Gaming has moved from the desktop to the laptop or game console.
That comment has been made before... many times...
You know what? The irony is that a PS4 or XBox One is really a desktop PC, abit one that you can't modify or upgrade much.
Yes, much of what the average person does with a computer works fine on a tablet or laptop, nothing wrong with that. The one area that will have problems for a long time to come is games.
And by games, I don't mean solitaire or candy crush, I mean Call of Duty type games. Those need lots and lots of power, something you can't get in a laptop due to size/power limits (there are rare expensive exceptions, but a desktop is still the best choice for those.
Yes, game consoles play many modern games as well, but they have the benefit of fixed hardware that can be optimized in a way that PC gaming cannot be, but that is also their limit.
The PS3/XB360 were great at launch, but REALLY out of date by the later years. The PS4/XB1 are fine today, but already they are behind a decent PC's performance.
4k gaming will require a whole pile of GPU resources the current machines do not have and it may be 7+ years before we see PS5/XB2.
The PC desktop market will never again be what it was in the 90s, but it isn't going away either.
The SSD is the last most "amazing" upgrade IMHO for PCs in awhile...
It brought back to life a number of machines that felt "slow".
Put a SSD in a Core2 machine and suddenly you've removed the major bottleneck for a lot of things.
My Mother-in-Law has a 2008 era AMD notebook, it runs some dual core something or other (I haven't looked at it in about 2 years). I dropped a 120GB SSD into it 2 years ago and she sees no reason to replace it, it is "Fast enough".
She uses Facebook, the web, plays solitaire, etc. She recently upgraded it to Windows 10, runs perfectly.
IMHO, one of the biggest issues is that PCs have been "good enough" for some time now for everything but games, and even then they haven't been growing much.
Office 2016 doesn't run noticeably faster for 95% of what people use it for on a 6700K Skylake than it does on a Core2Quad Q6600.
Windows 10 also runs just as well on a Q6600 as it deos on a Core i7 whatever. Oh sure, it IS faster on the newer machines, but not by so much to make millions of people throw them out.
I have a dozen computers of various power levels, ranging from the above Q6600 up to a Haswell i7 4790K refresh, having recently retired the last Athlon X2 5000 machine a year or so ago (it was just so old that it wasn't worth testing against anymore, if you're using something 10+ years old, it is time to upgrade).
Windows 10 runs beautifully on all of them, and while I can see a difference when they are side by side, on a stand alone basis, they are all "fine".
I don't think PCs are boring, no more than your average Mac, which is the same thing.
There is nothing overly special about a MacBook, other than it costs a lot and says "Apple" on it.
If you want the ultra light, ultra thin formfactor, sure, go for it... but frankly you can get a really nice PC for a whole lot less money and it works just fine.
I'm typing this reply on an ASUS 15.6" Core i3 notebook that was $349.
They're pushing spyware on it, making it a fascist data collection device instead of the PERSONAL computer that WE OWNED. Get it, MS? If you want this "ignition" to be something other than a funeral pyre, you need to get back to your roots.
That is a concern of the fringe minority, those who post on Slashdot perhaps, but it isn't a major concern of the average Joe.
If Snowden's NSA revelations didn't cause mass riots, nothing MS does is going to do so.
Besides, Google has been doing it for years, and look how popular Android is.
Karlsruhe has light rail within the urban city center and it probably works well for people within that area.
The issue is that the city is 67 sq miles.
The Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex is 9,286 sq miles.
DFW has a bus and light rail system, but it doesn't go nearly enough places and it is just used by the poor for the most part.
The only places that mass transit really works are the super dense cities such as NYC, London, Tokyo, etc.
I've been to London multiple times over the years, the Underground works well, and the links to British Rail also work well to transit outside of the city. I've never felt the need to rent a car in London.
The density of London is 14,200 people per square mile.
The density of Dallas/Fort Worth is 634 people per square mile.
You cannot have a working mass transit system when the density is that low.
In fairness, if you commute from one side of Houston to the other for work, you should probably move.:)
That being said, you're correct, some of the larger cities are bigger than some states. The Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex is massive as well, not quite as big as Houston, but close enough.
I have my own truck and I still don't drive across town unless I really, really have to, it would take more than hour, even outside of rushhour.
Public transit is a joke, used only by those who are completely impoverished, or by the VERY few who live right next to a light rail station and work downtown right next to the dropoff point, but those are extreme exceptions.
How will these "low tax" states pay for the the infrastructure needed to accommodate all these extra people and businesses? All of these "low tax" states also have the shittiest schools and public infrastructure.
"In 2005, 2006, and 2011, Plano was designated the best place to live in the Western United States by CNN Money magazine.
In 2006, Plano was selected as the 11th best place to live in the United States by CNN Money magazine.
It was also selected as the safest city in America in 2010 and 2011 by Forbes.
Plano schools consistently score among the highest in the nation.
Plano was rated the 10th Best Suburb for Education in the Nation in 2014 due to having one of the lowest student-teacher ratios (14 to 1), a high school graduation rate of 94 percent and some of the highest test scores in the nation.
It has been rated as the wealthiest city in the United States by CNN Money, and the United States Census Bureau declared Plano the wealthiest city of 2008 by comparing the median household income for all U.S. cities whose populations were greater than 250,000.
There are solutions to that congestion of yours, but I'm pretty sure the average car sitter will be quite unhappy to hear them.
Probably not, but I would be...
Tolls, congestion fees, dialing back on the lavish roads-roads-roads-and-more-roads subsidies
I don't mind tolls, we have been getting some nice new roads in the Dallas area thanks to them, that we might not have gotten otherwise...
635 to 35 just got a nice set of toll bridges to allow faster transit between the two, the rates adjust based on traffic conditions...
actually increasing the federal gas tax
I have no problem with this, so long as the money is only for roads. I would vote to triple the gas tax, if I could get a guarantee the money was used to build roads and bridges.
Or hey! How about yet another round of road widenings? Ease that beltway out a notch or too, yep, that'll solve that congestion. Sure thing.
Except they never do it by enough... they make the road plans to handle what we used to have, not what we will have... They always seem to be 10 years behind it, just when they finish, they need to start again. Instead of putting in a 3 lane highway with room to expand to 5, just go ahead and put in the 5 lane road...
Got enough private tax revenue to support all that public infrastructure spending?
Yes, there is plenty of tax money... build one less aircraft carrier and you're set...
---
It is of course easy for me to say the above, the costs are trivial for me, I can afford them. I get that a lot of people can't. So hike the min wage from $7.25/hr to $8.50/hr right now, with another raise to $10/hr in 1 year.
And I say that as a right wing Republican... My party leaders are stupid, what can I say?
No, and how you get that out of "If you really want to be a gun free zone, you need the sort of protections that airports and courtrooms have." is beyond me...
Makes sense to the rest of us, why do Americans find this point so hard to accept?
Because you're a sheep and ok to be disarmed by your government?
Seriously, I don't say that jokingly, gun registration is one step away from gun confiscation, and dozens of governments in first world nations have done it within my lifetime.
If you are smart enough to regulate a car, then regulating a gun follows a similar logic...
Except, that it doesn't...
I'm not afraid my government will want to one day seize all the guns...
There is ample evidence from many nations in just the past 30 years that many governments want to disarm their populations...
Any type of gun lists or gun registry makes that really easy to do...
If I saw that governments in general respected law abiding citizens to be armed, I'd feel otherwise. But since they don't, you simply can't trust them.
Windows 7 was really, really in demand... most people were on XP, not Vista, and were really due for an upgrade...
Windows 7 was a big noticeable upgrade over XP.
Windows 10 is less of a big noticeable upgrade over 7.
Windows 7 also wasn't hundreds of dollars, I paid something like $100 for 3 copies, or about $33 each.
---
I don't think people are rejecting Windows 10 for the reasons you're giving, I don't think the average consumer even knows about them, much less cares. The real issue may be "why upgrade, my computer works".
And when it comes to technology, yes, I'm sorry, but the average consumer is a moron.
According to that web site, it is over $4 a watt installed for > 10kw, over $5 a wall installed for 10kw.
That is even higher than here in Texas.
Where is this $2 a watt that people keep harping on about? I have seen multiple people say, "oh, solar is already cheaper than fossil fuels". Maybe, if you count just the cost of the panels, not installing them, and the rest of the gear is not counted, I suppose...
It depends on the real density of the object, what it hits, etc. And while you can computer model it, we don't have a lot of practical experience with it...
Could we survive that? Maybe, but not many of us. The dust would block out the sun and it would have stayed dark for years. The whole planet was covered in debris and dust. This was not a small impact.
It is interesting to note that if you put the details of that impact into the impact calculator, you don't get a response similar to what is written there. One of them is wrong.
My money is on the impact calculator being wrong, but I'm not an expert, so there we go.
---
TL;DR - it is amazingly unlikely to happen, but it would really, really suck if it did. Worse than WWIII would be.
So perhaps we should be sure it won't happen, rather than hope it won't.
1. You're assuming that calculator is accurate... it is perhaps a good guess, but that doesn't mean it will be correct. The rock that hit Earth and killed the dinos likely did its worst damage via firestorm, but we can only really guess.
2. You're correctly that it is very, very, very unlikely. Really, really low chances... of course if it did hit, it would be bad beyond measure.
But please, do talk to us more about what threats are real and likely in our lifetimes.
You win a prize for being unable to read what was written, rather than reading what you wanted to read.
And you worked so hard to type all that out too!
Asteroids are a real threat, but they aren't at all likely in our lifetimes.
It's clear that you're a master of risk management.
I'm able to understand the difference between what might kill me, and what might kill all of us.
A billion people could die tomorrow, and that would be sad, but life would go on. We could have global thermonuclear war tomorrow and 6 billion people could die, and that would suck, but life would go on.
If a 10km long rock hits Earth tomorrow, it likely would wipe out all humans on the planet. Life would NOT go on (at least not our kind of life).
The risk is low, the penalty for missing it is off the charts.
Slashdot Mirror
What I always find interesting is how people can read what they want to read, rather than what was written.
People claim in polls to care about privacy, but actions are worth more than words, and people's actions indicate they don't really care.
The NSA is still here, still spying, and life marches on.
Gaming has moved from the desktop to the laptop or game console.
That comment has been made before... many times...
You know what? The irony is that a PS4 or XBox One is really a desktop PC, abit one that you can't modify or upgrade much.
Yes, much of what the average person does with a computer works fine on a tablet or laptop, nothing wrong with that. The one area that will have problems for a long time to come is games.
And by games, I don't mean solitaire or candy crush, I mean Call of Duty type games. Those need lots and lots of power, something you can't get in a laptop due to size/power limits (there are rare expensive exceptions, but a desktop is still the best choice for those.
Yes, game consoles play many modern games as well, but they have the benefit of fixed hardware that can be optimized in a way that PC gaming cannot be, but that is also their limit.
The PS3/XB360 were great at launch, but REALLY out of date by the later years. The PS4/XB1 are fine today, but already they are behind a decent PC's performance.
4k gaming will require a whole pile of GPU resources the current machines do not have and it may be 7+ years before we see PS5/XB2.
The PC desktop market will never again be what it was in the 90s, but it isn't going away either.
The SSD is the last most "amazing" upgrade IMHO for PCs in awhile...
It brought back to life a number of machines that felt "slow".
Put a SSD in a Core2 machine and suddenly you've removed the major bottleneck for a lot of things.
My Mother-in-Law has a 2008 era AMD notebook, it runs some dual core something or other (I haven't looked at it in about 2 years). I dropped a 120GB SSD into it 2 years ago and she sees no reason to replace it, it is "Fast enough".
She uses Facebook, the web, plays solitaire, etc. She recently upgraded it to Windows 10, runs perfectly.
True, most of what Apple does was done by someone else... Apple has better PR and marketing however...
The iPod was not first, but it ran off with the market...
PC sales are declining for a reason.
You make a statement, but don't give the reason.
IMHO, one of the biggest issues is that PCs have been "good enough" for some time now for everything but games, and even then they haven't been growing much.
Office 2016 doesn't run noticeably faster for 95% of what people use it for on a 6700K Skylake than it does on a Core2Quad Q6600.
Windows 10 also runs just as well on a Q6600 as it deos on a Core i7 whatever. Oh sure, it IS faster on the newer machines, but not by so much to make millions of people throw them out.
I have a dozen computers of various power levels, ranging from the above Q6600 up to a Haswell i7 4790K refresh, having recently retired the last Athlon X2 5000 machine a year or so ago (it was just so old that it wasn't worth testing against anymore, if you're using something 10+ years old, it is time to upgrade).
Windows 10 runs beautifully on all of them, and while I can see a difference when they are side by side, on a stand alone basis, they are all "fine".
That is the real problem, IMHO.
I don't think PCs are boring, no more than your average Mac, which is the same thing.
There is nothing overly special about a MacBook, other than it costs a lot and says "Apple" on it.
If you want the ultra light, ultra thin formfactor, sure, go for it... but frankly you can get a really nice PC for a whole lot less money and it works just fine.
I'm typing this reply on an ASUS 15.6" Core i3 notebook that was $349.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/produ...
4GB of RAM, 500GB HD, AC Wi-Fi, DVD burner, 1080p display, Windows 10.
The only upgrade I did to it was replace the 500GB SSD with a 256GB Transcend SSD that I picked up on sale from Amazon for $72.
Turns the machine into a rocket for basic tasks. No, it isn't a gaming machine, but it runs everything else as fast as is needed, for less than $450.
If that is "boring", I'll take it.
They're pushing spyware on it, making it a fascist data collection device instead of the PERSONAL computer that WE OWNED. Get it, MS? If you want this "ignition" to be something other than a funeral pyre, you need to get back to your roots.
That is a concern of the fringe minority, those who post on Slashdot perhaps, but it isn't a major concern of the average Joe.
If Snowden's NSA revelations didn't cause mass riots, nothing MS does is going to do so.
Besides, Google has been doing it for years, and look how popular Android is.
Karlsruhe has light rail within the urban city center and it probably works well for people within that area.
The issue is that the city is 67 sq miles.
The Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex is 9,286 sq miles.
DFW has a bus and light rail system, but it doesn't go nearly enough places and it is just used by the poor for the most part.
The only places that mass transit really works are the super dense cities such as NYC, London, Tokyo, etc.
I've been to London multiple times over the years, the Underground works well, and the links to British Rail also work well to transit outside of the city. I've never felt the need to rent a car in London.
The density of London is 14,200 people per square mile.
The density of Dallas/Fort Worth is 634 people per square mile.
You cannot have a working mass transit system when the density is that low.
In fairness, if you commute from one side of Houston to the other for work, you should probably move. :)
That being said, you're correct, some of the larger cities are bigger than some states. The Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex is massive as well, not quite as big as Houston, but close enough.
I have my own truck and I still don't drive across town unless I really, really have to, it would take more than hour, even outside of rushhour.
Public transit is a joke, used only by those who are completely impoverished, or by the VERY few who live right next to a light rail station and work downtown right next to the dropoff point, but those are extreme exceptions.
How will these "low tax" states pay for the the infrastructure needed to accommodate all these extra people and businesses? All of these "low tax" states also have the shittiest schools and public infrastructure.
You think so?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Toyota is coming here for a reason...
"In 2005, 2006, and 2011, Plano was designated the best place to live in the Western United States by CNN Money magazine.
In 2006, Plano was selected as the 11th best place to live in the United States by CNN Money magazine.
It was also selected as the safest city in America in 2010 and 2011 by Forbes.
Plano schools consistently score among the highest in the nation.
Plano was rated the 10th Best Suburb for Education in the Nation in 2014 due to having one of the lowest student-teacher ratios (14 to 1), a high school graduation rate of 94 percent and some of the highest test scores in the nation.
It has been rated as the wealthiest city in the United States by CNN Money, and the United States Census Bureau declared Plano the wealthiest city of 2008 by comparing the median household income for all U.S. cities whose populations were greater than 250,000.
---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
BTW, if you want to see some money... not to be outdone, Allen, TX right next door just built a new football stadium... for their high school...
http://blog.metalconstruction....
Frisco is just to the north, also a very nice city...
Crime is low, land is cheap, houses are cheap, shopping is plentiful, roads are good, police are excellent, schools are outstanding, etc. etc. etc....
There are solutions to that congestion of yours, but I'm pretty sure the average car sitter will be quite unhappy to hear them.
Probably not, but I would be...
Tolls, congestion fees, dialing back on the lavish roads-roads-roads-and-more-roads subsidies
I don't mind tolls, we have been getting some nice new roads in the Dallas area thanks to them, that we might not have gotten otherwise...
635 to 35 just got a nice set of toll bridges to allow faster transit between the two, the rates adjust based on traffic conditions...
actually increasing the federal gas tax
I have no problem with this, so long as the money is only for roads. I would vote to triple the gas tax, if I could get a guarantee the money was used to build roads and bridges.
Or hey! How about yet another round of road widenings? Ease that beltway out a notch or too, yep, that'll solve that congestion. Sure thing.
Except they never do it by enough... they make the road plans to handle what we used to have, not what we will have... They always seem to be 10 years behind it, just when they finish, they need to start again. Instead of putting in a 3 lane highway with room to expand to 5, just go ahead and put in the 5 lane road...
Got enough private tax revenue to support all that public infrastructure spending?
Yes, there is plenty of tax money... build one less aircraft carrier and you're set...
---
It is of course easy for me to say the above, the costs are trivial for me, I can afford them. I get that a lot of people can't. So hike the min wage from $7.25/hr to $8.50/hr right now, with another raise to $10/hr in 1 year.
And I say that as a right wing Republican... My party leaders are stupid, what can I say?
Also NYC. Seriously, it's actually *slower* to drive around than take the subway in most (rush-hour) situations.
True, but that is the extreme exception...
NYC is so dense, it makes sense...
Come down to Dallas and try it, it would never work no matter how much money you throw at it, too spread out...
Ok so irrational paranoia then....
There can be no meaningful conversation with someone who makes such a statement.
The facts are clearly on my side, but you choose not to see it.
So gun regulation then?
No, and how you get that out of "If you really want to be a gun free zone, you need the sort of protections that airports and courtrooms have." is beyond me...
Makes sense to the rest of us, why do Americans find this point so hard to accept?
Because you're a sheep and ok to be disarmed by your government?
Seriously, I don't say that jokingly, gun registration is one step away from gun confiscation, and dozens of governments in first world nations have done it within my lifetime.
If you are smart enough to regulate a car, then regulating a gun follows a similar logic...
Except, that it doesn't...
I'm not afraid my government will want to one day seize all the guns...
There is ample evidence from many nations in just the past 30 years that many governments want to disarm their populations...
Any type of gun lists or gun registry makes that really easy to do...
If I saw that governments in general respected law abiding citizens to be armed, I'd feel otherwise. But since they don't, you simply can't trust them.
I have a crazy idea...
Get a degree in prison, get out on probation....
Ok, maybe there are some details to be worked out, but perhaps it isn't the worst idea ever...
Windows 7 was really, really in demand... most people were on XP, not Vista, and were really due for an upgrade...
Windows 7 was a big noticeable upgrade over XP.
Windows 10 is less of a big noticeable upgrade over 7.
Windows 7 also wasn't hundreds of dollars, I paid something like $100 for 3 copies, or about $33 each.
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I don't think people are rejecting Windows 10 for the reasons you're giving, I don't think the average consumer even knows about them, much less cares. The real issue may be "why upgrade, my computer works".
And when it comes to technology, yes, I'm sorry, but the average consumer is a moron.
According to that web site, it is over $4 a watt installed for > 10kw, over $5 a wall installed for 10kw.
That is even higher than here in Texas.
Where is this $2 a watt that people keep harping on about? I have seen multiple people say, "oh, solar is already cheaper than fossil fuels". Maybe, if you count just the cost of the panels, not installing them, and the rest of the gear is not counted, I suppose...
I keep seeing people say it is $2 a watt to install, but I haven't seen it. Lowest prices I've been quoted was about $3.50 a watt.
I'd be all over solar if it were $2 a watt installed.
6.5% for a few months isn't bad. How many of those would have been new system sales had Win 10 not been free?
Not all of course, but maybe half?
Supply and demand, it doesn't actually take a lot of demand drop the cut prices by a lot. A 3% demand drop might cut prices 10%.
Then there is the fact that we have had enough memory for awhile now. 8 year old Core2Duo systems with 2 GB of ram actually run Windows 10 just fine.
You can't imagine open rebellion because you're well fed, you're actually pretty safe, and you live in a very well off nation.
There isn't going to be a civil war in the US any time soon, people are happy with their food and TV...
The energy released is simple math
You'd think so, but no, not really...
It depends on the real density of the object, what it hits, etc. And while you can computer model it, we don't have a lot of practical experience with it...
Just curious, but have you read this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Could we survive that? Maybe, but not many of us. The dust would block out the sun and it would have stayed dark for years. The whole planet was covered in debris and dust. This was not a small impact.
It is interesting to note that if you put the details of that impact into the impact calculator, you don't get a response similar to what is written there. One of them is wrong.
My money is on the impact calculator being wrong, but I'm not an expert, so there we go.
---
TL;DR - it is amazingly unlikely to happen, but it would really, really suck if it did. Worse than WWIII would be.
So perhaps we should be sure it won't happen, rather than hope it won't.
2 points...
1. You're assuming that calculator is accurate... it is perhaps a good guess, but that doesn't mean it will be correct. The rock that hit Earth and killed the dinos likely did its worst damage via firestorm, but we can only really guess.
2. You're correctly that it is very, very, very unlikely. Really, really low chances... of course if it did hit, it would be bad beyond measure.
What the Hell is wrong with you people?
The same could be directed back at you...
Some of the "progressive" ideas being tossed around these days are just stupid, but you can't see it because they are "new and different".
Some of the new stuff is good. Equal rights, respect for all humans, these are good things. But that doesn't mean all that is new is good.
We have a whole generation of kids growing up with no respect for authority.
But please, do talk to us more about what threats are real and likely in our lifetimes.
You win a prize for being unable to read what was written, rather than reading what you wanted to read.
And you worked so hard to type all that out too!
Asteroids are a real threat, but they aren't at all likely in our lifetimes.
It's clear that you're a master of risk management.
I'm able to understand the difference between what might kill me, and what might kill all of us.
A billion people could die tomorrow, and that would be sad, but life would go on. We could have global thermonuclear war tomorrow and 6 billion people could die, and that would suck, but life would go on.
If a 10km long rock hits Earth tomorrow, it likely would wipe out all humans on the planet. Life would NOT go on (at least not our kind of life).
The risk is low, the penalty for missing it is off the charts.