What exactly is pathetic about it, as opposed to the dependency on phones or any other telecommunication system? Or any infrastructure for that matter. It's completely typical and ordinary.
No restrictive system is, there's always some situation that will be unfavourable to the user. Steam is actually quite good, but I prefer the total freedom cracks beget.
And let's not even get started on how much it costs to purchase and maintain a high level gaming PC.
There isn't a need for specialised 'gaming' PCs at all. You don't need to constantly upgrade either. Both are for posturing idiots with too much money.
Hardware is cheap now and 'standard' PCs are powerful. Any PC with a Core 2 Duo CPU and 2GB of RAM is fine for games; for pretty much anything in fact. A 600 dollar Dell has all this nowadays along with a 19" monitor and other peripherals.
All you need on top of that is a graphics card. Fortunately they're cheap now. A 110 dollar Geforce 9800 or Radeon 4850 will play every available game well.
You only need something more expensive for setups with a huge monitor (1920x1200 or more) but even then those GPUs above do a reasonable job for most games.
In the end you're looking about 800 dollars total starting from nothing. If you already have a PC then it's not even a quarter of that and you can game away.
Not that your concerns aren't valid, but you can decouple most non-Valve games from Steam by using a cracked retail executable. I've done it with Grid, works great.
It's more convenient since you can just run it from the start menu instead of waiting for Steam to log on and check for updates. It also sidesteps the whole "All eggs in one basket" problem you describe.
It's slashdotted already, so it looks like we've ironically exploded one hosting a gallery of exploding servers. Or maybe it just got depressed and offed itself.
That's a peak of 1.6 million concurrent users in the last 48 hours alone. For comparison Microsoft were boasting about Xbox Live reaching 1.5 million concurrent users back in January, the highest peak they'd ever had.
Your argument about the 'next-gen' concept seems self-refuting. The consoles are already behind PCs a bit in terms of graphics, and in five years they won't be any better but the PC will have moved on considerably. They can't even move on in complexity because they're saddled with 512MB of RAM. By then 8 or 16GB will be standard on PCs and so will the 64-bit OSes to take advantage of it.
Also, I'd say it's a good thing that we don't have to upgrade so often. It's good that someone can go out and get a 100 dollar graphics card and play any PC game available without performance worries. That's how it is now, and I like it.
Take a look at the Steam statistics as well. 1.6 million people simultaneously logged in was the peak in the last 48 hours. In the January survey, 5% of people had Intel GPUs.
You can also dole out this figure when people whinge about "The death of PC gaming." For comparison Xbox Live reached 1.5 million concurrent users in January and it was a record for them overall, not a 48-hour peak.
Turning the tables on Huang, the real "fear" here is of Larrabee... this bad-boy is not going to even require "drivers" in the conventional sense, it will be an open stripped-down x86 chip designed for massive SIMD and parallelism...
What do you mean no drivers? If it doesn't work with existing games it'll be a total failure, so it has to be compatible with DirectX and OpenGL. Which surely means drivers.
Besides, Nvidia doesn't give a damn about Linux in comparison to games. From that perspective it really doesn't look too imposing. These are my impressions from its Wikipedia entry:
Performance: 25 cores at 1Ghz gives you Gears of War at 60FPS at 1600x1200 with no anti-aliasing. That places it in the mid-high range of existing GPUs. The first version will have 32 cores, so we can extrapolate that it'll be a little faster than an 8800GTS 512. Maybe on par with a GTX 260, as the article says it's a conservative estimate. Problem: that isn't very good at all for a future product. Unless it's cheaper than the competition it may be obsolete upon release.
Scaling: The boasting of near-linear performance scaling with core count is nothing new or surprising, it's exactly the same thing with existing GPUs and their 'stream processors'. In current GPUs one of the primary product differentiations is the number of SPs.
Power: TDP of "up to 300 watts." A veritable space heater, with very bad performance-per-watt compared to the competition. For comparison my entire PC with a quad-core CPU, 4GB of RAM and an 8800GT draws 185 watts when fully utilised. Even the GTX 280, the worst single-GPU powerhog available, needs something like 190W by itself. 300W is just silly. That means very bulky, noisy cooling will be required.
Hopefully it's not as bad as it sounds. Intel are unbeatable in terms of manufacturing processes, so I find it a little difficult to believe that the power consumption could really be that bad, especially in conjunction with such a disproportionately low level of performance.
Well, it'd serve as a pretty stern warning to any future malfeasance.
So is the loss of career and freedom. Do you feel that's only getting off lightly? It's life-ruining, a terrible thing to inflict. That's why we're all pissed at the judges in the first place, because they did such a severe thing to others wrongfully.
I think it's enough of a deterrant. It's a big deal, it's severe, it hurts like hell for a long long time. Killing them is a step too far away from necessity, in my eyes, a step too far into the barbaric.
Judicial corruption should get zero tolerance. For each of the 5000 kids sent to these private prisons for the profit of the judges, the judges should have an equal number of months to the kids' sentences removed from their lives. The punishment must fit the crime. Clearly, for the aggregate theft of life from children, these judges deserve death.
Your judgement is warped by anger. They didn't kill anyone, so if the punishment is to fit and be mathematically determined as you said, they should be imprisoned for X years. Killing them doesn't enter the equation.
If you could actually change the system so that punishments existed or were effective in those situations, why not change it for the better without killing people? The bloodshed is unnecessary, imprisoning them for some years and forcibly ending their career would be enough. That's devastating, prevents further damage, and serves as sufficient deterrant also. That's justice.
Maybe you'd have a point if the public had to intervene - if there was no other recourse - but as is stands the damage is done and they've been caught. None of it will be fixed by killing them in some brutish rage.
Slashdot Mirror
What exactly is pathetic about it, as opposed to the dependency on phones or any other telecommunication system? Or any infrastructure for that matter. It's completely typical and ordinary.
Clearly governments need to get rid of their bad laws instead of introducing yet more bad government practices.
How crazy! Who would they appease by doing that?
No restrictive system is, there's always some situation that will be unfavourable to the user. Steam is actually quite good, but I prefer the total freedom cracks beget.
That's what I was thinking when I read the summary. "I'll see you in ten years."
And let's not even get started on how much it costs to purchase and maintain a high level gaming PC.
There isn't a need for specialised 'gaming' PCs at all. You don't need to constantly upgrade either. Both are for posturing idiots with too much money.
Hardware is cheap now and 'standard' PCs are powerful. Any PC with a Core 2 Duo CPU and 2GB of RAM is fine for games; for pretty much anything in fact. A 600 dollar Dell has all this nowadays along with a 19" monitor and other peripherals.
All you need on top of that is a graphics card. Fortunately they're cheap now. A 110 dollar Geforce 9800 or Radeon 4850 will play every available game well.
You only need something more expensive for setups with a huge monitor (1920x1200 or more) but even then those GPUs above do a reasonable job for most games.
In the end you're looking about 800 dollars total starting from nothing. If you already have a PC then it's not even a quarter of that and you can game away.
Not that your concerns aren't valid, but you can decouple most non-Valve games from Steam by using a cracked retail executable. I've done it with Grid, works great.
It's more convenient since you can just run it from the start menu instead of waiting for Steam to log on and check for updates. It also sidesteps the whole "All eggs in one basket" problem you describe.
Steam has about 20 million users total, according to Gabe.
What I'm wondering is why there's a 1,500Kg weight on top of the car...
It's slashdotted already, so it looks like we've ironically exploded one hosting a gallery of exploding servers. Or maybe it just got depressed and offed itself.
Boy isn't it just!
That's a peak of 1.6 million concurrent users in the last 48 hours alone. For comparison Microsoft were boasting about Xbox Live reaching 1.5 million concurrent users back in January, the highest peak they'd ever had.
Your argument about the 'next-gen' concept seems self-refuting. The consoles are already behind PCs a bit in terms of graphics, and in five years they won't be any better but the PC will have moved on considerably. They can't even move on in complexity because they're saddled with 512MB of RAM. By then 8 or 16GB will be standard on PCs and so will the 64-bit OSes to take advantage of it.
Also, I'd say it's a good thing that we don't have to upgrade so often. It's good that someone can go out and get a 100 dollar graphics card and play any PC game available without performance worries. That's how it is now, and I like it.
Take a look at the Steam statistics as well. 1.6 million people simultaneously logged in was the peak in the last 48 hours. In the January survey, 5% of people had Intel GPUs.
You can also dole out this figure when people whinge about "The death of PC gaming." For comparison Xbox Live reached 1.5 million concurrent users in January and it was a record for them overall, not a 48-hour peak.
Turning the tables on Huang, the real "fear" here is of Larrabee... this bad-boy is not going to even require "drivers" in the conventional sense, it will be an open stripped-down x86 chip designed for massive SIMD and parallelism...
What do you mean no drivers? If it doesn't work with existing games it'll be a total failure, so it has to be compatible with DirectX and OpenGL. Which surely means drivers.
Besides, Nvidia doesn't give a damn about Linux in comparison to games. From that perspective it really doesn't look too imposing. These are my impressions from its Wikipedia entry:
Performance: 25 cores at 1Ghz gives you Gears of War at 60FPS at 1600x1200 with no anti-aliasing. That places it in the mid-high range of existing GPUs. The first version will have 32 cores, so we can extrapolate that it'll be a little faster than an 8800GTS 512. Maybe on par with a GTX 260, as the article says it's a conservative estimate. Problem: that isn't very good at all for a future product. Unless it's cheaper than the competition it may be obsolete upon release.
Scaling: The boasting of near-linear performance scaling with core count is nothing new or surprising, it's exactly the same thing with existing GPUs and their 'stream processors'. In current GPUs one of the primary product differentiations is the number of SPs.
Power: TDP of "up to 300 watts." A veritable space heater, with very bad performance-per-watt compared to the competition. For comparison my entire PC with a quad-core CPU, 4GB of RAM and an 8800GT draws 185 watts when fully utilised. Even the GTX 280, the worst single-GPU powerhog available, needs something like 190W by itself. 300W is just silly. That means very bulky, noisy cooling will be required.
Hopefully it's not as bad as it sounds. Intel are unbeatable in terms of manufacturing processes, so I find it a little difficult to believe that the power consumption could really be that bad, especially in conjunction with such a disproportionately low level of performance.
Joking, but for the record it's named after the figure in Greek mythology, and so is Europe itself.
Besides that, it's also a complete fallacy.
Is the money not going to be taken away? Considering how it was attained, that's pretty stupid if it's true.
Well, it'd serve as a pretty stern warning to any future malfeasance.
So is the loss of career and freedom. Do you feel that's only getting off lightly? It's life-ruining, a terrible thing to inflict. That's why we're all pissed at the judges in the first place, because they did such a severe thing to others wrongfully.
I think it's enough of a deterrant. It's a big deal, it's severe, it hurts like hell for a long long time. Killing them is a step too far away from necessity, in my eyes, a step too far into the barbaric.
Judicial corruption should get zero tolerance. For each of the 5000 kids sent to these private prisons for the profit of the judges, the judges should have an equal number of months to the kids' sentences removed from their lives. The punishment must fit the crime. Clearly, for the aggregate theft of life from children, these judges deserve death.
Your judgement is warped by anger. They didn't kill anyone, so if the punishment is to fit and be mathematically determined as you said, they should be imprisoned for X years. Killing them doesn't enter the equation.
If you could actually change the system so that punishments existed or were effective in those situations, why not change it for the better without killing people? The bloodshed is unnecessary, imprisoning them for some years and forcibly ending their career would be enough. That's devastating, prevents further damage, and serves as sufficient deterrant also. That's justice.
What's the point of that?
Maybe you'd have a point if the public had to intervene - if there was no other recourse - but as is stands the damage is done and they've been caught. None of it will be fixed by killing them in some brutish rage.
What sources are you basing your post on?
What faux pas! This is a thread calling for prejudicious jokes, not generic insults.
I'm Irish, may I suggest something concerning Lucky Charms, or perhaps pots of gold? Alcoholism?
No, it's so you don't have to fear. Knowledge permits reaction.
Ah. So it works the same way as an American car does.
I wanted to put in a [citation needed], but you cited your email. Bastard!
(or any SF protected game) that doesn't involve physically yanking out IDE cable out of a machine to any CD/DVD players.
That's wrong. I own DiRT, which has Starforce, yet I play it with a cracked executable. Splinter Cell was an edge case.
It would be interesting if there were a dichotomy: benefit from copyright or use DRM and go it alone. Which would they choose?