You can keep your games that need a graphics card with a minimum 1 gig of memory, the spectrum ran the whole thing in 48k (1 gig = 1,000,000k) so you can see it was all about producing compact code, and although the games don’t look great by today’s standards, it was, and still is, all about the game play.

At the height of the 8 bit computer boom of the early 80s, nearly all computers had a built in programing language, normally BASIC (Beginners All Symbolic Instruction Code) which enabled you to create your own programs with a little programing knowledge, or even buy one of the many computer magazine (Your Sinclair and Crash! for example) and type the code in to the Spectrum – this could take hours and hours and then even longer as you trawl your way through it again trying to find out where the error is. Nowadays if you want a program to do a specific thing, just search the internet (just a pipe dream in the 80s) and download a copy, but back then there may have been a program for you, but more often than not you would code yourself one up. I have many a time sat there for days writing BASIC code to do something or other. This enabled the UK to be at the forefront of games design and writing for quite sometime as those spotty faced coding genius teenagers turned in to the 1st generation games designers, and started their own software companies (Ocean, Imagine, DK Tronics and Bug Byte to name a few).

If you want to have a look at a slice of the halogen days from the 80s computer scene then have a look at World of Spectrum, this site has EVERYTHING to do with the Spectrum, you can download games, magazine, emulators, books, tape magazines and loads more.

The classics Manic Miner, Jet Pac and School Daze

If you want to play some of the games that you can download from World of Spectrum’s game repository then the best PC emulator out there is Spectaculator.

The high-pressure system has you put the coffee grounds in to a deep spoon device which is fitted in to the unit and steam is forced through them which produces a frothy strong coffee. Advantages of this system is you can use any coffee you like, not held in to one pod type, but on the minus side, its messy and convoluted.

The Tassimo is a pod based system (pods are plastic containers that hold the coffee and steam/water is pumped through them and they pick up the coffee flavour on the way through) made by Kraft. There are many types of coffee’s, hot chocolates, and tea’s available; brands that produce for this system are Cadburys, Kenco, Twinings and Milka (they are all owned by the US Kraft company). Kenco coffee is not my favorite, but the shear choice of different drinks makes this a great all-rounder, but not the best in flavour.

The Dolce Gusto is made by Nescafe and can only make coffee and hot chocolate, but in my option, the best flavour of any of them. The are coffee varieties like Cappuccino and Latte – even Baileys flavoured. The only downside is Nescafe’s missing a trick and not producing a tea. One unique thing this machine does is you can make cold coffee for those hot summer days, not my sort of thing tho.

If you are just a coffee drinker the Dolce Gusto is best, otherwise go with a Tassimo – unless you are a coffee purist, then go with a coffee machine.

When Bill Gates was pied in the face it had a different tone altogether and instead of being outraged thought it was funny and played on the ridicule – the same tone was used when Jeremy Clarkson was attacked; humour and ridicule.

It is so very amusing to me that The Sun can be so two faced, AND THEIR READERS BUY IT, the readers need to wise up and change tabloid, The Sun and it’s controlling masters use it to brainwash and influence the British public.

Only a month a go Sharon Shoesmith was hounded in the tabloids (including News International papers) that as she was the boss of the social worker dept in which Baby P was under, she was guilty of allowing this baby to die due to negligence. If Shoesmith is ultimately guilty for this tragedy for being in charge then so is Brooks/Murdoch.

What they have done to try and get away with all of this is throw the NOTW on to the fire as a sacrificial lamb to try and deflect the attention away from them. This is not going to hurt their pockets at all as the rumours of replacing the NOTW with a sunday edition of The Sun will I am sure be true, and so, kerching, more money in to News International’s pockets and a few less journo’s to pay as well.

What should happen first of all is the stopping of News International buying up Sky shares, this would give too much power to Murdoch over the British news institutions – I think this was a bad idea anyway and I think this just goes to show that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Also the whole system of who watches the watchers needs to be overhauled, they seem allow things to go on that should not, whenever there is a scandal of some sort all the Press Complaints Dept seems to say is, “We’ve had a word with [someone] and fined they £[some piffeling amount] and they promise not to do it again”.  The upshot of this is that the paper that got in to trouble sells more copies of their paper and so the fine is a no-brainer.

I am not a big fan of the British newspaper industry – through their own fault over the years, but they deserve a better master than Murdoch.

The were some studies done, looking at the last 80 years of governments going in to recession, and everyone that came out faster were the ones that borrowed money to stimulate growth within the countries concerned, not the ones that cut back. Our previous Labour government (for all of their faults) I think realized this, and were doing so.

Remember that it was the financial markets that caused all of these problems to start with.

The Mail, The Express and The Sun were all outraged that the people had taken to the streets and went on strike (for many different reasons – reduced pay for same work, pensions etc), but I don’t see any politicians having a reduction in pay, or the financial fat cats that in affect run the UK; this must stop.

The government should be afraid of the people, not the people afraid of the government.

Please don’t think I am a Apple hater, the iPhone is a good device, but if you don’t like the way Apple do something - you are stuck with it, but because Android is an open source software it can be changed to suit the user.

Google’s announcement of the Honeycomb update to the Android system is mainly focused initially on tablet support, but many of the key technologies they have brought in with work down to the smaller devices too.

The video below is a replay of the event, but a great new feature worth mentioning  is that the Market is now available on the web. So instead of buying and discovering apps on the device you can now do this at https://market.android.com.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfJuigJebRg

If you really liked a particular movie, and you’re hoping it made enough money to warrant a sequel, then the wealth of box-office news can be confusing. How can you tell when a movie’s a hit? We asked the experts.If you even pay a little attention to what’s going on in the entertainment industry, it’s easy to get snowed in with box office information that seems meaningful, but is hard to interpret. If a movie’s number one in its opening weekend, does that mean it’s automatically a hit? Or is the percentage drop between the first and second weekends the important number? And so on. News outlets tend to report lots of box-office data without giving that much context.

As Phil Contrino, editor of BoxOffice.com, says, “The mainstream media is guilty of this. They look at the opening weekend — and instantly a movie is a success or a failure.” But the truth is way more complicated than that. Sometimes, a film can do well in its first weekend and then stumble in later weekends. Or a film can develop “legs,” like Christopher Nolan’s Inception, and win a few weekends in a row.

And of course, profit and loss are in the eye of the beholder — a lot of people were shocked when leaked financial statements showed that Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix had allegedly lost $167 million, despite $967 million in global revenues. Studio accounting, designed to make sure people don’t collect on back-end deals, is a marvel.

So how do you know if the box-office gods have smiled enough on your favorite movie that studios are likely to greenlight similar films?

The short answer is, it depends on a number of factors, but a rule of thumb seems to be that the film needs to make twice its production budget globally. For the longer answer, read on.

So does a movie just have to make back its production budget, or is there more involved?

There’s a lot more, although studios are loath to give out numbers. The studios seldom release accurate production budgets — and they’re even more leery of revealing how much they spend on other stuff, like promotion.

According to Contrino, the Print & Advertising (P&A) costs of a movie can be incredibly high — for a small $20 million film, the promotional budget can be higher than the production budget. That’s because those films are often romantic comedies or kids’ movies, which are cheap to make but still need a lot of promotion. For a film which cost between $35 and $75 million to make, the P&A budget will most likely be at least half the production budget. And the numbers only go up with bigger films. “If the studio spends a lot on the budget, they’re going to want to protect that investment by advertising it heavily,” says Contrino.

Case in point: Megamind cost between $130 million and $145 to make (depending on what source you believe.) But the P&A budget, or the cost of promoting the film, is estimated to be an additional $65 million, according to Contrino.

Of course, the promotional expenses are different for each film — Contrino points out that Fox didn’t seem to waste much money promoting Gulliver’s Travels, once it was clear they had a dud on their hands. You didn’t see that many TV ads for Jack Black’s Swiftian odyssey. So Gulliver didn’t lose as much money as it could have.

And in some cases, a studio will actually have less money at stake than the film’s production budget — sometimes, the distributor will just acquire an already-made film for a small fee, plus marketing costs, says Gitesh Pandya with BoxOfficeGuru.com. In those cases, the studio can make a profit even if the film doesn’t make back its production budget.

Is it true that studios get a bigger cut of the revenue from the opening weekend?

You might have noticed that studios are pushing a lot harder lately to make a film as big a hit as possible in its opening weekend. And films tend to open on more screens right away — a typical big film will open on 4,000 screens, instead of the hundreds of screens it would have opened on in the 1980s.

And it used to be true across the board that the opening weekend was when the biggest percentage of profits went to the studios. In the past, studios “strong-armed exhibitors into these front-loaded deals, wherein the overwhelming majority of the opening weekend take goes to the studio,” says David Mumpower with Box Office Prophets. “As much as 90% of that revenue is theirs.” The theaters only make money by selling “overpriced snacks” to audiences during that first week — but in the following weeks, the theater’s cut goes up. Eventually, by the fourth week, the studio’s cut has fallen to around 52 percent in most cases.

But after a bunch of theater chains declared bankruptcy in the early 2000s, these frontloaded deals started to fall out of fashion, says Doug Stone with BoxOfficeAnalyst.com.

Nowadays, with many of the bigger Hollywood blockbusters, the theater chains just get a standard cut of the whole revenue, regardless of which weekend it comes in.

So generally, how much of the domestic box office revenue goes to the studios?

The percentage of revenues that the exhibitor takes in depends on the individual contract for that film — which in turn depends on how much muscle the distributor has, according to Stone.

These deals often protect the theaters from movies that bomb at the box office by giving the theaters a bigger cut of those films. So if a film only makes $10 million at the box office, the distributor will get only 45 percent of that money. But if a film makes $300 million at the box office, then the distributor gets up to 60 percent of that money.

You can actually look at the securities filings for the big theater chains, to look at how much of their ticket revenues go back to the studios, points out Stone. So for example, the latest quarterly filing by Cinemark Holdings, shows that 54.5 percent of its ticket revenues went to the distributors. So as a ballpark figure, studios generally take in around 50-55 percent of U.S. box office money.

Is it better if a movie makes more of its revenue in the U.S.?

The highest profile example of a film that bombed in the U.S. but made tons of money overseas was The Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which made only about $100 million domestically but made about $270 million overseas. And a similar thing happened with the previous Narnia movie, Prince Caspian. Another big film that made way more money overseas than domestically was Terminator Salvation.

So if a film does incredibly well overseas but flops in the U.S., does that make it a hit? As with everything else to do with box office, the answer is “it depends.” But generally, domestic revenue seems to be be better for studios than overseas revenue, because the studios take a bigger cut of domestic revenue.

According to the book The Hollywood Economist by Edward Jay Epstein, studios take in about 40 percent of the revenue from overseas release — and after expenses, they’re lucky if they take in 15 percent of that number.

Domestic revenue just counts for a lot more than overseas revenue, says David Mumpower with Box Office Prophets:

The reason for this is simple. Collecting revenues abroad is a trickier proposition since the dollar fluctuates against foreign currencies. There are also tariffs from these governments in place in order to keep as much money as possible from leaving their countries and going abroad, which is an understandable practice. While the global conglomerates such as Fox, Disney and Time-Warner that run major Hollywood studios can secure sweetheart deals with various local governments, it doesn’t happen for each film. As such, international box office revenue is much less reliable than in North America.

But still, overseas box office does matter, more and more. And stars who have a huge global following are more likely to open a movie than ones who are only famous in the U.S. — just look at the fact that the world-famous Tom Cruise is still starring in movies, despite his ongoing backlash in North America. Mumpower points out that Cruise’s Knight and Day only made about $76 million in the U.S., against a production budget of $117 million. But since Knight and Day made $262 million overseas, chances are it will end up being profitable once home-video revenues are factored in.

Adds Mumpower:

A shocking number of 2010 releases did better abroad than in North America, which makes sense when we consider population numbers. It’s just a relatively new phenomenon for the industry. Avatar’s performance is a great demonstration of global expansion. It earned $760.5 million domestically, which is (almost) a drop in the bucket compared to the $2.02 billion it accrued in international box office. Only 27% (i.e. roughly a quarter) of Avatar’s box office was earned in North America. That’s how important the global picture has become to Hollywood studios.

Isn’t it true that most of the money is in DVD sales and cable TV airings now?

“DVD rentals and sales can tack on up to $60-$100 mil for a big title and TV rights, merchandise, and many other avenues can generate income,” says Chad Hartigan, a box office analyst with Exhibitor Relations.

And the studios get a much bigger cut of DVD revenues than they do of theatrical revenues, because the retailers aren’t as “significant of a middle man” as the theater owners, according to Paul Dergarabedian, president of Hollywood.com’s Box Office division. There are a lot of costs that go into running a movie theater, and showing movies is all the movie theater does — unlike most places where DVDs are sold.

There are some genres of film that do especially well on DVD — like horror films, which are often cheaper to make than other genres to begin with, says Dergarabedian. A horror movie might or might not break even at the theaters, but it’s sure to make lots more money when it hits DVD.

But actually, the trend towards studios depending on DVD sales may have peaked already — in 2009, for the first time in a decade, theatrical box office revenue was bigger than home-video revenue, says BoxOfficeAnalysts’ Stone. And this seems to be continuing into 2010. Perhaps because of piracy or the popularity of Netflix, DVD sales aren’t keeping pace with ticket sales any more. Says Stone, “Studios can no longer rely on as robust an ancillary market to prop up a failure at the box office.”

That’s one reason why you’re hearing so much about 3-D — those higher ticket prices are a way to plug the revenue hole from disappointing DVD sales. And studios are going to start investigating premium video-on-demand services more, as another way to shore up their earnings, says Stone.

Credits io9

J seems to have a bad time of it, and why is Q more popular than U, I thought QU were always together, but U can be used on it’s own?

It’s as easy as pressing a key when the language is being spoken—let’s say you’re trying to order some food in Spanish. It translates what you say into the phone on the fly, and then reads the Spanish version out loud, so the waiter can understand. They can then respond in Spanish, and the phone will convert it to English, speaking it out loud.

Now I’m not a traveller but you can imagine how crucial this would be to travellers—and while it can only compute English and Spanish for now, I’m betting Google’s working on all manner of other languages.

Android users with 2.1 or higher can download the new Google Translate now, which has a few other improvements built-in as well.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXpPhTM3a6c

The type of people who watch BBC3 are teenagers to late twenties, and although I am not in that category I still find stuff to watch. Pensioners and Oxbridge graduates are the type of people who complain that the £80 million odd a year spent on it is a waste of money – well I don’t go around saying that £71 million spent on BBC4 is a waste of money, do I? (although I do like some of BBC4′s output too).

There is a growing section of the audible public that thinks that if they don’t like it then it must be crap and be got rid of – there was a man in the 1930′s -40′s that had the same idea, he was called Adolf Hitler.