10. Wii

According to some, the only console that brought some innovation to gaming overall. According to me, the biggest crap Nintendo has ever released. Wii is generally like communism - good in theory, sucks in practice. It could have revolutionised video gaming, it could have been the best console, it could have easily defeat its rivals. But it didn’t. I mean, it actually is the best-selling console on the market, and it reached the kind of customers no one has ever managed to reach before - casual gamers, but Nintendo have completely forgotten about the more important consumer base, the hard(er?)core gamers. Because nobody wants to play Mario all the fucking time.

9. Public transportation

I actually have to use public transport to get to and from school almost everyday. And of course, it has many advantages - it’s cheap, relatively ecological and environment-friendly, and often there are the bus lanes which are really in case of a huge traffic jam. But the list of drawbacks is much longer, unfortunately.

First of all, public transportation in Kraków (where I live) is free for people over 70. One could think “heh, how many 70-year-olds would actually use public transport?”. Surprisingly, the answer is: all of them. The buses and trams, quite crowded without the billion grannies using them, often are filled with people almost standing on each other’s head because of the lack of room to breathe.

Another group of annoying people travelling by the same buses as I do that are the stinking homeless garbage collectors. Oh man, if you happen to be on a crowded bus with a bum standing next to you, preventing yourself from throwing up will be a very tough job.

The last annoying thing in public transportation I’d like to point out are the screaming children. When one of them starts crying, and by chance there’s another one riding the same bus, he will probably start crying as well, and then the third one, and the fourth one… This can drive you mad. Even though I do always wear earphones when travelling by bus, to clarify that.
I’m gonna have to get a driving license as soon as I can.

8. Pi (π)

Not that I hate it, I just hate the ambiguity it brings to mathematics. While you can give the exact area of a rectangle, (in most cases) triangle or even most of polygons, while working on circle- or sphere-related calculations, the exact value of pi is never known. Whether you will substitute it with 3.14, 22/7 or 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510, you will never get the accurate result.

While the value of pi has been computed to more than a trillion (10¹²) digits, elementary applications, such as calculating the circumference of a circle, will rarely require more than a dozen decimal places. For example, a value truncated to 39 decimal places is sufficient to compute the circumference of any circle that fits in the observable universe to a precision comparable to the size of a hydrogen atom.

Wikipedia

And even though the information I’ve found on Wikipedia (above) cheers me up, I never feel fully satisfied with my circumferences, because I know that pi’s expansion is infinite. That’s why I don’t use rounded corners on regua.biz.

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The American companies have always screwed Europe.

The UK citizens may not have experienced that much of screwing by the Americans, but I have never been given a chance to download songs from the iTunes Store, buy games at PlayStation Network or play games via Xbox Live. Yeah, even XBL is not officially available in Poland.
Thus, when I refer to “Europe” here, I generally mean “the UK”.

Microsoft is planning to boost the number of movies available for download on its Xbox Live Marketplace for Ireland [and the UK] from the present 30 or 40 films to up to 400 movies, in line with the US.

Over two years after the release of Xbox 360, someone has finally realised that people across the pond do use the Xbox Live Marketplace and they do want to be able to download the latest films.
More than a million of XBL subscribers live in the UK and Ireland, and I bet at least half a million all over the Europe. Of course, Microsoft is a US-based company, but how the hell could you forget where the Pilgrims came from?
People do watch the same movies here as the US-ers do (maybe except the French, but that’s a different story).
Obviously I’m glad that I’ll finally be able to rent a film other than the 300 from the XBLM, but isn’t that a bit too late?
From what I’ve seen during the past two years, Microsoft has been trying to make people understand they don’t need any CDs/DVDs/HD DVDs to watch their movies, all they need is a TV. And the 360, of course. Despite the spectacular success of their console all over the world, they - and many of the American companies - have been supporting one of the continents (guess which!) much more than the other ones.

I can understand delaying the releases of games that need to be translated, or even the retail ones as they have to be regionalised for the PAL system, but why the hell do we have to wait two weeks (often even longer) for a demo to come out in Europe? Is it more profitable to release the games in Europe a month later than in the US?
When we get the games, the Americans aren’t playing them anymore, because they got bored with them already.

The Xbox Live Marketplace has always been one of the major advantages of the 360. However, all the hyping reviews I’ve read before buying my 360 were probably written by Americans, because our Marketplace consists of three demos and four movies, two of which are the Dead or Alive Xtreme trailers.

Screwing Chechnya? Okay, I can live with that. Screwing Madagascar? That’s understandable. But screwing a whole continent?
Nah, Microsoft, you’d better get working on it. Because just as I’m not going to buy the Gold subscription to play on slowly working servers, I’m not going to use the Marketplace to watch 300 for the umpteenth time.
Dead or Alive trailers are fine, though.

Loading. The inevitable part of any gamer’s life. There are many different ways of fighting it – some developers decide to limit the number of textures and objects to load, others try making two-dimensional backgrounds, and Sony doubles the internal memory of their PlayStation Portable. But why do some games need much more time to load than others with similar graphics? The answer is: code optimisation.

The wannabe developers often release games that require twice as much RAM or CPU power as they would if they were produced by, let’s say, Activision. They usually don’t optimise their code as much as the experienced developers would. Thus, you don’t see many games that take ages to load published on the 360, because it is extremely difficult to pack a game into one DVD disc and developers are forced to make their code as compact as possible.

PC gaming, however, isn’t limited by the capacity of a disc. Not only do the unexperienced developers fail to produce optimised games – it often happens to such giants as EA. Have you ever played Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban on your computer? I could easily make myself a cup of tea while a new level was loading. There are THOUSANDS of other games with such a poor performance, but complaining about their efficiency is pointless; you will always hear the “get a better PC” argument as an answer. Of course, you can go to the shop and buy yourself a new graphic card, but wouldn’t it be better to spend this money on new games?

Obviously, it would. I don’t really like to see the new DirectX being implemented in computer games, I don’t really want my PC game to have outrageously great graphics, I don’t really want to be forced to change the game’s graphic details level to the minimum. I want my games to be working as fast as they were on the E3 demo when they were announced. And that’s why I value the next-gen consoles much more than the modern personal computers.

I do realise that this rant probably won’t convince the die-hard PC gamers to change their mind, but just think of how much cash you spend on new processors, graphic cards and RAM memory and how many games you could buy for it. In my opinion, PC gaming will eventually die, and now is the best time to abandon the sinking ship of hardware upgrades and join the gaming community with the brightest future.
Just get yourself a console.

A grindhouse is an American term for a theater that mainly showed exploitation films. It is also a term used to describe the genre of films that played in such theatres. Grindhouse films are also referred to as “exploitation films.” Grindhouses were known for continuous programs of B movies, usually consisting of a double feature where two (and very often three) films were shown consecutively.
 

Wikipedia

As I am a big fan of all Quentin Tarantino’s films, I was looking forward to the date of Grindhouse’s premiere. As it is a double film (or a ‘grindhouse‘), it consists of two movies (no shit!) - Death Proof written and directed by Tarantino, and Planet Terror written and directed by Robert Rodriguez.

Internationally (i.e. all countries except DVD region 1, that is the US and Canada), the movie - despite its name - is split into two films. At first, I thought it’s just a theft - they’re stealing our money by forcing us to pay twice to see a movie that Americans pay for only once. But now, as I’ve seen the film before it was released in Europe, I can say that it’s an ill wind that blows nobody good, and the Death Proof segment is being screened in all European cinemas in an extended version, which gives us about 27 minutes more of the film (including the scenes like the lap dance or the girls’ visit to the shop before they pick Zoë up, which have been replaced by a “missing reel” title cards or just passed over in the US!).

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Unfortunately, the boredom mentioned in the previous post hasn’t gone away and I had enough time to write another PHP script for comics displaying. This time it’s about Cyanide and Happiness, one of the funniest web comics on the Web.

It was much more difficult to write this script, because the comic isn’t categorised by date nor are its image files. I had to use cURL and even get the latest strip’s number from the C&H’s feed (although accessing explosm.net/comics redirects you to the latest one, it’s impossible to do such thing with cURL). It’s quite more complicated than the Garfield script and it (unluckily) takes more time to load. Also, because of the C&H authors’ carelessness, there are some gaps between episodes (e.g. after episode 15, there’s a huge gap until episode 39). I hard-coded a solution for one gap only, hope you won’t find it very annoying (the script displays an error message if there’s no strip with the requested number). The script has similar functionality to the Garfield one - it displays all kind of possible errors, has a simple yet sufficient menu.

All feedback is welcome, although - as with my previous ‘comic script’ - I’d prefer not develop this script, everything’s in your hands.

Enjoy. Here’s a working example, and the source code.