And what do I actually get from it, that wasn't available in XP?
DirectX 11. Also not available on Mac or Linux.
True! DX10/11 are important to me - just not $200 important.
I have preview panes in XP, too - not only that, but I have labels in my taskbar!
W7 has labels too, just not on by default (right-click taskbar -> Properties -> Taskbar buttons: [always combine, hide labels/combine when taskbar is full/never combine]). As for XPs preview panes, I shouldn't have to install a bunch of 3rd party programs just to get previews, jump lists, window transparency, search index from the start menu, media sharing to compatible devices (Windows Mobile, Xbox 360, Media Center PCs etc). These features really make a difference to your regular eye-candy suck.. er, consumer. Not as big a difference for the power users, but I've come to appreciate them and genuinely regard them as worthwhile improvements to the Windows platform.
As for XPs preview panes, I shouldn't have to install a bunch of 3rd party programs just to get previews, jump lists, window transparency, search index from the start menu, media sharing to compatible devices (Windows Mobile, Xbox 360, Media Center PCs etc).
True. But from my point of view, I've already spent time (not money) getting my computer set up this way, and now I'm supposed to pay for what I already had for free? No thanks!
Worse yet, the free stuff isn't compatible anymore, so to get DX11 I have to pony up the cash and live with Microsoft's solutions.
With enough marketing, you can almost bury bad reviews and lack of plot/gameplay/entertainment under a mountain of bullshit & biased reviews.
Ahh! Oblivion!
Why spend $4 million on development of a risky game that might be a massive hit when you can spend $1 million on the game, $3 million on marketing and be fairly sure that it'll make a million or two profit. If the marketing approach fails, its because of piracy obviously.
Yes, that's exactly it. The pirates are the downfall of every game company that ever collapsed!
Would I recommend it to a friend? Absolutely. Would I suggest that it's actually worth the retail price? I'm not so sure. It may be if you're upgrading from Windows XP, but if you're upgrading form Vista you're getting shafted.
My opinion: No. If it was just $60 or $70, I'd get it, but $200+ is a bit steep.
And what do I actually get from it, that wasn't available in XP? (either in the core of from third party programs) Just about nothing.
It's plain to see when you actually read the entire article. Most of the points are fawning over GUI elements. Where's the miraculous new features that are supposed to wow me?:P I have preview panes in XP, too - not only that, but I have labels in my taskbar!
The K6 series were very hot compared to Intel equivalents.
Irrelevent to his argument. See below:
Don't get me wrong, Intel has certainly regained my respect when it comes to performance, but to call AMD the toaster requires ignoring the past 10 years.
What, so you expect Microsoft to have a sticker on the console that says "do not reorient console while in use" or something? He picked it up and changed the angle while the game was still running! I mean, DUH!
Duh?
Works fine in laptops and most desktop computers. You can even re-orient HDDs if they aren't writing at the time. (sudden movement is probably bad, but I have taken an idle (powered on) HDD and tilted it from horizontal to vertical, without any damage.)
Since the XBox360 (if I had one) would be the only device I had that has this requirement, a sticker would be nice.
A while ago I was watching Firefly on DVD, and someone knocked my (desktop) computer over. It was dangling off the desk at a very strange angle, held partially on because of the sturdy DVI and VGA cords I had plugged in, which didn't want to stretch any farther. The DVD kept playing - no scratches upon later inspection.
It took me less than 5 seconds to jump up and get that computer put back on my desk - the DVD was still playing fine after a short shouting match.;)
Oh, and for anyone curious - It's an old Plextor PATA DVD-Burner. I got it because it was silent. It doesn't have one of those CD push-locks like laptop drives do. At the time I thought for sure something was going to get screwed up.
Yeah, but this is an HDD. That's rather like a stick of RAM. Doesn't really matter what manufacturer - pretty much any model will work fine on a modern motherboard.
Chipsets, GPUs, etc. have much more specifically tailored drivers. HDDs, and sticks of RAM don't.
It's only confusing, to me at least, because harddisk manufacturers changed how they measure and market storage space.
When? As long as I can remember, they've been using Metric. Metric is used for CPU speeds, RAM speeds, and lots of other stuff. Why should they switch to 1024 now?
Hint: They shouldn't.
I don't recall if it was Bill Gates who once asked who would ever need more than 512K of RAM. I still recall 64K being a lot of memory and cassette tapes were used for mass storage.
That quote is overused. At the time, 640K seemed like plenty for DOS programs.
That's the dark side not bright side, you have less storage than you thought not more, and it wouldn't be a problem if manufacturers based units on 1024.
It is a bright side, because now you don't think you have more storage than you do - you actually think you have what you bought.;)
Are you also pissed that so much space is wasted by the MFT? Probably not.
Are you also pissed that NTFS is a space waster, unlike Reiser4? (which packs tiny files into the same 4KB chunks, saving gigabytes on the HDD) Probably not.
Are you also pissed that the DRM in Vista scales back your resolution if you don't have an HDCP monitor? Probably not.
Are you also pissed that if Microsoft bothered to optimize Windows 7, they could make it run on 256MB, saving people hundreds of dollars in RAM upgrades? Probably not.
I just gave you many examples of actual wasteage, and areas where you get less than you paid for, or have to pay more to get what you need. HDDs have been using metric forever, and it's time the OS manufacturers got on board.
I still think RAM manufacturers should report their capacities in GiB. It'd show support without requiring any huge changes. Just add an i to the packaging.
How is that going to work? I've got a 1.5TB disk to install in my PC and it has a 32MB cache. Should both the disk and the cache use units of 1000 or should 1000 used for the disk and 1024 for the cache? If that's done wouldn't it confuse people? And if 1000 is used for the cache then won't that confuse people because RAM installed on the mobo still uses 1024?
That's exactly how it would work. It isn't any more confusing than what's currently happening - using 1000 for the storage space, 1024 for the cache, and displaying the number incorrectly.;)
If they want to make absolute sense of it, they have to get RAM manufacturers onboard for labelling their DIMMs in GiB.
Think of the bright side. Nobody will pick up a 1.5TB HDD and wonder why they only have 1.4TB.:)
Technically a 1MP camera has a 1152*864 or 1280*800 resolution.
Megapixels are close, but never exact.
I agree with the metric usage. I saw HDD manufacturers get sued because of incorrect prefix usage in Windows, and thought it was ludicrous.
But those same binary measurements will be required for stuff like RAM, and working with binary numbers. I'd just like to see them removed from our storage subsystems.
Yeah. People shouldn't have CD players either, because damnit, they take their eyes off the wheel for a few seconds!
If someone got in a car crash while changing a CD, I'd hope they get punished as well. After all, they're distracting themselves temporarily to provide themselves with a distraction. That's got to be malicious, like texting is!
Why? Rendering is specifically a task that is easily parallelizable, and thus using more cores will scale well even in existing games (unlike what happened with quad-core on desktops) - just split the output area in chunks, and render in parallel...
I think I explained my position fairly well. But if, by freak chance, we end up playing Crysis in 6 years at 34200fps, I will happily eat crow.
Ahh, but this is TF2, where bullets have spread. 80% headshot rate when people are dancing around, jumping, shooting wildly in all directions, is pretty easy to spot as a cheater.:P
Plus, you could be standing at the opposite end of an arena map, and he'd shoot you with his revolver twice to kill you. Not even snipers, scoped, can pull that off.
if you had a decent PC with a big screen you had a huge advantage because you can see the enemy before they can see you. I'd imagine that a PC player against someone using an SD TV would have a similar advantage.
True. I found that in BF2142, if I ramp the Anti-Aliasing up, I can spot when a few pixels change colour, immediately locating enemies hiding behind stuff, just peeking around an edge to shoot. I don't have that with TF2 - but it's a tad faster paced, and I play with AA off.
So in six years, Gordon Moore says we should have 32x the performance we have now.
No - 32x the transistors.
You fail to predict how using those transistors in a more optimized way(more suitable to modern rendering algorithms) will affect performance.
Just think about it - a plain old FPU and SSE4 might use the same number of transistors, but when the code needs to do a lot of fancy stuff at once, one is definitely faster.
Currently CPUs and GPUs are stamped together. Basically, they take a bunch of pre-made blocks of transistors(millions of blocks, billions of transistors in a GPU), and etch those into the silicon, and out comes a working GPU.
It's easy - relatively speaking - and doesn't require a huge amount of redesign between generations. When you get a certain combination working, you improve (shrink) your nanometre process and add more blocks.
However, compiler technology has advanced a lot recently, and with the vast amounts of processing power now available, it should be simpler getting more complex blocks fully utilized. A vastly more complex block, with interconnects to many other blocks, could perform better at a swath of different tasks. This is evident when comparing the performance hit from Anti-Aliasing. Previously even 2xAA had a huge performance hit, but nVidia altered their designs, and now Multisampling AA is basically free.
I recall seeing an article about a new kind of shadowing that was going to be used in DX11 games. The card used for the review got almost 200fps at high settings - with AA enabled that dropped to about 60fps, and with the new shadowing enabled, it dropped to about 20fps. It appears the hardware needs a redesign to be more optimized for whatever algorithm it uses!
Two other factors you're forgetting...
1) 3D CPU/GPU designs are coming slowly, where the transistors aren't just on a 2D plane... that would allow vastly denser CPUs and GPUs. If a processor had minimal leakage, and low power consumption, 500x more transistors wouldn't be a stretch.
2) Performance claims are merely claims. Intel claims a quad-core gives 4x more performance, but in many cases it's slower than a faster dual-core.
570x faster for every game? Doubtful. 570x faster at the most advanced rendering techniques being designed today, with AA and other memory-bandwidth hammering features ramped to the max? Might be accurate. A high end GPU from 6 years ago probably won't get 1fps on a modern game, so this estimate might even be low.
A claim of 250x the framerate in Crysis, with everything ramped to the absolute maximum, might be even accurate.
But general performance claims are almost never true.
This number sound ridiculously high to me. Can you cite a reliable source for that?
Seems rather low to me. It's well known that all the layers of abstraction between your CPU/GPU and the running program really slow things down. PCs have vastly faster hardware, and look at what they pull off!
I once heard from a game developer that the XBox360 has about as much processing power as a 2.0ghz Athlon 64. The XBox360 CPU is pretty weak, but with minimal OS overhead, almost no multitasking, and compilers that optimize perfectly for that particular CPU... it's much easier to milk performance. 50% doesn't seem unreasonable. Even claims of 80% loss wouldn't surprise me.
I've read first hand discussions from the GP2X(device) emu devs(writing emus for arm processors) that hand optimized assembly in specific areas boosted performance of their emus by 60%. That's huge! That's not just the running bits sped up 60% - the entire program's framerate went up that much.
Sony built an assembler for the PS2 that does a near-perfect job keeping all the registers and stuff full. Factoring this in, and what the emu devs stated, 50% really doesn't seem like a high estimate. And since the devs have no choice but to code better algorithms(rather than just bumping up the system requirements a tad), 50% almost seems too small to be feasible.
I'd love to see a match of TF2 between a bunch of console players vs. PC players. It'd be such a joke.:)
Just wait until the scripters and hackers get at them. I met a spy that gets ~80% hits with his revolver - most headshots. It was plainly obvious he was a hacker, because round after round, he'd run into crowds of people(Pyros, medics, heavies, etc.), owning them all.
Or he'd just shoot you from across the map.
I've also met genuinely great spies, like Jening. They're fun to play with, if you don't mind getting your ass handed to you over and over. Console players vs Jening... I wonder how many dozens he'd kill before they got him down.
I know how you feel. Not because I've experienced it, but because I've seen how cheaply PC stuff has become.
First off, I'm in Canada - where prices are more expensive than the US. I picked up a brand new 1TB HDD for $70, and a Saitek P3200 for $6. That includes shipping. Great quality PCI wireless cards can be found for under $25, and I got my SennHeiser PC161 headset for just over $40.:)
So when I see the prices you have to pay for console peripherals, I shudder. And then when I see the prices in other countries, like Australia, or Spain, it makes me want to retch! Talk about a crazy profit margin on the hardware!
Sony's business model is why its inferior...the developers have to foot the costs of hosting and bandwidth which causes many of them to just not bother. Add in a more refined interface, full chat, netflix, etc and I will gladly pay my paltry $40 a year for Live.
I thought Microsoft also charged the developers for demo/patch bandwidth?
A meaningless phrase, I think. The words "health insurance" suffices; universal health insurance is what Canadian and European residents get from their government. Bad writing at the least, which lead me to suspect that there were bad facts as well. However, most of the rest of it seemed well written.
No we don't.
Sure, if I stab myself with a fork, or need a prescription, going to a doctor or hospital is free. (expensive for the system, but free for me)
But dentists aren't free... and neither are optometrists. To get arch supports or other foot correction covered requires special (expensive) health insurance, but to get back surgery done doesn't.
After tripping down the stairs I had to pay for a chiropractic visit out of my own pocket. Our "universal healthcare" is pretty much limited to hospital/MD crap.
It's running Linux, which means less OS overhead and easier access to the hardware.
I know some people will argue that the specs are identical, but that's like saying a single-core Vista computer with 512MB of RAM is just as fast as a single-core XP computer with the same amount of RAM. It simply isn't true, despite what the specs say.
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And what do I actually get from it, that wasn't available in XP?
DirectX 11. Also not available on Mac or Linux.
True! DX10/11 are important to me - just not $200 important.
I have preview panes in XP, too - not only that, but I have labels in my taskbar!
W7 has labels too, just not on by default (right-click taskbar -> Properties -> Taskbar buttons: [always combine, hide labels/combine when taskbar is full/never combine]). As for XPs preview panes, I shouldn't have to install a bunch of 3rd party programs just to get previews, jump lists, window transparency, search index from the start menu, media sharing to compatible devices (Windows Mobile, Xbox 360, Media Center PCs etc). These features really make a difference to your regular eye-candy suck.. er, consumer. Not as big a difference for the power users, but I've come to appreciate them and genuinely regard them as worthwhile improvements to the Windows platform.
As for XPs preview panes, I shouldn't have to install a bunch of 3rd party programs just to get previews, jump lists, window transparency, search index from the start menu, media sharing to compatible devices (Windows Mobile, Xbox 360, Media Center PCs etc).
True. But from my point of view, I've already spent time (not money) getting my computer set up this way, and now I'm supposed to pay for what I already had for free? No thanks!
Worse yet, the free stuff isn't compatible anymore, so to get DX11 I have to pony up the cash and live with Microsoft's solutions.
Right, but $30 isn't a lot. I might've forked that out last time OSX got upgraded, simply for Time Machine.
There's always a feature that sticks out to make an OS important. I think for me it's probably DX10/11, but neither of those is worth $200 to me.
Not having DX10/11 on other operating systems is more of a negative in my eyes. Platform lock-in, plus an excessively high price. :/
With enough marketing, you can almost bury bad reviews and lack of plot/gameplay/entertainment under a mountain of bullshit & biased reviews.
Ahh! Oblivion!
Why spend $4 million on development of a risky game that might be a massive hit when you can spend $1 million on the game, $3 million on marketing and be fairly sure that it'll make a million or two profit. If the marketing approach fails, its because of piracy obviously.
Yes, that's exactly it. The pirates are the downfall of every game company that ever collapsed!
Would I recommend it to a friend? Absolutely. Would I suggest that it's actually worth the retail price? I'm not so sure. It may be if you're upgrading from Windows XP, but if you're upgrading form Vista you're getting shafted.
My opinion: No. If it was just $60 or $70, I'd get it, but $200+ is a bit steep.
And what do I actually get from it, that wasn't available in XP? (either in the core of from third party programs) Just about nothing.
It's plain to see when you actually read the entire article. Most of the points are fawning over GUI elements. Where's the miraculous new features that are supposed to wow me? :P I have preview panes in XP, too - not only that, but I have labels in my taskbar!
The K6 series were very hot compared to Intel equivalents.
Irrelevent to his argument. See below:
Don't get me wrong, Intel has certainly regained my respect when it comes to performance, but to call AMD the toaster requires ignoring the past 10 years.
Why yes, time flew by that quickly.
What, so you expect Microsoft to have a sticker on the console that says "do not reorient console while in use" or something? He picked it up and changed the angle while the game was still running! I mean, DUH!
Duh?
Works fine in laptops and most desktop computers. You can even re-orient HDDs if they aren't writing at the time. (sudden movement is probably bad, but I have taken an idle (powered on) HDD and tilted it from horizontal to vertical, without any damage.)
Since the XBox360 (if I had one) would be the only device I had that has this requirement, a sticker would be nice.
I think I would've tried to get that replaced.
A while ago I was watching Firefly on DVD, and someone knocked my (desktop) computer over. It was dangling off the desk at a very strange angle, held partially on because of the sturdy DVI and VGA cords I had plugged in, which didn't want to stretch any farther. The DVD kept playing - no scratches upon later inspection.
It took me less than 5 seconds to jump up and get that computer put back on my desk - the DVD was still playing fine after a short shouting match. ;)
Oh, and for anyone curious - It's an old Plextor PATA DVD-Burner. I got it because it was silent. It doesn't have one of those CD push-locks like laptop drives do. At the time I thought for sure something was going to get screwed up.
Yeah, but this is an HDD. That's rather like a stick of RAM. Doesn't really matter what manufacturer - pretty much any model will work fine on a modern motherboard.
Chipsets, GPUs, etc. have much more specifically tailored drivers. HDDs, and sticks of RAM don't.
Oh - the troll card.
Either prove HDD capacities used to be measured in 1024's or you're wrong.
Unless you can prove that, you are wrong (period) regardless of whether you think I'm a troll.
It's only confusing, to me at least, because harddisk manufacturers changed how they measure and market storage space.
When? As long as I can remember, they've been using Metric. Metric is used for CPU speeds, RAM speeds, and lots of other stuff. Why should they switch to 1024 now?
Hint: They shouldn't.
I don't recall if it was Bill Gates who once asked who would ever need more than 512K of RAM. I still recall 64K being a lot of memory and cassette tapes were used for mass storage.
That quote is overused. At the time, 640K seemed like plenty for DOS programs.
That's the dark side not bright side, you have less storage than you thought not more, and it wouldn't be a problem if manufacturers based units on 1024.
It is a bright side, because now you don't think you have more storage than you do - you actually think you have what you bought. ;)
So you're pissed that your 1,500,000,000,000 byte HDD isn't 1.5 TiB?
Are you also pissed that so much space is wasted by the MFT? Probably not.
Are you also pissed that NTFS is a space waster, unlike Reiser4? (which packs tiny files into the same 4KB chunks, saving gigabytes on the HDD) Probably not.
Are you also pissed that the DRM in Vista scales back your resolution if you don't have an HDCP monitor? Probably not.
Are you also pissed that if Microsoft bothered to optimize Windows 7, they could make it run on 256MB, saving people hundreds of dollars in RAM upgrades? Probably not.
I just gave you many examples of actual wasteage, and areas where you get less than you paid for, or have to pay more to get what you need. HDDs have been using metric forever, and it's time the OS manufacturers got on board.
I still think RAM manufacturers should report their capacities in GiB. It'd show support without requiring any huge changes. Just add an i to the packaging.
Macs have a history of having far less vulnerabilities than Windows.
But now they're catching up with Microsoft in that, as well as average patch time! :D
How is that going to work? I've got a 1.5TB disk to install in my PC and it has a 32MB cache. Should both the disk and the cache use units of 1000 or should 1000 used for the disk and 1024 for the cache? If that's done wouldn't it confuse people? And if 1000 is used for the cache then won't that confuse people because RAM installed on the mobo still uses 1024?
That's exactly how it would work. It isn't any more confusing than what's currently happening - using 1000 for the storage space, 1024 for the cache, and displaying the number incorrectly. ;)
If they want to make absolute sense of it, they have to get RAM manufacturers onboard for labelling their DIMMs in GiB.
Think of the bright side. Nobody will pick up a 1.5TB HDD and wonder why they only have 1.4TB. :)
Technically a 1MP camera has a 1152*864 or 1280*800 resolution.
Megapixels are close, but never exact.
I agree with the metric usage. I saw HDD manufacturers get sued because of incorrect prefix usage in Windows, and thought it was ludicrous.
But those same binary measurements will be required for stuff like RAM, and working with binary numbers. I'd just like to see them removed from our storage subsystems.
Yeah. People shouldn't have CD players either, because damnit, they take their eyes off the wheel for a few seconds!
If someone got in a car crash while changing a CD, I'd hope they get punished as well. After all, they're distracting themselves temporarily to provide themselves with a distraction. That's got to be malicious, like texting is!
Why? Rendering is specifically a task that is easily parallelizable, and thus using more cores will scale well even in existing games (unlike what happened with quad-core on desktops) - just split the output area in chunks, and render in parallel...
I think I explained my position fairly well. But if, by freak chance, we end up playing Crysis in 6 years at 34200fps, I will happily eat crow.
Ahh, but this is TF2, where bullets have spread. 80% headshot rate when people are dancing around, jumping, shooting wildly in all directions, is pretty easy to spot as a cheater. :P
Plus, you could be standing at the opposite end of an arena map, and he'd shoot you with his revolver twice to kill you. Not even snipers, scoped, can pull that off.
if you had a decent PC with a big screen you had a huge advantage because you can see the enemy before they can see you. I'd imagine that a PC player against someone using an SD TV would have a similar advantage.
True. I found that in BF2142, if I ramp the Anti-Aliasing up, I can spot when a few pixels change colour, immediately locating enemies hiding behind stuff, just peeking around an edge to shoot. I don't have that with TF2 - but it's a tad faster paced, and I play with AA off.
So in six years, Gordon Moore says we should have 32x the performance we have now.
No - 32x the transistors.
You fail to predict how using those transistors in a more optimized way(more suitable to modern rendering algorithms) will affect performance.
Just think about it - a plain old FPU and SSE4 might use the same number of transistors, but when the code needs to do a lot of fancy stuff at once, one is definitely faster.
(inaccurate example, but you get the idea)
Or... not.
Currently CPUs and GPUs are stamped together. Basically, they take a bunch of pre-made blocks of transistors(millions of blocks, billions of transistors in a GPU), and etch those into the silicon, and out comes a working GPU.
It's easy - relatively speaking - and doesn't require a huge amount of redesign between generations. When you get a certain combination working, you improve (shrink) your nanometre process and add more blocks.
However, compiler technology has advanced a lot recently, and with the vast amounts of processing power now available, it should be simpler getting more complex blocks fully utilized. A vastly more complex block, with interconnects to many other blocks, could perform better at a swath of different tasks. This is evident when comparing the performance hit from Anti-Aliasing. Previously even 2xAA had a huge performance hit, but nVidia altered their designs, and now Multisampling AA is basically free.
I recall seeing an article about a new kind of shadowing that was going to be used in DX11 games. The card used for the review got almost 200fps at high settings - with AA enabled that dropped to about 60fps, and with the new shadowing enabled, it dropped to about 20fps. It appears the hardware needs a redesign to be more optimized for whatever algorithm it uses!
Two other factors you're forgetting...
1) 3D CPU/GPU designs are coming slowly, where the transistors aren't just on a 2D plane... that would allow vastly denser CPUs and GPUs. If a processor had minimal leakage, and low power consumption, 500x more transistors wouldn't be a stretch.
2) Performance claims are merely claims. Intel claims a quad-core gives 4x more performance, but in many cases it's slower than a faster dual-core.
570x faster for every game? Doubtful. 570x faster at the most advanced rendering techniques being designed today, with AA and other memory-bandwidth hammering features ramped to the max? Might be accurate. A high end GPU from 6 years ago probably won't get 1fps on a modern game, so this estimate might even be low.
A claim of 250x the framerate in Crysis, with everything ramped to the absolute maximum, might be even accurate.
But general performance claims are almost never true.
general loss of performance (>50%)
This number sound ridiculously high to me. Can you cite a reliable source for that?
Seems rather low to me. It's well known that all the layers of abstraction between your CPU/GPU and the running program really slow things down. PCs have vastly faster hardware, and look at what they pull off!
I once heard from a game developer that the XBox360 has about as much processing power as a 2.0ghz Athlon 64. The XBox360 CPU is pretty weak, but with minimal OS overhead, almost no multitasking, and compilers that optimize perfectly for that particular CPU... it's much easier to milk performance. 50% doesn't seem unreasonable. Even claims of 80% loss wouldn't surprise me.
I've read first hand discussions from the GP2X(device) emu devs(writing emus for arm processors) that hand optimized assembly in specific areas boosted performance of their emus by 60%. That's huge! That's not just the running bits sped up 60% - the entire program's framerate went up that much.
Sony built an assembler for the PS2 that does a near-perfect job keeping all the registers and stuff full. Factoring this in, and what the emu devs stated, 50% really doesn't seem like a high estimate. And since the devs have no choice but to code better algorithms(rather than just bumping up the system requirements a tad), 50% almost seems too small to be feasible.
But just consider all the dev time saved. :)
I'd love to see a match of TF2 between a bunch of console players vs. PC players. It'd be such a joke. :)
Just wait until the scripters and hackers get at them. I met a spy that gets ~80% hits with his revolver - most headshots. It was plainly obvious he was a hacker, because round after round, he'd run into crowds of people(Pyros, medics, heavies, etc.), owning them all.
Or he'd just shoot you from across the map.
I've also met genuinely great spies, like Jening. They're fun to play with, if you don't mind getting your ass handed to you over and over. Console players vs Jening... I wonder how many dozens he'd kill before they got him down.
I know how you feel. Not because I've experienced it, but because I've seen how cheaply PC stuff has become.
First off, I'm in Canada - where prices are more expensive than the US. I picked up a brand new 1TB HDD for $70, and a Saitek P3200 for $6. That includes shipping. Great quality PCI wireless cards can be found for under $25, and I got my SennHeiser PC161 headset for just over $40. :)
So when I see the prices you have to pay for console peripherals, I shudder. And then when I see the prices in other countries, like Australia, or Spain, it makes me want to retch! Talk about a crazy profit margin on the hardware!
Sony's business model is why its inferior...the developers have to foot the costs of hosting and bandwidth which causes many of them to just not bother. Add in a more refined interface, full chat, netflix, etc and I will gladly pay my paltry $40 a year for Live.
I thought Microsoft also charged the developers for demo/patch bandwidth?
Right, but at least those of us that do care won't be subjected to the same privacy violations.
A meaningless phrase, I think. The words "health insurance" suffices; universal health insurance is what Canadian and European residents get from their government. Bad writing at the least, which lead me to suspect that there were bad facts as well. However, most of the rest of it seemed well written.
No we don't.
Sure, if I stab myself with a fork, or need a prescription, going to a doctor or hospital is free. (expensive for the system, but free for me)
But dentists aren't free... and neither are optometrists. To get arch supports or other foot correction covered requires special (expensive) health insurance, but to get back surgery done doesn't.
After tripping down the stairs I had to pay for a chiropractic visit out of my own pocket. Our "universal healthcare" is pretty much limited to hospital/MD crap.
It's running Linux, which means less OS overhead and easier access to the hardware.
I know some people will argue that the specs are identical, but that's like saying a single-core Vista computer with 512MB of RAM is just as fast as a single-core XP computer with the same amount of RAM. It simply isn't true, despite what the specs say.