I never count on a game's launch being a window to actually get to play said games, reliably.
Fair point. I don't buy games at launch, because why buy $60 games? I do see this complaint frequently in reviews of console ports, but that was sort of the "not made by EA" jab. NMS just has no excuse.
You're also not factoring in cheats and hacks, which are HUGE factors for multiplayer PC gaming, that almost never effect consoles. Several high-profile AAA titles are sometimes nearly unplayable only because the mp component is on the PC, such as GTA V.
I was going to object "that's why on PCs you can run your own server", but I guess that ability is vanishing. Still, there are planty of multi-player PC games that aren't overrun by cheaters - if the vendor insists on running the servers, then they're signing up to police cheating. Very popular games like LoL don't have this issue, after all.
If you're just some random person, not too tech savvy, the process for installing and updating a GPU + drivers is far more advanced than simply confirming a mandatory install for a console's OS.
Sure, you need to buy an actual gaming PC, but GPU drivers come via Windows Update these days. So that's about the same.
Yeh, Win7 seems to be the breaking change for many old games - stuff written in the XP era occasionally has issues, and I always check the forums first (if I buy em on GOG I never see issues). But Windows 7 is 7 years old now, and really it's the pre-Vista stuff that's troublesome.
I've never seen "Visual C++ runtime and.Net framework hell", but then I haven't bought a game in an actual box since Steam existed.
In any case, making new XBox games work as well on the "XBox family" seems no harder than the good results Steam and GOG have managed on games released in the past 5 years.
The reason I dare say most people buy a console for games is they know any game they buy for that console will just-simply-work (unless it's from EA).
This isn't the 90s. Most PC games "just-simply-work" (unless it's from EA) today, and have for years, as long as you keep your box patched (reasonably current vid card driver). The only exception I've had in 10 years was the new Doom, that for some reason needed a page file to run, and that astonished me because I hadn't had to dick with PC settings to run a game in so many years!
Sure, you can fiddle around with video options on games if you enjoy tweaking things, but the game at least works out of the box, and most games these days default to decent video settings for your box, instead of minimum settings.
The only place I expect a problem with a PC game these days is if I buy an very old game on Steam instead of on GOG - and you'd think I'd have learned that lesson by now.
What they're saying is the games 5 years from now will still run just fine on the "scorpio" box, they'll just run without that photo realistic 8K graphics - no different that PC gaming these days. If you don't have a high-end vid card, you turn enough of the bling off to get the framerate you like. Heck, the new trend is to just make it automatic, and have the game tweak what it needs to to maintain framerate.
MS has also said that you'll be able to run XBox games on any Windows 10 PC. So they want you to be able to do either. It's a cool idea, but I'm not rushing to "upgrade" my gaming PC to Win10 just yet. My Xbone mostly gathers dust, but one that supported Keyboard and mouse properly for games where I liked that? I might take that seriously as a gaming PC alternative.
Nope - unless I knew you. The odds of an anonymous stranger somewhere in the world flying to where I live just to do me harm are quite small. I'll accept that risk alongside lightning and meteor strikes. It's not a credible threat, as the police have repeatedly had to tell SJWs.
If I were a politician, it would be different. If the threat was to do something that could be done remotely to harm me, that might be different. That's why you hear about commentators getting SWATed, but not raped. And even then, I'd expect someone out to harm me would just do it, not threaten.
Threats in person are different in kind, because it's how most humans "work up to" violence. Heck, even armies until post-WWII would do this on battlefields. Sane people want to win the confrontation, by scaring the other guy off, with violence only if your best threats don't work. So in-person threats are serious, because that's so often how the violence starts.
Doxxing in general should be its own crime, IMO, but not a very serious one.
My suspicion is that dark matter is far outside the standard model (I think if it could interact with normal matter via the weak force as expected the initial detectors would have seen some signal).
I've seen it argued (but I don't have the depth to take a position either way), that anything new would need to be quite complex, as the "charges" would be described by SU(4), just because of the pattern: Weak hypercharge is U(1), EM with spin is SU(2), QCD is SU(3) (6 generators, 6 color charges). SU(4) has 15 generators, no clues what that mess would look like.
In any case, I wouldn't be surprised of dark matter were stranger than that. Particles that have mass not originating from the Higgs field, field for which the whole concept of "point particle" just doesn't work, that sort of thing.
Really looking forward to whatever eventually gets discovered, and all the new physics that will come form it.
Not all aircraft autopilots are that fancy, many aren't that safe for landing, and almost all will cheerfully fly into an obstacle. The technical sense seems correct for Tesla - it's somewhere in the range of things that get called "autopilot". Terrible choice for a marketing term, of course.
China is a brutally oppressive totalitarian society. Copy nothing that they do. Any time you find yourself recommending that that we copy something the Chinese government does? That's how you know you've gone off the rails.
Why would a reasonable person believe that anything said by a stranger on the internet is threatening? I've never understood that. Trash talk is trash, learn to ignore it.
My favorite thought crime that someone got a visit from the cops over (I don't think they were actually arrested): posting on a council forum about council housing assignments "I think she no likey". "Likey" rhymes with "pikey", you see. Much as if, in the us, you posted an objection to a section 8 housing assignment "I think she needs something bigger".
This sort of shit allows for the worst sort of selective enforcement, the worst sort of "if a cop doesn't like you, he can always find something". It's simply not consistent with the rule of law. Not that the US has any overall moral high ground here on rule of law these days, as important families seem to get away with anything, but at least we're clinging on to free speech!
"in the same sense as the other four forces in the Standard Model" is more than I clamed. Gravity still isn't really a force in that sense. But dark energy clearly causes mass to accelerate, and is thus a force (though I guess you can argue semantics about anything). Once would expect any new force to be outside the Standard Model at this point.
Further, we know what the "fifth force" is: we call it Dark Energy.
Once upon a time Feynman gave a lecture explaining how we knew there wasn't a fifth force, because a very precise experiment had been done to measure the attraction between two objects, and it was exactly what we expected from gravity. No mystery left to explain.
Well, two ways that can be wrong, and it looks like he might have been wrong in both ways: a force which was simply to weak to measure by any earthbound experiment, or a force which simply doesn't affects the objects measured (wooden spheres IIRC). The former is dark energy - it's so weak at human scale, or even at the scale of our galaxy, that you'd never see it. As for the latter: we still don't really know how dark matter works, and maybe it has its own forces (some oddball ones have been proposed).
No, they demand blood because someone decided to give the fruits of their labor away to random people who think they have the right to get it for free.
This is about marketing, not product. Almost every song ever released is available free to anyone who care to steal it - this "leak" doesn't change that in any way. This was all about building the marketing hype for the new album, giving/selling exclusivity deals to first radio play, that sort of thing. Sometimes "leaking" the album this way is a deliberate part of the marketing strategy, as some people will listen to it just because of the manufactured scandal who would never have heard of the album otherwise.
iTunes has proven people will pay for music they like. All else is marketing.
Why is it an issue? If you don't want to watch streamed Hollywood movies, the plugin won't be plugged-in. It's not going to reach out and stop your torrents, FFS.
The UI is better on PC, because you have a mouse and keyboard. Easy to search, easy to jump to any point in a video. Why would I care how much resources the video player is using? That's the only job of my HTPC.
Oh, I chose "promise" advisedly, as most people in my life who have said "I promise" have lied, and only a fool would think a politician more honest.
The UK spends less per person to cover 100% of people than the US, who collects more money per taxpayer to cover only a fraction of the population. Universal health care is cheaper than Medicare.
Correlation is not causation. US healthcare is the most expensive in the world because we fund almost all the medical research in the world. Almost all of what makes healthcare expensive for a senior today (excepting nursing care in the last months of life) is treatments that didn't exist 65 years ago. Pharma research especially is very capital heavy, and very skilled labor intensive. If we stopped funding that ("no patents on drugs! free for all!"), we'd be as cheap as Britain, but medical research would grind to a near halt.
Of course, the thing is, when you eventually do reboot them, they take hours to boot all the way up as they perform comprehensive integrity checks (who knows why it was rebooted?).
Not inherently. The AS/400 (IBMs minicomputer) could do this, because of some bizarre disk optimization requiring effective a full FSCK (or RAID rebuild - either is a sloppy analogy) on an unclean shutdown just to become coherent, but that was an extreme corner case.
A mainframe won't boot as fast as a OC because there's a lot more hardware to POST, but that's a few minutes, not hours.
Getting the crews and equipment all prepositioned in the right place and ready to fly is a delicate balance at the best of times and a complete nightmare when you have to start from scratch.
Any sane DR strategy would ensure all flights get completed (albeit quite late) without the need for recovery of the main system. You don't need to be able to make new reservation, or check status on the internet, to be able to finish each plane's planned journey for the day with the passengers that already have tickets.
No one credible would count duplicate equipment in the same data center to be any kind of DR plan at all. That's like confusing RAID with backup. And just like you don't have a backup unless you've tested it, you don't have a DR plan unless you've tested it.
But a "disaster plan" needn't be limited to IT in any way. Air France had some sort of computing disaster recently, a similarly total outage, but they completed all their scheduled flights (not on schedule, but still). They had a disaster plan involving everyone behind a counter at an airport on the phone to a massive call center, where everything was verified "manually" from offline backup systems (and possibly print-outs). "Is Joe Slashdotter booked for flight 123?" "Give me a minute - yup, let him on the plane." Low tech, but it worked.
My ex-wife and two of her siblings range between 27 and 35 years old and are all in section 8 housing.
None do crime or are on drugs. They are, however, in a town where the jobs don't pay enough to match real estate prices
Funny how supply and demand work out, isn't it. And by funny I mean "entirely predictable". Without the government prop, something would have to give - you can't have housing that no one can afford for long (see: 2008).
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You go to the store, put in your disk,
People still do that in the 21st century?
I never count on a game's launch being a window to actually get to play said games, reliably.
Fair point. I don't buy games at launch, because why buy $60 games? I do see this complaint frequently in reviews of console ports, but that was sort of the "not made by EA" jab. NMS just has no excuse.
You're also not factoring in cheats and hacks, which are HUGE factors for multiplayer PC gaming, that almost never effect consoles. Several high-profile AAA titles are sometimes nearly unplayable only because the mp component is on the PC, such as GTA V.
I was going to object "that's why on PCs you can run your own server", but I guess that ability is vanishing. Still, there are planty of multi-player PC games that aren't overrun by cheaters - if the vendor insists on running the servers, then they're signing up to police cheating. Very popular games like LoL don't have this issue, after all.
If you're just some random person, not too tech savvy, the process for installing and updating a GPU + drivers is far more advanced than simply confirming a mandatory install for a console's OS.
Sure, you need to buy an actual gaming PC, but GPU drivers come via Windows Update these days. So that's about the same.
Yeh, Win7 seems to be the breaking change for many old games - stuff written in the XP era occasionally has issues, and I always check the forums first (if I buy em on GOG I never see issues). But Windows 7 is 7 years old now, and really it's the pre-Vista stuff that's troublesome.
I've never seen "Visual C++ runtime and .Net framework hell", but then I haven't bought a game in an actual box since Steam existed.
In any case, making new XBox games work as well on the "XBox family" seems no harder than the good results Steam and GOG have managed on games released in the past 5 years.
The reason I dare say most people buy a console for games is they know any game they buy for that console will just-simply-work (unless it's from EA).
This isn't the 90s. Most PC games "just-simply-work" (unless it's from EA) today, and have for years, as long as you keep your box patched (reasonably current vid card driver). The only exception I've had in 10 years was the new Doom, that for some reason needed a page file to run, and that astonished me because I hadn't had to dick with PC settings to run a game in so many years!
Sure, you can fiddle around with video options on games if you enjoy tweaking things, but the game at least works out of the box, and most games these days default to decent video settings for your box, instead of minimum settings.
The only place I expect a problem with a PC game these days is if I buy an very old game on Steam instead of on GOG - and you'd think I'd have learned that lesson by now.
What they're saying is the games 5 years from now will still run just fine on the "scorpio" box, they'll just run without that photo realistic 8K graphics - no different that PC gaming these days. If you don't have a high-end vid card, you turn enough of the bling off to get the framerate you like. Heck, the new trend is to just make it automatic, and have the game tweak what it needs to to maintain framerate.
MS has also said that you'll be able to run XBox games on any Windows 10 PC. So they want you to be able to do either. It's a cool idea, but I'm not rushing to "upgrade" my gaming PC to Win10 just yet. My Xbone mostly gathers dust, but one that supported Keyboard and mouse properly for games where I liked that? I might take that seriously as a gaming PC alternative.
Nope - unless I knew you. The odds of an anonymous stranger somewhere in the world flying to where I live just to do me harm are quite small. I'll accept that risk alongside lightning and meteor strikes. It's not a credible threat, as the police have repeatedly had to tell SJWs.
If I were a politician, it would be different. If the threat was to do something that could be done remotely to harm me, that might be different. That's why you hear about commentators getting SWATed, but not raped. And even then, I'd expect someone out to harm me would just do it, not threaten.
Threats in person are different in kind, because it's how most humans "work up to" violence. Heck, even armies until post-WWII would do this on battlefields. Sane people want to win the confrontation, by scaring the other guy off, with violence only if your best threats don't work. So in-person threats are serious, because that's so often how the violence starts.
Doxxing in general should be its own crime, IMO, but not a very serious one.
My suspicion is that dark matter is far outside the standard model (I think if it could interact with normal matter via the weak force as expected the initial detectors would have seen some signal).
I've seen it argued (but I don't have the depth to take a position either way), that anything new would need to be quite complex, as the "charges" would be described by SU(4), just because of the pattern: Weak hypercharge is U(1), EM with spin is SU(2), QCD is SU(3) (6 generators, 6 color charges). SU(4) has 15 generators, no clues what that mess would look like.
In any case, I wouldn't be surprised of dark matter were stranger than that. Particles that have mass not originating from the Higgs field, field for which the whole concept of "point particle" just doesn't work, that sort of thing.
Really looking forward to whatever eventually gets discovered, and all the new physics that will come form it.
Not all aircraft autopilots are that fancy, many aren't that safe for landing, and almost all will cheerfully fly into an obstacle. The technical sense seems correct for Tesla - it's somewhere in the range of things that get called "autopilot". Terrible choice for a marketing term, of course.
China is a brutally oppressive totalitarian society. Copy nothing that they do. Any time you find yourself recommending that that we copy something the Chinese government does? That's how you know you've gone off the rails.
Not funny in the "ha ha" sense, but in the "is that gauge in the reactor control panel supposed to be in the red?" sense.
Why would a reasonable person believe that anything said by a stranger on the internet is threatening? I've never understood that. Trash talk is trash, learn to ignore it.
Wait, what? Is this knife regulation gone to far, or is a plastic fork now some drug paraphernalia?
My favorite thought crime that someone got a visit from the cops over (I don't think they were actually arrested): posting on a council forum about council housing assignments "I think she no likey". "Likey" rhymes with "pikey", you see. Much as if, in the us, you posted an objection to a section 8 housing assignment "I think she needs something bigger".
This sort of shit allows for the worst sort of selective enforcement, the worst sort of "if a cop doesn't like you, he can always find something". It's simply not consistent with the rule of law. Not that the US has any overall moral high ground here on rule of law these days, as important families seem to get away with anything, but at least we're clinging on to free speech!
"in the same sense as the other four forces in the Standard Model" is more than I clamed. Gravity still isn't really a force in that sense. But dark energy clearly causes mass to accelerate, and is thus a force (though I guess you can argue semantics about anything). Once would expect any new force to be outside the Standard Model at this point.
Further, we know what the "fifth force" is: we call it Dark Energy.
Once upon a time Feynman gave a lecture explaining how we knew there wasn't a fifth force, because a very precise experiment had been done to measure the attraction between two objects, and it was exactly what we expected from gravity. No mystery left to explain.
Well, two ways that can be wrong, and it looks like he might have been wrong in both ways: a force which was simply to weak to measure by any earthbound experiment, or a force which simply doesn't affects the objects measured (wooden spheres IIRC). The former is dark energy - it's so weak at human scale, or even at the scale of our galaxy, that you'd never see it. As for the latter: we still don't really know how dark matter works, and maybe it has its own forces (some oddball ones have been proposed).
Sure, but it's pretty clear that the guy who has the light is the one who's not the asshole.
Green means go. It's not complicated.
No, they demand blood because someone decided to give the fruits of their labor away to random people who think they have the right to get it for free.
This is about marketing, not product. Almost every song ever released is available free to anyone who care to steal it - this "leak" doesn't change that in any way. This was all about building the marketing hype for the new album, giving/selling exclusivity deals to first radio play, that sort of thing. Sometimes "leaking" the album this way is a deliberate part of the marketing strategy, as some people will listen to it just because of the manufactured scandal who would never have heard of the album otherwise.
iTunes has proven people will pay for music they like. All else is marketing.
Unusually for XKCD, it's a multi-comic arc. Go back a couple.
Why is it an issue? If you don't want to watch streamed Hollywood movies, the plugin won't be plugged-in. It's not going to reach out and stop your torrents, FFS.
The UI is better on PC, because you have a mouse and keyboard. Easy to search, easy to jump to any point in a video. Why would I care how much resources the video player is using? That's the only job of my HTPC.
Oh, I chose "promise" advisedly, as most people in my life who have said "I promise" have lied, and only a fool would think a politician more honest.
The UK spends less per person to cover 100% of people than the US, who collects more money per taxpayer to cover only a fraction of the population. Universal health care is cheaper than Medicare.
Correlation is not causation. US healthcare is the most expensive in the world because we fund almost all the medical research in the world. Almost all of what makes healthcare expensive for a senior today (excepting nursing care in the last months of life) is treatments that didn't exist 65 years ago. Pharma research especially is very capital heavy, and very skilled labor intensive. If we stopped funding that ("no patents on drugs! free for all!"), we'd be as cheap as Britain, but medical research would grind to a near halt.
Of course, the thing is, when you eventually do reboot them, they take hours to boot all the way up as they perform comprehensive integrity checks (who knows why it was rebooted?).
Not inherently. The AS/400 (IBMs minicomputer) could do this, because of some bizarre disk optimization requiring effective a full FSCK (or RAID rebuild - either is a sloppy analogy) on an unclean shutdown just to become coherent, but that was an extreme corner case.
A mainframe won't boot as fast as a OC because there's a lot more hardware to POST, but that's a few minutes, not hours.
Getting the crews and equipment all prepositioned in the right place and ready to fly is a delicate balance at the best of times and a complete nightmare when you have to start from scratch.
Any sane DR strategy would ensure all flights get completed (albeit quite late) without the need for recovery of the main system. You don't need to be able to make new reservation, or check status on the internet, to be able to finish each plane's planned journey for the day with the passengers that already have tickets.
No one credible would count duplicate equipment in the same data center to be any kind of DR plan at all. That's like confusing RAID with backup. And just like you don't have a backup unless you've tested it, you don't have a DR plan unless you've tested it.
But a "disaster plan" needn't be limited to IT in any way. Air France had some sort of computing disaster recently, a similarly total outage, but they completed all their scheduled flights (not on schedule, but still). They had a disaster plan involving everyone behind a counter at an airport on the phone to a massive call center, where everything was verified "manually" from offline backup systems (and possibly print-outs). "Is Joe Slashdotter booked for flight 123?" "Give me a minute - yup, let him on the plane." Low tech, but it worked.
My ex-wife and two of her siblings range between 27 and 35 years old and are all in section 8 housing.
None do crime or are on drugs. They are, however, in a town where the jobs don't pay enough to match real estate prices
Funny how supply and demand work out, isn't it. And by funny I mean "entirely predictable". Without the government prop, something would have to give - you can't have housing that no one can afford for long (see: 2008).