No, they are not. The procedures are verifiable and standardized, the data is verifiable, and the logic, is well, logic. They are not, as you claim, in any way "affected" by the people involved. At least, that is if the the study was done correctly, which can also be verified. You're begging the question. You're assuming they aren't affected by saying "at least, that is if the study was done correctly". That's like saying, "it's impossible to burn a pizza, at least, that is if the pizza was baked correctly".
The people who fund a study can affect whether the study is done correctly. Vioxx and the status of Iraq's WMDs are two examples of this that spring to mind instantly.
If the procedure is correct, the data is correct, and the logic is correct, then the conclusions will also be correct. It doesn't matter who paid for it.
All those "ifs" are affected by people involved, which includes those who paid for it. Influence doesn't have to be overt to be effective.
That's one of the biggest misconceptions most people hold...you don't need to buy a new 200-300 video card every year. Most people get away with a $100-$200 card every 2-4 years. No, *most* people can't. That's my point. Most people don't have systems powerful enough that all that's needed is a $100-$200 video card.
I think if everyone realized that $200 could upgrade their current PC to be more powerful than a PS3 or 360 Same as above.
Both of which completely misses my point. It's not the cost of a single video card that's the issue. It's the continual upgrade cycle of a product people don't even want--the desktop PC. People want TVs and they want notebooks.
Also, while the biggest majority of PC gamers are people playing the cheapo flash puzzle games, the rest of them are considerably more 'hardcore' than the average console gamer Exactly. By *definition* that puts the PC gamer into a smaller market. I think you agree with this. Actually, aside from some fairly small details, I'm not sure we really disagree much. I'll try to illustrate:
Casual Gaming -> Console Gaming -> PC Gaming
is a progression I think we can both agree on. The progression follows fairly well with:
enthusiasm in gaming effort involved visual quality game diversity money involved fewer people in target audience
But it seems like you are also arguing that a better progression would be:
Casual Gaming -> PC Gaming
I'm sure that for some people, that's true, but I think it's a *significantly* smaller number of people than the first progression I illustrated.
And for the whole failed thing...you said "Gaming PCs *can't* become more like consoles. If they did, you'd end up with something costing more than a console with a smaller screen and lacking the homogenous feature-set which make consoles "just work"." By hooking it up to a TV you get a larger screen, and a specialized set of software makes it just work...which basically describes a console and kind of points to the fact that modern consoles are getting to be more like PCs The bold rests my case. My screen comment was about the gaming PC still being, you know, a PC. Even if you hook it up to your TV (thus negating the "screen" part of my statement, which is fine if you want to, but doing so begins to negate the idea of it actually being a *PC*) the rest still stands. You'll have a more expensive, less homogenous, less "just working" device. That is, unless you enact the part I bolded, and just make it into a console, in which case, it's no longer really a PC.
The internals of a console are very PC-like. In fact, they always have been. The Atari 2600 was very much like the PCs of the day, the NES and SNES, the Genesis, the PS2, and so on, have all been very much like the PCs of their eras.
PCs are general purpose devices which can *also* play games. Consoles are devices designed entirely around the gaming on a TV. This whole part of the discussion rests on how you want to define PC. If you make it so loose that consoles *are* PCs, then there's nothing to argue, since PCs not only *can* be made more like a console, some of them *are* consoles! But when discussing PC gaming vs. console gaming, it's fairly clear we are talking about PCs as PCs and consoles as consoles, each being specific and different things.
I bring this up not to beat this dead horse, but to point out where I see the difference as. I don't mind disagreeing, but I don't think it's fair for you to say, "I'm right, so let's just drop it at that." Which is how:
anyway that whole argument is rather moot and pointless and needs to be dropped. comes across if you're going to stick it at the end of an argument about why the whole argument is very much *not* moot.
Windows OEM: $85 Keyboard, mouse, optical drive: $30
And what do you have? A low-end gaming PC.
If you want to go low-end: PS2 slim + your existing TV: $129.
With a gaming PC, what you've shown is the minimum reasonable price (missing a few key components along the way, but overdoing the audio, and choosing a dubious motherboard). What's the high-end? It's *significantly* more than the base entry price. For a console, the low-end *is* the high-end, as far as quality goes (you can pay more for quantity).
The requirement for a console is merely a TV, which everyone has. The requirement for a gaming PC is a PC, and as people are moving to notebooks, having to either eschew the notebook for a desktop, or have a notebook *and* a desktop, is a much greater hurdle.
And this low-end gaming PC you've specced is limited to the set of people capable and willing to build a PC from scratch, which is a significantly smaller set than the set of people who can add an A/V device to their TV.
You're right on all points, however nothing you say contradicts what I said or makes either a more or less viable option for gaming... Physically viable, I agree. But economically viable, I disagree.
First, and foremost, I don't mean to say that PC gaming will *ever* go away. It won't unless the PC itself goes away. What my point is that if someone is interested in playing games beyond a casual level, the console is, generally, the superior option. *Not* because the hardware features are better, *not* because the software is better, but because, as a way to play games, they are better.
It takes more effort and more money to play non-casual games on a PC than it does on a TV.
However, I do not see how I "failed" in that last part...you said PCs *can't* become more like consoles, and I described how they could become more like them. I didn't say it was a good idea or should be done, I just said it was possible. All you did was describe a console:
A PC in a A/V-friendly case with A/V outputs, multi-controller inputs, a gaming-centric OS that boots into/installs games? That *is* a console. In fact, it was even being designed by Infinium as the Phantom (the most appropriately named hardware ever). Such a hybrid system, however, would make for a poor console and a poor PC.
PC gaming isn't doomed, but it will have to ditch the "buy a $300 video card every year for the best gaming experience or a $200 every 18 months for 'n00b' but I suppose OK experience" nonsense if it's going to be anything more than a niche market. This is especially true as people are moving away from the desktop PC in favor of the notebook. If you ignore games for a moment, most people would prefer a large screen TV and a notebook computer. To go from that to games, it's easier to add a console than it is to add a gaming PC, both in cost and complexity.
If you're paying $1000+ for a PC system, you're either buying premium hardware, a lot of extra junk you don't actually need, or buying name-brand system. There certainly is a FLOOR when it comes to PC building costs, however that's about $300 or so for a system that would be just under what most consoles are capable of. In other words, their price points are about the same when you consider consoles benefit from economies of scale and sometimes sell at a loss to gain market share. Absolutely false. With the $300-$500 console, you can play all the newest games. With the $300 PC, you can't play the newest games (even setting aside the fact that for $300, you still have yet to buy a display).
In other words, games are designed to make optimal use of their target hardware. What a revelation that must have been for you... Your sarcasm doesn't change the fact that consoles are better designed for multiplayer on the same system than PCs are.
Maybe all console games are designed to be multiplayer because there is no other way to justify the price. Who would buy a console that DIDN'T support multiplayer? That's absurd. Multiplayer support isn't some sort of concession begrudgingly granted by the console maker. It's an integral part of the design.
Consoles come with screens? News to me. They don't need to, the vast overwhelming majority of people already have them. Very few people already have a computer screen but no computer. Additionally, the vast overwhelming majority of people who have both a computer screen and a television have a *significantly* larger TV than computer display. Then there's sound, as well.
Buying a console is like buying a factory-made street rod. Buying a PC is converting out your own. It might cost more but you get way more for your investment. It's not about how much you get for your investment. There's absolutely no doubt whatsoever that a PC provides more potential than a game console. But when it comes to games, the console is a much better investment for most people.
So the solution then is the ability to upgrade the videocard in a laptop.
That's what we need to do to save PC gaming! Upgradeable laptops! No. It also needs the cards to go with them (there are upgradable laptops). The cards will always be constrained by power and heat limitations.
The next problem is screen size. Even the largest laptop screen is going to be significantly smaller than the average TV. Throw in sound and input devices, and by the time you're done adding peripherals to your laptop, you're basically back at having a desktop PC, which is what people are moving away from. Even worse, not only have you saddled your notebook down like a desktop, but you're doing so at less performance at a higher cost.
Why go through all this trouble when you can just plug a box into your TV and be done with it?
I would be willing to bet many people have a PC purchased in the last three years. I would be willing to bet that more people have televisions.
He was just presenting that you could hook up several controllers to play multiplayer if you wanted I never said you couldn't. I just said it is silly to do so when you can buy a console which was designed for such use.
(with titles that support it). Which precludes 90%+ of all PC games.
And gaming PCs *can* become more like consoles. The case design could be a slim horizontal form factor, and sit either vertically or horizontally, they could put HDMI, component, and RCA outputs on it, and put 4+ USB ports on the front (or use wireless controllers), and make a customized software package that runs when the OS boots up to install and play games, so you don't even see the backend. But they don't, probably because most PC gamers want a PC that does PC stuff as well as gaming. And here is where you fail. Yes, you *can* hook your PC up to your TV. Yes, you *can* connect USB controllers to a PC. Yes, you *can* buy a PC case that works well in an AV center context. But once you've done that, what have you gained, gaming-wise? Very, very little. PC games are almost exclusively designed to be played with a keyboard and mouse, just as console games are almost exclusively designed to be played with the system's default controllers.
Aside from media center type uses, connecting a computer to a TV is almost *universally* inferior to simply using a console.
Do you realize that a console is pretty much a PC with standardized hardware and very restrictive licensing as to what software can run on them? Do you realize that that's the very reason consoles are superior gaming platforms for the vast majority of people?
In other words, you can turn a $1,000+ PC into a $500 console? The PC doesn't magically lose its other features just by playing games on it. The vast majority of PC games (and PC software and hardware in general) aren't well-suited for such use. Saying that the PC is an equal, if not superior, gaming system as the console because you can use USB controllers and plug it into a TV is just absurd.
If you're going to connect it to the TV and use USB controllers, your better off just buying a console (which is obviously my point). The only place where a PC outclasses the console when connected to the TV is as a media center, which it outside of the scope of the present topic.
Flaimbait? How in the world is this considered flamebait? I'm sincerely asking how the XNU kernel is necessarily more modulular than other kernels. Generally speaking:
The Linux kernel is monolithic, even if you compile everything as a module, it's basically stitched back together as a big monolith. Linux modules are just excised chunks of the kernel that you can load on demand, but you still need something specifically compiled into the kernel for each specific module to hook into.
With XNU, kernel extensions are more self-contained, and insert themselves into the kernel using more generic/universal interfaces.
That's why OS X device drivers don't have strict requirements for kernel version while binary Linux device drivers require a specific kernel version with specific compile-time options, and source drivers need the kernel to be compiled with support for them.
A PC can accommodate more than one palyer, too, if the game is designed for it. Most PCs come with at LEAST four to six USB ports and console-style controllers are not expensive at all. You can also hook your computer up to a TV too, especially with newer TVs that have compatible inputs. In other words, you can turn a $1,000+ PC into a $500 console?
PC games don't tend to support multi-player on the same system because PCs have inherently single-user interfaces, as the vast majority of PC games use the keyboard and mouse.
Console games, however, center around the controller pad (of whatever sort the system uses), and all systems are explicitly designed to support multiple players.
And while you can get console-type controllers for your PC, not all consoles adequately support a full keyboard and mouse. Arguably a keyboard and mouse provide much better, or at least more flexible, controls in certain situations. This contradicts your first argument. If the keyboard and mouse are so much better, why would you *want* to use a console-type controller on a PC?
There's a reason consoles have been becoming more like PCs, rather than gaming PCs becoming more like consoles. Gaming PCs *can't* become more like consoles. If they did, you'd end up with something costing more than a console with a smaller screen and lacking the homogenous feature-set which make consoles "just work".
With a $200 video card and a $300 Core2Duo, where do you plug them into each other? How do you view and hear the game? Control the game? Even going with relatively cheap components, you're still about $300 short of a complete computer, and at least $200 more for the display. Now we're at $1,000.
While price is in the favor of the console, that's not PC gaming's biggest problem. PC gaming depends on having a desktop computer, but the vast majority of people prefer a notebook to a desktop. A gaming console depends on having a television, which is not only a less onerous requirement, but one which most people already meet.
It's not so much that PC gaming is dead, it's that its fortune is tied to the desktop PC, and the desktop PC is beginning to become relegated to niche markets outside of the den, living room and bedroom. On the other hand, the console's fortune is tied to the television, which is entrenched in our dens, living rooms and bedrooms.
Until recently, if you had a PC, you most likely had a desktop PC, and souping it up to play games wasn't much of an extra expense. Initially (Commodore 64, Apple ][, etc.), it was no added expense (except maybe a joystick). Then, you maybe needed a newish CPU (486) and a VGA card. Then the 3D card. Now you need a high end just about everything.
In other words, when PC gaming first started, just having a PC meant you could play games. Then, as PC gaming started to become more mainstream (the Doom era), you might need a minor upgrade, but nothing too onerous. Increasingly, however, to play the cutting-edge PC games, you have to make a deliberate choice to purchase a gaming capable PC, and it's not just an economic choice, as you also need to choose a form-factor (desktop) which is probably not the one you'd prefer (notebook).
OS X is much more of a competitor to Windows than Linux,
No. You can't (legally or easily) load OS X onto your generic or HP, Dell or Lenovo PC. OS X only runs on Apple hardware, therefore it does not compete with Windows in the non-Apple hardware space. Linux does. You can't say "no" about what someone says, and then change the scope of what they said.
OS X very much *does* compete with Windows. When people buy a computer, the question is "PC or a Mac?" which, as it applies to the OS, is "Windows or Mac OS X?". An absolutely miniscule number of people who buy a PC, also ask themselves "Windows or Linux?".
The original scope was not how much of a competitor Mac OS X is with Windows "in the non-Apple hardware space". It was not qualified in any way at all, except for the implied scope being "on people's computers". Likewise, Linux on some random non-PC hardware also competes with Windows. In fact, any computing solution for which a person could also have reasonably chosen a Windows PC competes with Windows.
Linux is a great OS, but to fail to realize that OS X is the number one competitor with Windows right now makes me think you're spending too much time swimming in frigid, herring-filled waters. That is, unless you change the scope to something favorable to Linux, like, "on non-Apple hardware" or "on headless servers" or "on the Eee PC", or...
One in ten buys music legally, that's 30 million people. Only half of them like the Beatles, 15 million. Each buying 3 albums? I'll take "numbers pulled from my ass" for a hundred, Alex.
You're saying you think it's a reasonable possibility that iTunes is capable of making those albums go, combined, a further FORTY FIVES TIMES PLATINUM? The Beatles have already gone over 500 platinum.
Frankly, I'd be amazed if they managed a million Beatles album sales. Over what timeframe?
Regardless of all that, Apple doesn't have to make $400 million directly from Beatles music, they just need to make $400 million from the deal. How much advertising are they getting for free right now? How many people are going to buy the Beatles who are first-time iTunes users, and will go on to buy more music later? How many people are going to by some Beatles music, and while doing that, perhaps make another purchase or two that they otherwise wouldn't have?
And, will the surge of Beatles fans push iTunes into the #1 music retailer position, even if for just one quarter? Long enough to make more, extremely positive, news?
How will this affect AAPL? And again when the news is that the Beatles have landed? Then again when iTunes takes #1 (if it does).
All you've done is restated your initial opinion. So I'll restate mine.
Reason states the mob members should act knowing their actions will be known by everyone else. Emotions circumvent reason.
Most people in mobs believe, at the time at least, their actions to be moral.
It really comes down to this. Saying we should do away with cops and instead let groups of people voluntarily take matters into their own hands is the idea I'm arguing against. Even if those people are aware that their actions will be known to everyone else, that's insufficient to ensure that they will act more responsibly than cops do now, which is what the original statement was.
Once the mob is formed, it takes very little to turn it into a lynch mob. Complete transparency may reduce the number of mobs that turn into lynch mobs, but it's not going to be enough to bring the mob -> lynch mob conversion rate low enough to be socially acceptable. We're not talking about mobs of people who are merely gathered together to make a point, protest against some wrong, we are talking about mobs of people *explicitly* gathered to bring justice to someone deemed a criminal (by the mob itself, no less, not by a court). Such a mob is already pre-disposed to bringing harm to the person in question.
It's a monumentally stupid idea. I can't believe someone as coherent as you seem to be is actually defending it. I think it's more likely you are trying to defend a small point (that such mobs won't turn into lynch mobs, excepting the random one-off here and there), and taking that defense far beyond its scope. I think if you take a step back for a moment, you'll see the reason it's leading to such an absurd end is that it's wrong itself. I'll grant you that the OP didn't use the word "lynch mob", but that's exactly what he's promoting, *unless* you can truly expect all members of the mob to be level-headed, not get caught up in the excitement, and *not* take matters further than reason dictates.
After all, imagine the criminal in question killed some member of that mob's child. Do you think that person isn't going to be seeking blood, even knowing full well to do so would bring a mob after him (a mob that, most likely, won't be blood-thirsty for him, but will be more likely to just take *him* to jail)? That's why we have cops. Cops don't have the same emotional investment the members of the mob will have. That's not to mention the type of person who will be attracted to the mobs that form. The rational people are going to stay home. To join that mob already implies a predisposition to irrational acts.
Right now Apple is proving the market for such a device, and then products like OpenMoko will come in and claim it, using the iPhone as R&D to prove concept but without encumbering themselves as Apple is doing. That assumes both the hardware and the OS of then OpenMoko will be as compelling as the iPhone and OS X Touch.
Basically, it's:
1. Apple invents the iPhone
2....
3. OpenMoko Profits!
It's that second entry that's a bitch. I don't see why you can so dismissively hand-wave away the difficult task of designing hardware and an OS like you've done. If it were so easy, Linux would be more usable than Mac OS X, and more game- and business-friendly than Windows, and it would run on Open Source hardware, and this would have come to pass a decade ago (well, I guess then it would have had to have been more usable than Mac OS instead).
But Linux is *still* behind Windows, Mac OS X, and non-Open Source hardware. Until you integrate that into your prediction for OpenMoko, any outcome based on it is going to be extremely unlikely.
The example given was of cops. Well, in a transparent society, you don't want cops, because everyone is a cop. If you see someone doing something, and you know they shouldn't be doing it, you rally the people around and take action personally. It's extremely disturbing that you think the best form of law enforcement is the lynch mob. I think P is reading way too much into GP's words. GP didn't say 'lynch'; he said 'act'. Keep in mind that in this hypothetical situation, GP's actions are also transparent. This gives him a very strong incentive to act reasonably, justly, and proportionately. He specifically said we don't want cops, but groups of people. If you don't have cops, it's up to the people to act, and while the thought of being watched might have some effect, it's only really going to strongly affect those who are thinking rationally, which is counter to how mobs act.
Mobs are like bell curves. You're going to have a few rational people and a few completely frenzied irrational people, but the center is going to end up going one way or the other. Will they listen to the emotional ravings of the irrational? Or will they remain calm and cool-headed? Given how emotions are far more contagious than reason, mobs are highly likely to bring the irrational average up.
But, like you said, the society is transparent, and the actions of each of the mob members is going to be known to everyone. Without police, you end up having to send another mob out to take care of the first one.
And mobs are like bell curves. You're going to have a few rational people and a few completely frenzied irrational people... without police, you end up having to send another mob out to take care of the second one.
If you're going to have a transparent society, and you don't want to be powerless, you need to bloody participate. You need to break down the ultra-specialization that has become so commonplace in modern society, educate yourself about the various sectors that sustain your life and your society, and participate in each of them actively. That's impossible. To require people do the impossible in order to make a system work ensures the system won't work.
The example given was of cops. Well, in a transparent society, you don't want cops, because everyone is a cop. If you see someone doing something, and you know they shouldn't be doing it, you rally the people around and take action personally. It's extremely disturbing that you think the best form of law enforcement is the lynch mob.
Another example, government. Government isn't supposed to "serve" the people, it is supposed to "be" the people. It's supposed to be both. "By, Of, and For, The People" is the quote.
The matters that government are concerned with should be the very first things that are made transparent, not the inside of your refrigerator. That's quite true, but misses the point. Pretty much *every* aspect of the government should be immediately transparent, and there should be no part of the government that stays opaque longer than something like 50 years (although the argument for military secrets lasting at least as long as the thing they refer to is compelling, and I won't argue strongly one way or the other about that). But the contents of your refrigerator should only become transparent by your choice, and no one else's.
Privacy is one of the most fundamental things about being human. If privacy is to become null, the very definition of being human is going to have to change.
Basically, they prefer simpler over complex, and less/no eye candy over annoying stuff. But the focus shouldn't be on "simpler over complex" but on "more usable over less usable". Often, simpler *is* more usable. But sometimes it's not. Likewise, sometimes eye candy increases usability.
And again, this is where Linux programmers completely fail to understand how humans interact with computers.
GNOME isn't too complex, but it's not very usable. This is mostly due to the menu system. XFCE, for example, isn't all that much simpler in capability of the UI, but it does present a more usable interface with the little dock-like shortcuts, while still having a full GNOME-like menu. To rephrase, GNOME presents the complex UI as the primary way to interact while XFCE presents the simpler interface primarily.
GNOME is more complex in what it can do, but most of that complexity is provided to app developers, not directly to the user.
KDE, on the other hand, is both complex *and* has poor usability. It's a lost cause, except for the type of user who enjoys complexity.
As for eye candy, Mac OS X uses eye candy to generally enhance usability. The genie effect, dashboard, exposé, and spaces all use eye candy to show what's going on in a way that people can naturally grasp. A lot of the eye candy in Compiz and the like is purely for the "wow" factor, and actually *harms* usability. The 3d cube and the jiggly window moving are negative. The fading/falling windows and menus are fairly neutral (although I think slightly negative).
100 years from now. Do you thing proprietary software has a chance in hell? 2108: Finally, the Year of Linux on the Desktop!
In the meantime, proprietary software will do quite well. It's really hard to get excited about something that's 100 years out.
I realize the "100 years" wasn't meant to be a precise number, but it does illustrate the point that, while it might seem highly probably that Open Source is going to *eventually* supplant Proprietary, you still have to live in the here-and-now.
Even so, I'm not fully convinced that proprietary software is going to vanish from the consumer market. For that to happen, it would require that there's no sufficiently desirable improvement over the current (at the time) state of Open Source/Free software. It does seem inevitable, but it's all to easy to underestimate how much room for improvement there is. For example, the apocryphal quote from (interestingly) about 100 years ago about everything inventable having already been invented. Or, just 10 years ago, did it seem logical that word processing programs from 2008 to *still* be sluggish on modern hardware?
So, that day may come, the day Open Source supplants Proprietary. Or it may not. But it's definitely not here now, and the cool thing about that day is that when it *does* come, those of us using Proprietary software will (by definition) have switched over to Open Source, so we end up using the best software the whole time.
The tabbed interface of the Eee PC is simpler, but that does not mean it's more usable. That's one of the big mistakes people make about the Mac. Mac OS X is more usable than Windows (as a general rule, YMMV), but it's not simpler. In many ways, OS X is much more complex than Windows, but that complexity is *managed*, not merely limited.
The main problem Linux faces is not that it's too complex, but that it's designed with a philosophy that tends to value "technologically correct" above all else. There are times when being less precise, less technically oriented, less detailed or less optioned is better for the human user, even if it is not as "true" to the computer itself. Apple seems to explicitly understand this, Microsoft seems to sort of intuit this without understanding it (so they don't make the right choices, but they realize such choices need to be made, which is better than nothing), while on Linux, this seems to be poorly understand, and often seen as a negative.
With most cases of usability efforts on Linux, it's often just trying to copy (and improve upon) some existing system (GIMP vs Photoshop, KDE vs Windows, GNOME vs Mac OS (classic), etc.), it's an attempt to be more usable for admin-types (dselect, aptitude, etc.), or--and this is where Linux truly falls flat on its face--when someone attempts to make a truly usable Linux, they don't think, "let's make a Linux that works the way people work," they think, "let's make an interface that is so simple, even an idiot can use it." Instead of respecting the humanity of their target audience, they insult them.
That is a problem Moore's Law can't do anything about.
Linux won't truly take off until they stop insulting the normal person, and start respecting them. Ubuntu is close, but it's still too technically-oriented. The thing is, though, I'm not sure this is a bad thing. It might be, as it does keep Linux from being a mainstream OS, but on the other hand, it *is* an excellent OS for the people who are more technically-minded, and prefer absolute control, who value technology over aesthetics and the humanity of the interface. If Linux truly evolved to become a user-oriented OS, it would leave a void for the technical user. I suppose there'd still be the DIY Linux distros, plus there's always BSD or Plan 9, or some new OS yet to be created. Still, I'm not sure that if a User-Oriented Linux became a major OS player, that the more bare-bones technically-oriented Linuxes wouldn't find themselves losing significant attention by both users and developers alike.
Moore's law pertains to transistor density, not price.
It's such a well-known thing that anyone who makes the inference that Moore's law has anything to do with price is an idiot. Moore's Law is strongly correlated with price. For about the same price, you can double the number of transistors every 18-24 months, *or* you can keep the same amount of transistors for less cost, or some combination thereof.
In fact, the relation between Moore's Law and price is so well known, that I'd say anyone who thinks it has *nothing* to do with price is the idiot...
I have to object to the term "actual vote" in that phrase. In my opinion, the "actual vote" is the one that counts toward the nomination/win. I'm not saying it's right, just realistic. The "actual vote" last night was the voters themselves. The "actual vote" during the convention later this year will be the one you are talking about.
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The people who fund a study can affect whether the study is done correctly. Vioxx and the status of Iraq's WMDs are two examples of this that spring to mind instantly.
If the procedure is correct, the data is correct, and the logic is correct, then the conclusions will also be correct. It doesn't matter who paid for it.
All those "ifs" are affected by people involved, which includes those who paid for it. Influence doesn't have to be overt to be effective.Both of which completely misses my point. It's not the cost of a single video card that's the issue. It's the continual upgrade cycle of a product people don't even want--the desktop PC. People want TVs and they want notebooks. Also, while the biggest majority of PC gamers are people playing the cheapo flash puzzle games, the rest of them are considerably more 'hardcore' than the average console gamer Exactly. By *definition* that puts the PC gamer into a smaller market. I think you agree with this. Actually, aside from some fairly small details, I'm not sure we really disagree much. I'll try to illustrate:
Casual Gaming -> Console Gaming -> PC Gaming
is a progression I think we can both agree on. The progression follows fairly well with:
enthusiasm in gaming
effort involved
visual quality
game diversity
money involved
fewer people in target audience
But it seems like you are also arguing that a better progression would be:
Casual Gaming -> PC Gaming
I'm sure that for some people, that's true, but I think it's a *significantly* smaller number of people than the first progression I illustrated. And for the whole failed thing...you said "Gaming PCs *can't* become more like consoles. If they did, you'd end up with something costing more than a console with a smaller screen and lacking the homogenous feature-set which make consoles "just work"." By hooking it up to a TV you get a larger screen, and a specialized set of software makes it just work...which basically describes a console and kind of points to the fact that modern consoles are getting to be more like PCs The bold rests my case. My screen comment was about the gaming PC still being, you know, a PC. Even if you hook it up to your TV (thus negating the "screen" part of my statement, which is fine if you want to, but doing so begins to negate the idea of it actually being a *PC*) the rest still stands. You'll have a more expensive, less homogenous, less "just working" device. That is, unless you enact the part I bolded, and just make it into a console, in which case, it's no longer really a PC.
The internals of a console are very PC-like. In fact, they always have been. The Atari 2600 was very much like the PCs of the day, the NES and SNES, the Genesis, the PS2, and so on, have all been very much like the PCs of their eras.
PCs are general purpose devices which can *also* play games. Consoles are devices designed entirely around the gaming on a TV. This whole part of the discussion rests on how you want to define PC. If you make it so loose that consoles *are* PCs, then there's nothing to argue, since PCs not only *can* be made more like a console, some of them *are* consoles! But when discussing PC gaming vs. console gaming, it's fairly clear we are talking about PCs as PCs and consoles as consoles, each being specific and different things.
I bring this up not to beat this dead horse, but to point out where I see the difference as. I don't mind disagreeing, but I don't think it's fair for you to say, "I'm right, so let's just drop it at that." Which is how: anyway that whole argument is rather moot and pointless and needs to be dropped. comes across if you're going to stick it at the end of an argument about why the whole argument is very much *not* moot.
Windows OEM: $85
Keyboard, mouse, optical drive: $30
And what do you have? A low-end gaming PC.
If you want to go low-end:
PS2 slim + your existing TV: $129.
With a gaming PC, what you've shown is the minimum reasonable price (missing a few key components along the way, but overdoing the audio, and choosing a dubious motherboard). What's the high-end? It's *significantly* more than the base entry price. For a console, the low-end *is* the high-end, as far as quality goes (you can pay more for quantity).
The requirement for a console is merely a TV, which everyone has. The requirement for a gaming PC is a PC, and as people are moving to notebooks, having to either eschew the notebook for a desktop, or have a notebook *and* a desktop, is a much greater hurdle.
And this low-end gaming PC you've specced is limited to the set of people capable and willing to build a PC from scratch, which is a significantly smaller set than the set of people who can add an A/V device to their TV.
First, and foremost, I don't mean to say that PC gaming will *ever* go away. It won't unless the PC itself goes away. What my point is that if someone is interested in playing games beyond a casual level, the console is, generally, the superior option. *Not* because the hardware features are better, *not* because the software is better, but because, as a way to play games, they are better.
It takes more effort and more money to play non-casual games on a PC than it does on a TV. However, I do not see how I "failed" in that last part...you said PCs *can't* become more like consoles, and I described how they could become more like them. I didn't say it was a good idea or should be done, I just said it was possible. All you did was describe a console:
A PC in a A/V-friendly case with A/V outputs, multi-controller inputs, a gaming-centric OS that boots into/installs games? That *is* a console. In fact, it was even being designed by Infinium as the Phantom (the most appropriately named hardware ever). Such a hybrid system, however, would make for a poor console and a poor PC.
PC gaming isn't doomed, but it will have to ditch the "buy a $300 video card every year for the best gaming experience or a $200 every 18 months for 'n00b' but I suppose OK experience" nonsense if it's going to be anything more than a niche market. This is especially true as people are moving away from the desktop PC in favor of the notebook. If you ignore games for a moment, most people would prefer a large screen TV and a notebook computer. To go from that to games, it's easier to add a console than it is to add a gaming PC, both in cost and complexity.
That's what we need to do to save PC gaming! Upgradeable laptops! No. It also needs the cards to go with them (there are upgradable laptops). The cards will always be constrained by power and heat limitations.
The next problem is screen size. Even the largest laptop screen is going to be significantly smaller than the average TV. Throw in sound and input devices, and by the time you're done adding peripherals to your laptop, you're basically back at having a desktop PC, which is what people are moving away from. Even worse, not only have you saddled your notebook down like a desktop, but you're doing so at less performance at a higher cost.
Why go through all this trouble when you can just plug a box into your TV and be done with it?
Aside from media center type uses, connecting a computer to a TV is almost *universally* inferior to simply using a console.
If you're going to connect it to the TV and use USB controllers, your better off just buying a console (which is obviously my point). The only place where a PC outclasses the console when connected to the TV is as a media center, which it outside of the scope of the present topic.
The Linux kernel is monolithic, even if you compile everything as a module, it's basically stitched back together as a big monolith. Linux modules are just excised chunks of the kernel that you can load on demand, but you still need something specifically compiled into the kernel for each specific module to hook into.
With XNU, kernel extensions are more self-contained, and insert themselves into the kernel using more generic/universal interfaces.
That's why OS X device drivers don't have strict requirements for kernel version while binary Linux device drivers require a specific kernel version with specific compile-time options, and source drivers need the kernel to be compiled with support for them.
PC games don't tend to support multi-player on the same system because PCs have inherently single-user interfaces, as the vast majority of PC games use the keyboard and mouse.
Console games, however, center around the controller pad (of whatever sort the system uses), and all systems are explicitly designed to support multiple players. And while you can get console-type controllers for your PC, not all consoles adequately support a full keyboard and mouse. Arguably a keyboard and mouse provide much better, or at least more flexible, controls in certain situations. This contradicts your first argument. If the keyboard and mouse are so much better, why would you *want* to use a console-type controller on a PC? There's a reason consoles have been becoming more like PCs, rather than gaming PCs becoming more like consoles. Gaming PCs *can't* become more like consoles. If they did, you'd end up with something costing more than a console with a smaller screen and lacking the homogenous feature-set which make consoles "just work".
With a $200 video card and a $300 Core2Duo, where do you plug them into each other? How do you view and hear the game? Control the game? Even going with relatively cheap components, you're still about $300 short of a complete computer, and at least $200 more for the display. Now we're at $1,000.
While price is in the favor of the console, that's not PC gaming's biggest problem. PC gaming depends on having a desktop computer, but the vast majority of people prefer a notebook to a desktop. A gaming console depends on having a television, which is not only a less onerous requirement, but one which most people already meet.
It's not so much that PC gaming is dead, it's that its fortune is tied to the desktop PC, and the desktop PC is beginning to become relegated to niche markets outside of the den, living room and bedroom. On the other hand, the console's fortune is tied to the television, which is entrenched in our dens, living rooms and bedrooms.
Until recently, if you had a PC, you most likely had a desktop PC, and souping it up to play games wasn't much of an extra expense. Initially (Commodore 64, Apple ][, etc.), it was no added expense (except maybe a joystick). Then, you maybe needed a newish CPU (486) and a VGA card. Then the 3D card. Now you need a high end just about everything.
In other words, when PC gaming first started, just having a PC meant you could play games. Then, as PC gaming started to become more mainstream (the Doom era), you might need a minor upgrade, but nothing too onerous. Increasingly, however, to play the cutting-edge PC games, you have to make a deliberate choice to purchase a gaming capable PC, and it's not just an economic choice, as you also need to choose a form-factor (desktop) which is probably not the one you'd prefer (notebook).
Whereas with a console, you just need a TV.
Resting your faith in humanity on two random slashdotters? You shall become a cynic in 3, 2, 1...
No. You can't (legally or easily) load OS X onto your generic or HP, Dell or Lenovo PC. OS X only runs on Apple hardware, therefore it does not compete with Windows in the non-Apple hardware space. Linux does. You can't say "no" about what someone says, and then change the scope of what they said.
OS X very much *does* compete with Windows. When people buy a computer, the question is "PC or a Mac?" which, as it applies to the OS, is "Windows or Mac OS X?". An absolutely miniscule number of people who buy a PC, also ask themselves "Windows or Linux?".
The original scope was not how much of a competitor Mac OS X is with Windows "in the non-Apple hardware space". It was not qualified in any way at all, except for the implied scope being "on people's computers". Likewise, Linux on some random non-PC hardware also competes with Windows. In fact, any computing solution for which a person could also have reasonably chosen a Windows PC competes with Windows.
Linux is a great OS, but to fail to realize that OS X is the number one competitor with Windows right now makes me think you're spending too much time swimming in frigid, herring-filled waters. That is, unless you change the scope to something favorable to Linux, like, "on non-Apple hardware" or "on headless servers" or "on the Eee PC", or
Regardless of all that, Apple doesn't have to make $400 million directly from Beatles music, they just need to make $400 million from the deal. How much advertising are they getting for free right now? How many people are going to buy the Beatles who are first-time iTunes users, and will go on to buy more music later? How many people are going to by some Beatles music, and while doing that, perhaps make another purchase or two that they otherwise wouldn't have?
And, will the surge of Beatles fans push iTunes into the #1 music retailer position, even if for just one quarter? Long enough to make more, extremely positive, news?
How will this affect AAPL? And again when the news is that the Beatles have landed? Then again when iTunes takes #1 (if it does).
All you've done is restated your initial opinion. So I'll restate mine.
Reason states the mob members should act knowing their actions will be known by everyone else.
Emotions circumvent reason.
Most people in mobs believe, at the time at least, their actions to be moral.
It really comes down to this. Saying we should do away with cops and instead let groups of people voluntarily take matters into their own hands is the idea I'm arguing against. Even if those people are aware that their actions will be known to everyone else, that's insufficient to ensure that they will act more responsibly than cops do now, which is what the original statement was.
Once the mob is formed, it takes very little to turn it into a lynch mob. Complete transparency may reduce the number of mobs that turn into lynch mobs, but it's not going to be enough to bring the mob -> lynch mob conversion rate low enough to be socially acceptable. We're not talking about mobs of people who are merely gathered together to make a point, protest against some wrong, we are talking about mobs of people *explicitly* gathered to bring justice to someone deemed a criminal (by the mob itself, no less, not by a court). Such a mob is already pre-disposed to bringing harm to the person in question.
It's a monumentally stupid idea. I can't believe someone as coherent as you seem to be is actually defending it. I think it's more likely you are trying to defend a small point (that such mobs won't turn into lynch mobs, excepting the random one-off here and there), and taking that defense far beyond its scope. I think if you take a step back for a moment, you'll see the reason it's leading to such an absurd end is that it's wrong itself. I'll grant you that the OP didn't use the word "lynch mob", but that's exactly what he's promoting, *unless* you can truly expect all members of the mob to be level-headed, not get caught up in the excitement, and *not* take matters further than reason dictates.
After all, imagine the criminal in question killed some member of that mob's child. Do you think that person isn't going to be seeking blood, even knowing full well to do so would bring a mob after him (a mob that, most likely, won't be blood-thirsty for him, but will be more likely to just take *him* to jail)? That's why we have cops. Cops don't have the same emotional investment the members of the mob will have. That's not to mention the type of person who will be attracted to the mobs that form. The rational people are going to stay home. To join that mob already implies a predisposition to irrational acts.
Basically, it's:
1. Apple invents the iPhone
2.
3. OpenMoko Profits!
It's that second entry that's a bitch. I don't see why you can so dismissively hand-wave away the difficult task of designing hardware and an OS like you've done. If it were so easy, Linux would be more usable than Mac OS X, and more game- and business-friendly than Windows, and it would run on Open Source hardware, and this would have come to pass a decade ago (well, I guess then it would have had to have been more usable than Mac OS instead).
But Linux is *still* behind Windows, Mac OS X, and non-Open Source hardware. Until you integrate that into your prediction for OpenMoko, any outcome based on it is going to be extremely unlikely.
Mobs are like bell curves. You're going to have a few rational people and a few completely frenzied irrational people, but the center is going to end up going one way or the other. Will they listen to the emotional ravings of the irrational? Or will they remain calm and cool-headed? Given how emotions are far more contagious than reason, mobs are highly likely to bring the irrational average up.
But, like you said, the society is transparent, and the actions of each of the mob members is going to be known to everyone. Without police, you end up having to send another mob out to take care of the first one.
And mobs are like bell curves. You're going to have a few rational people and a few completely frenzied irrational people
Privacy is one of the most fundamental things about being human. If privacy is to become null, the very definition of being human is going to have to change.
And again, this is where Linux programmers completely fail to understand how humans interact with computers.
GNOME isn't too complex, but it's not very usable. This is mostly due to the menu system. XFCE, for example, isn't all that much simpler in capability of the UI, but it does present a more usable interface with the little dock-like shortcuts, while still having a full GNOME-like menu. To rephrase, GNOME presents the complex UI as the primary way to interact while XFCE presents the simpler interface primarily.
GNOME is more complex in what it can do, but most of that complexity is provided to app developers, not directly to the user.
KDE, on the other hand, is both complex *and* has poor usability. It's a lost cause, except for the type of user who enjoys complexity.
As for eye candy, Mac OS X uses eye candy to generally enhance usability. The genie effect, dashboard, exposé, and spaces all use eye candy to show what's going on in a way that people can naturally grasp. A lot of the eye candy in Compiz and the like is purely for the "wow" factor, and actually *harms* usability. The 3d cube and the jiggly window moving are negative. The fading/falling windows and menus are fairly neutral (although I think slightly negative).
In the meantime, proprietary software will do quite well. It's really hard to get excited about something that's 100 years out.
I realize the "100 years" wasn't meant to be a precise number, but it does illustrate the point that, while it might seem highly probably that Open Source is going to *eventually* supplant Proprietary, you still have to live in the here-and-now.
Even so, I'm not fully convinced that proprietary software is going to vanish from the consumer market. For that to happen, it would require that there's no sufficiently desirable improvement over the current (at the time) state of Open Source/Free software. It does seem inevitable, but it's all to easy to underestimate how much room for improvement there is. For example, the apocryphal quote from (interestingly) about 100 years ago about everything inventable having already been invented. Or, just 10 years ago, did it seem logical that word processing programs from 2008 to *still* be sluggish on modern hardware?
So, that day may come, the day Open Source supplants Proprietary. Or it may not. But it's definitely not here now, and the cool thing about that day is that when it *does* come, those of us using Proprietary software will (by definition) have switched over to Open Source, so we end up using the best software the whole time.
The tabbed interface of the Eee PC is simpler, but that does not mean it's more usable. That's one of the big mistakes people make about the Mac. Mac OS X is more usable than Windows (as a general rule, YMMV), but it's not simpler. In many ways, OS X is much more complex than Windows, but that complexity is *managed*, not merely limited.
The main problem Linux faces is not that it's too complex, but that it's designed with a philosophy that tends to value "technologically correct" above all else. There are times when being less precise, less technically oriented, less detailed or less optioned is better for the human user, even if it is not as "true" to the computer itself. Apple seems to explicitly understand this, Microsoft seems to sort of intuit this without understanding it (so they don't make the right choices, but they realize such choices need to be made, which is better than nothing), while on Linux, this seems to be poorly understand, and often seen as a negative.
With most cases of usability efforts on Linux, it's often just trying to copy (and improve upon) some existing system (GIMP vs Photoshop, KDE vs Windows, GNOME vs Mac OS (classic), etc.), it's an attempt to be more usable for admin-types (dselect, aptitude, etc.), or--and this is where Linux truly falls flat on its face--when someone attempts to make a truly usable Linux, they don't think, "let's make a Linux that works the way people work," they think, "let's make an interface that is so simple, even an idiot can use it." Instead of respecting the humanity of their target audience, they insult them.
That is a problem Moore's Law can't do anything about.
Linux won't truly take off until they stop insulting the normal person, and start respecting them. Ubuntu is close, but it's still too technically-oriented. The thing is, though, I'm not sure this is a bad thing. It might be, as it does keep Linux from being a mainstream OS, but on the other hand, it *is* an excellent OS for the people who are more technically-minded, and prefer absolute control, who value technology over aesthetics and the humanity of the interface. If Linux truly evolved to become a user-oriented OS, it would leave a void for the technical user. I suppose there'd still be the DIY Linux distros, plus there's always BSD or Plan 9, or some new OS yet to be created. Still, I'm not sure that if a User-Oriented Linux became a major OS player, that the more bare-bones technically-oriented Linuxes wouldn't find themselves losing significant attention by both users and developers alike.
It's such a well-known thing that anyone who makes the inference that Moore's law has anything to do with price is an idiot. Moore's Law is strongly correlated with price. For about the same price, you can double the number of transistors every 18-24 months, *or* you can keep the same amount of transistors for less cost, or some combination thereof.
In fact, the relation between Moore's Law and price is so well known, that I'd say anyone who thinks it has *nothing* to do with price is the idiot...