Lion Warning [slim]

Beckham, ASLEEP! [brit]

Oh jesus, GET A LIFE.
David Beckham sleeping = art
So you put a camera in front of David Beckham, and you filmed him sleeping for over an hour, and you think it's *ART* ?
Fuck off love. This is what happens when the pot noodle generation get given enough grant money to stop them having to get proper jobs, or actually do something that doesn't involve a 15 minute trip to Dixons and knowing some bloke with a VCR.

Blueyonder give bandy for free! [lurks]

Ever keen to compete, UK cable Internet provider Blueyonder, issued a shock press release an hour ago. Only some weeks ago they cut my monthly cost by £5 but it seems now they're upping everyone's downstream bandwidth by 50%!

Telewest Broadband is making the most of its advanced fibre optic network by revamping its range of blueyonder internet products to offer faster speeds for the same price as existing services.

The cable company is set to turn up the heat on rival internet providers by permanently boosting the speed of broadband internet connections by 50 per cent, creating another clear benefit for its blueyonder services.

The unique range of access tiers will be available to new customers by the end of May and existing customers will be upgraded, on a region-by-region basis, over the same period. The overhaul will see the following changes:

Nifty huh? So your regular 512K, 1MB and 2MB (the one I have) are being upgraded and they're also adding a cheap 256K service which I reckon they should have introduced ages ago. People want always on Internet, not 'broadband' as such. Anyhow, here's the details;

• blueyonder broadband 750Kb
  The standard blueyonder broadband service will increase in speed from 512Kb to 750Kb, but still cost from only £25 per month
• blueyonder broadband 1.5Mb
  The faster 1Mb service also gets a 50 per cent bandwidth boost to 1.5Mb, for the current price of £35 per month
• blueyonder broadband 3Mb
  The flagship 2Mb service becomes the UK's first residential 3Mb service, offering speeds up to 60 times faster than dial-up access, from £50 a month
• blueyonder broadband 256Kb
  The recently launched entry-level service will remain unchanged, costing from just £17.99 per month

So, it appears I'll get a 3MB connection. Hello 375K/s downloads. Still, the lame thing is they've not mentioned upstream so I'm guessing that's still 256K. That's really annoying. That's the thing which is actually worth paying for, especially teleworkers. Instead this is basically just a specification arms race where as in reality people just wont use this bandwidth anyway and BY cap the upstream so the P2P stuff doesn't hurt their network so much.
I'd rather they intelligently targetted P2P abusers and increased the upstream on the top-tier products. Fat chance though, I guess. Still, an extra megabit for free - better than a kick in the teeth eh?

Adults allowed to see hard willies shocker [slim]

What is goign on with censorship in the uk? All of a sudden what's accepted and what's not has changed dramatically. Melonfarmers reports today that 'The Good Old Naughty Days' has been passed BBFC for general release completely uncut. This black and white film nearly 100 years old containts not only hard ons (gasp), full penetration (holy cow) but bestiality. How the fuck did this happen? There's been no change of laws, no change of guidelines, yet all of a sudden we've gone from not being able to see an open vag or a hard on to be able to see them both together in their natural environment with the family pet involved for good measure!
It's the same with the satellite pron sub channels. They're notoroisly softcore, but just for the last few weeks they've been shoving in hardcore material almost at random. One second your can see a coupling having sex apparently using their belly buttons instead of their genitals, the next you've got closeups of equipment being inserted in full detail.
I'm not complaining about any of this, if you pay for porn, you should be able to watch it. If you get offended by porn, don't pay to see it, see? What I would like to see is some clarity on why it is this stuffs suddenly allowed, what exactly is allowed, and where can we get hold of it!

bbc.co.uk [beej]

Just to let you know that BBC marketing finally accepted defeated in the case that BBCi is a nonsense brand name. I know it was nonsense because you all told me so when that name came in.
So the BBC website will be rebranded, referred to, and promoted as 'bbc.co.uk' and that's just a victory for common sense. The grey 'i' in the corner of every page will slip off quietly.

Interactive TV gets lumbered with BBCi, which is fine because no-one uses it anyway.
For the patriots amongst us, hurray for it not being the very un-British bbc.com domain.

Battlefield Vietnam: see you in Hanoi! [brit]

I bought BF:V on Saturday morning, having been somewhat put off by the reports I heard from my fellow EED regarding this latest 'Battlefield' title from EA. Various stories about how you get shot from miles away without seeing what's happening, and the ongoing love affair with Desert Combat meant it wasn't in the 'must have' bracket.
However, Desert Combat seems to have died, so I grabbed a copy and fired it up; put simply, this game rocks.
The first thing you'll notice is the audio; it's absolutely amazing. From the moment the intro kicks off, you know they've actually bothered to do a good job with the sound, and the sound tracks. This is Vietnam Rock And Roll baby.
The gameplay is the same pretty much as previous Battlefield titles, and as you'd expect the weapons, levels, vehicles, etc are all different; but it's much more than a simple reskinning of Battlefield 1942 - it feels different, it plays different, and seems to me at least to have got the balance between gameplay and realism smack on.
So, here's some screenies for ya - the attention to detail and the engine tweak to provide the foliage and fauna is amazingly good; unlike '42, hills and grass and trees actually look like the same.

You can use the fauna for excellent cover, and the draw distance is superb.

Touches like this are so cool; as the downwash from the helo hits the ground, billowing clouds of dust and debris are kicked up into a mini duststorm that's powerful enough to push things like jeeps out of the way.

The level of detail even goes to the cockpits. Those control sticks actually move, they're not just some lame texture attempt.

HL2: the new DNF [beej]

A quote out from Gabe Newell:

'We've already spent millions into this project, and we're willing to spend as much as we need to make this the best first person experience ever. If that means delaying the game to 2005, we'll do it without any hesitation.'

I've heard this shit somewhere before, and it involves another FPS hero character saving the world from aliens as well!
Begrudgingly, its what I don't want to hear and also do want to hear. I hate rushed games, I hate 18-month turnaround games, and I love ground-breaking big-on-story games.
But then, it was just about to come out six months ago, then someone mysteriously hax0red the source code and now it needs another year? And the latest on TF2 is that it is still in progress, it was just being converted to the Source engine?
This game is turning into a right saga. Pleeeeease tell me these delays aren't all down to Steam. That 'platform' just isn't worth it. It didn't have any problems delivering CS:CZ because... wait for it... no-one bought the fucking piece of shit! What is the official line on HL2 multiplayer anyway? Net play wasn't bad in HL at all, it was easy and pickup'n'play stuff - it was just trounced by the teamplay in TFC and then utterly usurped by CS.
We're good for games right now. We've got Doom 3 looming (right?) and then summer is coming up fast. So we basically need HL2 for August/September, no later Mr.Newell or else.