No reason to bash (2010-12-15)

[ibisum]

I'm waiting for the opportunity to buy 10 Pandora's and have them delivered within the same week. When that is possible, I will do that, and then have a huge Pandora party with all the folks in my neighborhood who have wanted one since mine arrived.


I just wish we could get over this supply problem. Man, its a drag.

 

[ledow]

No access.


"TalkTalk is the worst ISP I have ever been with. My net connection has been broken now for weeks. Their call centres are torture."

Probably because TalkTalk are the only "free" ISP in the UK, because they give you the broadband for nothing along with your normal phone line (and on your phone line, all calls to all other TalkTalk customers are free too). Seriously, I used TalkTalk for about a year just because they gave us a year's free international calls to try to keep us there but after that there's NOTHING to keep you on them (their customer service is and always has been atrocious but hey, I was getting free international calls to my wife's father in the US / Kuwait, free calls to her mother in Cornwall, free calls to half-a-dozen friends and phone bills on the order of £2 per quarter). They would also have thrown in free broadband too, but use their broadband? You've *GOT* to be joking! TalkTalk has THE WORST reputation of any ISP ever because it's basically "thrown in for free" in order to try to keep you with them. When our "free international calls" expired, and TalkTalk refused to deal with either me or my wife (which is hilarious, because we're the only one who lived in that house and paid the bills!) it took *minutes* to get us put back on BT (did it online with two clicks). It took about 2 days to get the ADSL moved over to PlusNet, too. We didn't even *need* any co-operation from TalkTalk whatsoever - the companies knew how terrible they were and just did it for us, automatically in the case of BT.


Seriously, any ISP is better than TalkTalk and if you're *relying* on your broadband to do business, that's a bit dodgy. Stop being a cheapskate - you can move to another ADSL ISP in a matter of days without having to lift a finger, from silly prices like £5.99 a month (PlusNet). If you have an ADSL line, ANY ISP will gladly take that up for you in a matter of minutes. Hell, a pay-as-you-go 3G dongle costs £15 a month (or £2 a day on a day-to-day package) for 2Mb access (3Gb limit - T-Mobile). Sorry, but if you're doing business online and you can't even get an ISP to get you online, let alone having a *business* broadband connection, and can't switch, and choose the "free" ISP's instead of the cheap ones, and can't be bothered to do anything about it after "weeks" then you really don't care about it.

 

[Timstertoo]

Probably because TalkTalk are the only "free" ISP in the UK, because they give you the broadband for nothing along with your normal phone line (and on your phone line, all calls to all other TalkTalk customers are free too). Seriously, I used TalkTalk for about a year just because they gave us a year's free international calls to try to keep us there but after that there's NOTHING to keep you on them (their customer service is and always has been atrocious but hey, I was getting free international calls to my wife's father in the US / Kuwait, free calls to her mother in Cornwall, free calls to half-a-dozen friends and phone bills on the order of £2 per quarter). They would also have thrown in free broadband too, but use their broadband? You've *GOT* to be joking! TalkTalk has THE WORST reputation of any ISP ever because it's basically "thrown in for free" in order to try to keep you with them. When our "free international calls" expired, and TalkTalk refused to deal with either me or my wife (which is hilarious, because we're the only one who lived in that house and paid the bills!) it took *minutes* to get us put back on BT (did it online with two clicks). It took about 2 days to get the ADSL moved over to PlusNet, too. We didn't even *need* any co-operation from TalkTalk whatsoever - the companies knew how terrible they were and just did it for us, automatically in the case of BT.


Seriously, any ISP is better than TalkTalk and if you're *relying* on your broadband to do business, that's a bit dodgy. Stop being a cheapskate - you can move to another ADSL ISP in a matter of days without having to lift a finger, from silly prices like £5.99 a month (PlusNet). If you have an ADSL line, ANY ISP will gladly take that up for you in a matter of minutes. Hell, a pay-as-you-go 3G dongle costs £15 a month (or £2 a day on a day-to-day package) for 2Mb access (3Gb limit - T-Mobile). Sorry, but if you're doing business online and you can't even get an ISP to get you online, let alone having a *business* broadband connection, and can't switch, and choose the "free" ISP's instead of the cheap ones, and can't be bothered to do anything about it after "weeks" then you really don't care about it.

Yeah I was wondering about that too.


How about the neighbours WiFi? Take your laptop to a place that serves coffee and offers free WiFi and pull your mails in. Take it to a pub, get slaughtered and get your mails at the same time, how's that for efficiency! Use your phone as a modem to get the mails in. Go wardriving until you find an open Wifi.


Hell, even anyone you know within walking distance if you can just plug it in for a couple of minutes x times a day.


There must be something I'm not getting. :blink:


Does Craig you live 150 miles from the nearest living person in an area that has no mobile phone coverage? Also how does he Twitter then? He writes a letter to a friend and after he receives it over snail mail he does it for him?


So many questions!

 

[EvilDragon]

There are not that many buildings with WiFi around Craig's house - I've been there building Pandoras, it's on the countryside


You can even twitter with mobile phones nowadays though...

 

[Timstertoo]

There are not that many buildings with WiFi around Craig's house - I've been there building Pandoras, it's on the countryside


You can even twitter with mobile phones nowadays though...

Well yes, but don't you do that over the internet connection of said mobile phone? So wouldn't you be able to pull your mail in then?


I can remember reading somewhere that Craig had x amount of mails to catch up on due to no internet connection.


I'm just wondering why he wouldn't go get internet from somewhere with his online business and all. It's pure interest in someones reasoning I'm really not trying to make a point about the Pandora or anything else for that matter. Honest!


It's just not a problem I would have. I have several connections at my disposal from different providers and I own a bar-restaurant (with free WiFi for my customers ). I would survive without internet but I'm sure as hell not going to miss any business due to not being able to respond to a mail! :blink: Also I'm a total internet junkie and I get twitchy without having it close to me at all times. Real close.

 

[Dead1nside]

Haven't really seen Craig around for a while, bar his tweets. If there's one thing I'm sensing from the community is there is a desire for more programs, more optimisation, new OS builds etc. I was wondering if OP could put the dev fund money to use _now_, to remedy some of this, to create interest, spur on development. For example. drk||Raziel (hope I got the name right) doesn't even have his Pandora yet; in my book, he'd be a great candidate for a free or subsidised Pandora.


ED, could you maybe approach Craig with this, if he doesn't see it please? I really think it'd help with morale too, just like you're awesome videos do. Thank you.

 

[SNESFAN]

I think a pandora should go to all the big names in emulation to make dedicated or optimized ports of each of their console emulators. Or at a minimum the ones that need the most amount of work.


hearing that there's ginge wrapped ports of emulators that runs better than the ones natively written for the pandora on what is hailed to be "the console emulator's wet dream" doesn't spout well for this. I can respect lack of developers, but if 1/4 of devices are in the wild and based off the poll from a year or so ago more than half of the people that responded checked the mark for being a developer. That leads one to believe there's a heck of a lot of either liars or unreleased software.


That and the whole topic of streamlining a common frontend for emulators or a unified menu system that would make the entire system look more polished. I think that would be a good way to spend some of the dev fund. I would much rather see a graphic overhaul/makeover of the entire os/sdk than some commercial title some people may not like anyway.


The ones that like "linuxy" environments have their desktop, those that *really* don't care for that thing, streamline the minimenu and the in-app menus to make at least that part of the os not look so hacky. The menu it's self doesn't look *that* bad but going from app to app, there is little to no consistency.

 

[Asiyura]

[…]
That and the whole topic of streamlining a common frontend for emulators or a unified menu system that would make the entire system look more polished. I think that would be a good way to spend some of the dev fund. I would much rather see a graphic overhaul/makeover of the entire os/sdk than some commercial title some people may not like anyway.


The ones that like "linuxy" environments have their desktop, those that *really* don't care for that thing, streamline the minimenu and the in-app menus to make at least that part of the os not look so hacky. The menu it's self doesn't look *that* bad but going from app to app, there is little to no consistency.

There was a discussion on the other forum and here too about that and I shared your opinion.


A unified look and feel for all the emulators would be an undeniable gain.


But like WizardStan or Exophase (or somebody else) said, most of the devs want to make their softs looks the way they want.


So the best way to get unified look and feel would be to get the source code and redo the whole GUI part of those softs.


It would make the Pandora easier to use for the people who aren't used to the "hackish" interfaces frequently found in homebrew softwares.


When I'll get my Pandora and my schedule allow is, I'll try to redo the GUI of an emulator.


But I'm no code genius, I can't promise I'll be able to do it.

 

[SNESFAN]

There was a discussion on the other forum and here too about that and I shared your opinion.


A unified look and feel for all the emulators would be an undeniable gain.


But like WizardStan or Exophase (or somebody else) said, most of the devs want to make their softs looks the way they want.


So the best way to get unified look and feel would be to get the source code and redo the whole GUI part of those softs.


It would make the Pandora easier to use for the people who aren't used to the "hackish" interfaces frequently found in homebrew softwares.


When I'll get my Pandora and my schedule allow is, I'll try to redo the GUI of an emulator.


But I'm no code genius, I can't promise I'll be able to do it.

I'm extremely aware of the last conversation about it. I threw the recommendation out there and a skeezix replied that he hasn't seen or heard of a good enough implementation of it to make it worth while looking into. He also said he didn't have time to do it himself if it there was a good implementation with all the other stuff going on in his life at the moment. I'm sure it wasn't the first time it was brought up either, but that just reinforced the fact that some see it as a problem. I think a step in the right direction would be to make sure all the emulators accept command line arguments, turning the emulator into basically engines. Trying to round up all the developers and get them on the same page I agree will be difficult if not impossible but get them to allow their emulator to accept common arguements and a small api system that would allow you to frame up the menu to your own liking might be easier.


As long as the emulator stays open source then it's like you said someone can come along later and create the framework for the menus etc. I think maybe some of the dev fund should go to someone that specializes in that kinda thing.


I'm eager to see what you come up with though


open sourced front end that would freshen up the emulators a bit possibly, still doesn't address the in-app menu system etc


http://www.cabrio-fe.org/download/


it's sort of like hyperspin or what it was based off of or a clone possibly, great potential

 

[Creature XL]

The ones that like "linuxy" environments have their desktop, those that *really* don't care for that thing, streamline the minimenu and the in-app menus to make at least that part of the os not look so hacky. The menu it's self doesn't look *that* bad but going from app to app, there is little to no consistency.

A consistent UI and/or in-game menus would really be cool and maybe even important. And I am sure that two or three people would code something like that. I might be even one of them. However, it will be a lot of work, as every emu is different, let alone needs different options. Further, I guess not all use a common "environment" like for example SDL...

 

[quartercast]

Picklelauncher?