If you look at the health insurance system that existed in the past this was not as big of a problem. Initially you had most health insurance being provided by mutuals where they did not have concepts like preexisting conditions. But what happened was these non-profits were soon getting dominated by for-profit health insurers. Not because these private insurers were more efficient, but rather because they invented concepts like preexisting conditions and did a lot to limit the pool of people they insured. This let them offer lower prices and seem like a better deal until you got sick and they upped your rates or got rid of you all together.
This got an order of magnitude worse as some of these private insurers became publicly traded companies. Not only did going public give them more capital to work with to further undercut competitors, but it also created a necessity of every increasing profits on a quarterly basis. That means they have to continually find ways to screw the insured.
So no, it wasn't always this way, but it definitely is now.
Trademark law forces trademark holders to litigate at the slightest hint of dilution. If they don't do it, then they won't have standing to file suit later when it's more serious. Don't blame Wikipedia, it's how the law is written.
Indeed, but ultimately it requires government to step in and take control. It's not government regulation that created the problem, it's the lack of it that created the problem.
The problem is that there's a natural monopoly because of the physical impediments to connecting a dwelling to the network. I have three wires coming into my home:
1) Power line 2) Cable line 3) Phone line
It would be prohibitively expensive to set up the infrastructure to connect me to yet another line and that's what would be necessary to have true competition.
To understand the problem, compare what we have in broadband service to the way that dial-up worked. In the dial-up market there were thousands of competitors because while local phone carriers provided the phone line, they had no control beyond the last mile. You could connect to compuserve, AOL, or hundreds of independent ISP's. The result was increasing speeds (within the physical limits of the phone wires) and declining prices.
With broadband, you have the cable companies who have monopoly control over their wires and you have the phone company that has an effective monopoly. Yeah, I can get DSL from other providers, but the phone company deliberately interferes with this and because of their control of the local pipes, can generally offer cheaper service. So while you have competition, in theory, between DSL and cable, as a practical matter it's nonexistent.
There's potential for competition from wireless and that's somewhere the government can do a lot to help. However, wireless will always be slower than a wired connection, and ultimately if I want wireless I'm looking at the same companies who currently provide DSL service (AT&T, Verizon, etc).
Hmmmm... Good point. I'll need to think about that a bit. I'm not sure how much of that would go on, but it's definitely a concern. Showing that their vote had been counted wouldn't be of that much value though.
Actually I think you can make an electronic voting system that's trustworthy and that there are advantages to it. For example, in Chicago they use electronic voting machines for the early voting. The reason for this is that it permits anybody to vote at any precinct in the city because they can pull up the correct ballot electronically. So if your closest polling place is nearer to your work than your home, you can just go there. Convenient and insures more people vote.
Furthermore, electronic systems are easier to use and less prone to human error in the voting booth. It's much easier to screw up punching a hole in the right place or filling in the right bubble. If you click the box and the check mark appears, then it's much clearer who you picked. In fact, the problems we hear of peoples votes being switched is almost certainly a miscalibration of the screen, but it means voters can see the mistake rather than if they punched the wrong box and can't tell for sure.
If you have a verifiable paper trail and you have adequate safeguards of the chain of custody of the machines, then it is a good way to do things. You should also incorporate some degree of spot checking and random sampling of voting machines to insure that they are accurate. If they fail those checks you fall back to the paper trail and do things the hard way.
Also, with an electronic system, you open up the possibility of making the vote even more secure. For example, have each voter receive a receipt for their vote with a unique identifier code. This code would not make it possible to track a vote back to the individual who voted, but it allow them to log into a website the day after the election and confirm that their vote was accurately counted. Seeing that the vote made it through the machines and came out right on the other end would do a lot to help people feel confident in the system.
In the end, no voting system is perfect. Relying on paper ballots is prone to errors too as we saw in the 2000 election. Electronic systems with no paper trail are a horrifically bad idea, but with a paper trail and some effort to insure that the electronic systems are doing accurate counts, I think it's a good way to go.
Indeed. At one place I worked the server room would stay reasonably cool as long as the door was open. If somebody happened to close the door, by morning, servers were crashing. Also, long term overheating might not cause crashes, but it will cause things like hard drives to fail prematurely.
There is liability insurance for events such as this. It might be a little on the expensive side for a small event like this, but very likely worth it.
As for the security, I would hire a security guard. At the least, having a guard at the door serves as a deterrent. Basically, keeping honest people honest. You also might want to have people sign a waiver that you don't take responsibility for any thefts. Get a lawyer to help you draft that. Well worth it.
Exactly. Can you write clean and elegant PERL code? Absolutely. But it's also trivial to write Perl that looks like line noise. It will take more Java to do a given task, but the structure forces you to write better code than Perl. For a good coder, it may be irrelevant, but how many large corporations are populated exclusively with good coders?
The reality is that there's still a need for physical media here. On-line distribution is improving, but getting high quality video over the Internet is still not quite there yet. Furthermore, getting a disc in a box and putting it into a player is simple and familiar to most people.
Having said that, the drive for Blu-ray isn't going to ever be like it was for DVD. I recentl advised some folks doing an HD upgrade to skip getting a blu-ray player because they are too pricey still and they wouldn't get enough out of the difference. If something is made for HD from the get go, it does look nicer on blu-ray, but it's a marginal difference in most cases. The HD version of Blade Runner is absolutely gorgeous, but if I'd never seen it, the original is still a great film.
My expectation is that this will probably be the last generation of dedicated video formats. It's up to playing high definition content and there's no new higher definition standard on the way (nor can I see any reason to go there). So blu-ray will probably be it. It will likely always have a market because people like to collect movies, etc, but it will eventually just become like DVD is today where it's dirt cheap and common.
This sounds a lot like that episode of the Simpsons where Bart unleashes some lizards that spread all over and end up killing off the pigeons which annoyed the town: Skinner: Well, I was wrong; the lizards are a godsend. Lisa: But isn't that a bit short-sighted? What happens when we're overrun by lizards? Skinner: No problem. We simply release wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the lizards. Lisa: But aren't the snakes even worse? Skinner: Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat. Lisa: But then we're stuck with gorillas! Skinner: No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.
The reality of it is that as we run low on various elements, the price will go up due to factors of supply and demand. This will help drive efforts to find alternatives, reduce the amount needed, and where feasible, recover/recycle those elements. We will never actually run out, but it may simply become too expensive to build TV's out of. Then we'll have to find another way to do it. If there's enough need and the price is worth it, we might end up prospecting asteroids to get the minerals we need.
As for peak oil, we don't know if we've hit it yet because there's historically been an incentive for many oil producers to keep their reserve numbers a secret. We don't know if they've artificially inflated or deflated their numbers for a variety of reasons. Being at peak oil does not mean we aren't going to discover more oil. What it means is that in the future, the oil we discover will be harder to get to, harder to produce, and will not sufficiently replace all the easy to drill oil we have had in the past. It will become impossible to increase oil production and we'll see a decline that will lead to drastic price increases, a switch to alternatives, and overall a decline in demand for it.
Indeed. Apple, just like Dell, or any other company is charging "what the market will bear". If they can get away with charging twice as much for a component, then they will. Dell would do the same thing if they could.
I seem to recall that the sun is only available during the daytime. The one major flaw with solar power is that you need a lot of that power when the sun isn't available. This is especially true in more extreme northern and southern climates.
So you definitely need some means to switch the power, transferring from areas that have sunlight at any given moment to those that do not. Having said that, there's no reason not to start down this road. It will take us decades to build out all this infrastructure and the technology for harnessing, storing, and transmitting power will improve along the way. I don't see any substantially better options coming down the pike.
As a consumer, I'd love to have a limitless supply of music any time I want it. But this model seems to guarantee the destruction of what little power remains in the hands of artists. Today, a music label makes money from finding talent, marketing them, getting their music published, etc. Yes, they rip off said talent, and yes, they often find one hit wonder pop crap. But, having said that, it at least provides a model where artists get paid in proportion to the how much music they sell and, theoretically, how popular they are.
The trouble I see with a model like this is that the incentive for music labels would suddenly become a volume business. Basically just fill up the jukebox with as much crap as possible. In fact, realistically, would they have to do much of anything in terms of artist development and promotion? Apple sells a pod, then the music label gets a cut, and some smidgen of that cut ends up in the pockets of some artists. Wouldn't the label benefit from having a lot of small artists they pay nothing to?
Seems like, at the end of the day it empowers the large labels, damages the independent labels, and reduces, yet again, the money that goes into a musician's pocket.
When I heard about the SDK and having Java available for it I was thrilled. I'm a java developer, so I was thinking maybe I'd get an iPhone and play a bit. But with all these restrictions and blocking Java from the platform, I'm rapidly losing my interest. Apple's little deal with AT&T is going to hurt them in the long run I suspect. I don't own an iPhone yet for precisely the problem that changing carriers is a huge pain I prefer to avoid.
Apple's been drinking a bit too much of their own koolaid. I recognize that controlling the platform allows them to provide some guarantees of the user experience. But when they go beyond user experience to manipulating this control for purely economic gain, they will eventually be diminishing the user experience. When you say to a user that they can't have a specific app because it would cost Apple money, you're well and truly on the slippery slope.
Honestly what I wish some cell company would do is offer a data phone that's mostly focussed on texting and web browsing, which would be open and permit the use of VOIP clients. This won't happen because carriers have too much to gain from the lock in and overcharging they currently exhibit on their minute plans. Because of how spectrum is licensed, it guarantees a limited number of players who all have the same interests. So it won't happen, but I can dream can't I?:)
On point #2, I assume you are a statistically significant sample?:) I have had driver issues. Friends of mine have had driver issues. It happens and it's the nature of the beast when you've got numerous vendors making numerous devices for systems.
On point #3, of course there are bugs on console games, but the point is that because it's a constrained hardware environment, the QA process is WAY simpler. If I told you to test a game for XBOX, what would you do? Get an XBOX and test it. If I told you to test a game for a PC, your first question is what kind of PC? You've got countless variations of processors, sound cards, graphics cards and other bits that can change the results. So it's not a matter of the inherent code quality but of the far far simpler QA process involved.
On point #4, yes PC hardware will always be bleeding edge, but that's as much the plus as the minus. It results in a fixation by developers on pushing the envelope in terms of graphics, sound, etc, and results in less emphasis on game play, story, etc. This also tends to factor into #3. If you're dealing with new specs all the time you're always hitting a moving target. If you've got a console that's a stable platform for 6 years, you have a known quantity to work with. Is my PC faster than my PS3? Sure. Is the quality of games available for it superior? Depends on how you measure quality.
I think things are different now because of three factors:
1) Consoles are now networkable 2) HDTV is making the video quality of consoles far more appealing and arguably superior to the PC gaming experience 3) Leveraging that networking, consoles are getting better at using social networks in games (XBox live, etc)
So with this generation we see the same costs and hassles in a PC gaming system, but it is a bit worse now. You see a much larger gap between low end and high end gaming systems. So in order to keep up with the latest, you have to spend a lot more than you once did. I mean $500 for a video card is pretty routine these days when a few years ago, you'd not be spending that much unless you worked for a graphics firm. Now that card may be wonderful, but the problem is that studios end up designing games for such systems and those sub $100 video cards will no longer cut it.
I won't deny that the controls for FPS and RTS games are better on a PC and it's why I continue to do PC gaming. But truth be told I can't see myself dropping another $1000-2000 on a souped up PC in the next couple of years to keep up with the technology. I just got a PS3 a few months ago after I bought an HDTV and I'm pretty thrilled with it. Collectively that cost would be more than a PC, granted, but that TV will last me 10 years if not more, and the console will last me 5. I suppose if you never watch TV or movies it's not as good a deal, but I do.
Basically I come at this from the perspective of a long time PC gamer and console doubter and after picking up a console I can't see myself dumping the money into another gaming PC. I think I overall find the PC gaming experience a little better still but not enough to bother with the hassles and costs.
What you're saying is 100% true, but this is the problem: what PC is sufficient for gaming?
I don't know anybody who doesn't own a PC. But I also know very few people with PC's that are capable of gaming. Don't get me wrong, there will still be some market out there and the independent home brew developers will definitely continue. There will be plenty of room for people who want to play more casual games, but the market for PC games akin to what we see on consoles today will continue to dwindle.
1) Here's the thing, if I buy a PC to play DVD's, browse the Internet, etc, I can get something for $400-600 that does the job adequately. However, that system will not play games. If I want to play games I'm looking at a $1000-1500 box at a minimum. That premium is entirely about playing games and that extra horsepower goes almost entirely unused when playing a movie, etc. Besides, if you are playing games you'll need to upgrade at least once every 3 years where as consoles have about a 5-6 year life cycle. So it's even worse.
2) Okay, well lucky you. I have. I know many friends that have. I know several gamers who will reinstall their operating from scratch routinely to keep kruft to a minimum and to keep the systems running smoothly. I've often had a game get installed, have glitches, require patches and driver updates, etc. On the other hand, every console game I've ever bought has worked out of the box.
3) Console games are generally patched more rapidly and effectively than PC games because the hardware platform is consistent thus making glitches consistent. Much easier to QA and to track down issues when they happen instead of having a bunch of obscure bugs that pop up on random hardware configurations.
4) What I'm saying is that when the PS2 came out, my PC was substantially faster than the PS2. When the PS3 came out, the overall performance was probably a little better in my PC, but not enough that I'd really notice with most games. That by and large, the hardware that's available for console gaming is no longer a limiting factor on the games. Heck, the wii demonstrates that you can make a compelling gaming environment on pretty low end hardware.
Linux as a subset of PC gaming suffers from many of the same problems, hence my pointing it out. It has a host of issues all it's own, but the complexities of PC harware are pointing a giant bazooka at the foot of PC gaming.
The other factor there is that if you've got a Linux box and you're a gamer, I guarantee you dual boot to play most of your games. Given that, why would a developer go out of their way to make a game for linux when you can just dual boot to play. I mean I've picked up games for Linux before when they were available, but a game not being Linux compatible never stopped me from getting it.
Good point. However, the major difference is that, given a consistent hardware platform in consoles, the bugs that are found tend to effect everybody and thus there's more of a fire under developers to fix problems quickly or get them right on release. Basically within a couple weeks of launch a game will be broadly playable for most people with maybe a few glitches here and there.
With PC games there's nearly infinite hardware combinations which means that inevitably no matter how much QA you do, there will be bugs at release and so I think there's more of a tendency to assume that there will be bugs and that it's okay. Some people will find themselves completely unable to play the game, ever, even after several patches. A good friend of mine recently had to threaten Valve through the BBB in order to get a refund on a game that never worked on his system in spite of numerous patches. That's not a likely scenario on a console.
The simple truth is that gaming on PC's, regardless of the operating system is dying a slow death. I'm a long time fan of PC gaming, but when given that:
1) a gaming PC is substantially more expensive than a console 2) you frequently have driver and other compatibility problems 3) a number of PC games are launched in a rather buggy state 4) the overall performance level of consoles has improved a lot in the latest generation
There's just not a lot left that PC games can claim superiority on. Linux gaming is even more dead because it's a very small subset of PC gaming with a lot of complexities that make support very difficult. It costs more dollars per gamer to develop and support the platform, and on top of that, you've got an industry full of people that have a ton of DirectX experience which does no good on Linux (Wine aside).
I've built apps on Tomcat that had none of those problems. Tomcat, being free, ends up being the default of folks trying to do things on the cheap. Thus it has a certain gravitational pull to people who are throwing together hacky, poorly considered projects, in a hurry, on the cheap.
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If you look at the health insurance system that existed in the past this was not as big of a problem. Initially you had most health insurance being provided by mutuals where they did not have concepts like preexisting conditions. But what happened was these non-profits were soon getting dominated by for-profit health insurers. Not because these private insurers were more efficient, but rather because they invented concepts like preexisting conditions and did a lot to limit the pool of people they insured. This let them offer lower prices and seem like a better deal until you got sick and they upped your rates or got rid of you all together.
This got an order of magnitude worse as some of these private insurers became publicly traded companies. Not only did going public give them more capital to work with to further undercut competitors, but it also created a necessity of every increasing profits on a quarterly basis. That means they have to continually find ways to screw the insured.
So no, it wasn't always this way, but it definitely is now.
Does any of that amount to $700M?
No.
Trademark law forces trademark holders to litigate at the slightest hint of dilution. If they don't do it, then they won't have standing to file suit later when it's more serious. Don't blame Wikipedia, it's how the law is written.
Indeed, but ultimately it requires government to step in and take control. It's not government regulation that created the problem, it's the lack of it that created the problem.
The problem is that there's a natural monopoly because of the physical impediments to connecting a dwelling to the network. I have three wires coming into my home:
1) Power line
2) Cable line
3) Phone line
It would be prohibitively expensive to set up the infrastructure to connect me to yet another line and that's what would be necessary to have true competition.
To understand the problem, compare what we have in broadband service to the way that dial-up worked. In the dial-up market there were thousands of competitors because while local phone carriers provided the phone line, they had no control beyond the last mile. You could connect to compuserve, AOL, or hundreds of independent ISP's. The result was increasing speeds (within the physical limits of the phone wires) and declining prices.
With broadband, you have the cable companies who have monopoly control over their wires and you have the phone company that has an effective monopoly. Yeah, I can get DSL from other providers, but the phone company deliberately interferes with this and because of their control of the local pipes, can generally offer cheaper service. So while you have competition, in theory, between DSL and cable, as a practical matter it's nonexistent.
There's potential for competition from wireless and that's somewhere the government can do a lot to help. However, wireless will always be slower than a wired connection, and ultimately if I want wireless I'm looking at the same companies who currently provide DSL service (AT&T, Verizon, etc).
Hmmmm... Good point. I'll need to think about that a bit. I'm not sure how much of that would go on, but it's definitely a concern. Showing that their vote had been counted wouldn't be of that much value though.
Actually I think you can make an electronic voting system that's trustworthy and that there are advantages to it. For example, in Chicago they use electronic voting machines for the early voting. The reason for this is that it permits anybody to vote at any precinct in the city because they can pull up the correct ballot electronically. So if your closest polling place is nearer to your work than your home, you can just go there. Convenient and insures more people vote.
Furthermore, electronic systems are easier to use and less prone to human error in the voting booth. It's much easier to screw up punching a hole in the right place or filling in the right bubble. If you click the box and the check mark appears, then it's much clearer who you picked. In fact, the problems we hear of peoples votes being switched is almost certainly a miscalibration of the screen, but it means voters can see the mistake rather than if they punched the wrong box and can't tell for sure.
If you have a verifiable paper trail and you have adequate safeguards of the chain of custody of the machines, then it is a good way to do things. You should also incorporate some degree of spot checking and random sampling of voting machines to insure that they are accurate. If they fail those checks you fall back to the paper trail and do things the hard way.
Also, with an electronic system, you open up the possibility of making the vote even more secure. For example, have each voter receive a receipt for their vote with a unique identifier code. This code would not make it possible to track a vote back to the individual who voted, but it allow them to log into a website the day after the election and confirm that their vote was accurately counted. Seeing that the vote made it through the machines and came out right on the other end would do a lot to help people feel confident in the system.
In the end, no voting system is perfect. Relying on paper ballots is prone to errors too as we saw in the 2000 election. Electronic systems with no paper trail are a horrifically bad idea, but with a paper trail and some effort to insure that the electronic systems are doing accurate counts, I think it's a good way to go.
Indeed. At one place I worked the server room would stay reasonably cool as long as the door was open. If somebody happened to close the door, by morning, servers were crashing. Also, long term overheating might not cause crashes, but it will cause things like hard drives to fail prematurely.
There is liability insurance for events such as this. It might be a little on the expensive side for a small event like this, but very likely worth it.
As for the security, I would hire a security guard. At the least, having a guard at the door serves as a deterrent. Basically, keeping honest people honest. You also might want to have people sign a waiver that you don't take responsibility for any thefts. Get a lawyer to help you draft that. Well worth it.
Exactly. Can you write clean and elegant PERL code? Absolutely. But it's also trivial to write Perl that looks like line noise. It will take more Java to do a given task, but the structure forces you to write better code than Perl. For a good coder, it may be irrelevant, but how many large corporations are populated exclusively with good coders?
The reality is that there's still a need for physical media here. On-line distribution is improving, but getting high quality video over the Internet is still not quite there yet. Furthermore, getting a disc in a box and putting it into a player is simple and familiar to most people.
Having said that, the drive for Blu-ray isn't going to ever be like it was for DVD. I recentl advised some folks doing an HD upgrade to skip getting a blu-ray player because they are too pricey still and they wouldn't get enough out of the difference. If something is made for HD from the get go, it does look nicer on blu-ray, but it's a marginal difference in most cases. The HD version of Blade Runner is absolutely gorgeous, but if I'd never seen it, the original is still a great film.
My expectation is that this will probably be the last generation of dedicated video formats. It's up to playing high definition content and there's no new higher definition standard on the way (nor can I see any reason to go there). So blu-ray will probably be it. It will likely always have a market because people like to collect movies, etc, but it will eventually just become like DVD is today where it's dirt cheap and common.
This sounds a lot like that episode of the Simpsons where Bart unleashes some lizards that spread all over and end up killing off the pigeons which annoyed the town:
Skinner: Well, I was wrong; the lizards are a godsend.
Lisa: But isn't that a bit short-sighted? What happens when we're overrun by lizards?
Skinner: No problem. We simply release wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the lizards.
Lisa: But aren't the snakes even worse?
Skinner: Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat.
Lisa: But then we're stuck with gorillas!
Skinner: No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.
The reality of it is that as we run low on various elements, the price will go up due to factors of supply and demand. This will help drive efforts to find alternatives, reduce the amount needed, and where feasible, recover/recycle those elements. We will never actually run out, but it may simply become too expensive to build TV's out of. Then we'll have to find another way to do it. If there's enough need and the price is worth it, we might end up prospecting asteroids to get the minerals we need.
As for peak oil, we don't know if we've hit it yet because there's historically been an incentive for many oil producers to keep their reserve numbers a secret. We don't know if they've artificially inflated or deflated their numbers for a variety of reasons. Being at peak oil does not mean we aren't going to discover more oil. What it means is that in the future, the oil we discover will be harder to get to, harder to produce, and will not sufficiently replace all the easy to drill oil we have had in the past. It will become impossible to increase oil production and we'll see a decline that will lead to drastic price increases, a switch to alternatives, and overall a decline in demand for it.
Indeed. Apple, just like Dell, or any other company is charging "what the market will bear". If they can get away with charging twice as much for a component, then they will. Dell would do the same thing if they could.
I seem to recall that the sun is only available during the daytime. The one major flaw with solar power is that you need a lot of that power when the sun isn't available. This is especially true in more extreme northern and southern climates.
So you definitely need some means to switch the power, transferring from areas that have sunlight at any given moment to those that do not. Having said that, there's no reason not to start down this road. It will take us decades to build out all this infrastructure and the technology for harnessing, storing, and transmitting power will improve along the way. I don't see any substantially better options coming down the pike.
As a consumer, I'd love to have a limitless supply of music any time I want it. But this model seems to guarantee the destruction of what little power remains in the hands of artists. Today, a music label makes money from finding talent, marketing them, getting their music published, etc. Yes, they rip off said talent, and yes, they often find one hit wonder pop crap. But, having said that, it at least provides a model where artists get paid in proportion to the how much music they sell and, theoretically, how popular they are.
The trouble I see with a model like this is that the incentive for music labels would suddenly become a volume business. Basically just fill up the jukebox with as much crap as possible. In fact, realistically, would they have to do much of anything in terms of artist development and promotion? Apple sells a pod, then the music label gets a cut, and some smidgen of that cut ends up in the pockets of some artists. Wouldn't the label benefit from having a lot of small artists they pay nothing to?
Seems like, at the end of the day it empowers the large labels, damages the independent labels, and reduces, yet again, the money that goes into a musician's pocket.
When I heard about the SDK and having Java available for it I was thrilled. I'm a java developer, so I was thinking maybe I'd get an iPhone and play a bit. But with all these restrictions and blocking Java from the platform, I'm rapidly losing my interest. Apple's little deal with AT&T is going to hurt them in the long run I suspect. I don't own an iPhone yet for precisely the problem that changing carriers is a huge pain I prefer to avoid.
:)
Apple's been drinking a bit too much of their own koolaid. I recognize that controlling the platform allows them to provide some guarantees of the user experience. But when they go beyond user experience to manipulating this control for purely economic gain, they will eventually be diminishing the user experience. When you say to a user that they can't have a specific app because it would cost Apple money, you're well and truly on the slippery slope.
Honestly what I wish some cell company would do is offer a data phone that's mostly focussed on texting and web browsing, which would be open and permit the use of VOIP clients. This won't happen because carriers have too much to gain from the lock in and overcharging they currently exhibit on their minute plans. Because of how spectrum is licensed, it guarantees a limited number of players who all have the same interests. So it won't happen, but I can dream can't I?
On point #2, I assume you are a statistically significant sample? :) I have had driver issues. Friends of mine have had driver issues. It happens and it's the nature of the beast when you've got numerous vendors making numerous devices for systems.
On point #3, of course there are bugs on console games, but the point is that because it's a constrained hardware environment, the QA process is WAY simpler. If I told you to test a game for XBOX, what would you do? Get an XBOX and test it. If I told you to test a game for a PC, your first question is what kind of PC? You've got countless variations of processors, sound cards, graphics cards and other bits that can change the results. So it's not a matter of the inherent code quality but of the far far simpler QA process involved.
On point #4, yes PC hardware will always be bleeding edge, but that's as much the plus as the minus. It results in a fixation by developers on pushing the envelope in terms of graphics, sound, etc, and results in less emphasis on game play, story, etc. This also tends to factor into #3. If you're dealing with new specs all the time you're always hitting a moving target. If you've got a console that's a stable platform for 6 years, you have a known quantity to work with. Is my PC faster than my PS3? Sure. Is the quality of games available for it superior? Depends on how you measure quality.
I think things are different now because of three factors:
1) Consoles are now networkable
2) HDTV is making the video quality of consoles far more appealing and arguably superior to the PC gaming experience
3) Leveraging that networking, consoles are getting better at using social networks in games (XBox live, etc)
So with this generation we see the same costs and hassles in a PC gaming system, but it is a bit worse now. You see a much larger gap between low end and high end gaming systems. So in order to keep up with the latest, you have to spend a lot more than you once did. I mean $500 for a video card is pretty routine these days when a few years ago, you'd not be spending that much unless you worked for a graphics firm. Now that card may be wonderful, but the problem is that studios end up designing games for such systems and those sub $100 video cards will no longer cut it.
I won't deny that the controls for FPS and RTS games are better on a PC and it's why I continue to do PC gaming. But truth be told I can't see myself dropping another $1000-2000 on a souped up PC in the next couple of years to keep up with the technology. I just got a PS3 a few months ago after I bought an HDTV and I'm pretty thrilled with it. Collectively that cost would be more than a PC, granted, but that TV will last me 10 years if not more, and the console will last me 5. I suppose if you never watch TV or movies it's not as good a deal, but I do.
Basically I come at this from the perspective of a long time PC gamer and console doubter and after picking up a console I can't see myself dumping the money into another gaming PC. I think I overall find the PC gaming experience a little better still but not enough to bother with the hassles and costs.
What you're saying is 100% true, but this is the problem: what PC is sufficient for gaming?
I don't know anybody who doesn't own a PC. But I also know very few people with PC's that are capable of gaming. Don't get me wrong, there will still be some market out there and the independent home brew developers will definitely continue. There will be plenty of room for people who want to play more casual games, but the market for PC games akin to what we see on consoles today will continue to dwindle.
1) Here's the thing, if I buy a PC to play DVD's, browse the Internet, etc, I can get something for $400-600 that does the job adequately. However, that system will not play games. If I want to play games I'm looking at a $1000-1500 box at a minimum. That premium is entirely about playing games and that extra horsepower goes almost entirely unused when playing a movie, etc. Besides, if you are playing games you'll need to upgrade at least once every 3 years where as consoles have about a 5-6 year life cycle. So it's even worse.
2) Okay, well lucky you. I have. I know many friends that have. I know several gamers who will reinstall their operating from scratch routinely to keep kruft to a minimum and to keep the systems running smoothly. I've often had a game get installed, have glitches, require patches and driver updates, etc. On the other hand, every console game I've ever bought has worked out of the box.
3) Console games are generally patched more rapidly and effectively than PC games because the hardware platform is consistent thus making glitches consistent. Much easier to QA and to track down issues when they happen instead of having a bunch of obscure bugs that pop up on random hardware configurations.
4) What I'm saying is that when the PS2 came out, my PC was substantially faster than the PS2. When the PS3 came out, the overall performance was probably a little better in my PC, but not enough that I'd really notice with most games. That by and large, the hardware that's available for console gaming is no longer a limiting factor on the games. Heck, the wii demonstrates that you can make a compelling gaming environment on pretty low end hardware.
Linux as a subset of PC gaming suffers from many of the same problems, hence my pointing it out. It has a host of issues all it's own, but the complexities of PC harware are pointing a giant bazooka at the foot of PC gaming.
The other factor there is that if you've got a Linux box and you're a gamer, I guarantee you dual boot to play most of your games. Given that, why would a developer go out of their way to make a game for linux when you can just dual boot to play. I mean I've picked up games for Linux before when they were available, but a game not being Linux compatible never stopped me from getting it.
Good point. However, the major difference is that, given a consistent hardware platform in consoles, the bugs that are found tend to effect everybody and thus there's more of a fire under developers to fix problems quickly or get them right on release. Basically within a couple weeks of launch a game will be broadly playable for most people with maybe a few glitches here and there.
With PC games there's nearly infinite hardware combinations which means that inevitably no matter how much QA you do, there will be bugs at release and so I think there's more of a tendency to assume that there will be bugs and that it's okay. Some people will find themselves completely unable to play the game, ever, even after several patches. A good friend of mine recently had to threaten Valve through the BBB in order to get a refund on a game that never worked on his system in spite of numerous patches. That's not a likely scenario on a console.
The simple truth is that gaming on PC's, regardless of the operating system is dying a slow death. I'm a long time fan of PC gaming, but when given that:
1) a gaming PC is substantially more expensive than a console
2) you frequently have driver and other compatibility problems
3) a number of PC games are launched in a rather buggy state
4) the overall performance level of consoles has improved a lot in the latest generation
There's just not a lot left that PC games can claim superiority on. Linux gaming is even more dead because it's a very small subset of PC gaming with a lot of complexities that make support very difficult. It costs more dollars per gamer to develop and support the platform, and on top of that, you've got an industry full of people that have a ton of DirectX experience which does no good on Linux (Wine aside).
I've built apps on Tomcat that had none of those problems. Tomcat, being free, ends up being the default of folks trying to do things on the cheap. Thus it has a certain gravitational pull to people who are throwing together hacky, poorly considered projects, in a hurry, on the cheap.