Exactly, and I'd also add: most people don't do heavy data entry - thus a keyboard is less of an issue. I already use my iphone to browse the net a lot more than i thought I would, simply because my PC is upstairs and it is "good enough" to check up on news, etc if i'm not planning to do extensive data entry. A tablet (with a bit more screen real estate) would be even more useful.
Who's gonna start counting? Methinks its a PR excercise for all the shit amd are copping not being able to best a sandy bridge quad core with 1.5x as many transistors and (according to AMD measurements) 2x as many cores.
Alternatively, PHB simply said "iPads for all!" without consulting the IT department or asking about the back end infrastructure required to support such a decision.
Here, here. I have a huge library of PC games that i can't play anymore (well, not without massive amounts of dicking around) due to operating system upgrades. The move from DOS/95/98 to 2000/xp killed a heap, the move from 2000/xp to 7 killed a heap more.
I can still pull out my Megadrive, supernes, or Lynx and everything still works. 20 years later.
Consoles peaked with the PS2 and Xbox. The current ones (i'm a PS3 owner) are insecure, forever needing updates whenever you want to play, hot, noisy and often requiring online connectivity to play. If i wanted to deal with that bullshit, i'd use my PC.
Words with friends for one example? The sale price doesn't matter so much when you're pushing a couple of hundred MILLION copies, vs maybe a few hundred thousand for a blockbuster PC game. Sell at 1/10th the price, at 1000 times the number shipped you're still miles ahead.
The development costs on iphone are lower because there is only a few hardware generations to worry about.
news flash: the money is in phones. People get carrier subsidized upgrades every 2 years. The number of phones sold is truly staggering. I'm quite sure that neither sony or microsoft or nintendo have shipped more than a couple of hundred million consoles, yet these are the sorts of numbers that android and IOS devices are making up these days. And thats without even counting China about to take off in a big way. And people using these devices count for a FAR bigger game market than consoles. I mean, angry birds has been installed something like 500 million times (plus). When did the last PC / console game ship that many units? Hint: never.
The thing is - yes, in theory a console will always be able to have more horsepower. But we're already at the point where throwing more horsepower at the game isn't going to necessarily make it any better. People are going to take more portable over more power these days, because more power just isn't required.
Apple aren't dumbing down the mac. Nothing has been removed. They've added a couple of OPTIONAL components, and thats it. And after running lion for a bit, i've actually found a use for launchpad. I was skeptical at first, but if you set it up properly it means you can quickly flick to your application selection (when using a trackpad) without having to aim for anything or navigate your FS, or type into spotlight. Lion is clearly developed with trackpads in mind (which makes sense given most macs sold these days are notebooks) - if you use it with a trackpad for a while it makes sense.
I think you'll find that in the near future, there will be consoles based on similar hardware to the appletv2. casual (read: 90% of general public) gamers don't care about high def multi million polygon models. They want something quiet that can stream media, play cutsey games for the kids and be ready to use without having to do fucking updates every 3 days.
I'd almost put money on the fact that I expect the Apple TVs to be able to pair controllers (or i-devices) via wifi or bluetooth to play games purchased off the app store.
No. They prefer controllers because they work when sitting on a couch with your friends. For a lot of games, the actual controls suck, but because everyone on the couch has the same sucky controls, its OK.
I guess there's 2 choices. Buy a console and run console games (and leave the PC for pc-only games and/or actual serious stuff)... or
Buy console controllers, download custom third party non-certified drivers, build your own rig to try and get something that is quiet, doesn't look like arse and fits in your entertainment unit, deal with driver updates, windows update, antivirus software, etc... and then have to use a keyboard and mouse to navigate...
Damn those console owners are crazy.
Trying to turn a PC into a console just results in something that sort of works like one at higher expense and less convenience.
The best games i have ever played all run with well under half a gig of memory. Current console horsepower is plenty, games are shit because developers don't care.
Whilst I'm a huge amiga fan and ex-owner.... the amiga came out in 1986. In 1991, shit like wing commander was out for the PC, which totally blew anything the amiga could do out of the water. Thats 5 years, not 15. Shit, doom came out in what... 1993? 1994? 8 years later, and there was nothing even close available for any amiga that commodore released by that point in time.
From memory i think it would work if you had himem.sys loaded, but not if you were running emm386.... towards the time it came out, most newer games of the day didn't need emm386 or EMS any more. From memory....
.... and the reason we're still using 5 year old consoles is because the horsepower in them is still plenty and not being fully exploited. As you increase the level of graphical detail, the level of effort needed to generate the content goes up. The level of effort is already pretty high, and its a case of diminishing returns. Graphics are rapidly approaching "good enough", and the more attractive selling point is now mobility rather than getting 10 more FPS or slightly more polygons on screen.
Eventually, mobile will be the only web. Why would i bother walking over to a PC to browse the internet when i can do it from the tablet i use to control my house, or the mobile phone in my pocket? Or the device embedded in my TV (which is likely to be something ARM/mobile OS based, rather than a full blown PC).
The vast majority of people who want to "browse the internet" don't necessarily want to use a PC to do it. Its simply that until recently, using a PC has been a requirement. Most people have no interest in computers and something like a tablet is ideal for them.
If this was released by the US government, could infections in the government of other countries be considered an act of war? After all it is theft of resources and corruption of data.
Slashdot Mirror
not sure if serious.jpeg
Exactly, and I'd also add: most people don't do heavy data entry - thus a keyboard is less of an issue. I already use my iphone to browse the net a lot more than i thought I would, simply because my PC is upstairs and it is "good enough" to check up on news, etc if i'm not planning to do extensive data entry. A tablet (with a bit more screen real estate) would be even more useful.
This explains why a heap of people are jumping on the shitty netbook bandwagon for those 1024x600 screens, amirite?
Who's gonna start counting? Methinks its a PR excercise for all the shit amd are copping not being able to best a sandy bridge quad core with 1.5x as many transistors and (according to AMD measurements) 2x as many cores.
Maybe they're....y'know.... doing a pay run. or maintenance....
Not everybody likes having their data owned by Google.
Alternatively, PHB simply said "iPads for all!" without consulting the IT department or asking about the back end infrastructure required to support such a decision.
Like which decent tablet is significantly cheaper than an iPad?
Does anyone care about playing Doom v10,000 any more?
I can still pull out my Megadrive, supernes, or Lynx and everything still works. 20 years later.
Consoles peaked with the PS2 and Xbox. The current ones (i'm a PS3 owner) are insecure, forever needing updates whenever you want to play, hot, noisy and often requiring online connectivity to play. If i wanted to deal with that bullshit, i'd use my PC.
Words with friends for one example? The sale price doesn't matter so much when you're pushing a couple of hundred MILLION copies, vs maybe a few hundred thousand for a blockbuster PC game. Sell at 1/10th the price, at 1000 times the number shipped you're still miles ahead.
The development costs on iphone are lower because there is only a few hardware generations to worry about.
news flash: the money is in phones. People get carrier subsidized upgrades every 2 years. The number of phones sold is truly staggering. I'm quite sure that neither sony or microsoft or nintendo have shipped more than a couple of hundred million consoles, yet these are the sorts of numbers that android and IOS devices are making up these days. And thats without even counting China about to take off in a big way. And people using these devices count for a FAR bigger game market than consoles. I mean, angry birds has been installed something like 500 million times (plus). When did the last PC / console game ship that many units? Hint: never.
The thing is - yes, in theory a console will always be able to have more horsepower. But we're already at the point where throwing more horsepower at the game isn't going to necessarily make it any better. People are going to take more portable over more power these days, because more power just isn't required.
Apple aren't dumbing down the mac. Nothing has been removed. They've added a couple of OPTIONAL components, and thats it. And after running lion for a bit, i've actually found a use for launchpad. I was skeptical at first, but if you set it up properly it means you can quickly flick to your application selection (when using a trackpad) without having to aim for anything or navigate your FS, or type into spotlight. Lion is clearly developed with trackpads in mind (which makes sense given most macs sold these days are notebooks) - if you use it with a trackpad for a while it makes sense.
I think you'll find that in the near future, there will be consoles based on similar hardware to the appletv2. casual (read: 90% of general public) gamers don't care about high def multi million polygon models. They want something quiet that can stream media, play cutsey games for the kids and be ready to use without having to do fucking updates every 3 days.
I'd almost put money on the fact that I expect the Apple TVs to be able to pair controllers (or i-devices) via wifi or bluetooth to play games purchased off the app store.
No. They prefer controllers because they work when sitting on a couch with your friends. For a lot of games, the actual controls suck, but because everyone on the couch has the same sucky controls, its OK.
So, hows that Windows UI using a controller?
I guess there's 2 choices. Buy a console and run console games (and leave the PC for pc-only games and/or actual serious stuff)... or
Buy console controllers, download custom third party non-certified drivers, build your own rig to try and get something that is quiet, doesn't look like arse and fits in your entertainment unit, deal with driver updates, windows update, antivirus software, etc... and then have to use a keyboard and mouse to navigate...
Damn those console owners are crazy.
Trying to turn a PC into a console just results in something that sort of works like one at higher expense and less convenience.
Possibly invasive DRM?
The best games i have ever played all run with well under half a gig of memory. Current console horsepower is plenty, games are shit because developers don't care.
Whilst I'm a huge amiga fan and ex-owner.... the amiga came out in 1986. In 1991, shit like wing commander was out for the PC, which totally blew anything the amiga could do out of the water. Thats 5 years, not 15. Shit, doom came out in what... 1993? 1994? 8 years later, and there was nothing even close available for any amiga that commodore released by that point in time.
From memory i think it would work if you had himem.sys loaded, but not if you were running emm386.... towards the time it came out, most newer games of the day didn't need emm386 or EMS any more. From memory....
.... and the reason we're still using 5 year old consoles is because the horsepower in them is still plenty and not being fully exploited. As you increase the level of graphical detail, the level of effort needed to generate the content goes up. The level of effort is already pretty high, and its a case of diminishing returns. Graphics are rapidly approaching "good enough", and the more attractive selling point is now mobility rather than getting 10 more FPS or slightly more polygons on screen.
Eventually, mobile will be the only web. Why would i bother walking over to a PC to browse the internet when i can do it from the tablet i use to control my house, or the mobile phone in my pocket? Or the device embedded in my TV (which is likely to be something ARM/mobile OS based, rather than a full blown PC).
The vast majority of people who want to "browse the internet" don't necessarily want to use a PC to do it. Its simply that until recently, using a PC has been a requirement. Most people have no interest in computers and something like a tablet is ideal for them.
If this was released by the US government, could infections in the government of other countries be considered an act of war? After all it is theft of resources and corruption of data.