The problem isn't that they aren't selling the things, it's that they can't seem to get the stock up into stores. Ramping up production after almost 2 years on the market never crossed their minds. Imagine all the units they aren't selling because they can't get in-store stock up.
This is all good and nice and all, but when will I be able to walk into a Best Buy/Wal Mart or any other store and actually buy a Wii Console ? The "shortage" is getting ridiculous.
Now compare those 300-400 bucks to a last gen console, compare all the things a console can do with all the things a pc can do. And don't forget that those components you have just replaced together can make a second pc that you could give to your kids to make their homework and all those silly usefull stuff computers do, or you could sell them on ebay for a not so bad price (look at old type ram prices on ebay for example) Or you could just get a PS3 for the same price, get the greatest and latest gaming goodies, and still have it do all the things a PC can do by visiting this url : http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com/products/ydl/
And you just had to take it out of its cardboard box...
As I said, I recently gutted my 4 year old PC. Completely replaced just about everything. Wound up with a very nice new system for about $600. Sure, I guess I could have bought a console for that price... But then I'd need to buy/build a new PC for my day-to-day use as well, because I don't just use my PC exclusively for gaming. I watch movies on it, listen to music, read the news, surf the web, get email. And I was able to re-use all my old hardware to build a very nice media center PC. Or you could've just kept your 4 year old PC instead of gutting it, use it to watch movies, listen to music, read the news, surf the web, get email. I assume you were already doing all that with it anyhow since I was doing all that back in 1998, on a Pentium 2 with barely 64 MB of ram. In Linux on top of it. Then you could've gotten a PS3 for 100$ less then you spent, and used it as a Media center and gaming platform. That extra 100$ could've went to games. The PS3 is going to have a longer lifetime of running current games than your 600$ PC will anyhow.
1. APIs. Yes, I'm aware of OpenGL and other APIs that can be cobbled together, but DirectX presents a much more coherent and stable platform for game developers to work with. Even with the unpopularity of DirectX 10, look at all the games that can smoothly use DX9 and have modular support for DX10... show me a single Linux API that can work that well. The closest thing I've seen is SDL which is a shadow of DirectX, and from what I can see is basically a dead project now. DirectX just sounds like it's a single API. The truth is it's a collection of different APIs for different things. DirectSound, DirectInput, DirectDraw, Direct3D, etc..
SDL is a Layer library. It's basically an abstraction to things like Alsa, Xlibs, Mesa, OpenAL and others. Cobbled together APIs might sound bad, but in the end, it's no harder to learn to make a SDL application using OpenGL for graphics than it is to learn Direct3D with Win32.
3. Linux is a moving/amorphous target. Usually people get around this by using open source, since that means you can just compile against the new kernel and you're fine. But for a closed source, binary distribution this isn't as simple. The game manufacturers (who use a lot of tricks to make their games faster and better) would have to try to optimize for a platform that has multiple distributions and multiple hardware platforms (32 bit, 64 bit, solaris, mac) where there's no guarantee the kernel or the scheduler or the window manager will remain the same. In windows they can be sure that the movement's going to be steady and they'll have to release a compatibility patch infrequently. This more than the rest of your post, marks you as Linux ignorant. User space software isn't linked against the kernel. What you are describing is dynamically linked binaries against libc and other distribution supplied libraries like for gaming : SDL, OpenAL, Xlibs, Mesa. There are 2 ways around that particular problem:
1- Ship statically linked executables. Loki Games (remember them ? they made ports of commercial games to Linux) did that back in 2001. I take out my HOM&MIII CD and install it on Ubuntu 7.10 and it works. Just like it worked on Red Hat 6.0 back in the day, just like I used to run it on Slackware 8.0. I has a graphic installer, made using GTK+, it's as easy to install as any Windows games. Sure this doesn't account for sparc/ppc/mips/etc architectures, since you still need another binary for those, but neither did Windows games work on Windows NT for PPC/Alpha/Mips back when Microsoft was still cross-architecture so that's not actually a Linux weakness nor is it an issue. The Latest Sun Sparc workstations don't exactly have game ready hardware.
2- The Oracle way. They basically ship you compiled object files and the installer links them for you against your own system libraries. Takes a bit longer to install, but you're sure you don't have to find the exact library they linked against and the executable size can remain smaller thanks to dynamic linking. This requires that you supply it with a linker (GNU ld) and all the proper dev packages of your distribution, so it's a little more complex. Of course distributions could make sure to just install everything by default if games shipped this way.
People that have been shipping binary Linux software since Linux has existed have never had the specific issues you mentionned. Quit the FUD and go for the real reason there is no gaming on Linux : lack of Market Share. Loki Games basically proved that. They went bankrupt after a few ports since their installed base wasn't enough to support their porting costs.
Ah, you're a Linux user not much into games then. Why are you even bothering with this article then ? His point is basically that PCs being sold right now, right next to the PC game aisle, can't even run games sold 8 years ago. Would it be so wrong for Intel to actually make a chipset that works ? It could have saved Microsoft from that class action lawsuit too, since the 915 is at the heart of the problem. Intel pushed for the 915 to be labeled Vista Capable when it wasn't in fact capable of running Aeroglass.
Btw, I'm a Linux user on the desktop and I play games on consoles almost exclusively nowadays, I just see his point about the hardware being sold. If nVidia and ATI can manage to ship on-board video that has decent 3D acceleration at a reasonable price, why can't Intel do the same ? They've basically sucked at it since they introduced the i740 chipset way back in the day. All hype, no go.
Before I ever got into Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest (Dragon Warrior here) type RPGs, I was introduced to the genre with things like Pool of Radiance and other TSR gold box titles, not to mentions things like Ultima.
I have played both types of RPG quite extensively, and yet I still prefer the simpler console gameplay where you can just sit back with a controller and used simplified menus than the more complex interface driven RPGs. Not to mention it seems like the Japanese seem to have a better grip on what makes an epic story vs the US' obsession with non-linear and very interactive driven games.
I'd say both are almost from a seperate genre, the Console RPG and the PC RPG.
Thin client has always been a client-server architecture. I don't see where you stating that Web 2.0 is one is any different than Citrix, X, 3270 or any other kind of dumb terminal is different in this regard. Sure X reverse the terminology on what is the Server and what is the Client, but that's all it is, terminology. It is essentially the same thing in the end.
The Web open standards you so gracefully proclaim the champion and main difference won't be able to implement all the features of locally run applications. Older thin client architectures like Terminal Servers, Citrix, X don't need any special plugins like a Web Browser does in order to give all the features of the underlying OS and clients to an application. That is a cruft you'll have to live with.
Given that, the only difference I see is that Web apps are currently constrained to using a browser as a runtime. Given a powerful enough "browser", I see no reason why they can't do everything a local app can do. Not that I think they should replace local apps, but it's naive to think that they can't. This is where you truly think that your new fangled Marketing drivel is different from the past, yet you ignore all the past work and errors done. Things like CAD/CAE require more and more hard drive space/cpu/memory to work. This is the reason Adobe explicitly disabled running more than 2 instances of Autocad on a computer, preventing Citrix and Terminal Servers from actually being used to run the app. Also, at my old job, we used to be a thin architecture implementor. My boss asked me to bypass the Autocad thing. I came back to him with detailed costs of running Autocad over the network vs locally with network based archiving. The thin client solution had exactly 0 advantages and a big list of problems/disadvantages. The biggest problem came from the fact that getting 4 Workstations was cheaper than getting 1 server or a server farm capable of handling the load of 4 people using Autocad. Server RAM and bigger RAM chips were one of the biggest cost. CPU was a killer and was network bandwidth required for remote display.
Web 2.0 is not going to solve everything, just Citrix, X, Terminal Services, etc.. before it. You'll never have just a box with a Web Browser giving you all your computing needs. It'll work for basic tasks like e-mail, word processing, spread sheets and maybe some Videos streamed over the network (not HD content, sorry, you're still better off downloading that and viewing it locally instead of buffering for 15 minutes). Solutions like this already exist :
When consumers buy machines barely able to play Quake III (looking at you Intel 9xx and 3xxx), I'm glad the game devs aren't supporting it. You wouldn't want to be playing Quake III 8 years later would you ? That is what this article is about, Intel chipsets found in most consumer products not being up to par with graphic accelerators sold 8 years ago. ATI and nVidia are both shipping integrated solutions that are much better than Intel, they just don't have the market share. So basically, the gap is too wide between the lowest end PC and the highest end PC to make a game that will work on both, without sacrificing the higher-end version.
All this only applies to eye-candy gaming that FPS nuts love.
When quitting a game if you have all of your icons/windows bound to a corner of the screen... Try checking your settings... as this absolutely should not happen. If it does maybe you should go look for a patch for the game you are playing or update your drivers. Maybe you run a really low desktop resolution, but for most people capable of running 1280xXXX resolutions on the desktop, but not in games, this is the result you get. That is because the game will switch the resolution and Windows will reposition all your icons and Windows to fit this new resolution, like the dumb idiot OS it is.
I think the Echo/Yaris Cup series pretty much pisses all over that analogy. Most drivers say it's the most fun they've had in a while since the cars are underperforming and need to be run mostly stock (tires/brake upgrades are allowed). Something about the challenge with over the top body roll and 105 horse power.
I think this is something that is lost on some people. Not only do you often have the ability to fix your PC problem yourself (where this is more difficult to impossible with a console), it is also far easier to get PC service without shipping off your system. From my experience, console repairs typically take longer to perform and often require the shipping of the console back to a manufacturer for repair or replacement (more likely the latter). This is only due to the fact that most PC issues you run into will be software issues and will be fixed by either upgrading/downgrading a driver, removing bad "optimizer" software, changing some settings here and there or in the worst case scenario, reinstalling your game/Windows from scratch to go back to the way it was. Console software on the other hand is mostly rock solid since it is minimal and made for only 1 hardware configuration.
When it comes to hardware problems, PCs and Consoles are very much alike. If you have faulty hardware in your PC, you have the same 2 choices as with a console. Repair or replace. The PC has only the slight advantage where you can replace it part by part yourself and getting nVidia to "repair" an out of warranty card is probably impossible. However, most consumers can't really diagnose faulty hardware and most techs go the trial and error route since finding out that it was that 3rd RAM chip that was causing the problems isn't even apparent in the first place. So unless you have a spare parts bin to try out old parts or like spending an afternoon trying different RAM configurations in your PC to find out what works, you're pretty much going to ship it off or have a store ship it off for you just like you would the console.
In the end, repairing either is pretty much the same deal.
I would answer "One is loaded over a network, primarily uses network-based systems for storage, and works with a small set of standard local applications." If that small set of standard local applications ever becomes capable of delivering web apps which can actually rival the "heavier" desktop apps, then I would say that the client OS is exactly as relevant as CPU microcode -- it's absolutely essential, it must kick ass, and it's also something the user doesn't care about. Ah good old thin client architectures. Is that all Web 2.0 is ? A rebranding of what Citrix has been doing forever. Of what X terminals used to be in the early 90s ? Tn3270 in the 80s ?
The medium and server type may have changed, but thin clients have been around forever. To think that "This time it'll work out" is naive and ignorant of the past. As the GP said, not all applications can be replaced by thin client solutions.
How this got insightful shows how much people don't understand this story.
The Vista Capable sticker is not about buying a machine with Vista on it. The Class Action Lawsuit is not about Vista running "like crap". This lawsuit is because people bought Windows XP computers with a sticker basically telling them the machine would be able to run Windows Vista when it came out. The lawsuit is because when Vista did come out, most of these Vista Capable computers would not run anything but Vista Home Basic, basically, Vista would run without Aero, which a lot of people claim is the experience Microsoft marketed as being Vista.
So yes, maybe you only care about Flash and AJAX, but the people in this lawsuit very much care about the OS itself. Don't buy the Hype, Fat client and stand-alone applications are here to stay. The WEB isn't the solution to every problem.
If you throw a live Bee's nest in someone's kitchen where he's having a diner party, sure it can be considered a prank, and since you're not responsible for the fact that the Bees will defend themselves, it's perfectly innocent right ?
Don't stir a Hornet's nest. You know SWAT teams aren't renowned for their sense of humor, don't go playing pranks on them. There is a term for what you are describing, it is Criminal Negligence. You are responsible if people get hurt, end of story. It has nothing to do with the Old Generation and everything to do with the new generation not wanting to take responsibility for their actions.
You're missing the Total part of his equation. Basically, their premise is that Linux isn't free (as in beer) as you put it, it actually has a cost attached. TCO includes not only license costs, but support personnel costs, hardware cost, training costs, maintenance contract costs, actual maintenance costs, etc..
Their argument is basically that Windows has lower cost because there are more professionals out there that are trained to support/maintain Windows based system, and these professionals usually have lower wages/consulting fees than their equivalent Unix/Linux professionals. They also argue that Windows training in general is cheaper, that it is easier to maintain through their many support/update tools and include some highly dubious claims about Linux legal costs by up there because you don't have a single vendor backing you and that you will be liable for copyright/patent infringement and that the IP holders will go after you directly as a customer.
So that's basically why he thinks Windows is better TCO.
The funniest part of this troll is that you've been using Linux for 10 years, yet fail to notice that there's a pre-built Synergy package available in Universe.
apt-get install synergy was all you had to do and it would've simply worked. Instead, you found out the hard way that Ubuntu doesn't install -dev packages that contain the header files/libs needed to compile programs and instead of looking to see if there was a package that installed all the needed packages in 1 apt-get command, you installed every -dev package 1 by 1.
I don't believe you actually scrapped a drive or that this happened though, just a bad troll.
You can whine about the Ubuntu Forums all you want, but all you did there was insult people and refuse to try anything they told you. If a bootloader install fails, you need bootable media to recover it. End of story. You refused to get any bootable media to restore a functionning bootloader. It took you a week to get to that point, where everyone would be at least back up in Windows in under 5 minutes.
Also, the Bootloader is not Ubuntu's, it's GNU Grub and it's used by almost all Linux distributions nowadays. If it was that flaky, a lot less people would be using Linux.
You're simply a bad troll who thinks he knows more about computers than he actually does.
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The problem isn't that they aren't selling the things, it's that they can't seem to get the stock up into stores. Ramping up production after almost 2 years on the market never crossed their minds. Imagine all the units they aren't selling because they can't get in-store stock up.
This is all good and nice and all, but when will I be able to walk into a Best Buy/Wal Mart or any other store and actually buy a Wii Console ? The "shortage" is getting ridiculous.
But the PS3 does support a mouse. So what you said could also be complete baloney.
And you just had to take it out of its cardboard box...
SDL is a Layer library. It's basically an abstraction to things like Alsa, Xlibs, Mesa, OpenAL and others. Cobbled together APIs might sound bad, but in the end, it's no harder to learn to make a SDL application using OpenGL for graphics than it is to learn Direct3D with Win32.
1- Ship statically linked executables. Loki Games (remember them ? they made ports of commercial games to Linux) did that back in 2001. I take out my HOM&MIII CD and install it on Ubuntu 7.10 and it works. Just like it worked on Red Hat 6.0 back in the day, just like I used to run it on Slackware 8.0. I has a graphic installer, made using GTK+, it's as easy to install as any Windows games. Sure this doesn't account for sparc/ppc/mips/etc architectures, since you still need another binary for those, but neither did Windows games work on Windows NT for PPC/Alpha/Mips back when Microsoft was still cross-architecture so that's not actually a Linux weakness nor is it an issue. The Latest Sun Sparc workstations don't exactly have game ready hardware.
2- The Oracle way. They basically ship you compiled object files and the installer links them for you against your own system libraries. Takes a bit longer to install, but you're sure you don't have to find the exact library they linked against and the executable size can remain smaller thanks to dynamic linking. This requires that you supply it with a linker (GNU ld) and all the proper dev packages of your distribution, so it's a little more complex. Of course distributions could make sure to just install everything by default if games shipped this way.
People that have been shipping binary Linux software since Linux has existed have never had the specific issues you mentionned. Quit the FUD and go for the real reason there is no gaming on Linux : lack of Market Share. Loki Games basically proved that. They went bankrupt after a few ports since their installed base wasn't enough to support their porting costs.
Ah, you're a Linux user not much into games then. Why are you even bothering with this article then ? His point is basically that PCs being sold right now, right next to the PC game aisle, can't even run games sold 8 years ago. Would it be so wrong for Intel to actually make a chipset that works ? It could have saved Microsoft from that class action lawsuit too, since the 915 is at the heart of the problem. Intel pushed for the 915 to be labeled Vista Capable when it wasn't in fact capable of running Aeroglass. Btw, I'm a Linux user on the desktop and I play games on consoles almost exclusively nowadays, I just see his point about the hardware being sold. If nVidia and ATI can manage to ship on-board video that has decent 3D acceleration at a reasonable price, why can't Intel do the same ? They've basically sucked at it since they introduced the i740 chipset way back in the day. All hype, no go.
Before I ever got into Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest (Dragon Warrior here) type RPGs, I was introduced to the genre with things like Pool of Radiance and other TSR gold box titles, not to mentions things like Ultima.
I have played both types of RPG quite extensively, and yet I still prefer the simpler console gameplay where you can just sit back with a controller and used simplified menus than the more complex interface driven RPGs. Not to mention it seems like the Japanese seem to have a better grip on what makes an epic story vs the US' obsession with non-linear and very interactive driven games.
I'd say both are almost from a seperate genre, the Console RPG and the PC RPG.
The Web open standards you so gracefully proclaim the champion and main difference won't be able to implement all the features of locally run applications. Older thin client architectures like Terminal Servers, Citrix, X don't need any special plugins like a Web Browser does in order to give all the features of the underlying OS and clients to an application. That is a cruft you'll have to live with.
Given that, the only difference I see is that Web apps are currently constrained to using a browser as a runtime. Given a powerful enough "browser", I see no reason why they can't do everything a local app can do. Not that I think they should replace local apps, but it's naive to think that they can't. This is where you truly think that your new fangled Marketing drivel is different from the past, yet you ignore all the past work and errors done. Things like CAD/CAE require more and more hard drive space/cpu/memory to work. This is the reason Adobe explicitly disabled running more than 2 instances of Autocad on a computer, preventing Citrix and Terminal Servers from actually being used to run the app. Also, at my old job, we used to be a thin architecture implementor. My boss asked me to bypass the Autocad thing. I came back to him with detailed costs of running Autocad over the network vs locally with network based archiving. The thin client solution had exactly 0 advantages and a big list of problems/disadvantages. The biggest problem came from the fact that getting 4 Workstations was cheaper than getting 1 server or a server farm capable of handling the load of 4 people using Autocad. Server RAM and bigger RAM chips were one of the biggest cost. CPU was a killer and was network bandwidth required for remote display.
Web 2.0 is not going to solve everything, just Citrix, X, Terminal Services, etc.. before it. You'll never have just a box with a Web Browser giving you all your computing needs. It'll work for basic tasks like e-mail, word processing, spread sheets and maybe some Videos streamed over the network (not HD content, sorry, you're still better off downloading that and viewing it locally instead of buffering for 15 minutes). Solutions like this already exist :
http://www.wyse.com/products/hardware/thinclients/index.asp
Like I said, it's been tried before, and Thick clients are here to stay.
When consumers buy machines barely able to play Quake III (looking at you Intel 9xx and 3xxx), I'm glad the game devs aren't supporting it. You wouldn't want to be playing Quake III 8 years later would you ? That is what this article is about, Intel chipsets found in most consumer products not being up to par with graphic accelerators sold 8 years ago. ATI and nVidia are both shipping integrated solutions that are much better than Intel, they just don't have the market share. So basically, the gap is too wide between the lowest end PC and the highest end PC to make a game that will work on both, without sacrificing the higher-end version.
All this only applies to eye-candy gaming that FPS nuts love.
I think the Echo/Yaris Cup series pretty much pisses all over that analogy. Most drivers say it's the most fun they've had in a while since the cars are underperforming and need to be run mostly stock (tires/brake upgrades are allowed). Something about the challenge with over the top body roll and 105 horse power.
Not all games are RTS or FPS. Mouse support is not needed for every game. For my good old platformers and RPGs, I much prefer the game pad.
The problem isn't console gaming is starting to have the same issues as PC gaming, it's that you own a Microsoft product :)
When it comes to hardware problems, PCs and Consoles are very much alike. If you have faulty hardware in your PC, you have the same 2 choices as with a console. Repair or replace. The PC has only the slight advantage where you can replace it part by part yourself and getting nVidia to "repair" an out of warranty card is probably impossible. However, most consumers can't really diagnose faulty hardware and most techs go the trial and error route since finding out that it was that 3rd RAM chip that was causing the problems isn't even apparent in the first place. So unless you have a spare parts bin to try out old parts or like spending an afternoon trying different RAM configurations in your PC to find out what works, you're pretty much going to ship it off or have a store ship it off for you just like you would the console.
In the end, repairing either is pretty much the same deal.
The medium and server type may have changed, but thin clients have been around forever. To think that "This time it'll work out" is naive and ignorant of the past. As the GP said, not all applications can be replaced by thin client solutions.
How this got insightful shows how much people don't understand this story.
The Vista Capable sticker is not about buying a machine with Vista on it. The Class Action Lawsuit is not about Vista running "like crap". This lawsuit is because people bought Windows XP computers with a sticker basically telling them the machine would be able to run Windows Vista when it came out. The lawsuit is because when Vista did come out, most of these Vista Capable computers would not run anything but Vista Home Basic, basically, Vista would run without Aero, which a lot of people claim is the experience Microsoft marketed as being Vista.
So yes, maybe you only care about Flash and AJAX, but the people in this lawsuit very much care about the OS itself. Don't buy the Hype, Fat client and stand-alone applications are here to stay. The WEB isn't the solution to every problem.
Everything should work just fine after that
A little research goes a long way. Any front-end for MPlayer will have all these options in their GUI Preferences somewhere.
And I can drive to the store and buy whatever I have money for about 3000% faster than you can download it.
If you throw a live Bee's nest in someone's kitchen where he's having a diner party, sure it can be considered a prank, and since you're not responsible for the fact that the Bees will defend themselves, it's perfectly innocent right ?
Don't stir a Hornet's nest. You know SWAT teams aren't renowned for their sense of humor, don't go playing pranks on them. There is a term for what you are describing, it is Criminal Negligence. You are responsible if people get hurt, end of story. It has nothing to do with the Old Generation and everything to do with the new generation not wanting to take responsibility for their actions.
You're missing the Total part of his equation. Basically, their premise is that Linux isn't free (as in beer) as you put it, it actually has a cost attached. TCO includes not only license costs, but support personnel costs, hardware cost, training costs, maintenance contract costs, actual maintenance costs, etc..
Their argument is basically that Windows has lower cost because there are more professionals out there that are trained to support/maintain Windows based system, and these professionals usually have lower wages/consulting fees than their equivalent Unix/Linux professionals. They also argue that Windows training in general is cheaper, that it is easier to maintain through their many support/update tools and include some highly dubious claims about Linux legal costs by up there because you don't have a single vendor backing you and that you will be liable for copyright/patent infringement and that the IP holders will go after you directly as a customer.
So that's basically why he thinks Windows is better TCO.
The funniest part of this troll is that you've been using Linux for 10 years, yet fail to notice that there's a pre-built Synergy package available in Universe.
apt-get install synergy was all you had to do and it would've simply worked. Instead, you found out the hard way that Ubuntu doesn't install -dev packages that contain the header files/libs needed to compile programs and instead of looking to see if there was a package that installed all the needed packages in 1 apt-get command, you installed every -dev package 1 by 1.
I don't believe you actually scrapped a drive or that this happened though, just a bad troll.
You can whine about the Ubuntu Forums all you want, but all you did there was insult people and refuse to try anything they told you. If a bootloader install fails, you need bootable media to recover it. End of story. You refused to get any bootable media to restore a functionning bootloader. It took you a week to get to that point, where everyone would be at least back up in Windows in under 5 minutes.
Also, the Bootloader is not Ubuntu's, it's GNU Grub and it's used by almost all Linux distributions nowadays. If it was that flaky, a lot less people would be using Linux.
You're simply a bad troll who thinks he knows more about computers than he actually does.
Are you being funny or serious ? Because those embedded systems sure as heck don't run on Windows...