Depends on the parts inside the devices I think. The example from the article was a bluetooth trackpad. That's a relatively complex device, probably using several chips with specific power requirements. But an older style IR remote control for the TV is going to be easier to deal with large voltage ranges. And face it, the toy companies don't care if you have to change the batteries after a couple of months of playing with their products. Many of those things are dirt cheap and the profit margins of the electronics are so tiny that they can't afford the higher quality.
Probably cost. Assume that the customer is changing batteries periodically, problem is solved! Consumer electronics is all about cutting costs and corners. My guess is that some devices have this circuit and some don't. This thing is essentially mandatory on some device types; ie, smart water or gas meters and other sorts of remote sensors where changing the battery is a relatively expensive operation. Probably see more of this with the better quality "internet of things" devices that need to be standalone and cant be recharged every night.
I noticed my Roku remote controller burns through batteries much faster than a typical remote. Ie, 6 months versus several years. I think this is either because it's active much more often (it has a radio link active even when no button is pushed), or because it has a higher voltage requirement on some of the parts inside. I think this sort of boost would work here because these batteries do start working again if I jiggle or rotate them.
I think the use here depends upon the type of device. Note that the demo in the article used an Apple bluetooth trackpad which seems like the sort of thing to have parts with a higher voltage threshold.
I also think many devices using small batteries are also relatively simple as well as miniaturized, like the remote controller or bluetooth mouse. It's extra design and cost to insert a boost into the circuit. So you get the engineering tradeoff here; the cheapest solution to the problem if you look at only device cost by itself is to assume that the customers will change their batteries every 6 months.
True, but there's pay per view options about for various movies. I've got roku so I can just head to one of those channels. I've never done it though...
In the past when I subscribed to a "premium" channel on cable or satellite I would unsub again after a month or two and regret it. One or two new movies and you watch them the first week, then you have 3 more weeks of nothing new at all. Whereas if I wait a year they'd show up on some of the normal channels anyway.
In the old days you could not get patches for consoles at all. But PCs could so they'd get the patches and if there was a console version they'd be stuck. There's a long period of time between when a game goes to be pressed onto CDs or DVDs and by the time it arrives in the stores, so there's inevitably a few bugs or quirks that have been discovered in that period of time, or maybe a last minute rebalancing, etc.
Even today this is still often the case, you can't really get mods for newish games like Skyrim or Fallout 3 on consoles, you only get the patches but not the "unofficial" ones.
They've been experimenting with this idea from the start. Daggerfall was one big gigantic pile of randomness. So it ended up as my least favorite game I've ever finished. In Morrowind they removed much of the randomness and started crafting things by hand, shrinking the game world down tremendously, and it's one of my favorite games.
Actually many of the "radiant" quests in Skyrim are interesting and hand crafted, it's just that often they're not recognized as being radiant quests. Some radiant quests you'll only get once. It's when you get to someone who has an infinite supply of quests (usually at the end of a faction's main quest line) that it starts to get really dumb.
If they add some dynamic quests to FO4 then they should be simpler things. As in escorting a caravan, nothing more or less, you get paid at the end and that's your reward (along with maybe finding some new locations). But I don't want anymore "Bob in Megaton has a problem with ghouls in his basement"...
But Obsidian screwed up a bunch of it too. They worked too hard to make sure you had to make hard moral choices which FO1&2 never did. Every single main quest ending felt like a wrong ending. Every faction to ally with were bastards. Sometimes on replays I avoid seeing some people because I know I'll get a quest that can not be resolved happily. Too many shades of gray in spots that should be black and white in a classical fallout world.
Having replayed skyrim recently, I think the vehicles could be like the horses. Not amazingly fast, no usable combat while in a vehicle, but if you've made it your personal goal to walk everywhere instead of insta-magic-travel then having a slightly faster mobility is handy while retaining immersion.
For the NPC companions, they're not there to help me fight, but to help me carry the loot! Except for dogmeat, he's there because he's not yet house trained.
Skyrim had a ton of quests, but I'd rather see fewer of them. Not because I don't like quests, but because they feel like they're holding my hand. I like having a really long term objective and then it's up to me to figure out the intermediate steps without any arrow pointing the way. Fallout 3 felt that way for the most part, there were lots of things to do without anyone in the game telling you to do them or vector quests that sent you straight to the hidden cave. Thus you get rewarded for exploring.
The "dumbing down" is because the consoles of the era typically couldn't support some basic stuff. Like saving games on demand. Or assuming really tiny television screen resolution. So you'd scale up rez on your PC to 1280x1024 and you'd end up with a really tiny unreadable user interface. Even in a game as new as Skyrim the default UI wouldn't scale up even though consoles are so much better now. Or any game with one of those ridiculous radial selection interfaces (makes sense if you only have a button and a joystick, it's utterly ridiculous if you've got a mouse and keyboard). Or the levels would be really small with frequent loading screens because the consoles couldn't pull in a whole level (think Thief 3). Or the complete inability to use your mouse to select things, or type in something to name your character, etc. Or worse of all in newer games are the "quick time events"; sure it makes sense when your control is limited with only 4 buttons to push, but on the PC it feels like the game is making fun of you and that after 20 hours in the game you're still being spoon fed the tutorial.
"Dumbed down" doesn't mean that the players are dumb, but that the game was intentionally hobbled. It especially applies in cases where a sequel to a game dropped many of the earlier features for a PC-only original.
Yes, Bethesda should review what the popular mods are this time around. But I suspect that yet again, continuing the trend from Morrowind, that we'll need a UI overhaul mod just to make things friendly for the PC.
For the hardcore mode, I liked the FO:NV version of it much better than any mod I ever saw. The mod makers all ways to be really hardcore, but FO:NV made it so that you still had to eat and drink but forcing you to stop every hour to do so (or with some you'd die after fast travel because you "forgot" to eat during the long trip). I remember the more realistic survival mode for Skyrim that required shelter to protect against the cold and whatnot, but after a few hours I uninstalled it forever because it got too annoying.
Mods I tend to think of as must-have are the UI overhauls, disabling unnecessary clutter on the screen (stupid arrows pointing to quest objectives), and the unofficial bug fixes. The rest I think of as optional, though nice to have.
Ya, I laughed at those who whined about how guns didn't fire exactly in the direction they were pointed. RPG is not about you leet the player is, but how good the skills of the character are. Thus the need to actually put points into stats and skills.
I never liked the intro to FO:NV that much myself. It goes on too long. It's like there are two separate intros back to back really; one that shows the background world, and one that shows your confusing backstory. It could have used a bit of editing, or maybe put in a tiny bit of gameplay between the two.
If there was FO3, with another area of content right next door, I'd have explored that area too even if it was the same green sky, same game play, same enemies, etc. Why not? I mean 100 hours in FO3 and you can't be bothered with 1 hour in FO:NV?
You bought the game. Sure it was only $4, but if $4 fell out of my pocket I'd still spend the effort to bend down and pick it back up.
$1 an episode is too much. That's what you pay for full overpriced undervalue cable. But what's on HBO or Showtime anyway? Even if they have great shows, if you're not an existing customer then you're not hooked on what they have.
Not really Netflix's fault, they have to negotiate with Hollywood which is very relectant to give out rights to movies, even old ones no longer in the theaters for decades. I doubt Showtime is going to have all those old movies either, probably just the latest releases for a limited time only, same as the cable version of Showtime (which is overpriced).
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Because there's no teeth to the requirement about when you can hire H1-B workers, so companies feel free to lie openly and blatantly to congress.
Depends on the parts inside the devices I think. The example from the article was a bluetooth trackpad. That's a relatively complex device, probably using several chips with specific power requirements. But an older style IR remote control for the TV is going to be easier to deal with large voltage ranges. And face it, the toy companies don't care if you have to change the batteries after a couple of months of playing with their products. Many of those things are dirt cheap and the profit margins of the electronics are so tiny that they can't afford the higher quality.
Probably cost. Assume that the customer is changing batteries periodically, problem is solved! Consumer electronics is all about cutting costs and corners. My guess is that some devices have this circuit and some don't. This thing is essentially mandatory on some device types; ie, smart water or gas meters and other sorts of remote sensors where changing the battery is a relatively expensive operation. Probably see more of this with the better quality "internet of things" devices that need to be standalone and cant be recharged every night.
But can you miniaturize it so that it fits in place in a standard device accepting AA batteries? That's the tricky part that's being done here.
I noticed my Roku remote controller burns through batteries much faster than a typical remote. Ie, 6 months versus several years. I think this is either because it's active much more often (it has a radio link active even when no button is pushed), or because it has a higher voltage requirement on some of the parts inside. I think this sort of boost would work here because these batteries do start working again if I jiggle or rotate them.
I think the use here depends upon the type of device. Note that the demo in the article used an Apple bluetooth trackpad which seems like the sort of thing to have parts with a higher voltage threshold.
I also think many devices using small batteries are also relatively simple as well as miniaturized, like the remote controller or bluetooth mouse. It's extra design and cost to insert a boost into the circuit. So you get the engineering tradeoff here; the cheapest solution to the problem if you look at only device cost by itself is to assume that the customers will change their batteries every 6 months.
Well, it's been over a month since Pillars of Eternity and the DVDs still haven't arrived.
But more time from sending off to a printer until the CDs are ready, manuals are printed, and it's all boxed up.
True, but there's pay per view options about for various movies. I've got roku so I can just head to one of those channels. I've never done it though...
In the past when I subscribed to a "premium" channel on cable or satellite I would unsub again after a month or two and regret it. One or two new movies and you watch them the first week, then you have 3 more weeks of nothing new at all. Whereas if I wait a year they'd show up on some of the normal channels anyway.
In the old days you could not get patches for consoles at all. But PCs could so they'd get the patches and if there was a console version they'd be stuck. There's a long period of time between when a game goes to be pressed onto CDs or DVDs and by the time it arrives in the stores, so there's inevitably a few bugs or quirks that have been discovered in that period of time, or maybe a last minute rebalancing, etc.
Even today this is still often the case, you can't really get mods for newish games like Skyrim or Fallout 3 on consoles, you only get the patches but not the "unofficial" ones.
I'm still playing Fallout 1 today (or tonight when I get home).
But if you don't have enough caps to get off that train you may be riding it forever.
They've been experimenting with this idea from the start. Daggerfall was one big gigantic pile of randomness. So it ended up as my least favorite game I've ever finished. In Morrowind they removed much of the randomness and started crafting things by hand, shrinking the game world down tremendously, and it's one of my favorite games.
Actually many of the "radiant" quests in Skyrim are interesting and hand crafted, it's just that often they're not recognized as being radiant quests. Some radiant quests you'll only get once. It's when you get to someone who has an infinite supply of quests (usually at the end of a faction's main quest line) that it starts to get really dumb.
If they add some dynamic quests to FO4 then they should be simpler things. As in escorting a caravan, nothing more or less, you get paid at the end and that's your reward (along with maybe finding some new locations). But I don't want anymore "Bob in Megaton has a problem with ghouls in his basement"...
But Obsidian screwed up a bunch of it too. They worked too hard to make sure you had to make hard moral choices which FO1&2 never did. Every single main quest ending felt like a wrong ending. Every faction to ally with were bastards. Sometimes on replays I avoid seeing some people because I know I'll get a quest that can not be resolved happily. Too many shades of gray in spots that should be black and white in a classical fallout world.
Having replayed skyrim recently, I think the vehicles could be like the horses. Not amazingly fast, no usable combat while in a vehicle, but if you've made it your personal goal to walk everywhere instead of insta-magic-travel then having a slightly faster mobility is handy while retaining immersion.
For the NPC companions, they're not there to help me fight, but to help me carry the loot! Except for dogmeat, he's there because he's not yet house trained.
Skyrim had a ton of quests, but I'd rather see fewer of them. Not because I don't like quests, but because they feel like they're holding my hand. I like having a really long term objective and then it's up to me to figure out the intermediate steps without any arrow pointing the way. Fallout 3 felt that way for the most part, there were lots of things to do without anyone in the game telling you to do them or vector quests that sent you straight to the hidden cave. Thus you get rewarded for exploring.
The "dumbing down" is because the consoles of the era typically couldn't support some basic stuff. Like saving games on demand. Or assuming really tiny television screen resolution. So you'd scale up rez on your PC to 1280x1024 and you'd end up with a really tiny unreadable user interface. Even in a game as new as Skyrim the default UI wouldn't scale up even though consoles are so much better now. Or any game with one of those ridiculous radial selection interfaces (makes sense if you only have a button and a joystick, it's utterly ridiculous if you've got a mouse and keyboard). Or the levels would be really small with frequent loading screens because the consoles couldn't pull in a whole level (think Thief 3). Or the complete inability to use your mouse to select things, or type in something to name your character, etc. Or worse of all in newer games are the "quick time events"; sure it makes sense when your control is limited with only 4 buttons to push, but on the PC it feels like the game is making fun of you and that after 20 hours in the game you're still being spoon fed the tutorial.
"Dumbed down" doesn't mean that the players are dumb, but that the game was intentionally hobbled. It especially applies in cases where a sequel to a game dropped many of the earlier features for a PC-only original.
The perk is only with a DLC.
Yes, Bethesda should review what the popular mods are this time around. But I suspect that yet again, continuing the trend from Morrowind, that we'll need a UI overhaul mod just to make things friendly for the PC.
For the hardcore mode, I liked the FO:NV version of it much better than any mod I ever saw. The mod makers all ways to be really hardcore, but FO:NV made it so that you still had to eat and drink but forcing you to stop every hour to do so (or with some you'd die after fast travel because you "forgot" to eat during the long trip). I remember the more realistic survival mode for Skyrim that required shelter to protect against the cold and whatnot, but after a few hours I uninstalled it forever because it got too annoying.
Mods I tend to think of as must-have are the UI overhauls, disabling unnecessary clutter on the screen (stupid arrows pointing to quest objectives), and the unofficial bug fixes. The rest I think of as optional, though nice to have.
Ya, I laughed at those who whined about how guns didn't fire exactly in the direction they were pointed. RPG is not about you leet the player is, but how good the skills of the character are. Thus the need to actually put points into stats and skills.
I never liked the intro to FO:NV that much myself. It goes on too long. It's like there are two separate intros back to back really; one that shows the background world, and one that shows your confusing backstory. It could have used a bit of editing, or maybe put in a tiny bit of gameplay between the two.
If there was FO3, with another area of content right next door, I'd have explored that area too even if it was the same green sky, same game play, same enemies, etc. Why not? I mean 100 hours in FO3 and you can't be bothered with 1 hour in FO:NV?
You bought the game. Sure it was only $4, but if $4 fell out of my pocket I'd still spend the effort to bend down and pick it back up.
PS1 was far too expensive for me :-)
$1 an episode is too much. That's what you pay for full overpriced undervalue cable. But what's on HBO or Showtime anyway? Even if they have great shows, if you're not an existing customer then you're not hooked on what they have.
Not really Netflix's fault, they have to negotiate with Hollywood which is very relectant to give out rights to movies, even old ones no longer in the theaters for decades. I doubt Showtime is going to have all those old movies either, probably just the latest releases for a limited time only, same as the cable version of Showtime (which is overpriced).
Except that you can arm yourself with lasers for a change.