Nevermind, I'm happy with Ubuntu for now, I'm sure they'll get the bugs worked out soon enough.