when I say "9 times out of 10 i get better discussion" I'm talking about topics that would warrant discussion.
I think that a lot of my friends just "skim" facebook for interesting stuff, but dig in to google+ because there's less there, so you have more time to peruse each post.
It's like the tabloids at the supermarket. you're standing in line there, maybe you see that lindsey lohan has done something stupid or one of the kardashians is pregnant or tom cruise has been proven to be a robot or something. maybe you'll even pick up one and look at it for a few seconds... but there's so much garbage there that you just skim it and ignore most of it.
if instead of 15 tabloids you had, say, 2 newspapers, you'd probably spend a lot more time looking at a given article in the time available to you.
Honestly, I've found that very few of my facebook friends have much to say really. everything is in 1 or 2 sentence bites at best. occasionally somebody's post may have a good comments section where you can have a lively debate, but not often. I'm guessing that facebook limits you to about 4 or 5 sentences in your inital post to discourage people from posting 30-page spam updates or something like that, but considering that they auto-shorten anything beyond about 3 lines anyway, what's the point? I very much enjoy that Google+ will let my inital post be whatever the hell I want it to be.
It was never said. It just makes the most sense, so fans latch on to it.
For instance, it is the only way that neo having powers "outside" the matrix (or what the characters in the movie understand to be the matrix) makes any sense whatsoever.
sure it could, it'd just be flickery as all hell. remember mega man?
by "complexity", I meant complexity of design, plot, and pacing. not graphics or collision physics.
something like, say, the legend of zelda, super mario bros 3, or final fantasy. they have a lot more substance than just about anything you can get on a portable today, but they're nowhere near a mass effect, a starcraft II, etc.
My favorite android games are Battleheart, Robodefense, and Game Dev Story. I've had fun with others, including the ubiquitous Angry Birds series. Also a bunch of the little cheapie games are worth throwing on there. I had fun with jewels, simon, etc. My wife plays words with friends and stair dismount a lot. I must admit that stair dismount is viciously good fun. Zombieville is a pretty good little action game, but suffers a bit from bad controls.
For ebooks, The Nook android app for it is damn near as nice as the full nook firmware. The title/menu navigation is a bit slower (maybe it's just cause I have like 150 books in the same directory), but the actual reading experience may be even better. I've tried aldiko, the other popular reader software, and I like the nook for android better.
I'm a big fan of the Winamp app for android. I tried poweramp, which seems to get all the press... and it was nice, but I'm not paying for it when winamp is 95% as good and also free. I got the album art grabber app to help download album covers. I installed rockbox's android port on my droid, but didn't like it enough to try it on my nook. it has a great back end, but it's still unstable and the UI leaves a lot to be desired after the polish seen in winamp and poweramp.
I have both Astro file manager and ES File explorer on there. ES is probably the better file manager, but I use astro out of habit. Astro will also install.apk files for you, no need to download a dedicated apk installer. Maybe ES will do the same, I haven't tried yet.
of course you've got apps like yahoo and aim messenger, facebook, google+, etc. For some reason I have problems installing the latter 2 on my nook. the market pages for them are missing a download button. i see everything except a button to get them. maybe 1 out of 10 apps I want have that problem on my nook (no problems at all on my droid). I don't know if it's a configuration problem, a cyanogen problem, or what... but there are other sources (.apk files mostly) for apps you can't get off the market.
also, dolphin browser is fairly superior experience to the built-in webkit-based browser that android comes with. the only thing dolphin is missing is an easy way to change tabs without scrolling all the way to the top, but perhaps I just haven't dug deep enough into the configuration yet to find it. I haven't tried the firefox android port yet.
If the market can support all 3 "levels" of game, great, but I see a lot of talk about how "the market has to change, ios/android games are a wake up call to the industry" etc. with the game of convincing blizzard, bioware, infinity ward, 2k studios, turn 10, etc that they should be moving in that direction, and abandon the high concept, high polish, big budget, big development team projects.
I think that is entirely the wrong lesson to learn from this. I think the right lesson to learn is that there may be markets that are untapped, and to try and satisfy those markets on their own terms, not try and hybrid yourself into that market by force.
If there is a 3rd level, midway between angry birds and civ 5, where we get games with the complexity of, say, NES games... I'll be interested to see what we get at that level. But I don't think our best development teams need to aim for that goal blindly, which is what a lot of people seem to suggest is prudent.
It was an officially licensed nintendo product. It was all over the pages of Nintendo's own magazine, Nintendo Power, with all sort of articles and commentary devoted to it. Nintendo created a "gaming series" designation specifically for the power glove games. it was featured prominently in the nintendo-produced movie "the wizard".
I think it's safe to say that even if it was manufactured by Mattel, it still had PLENTY of official Nintendo marketing dollars behind it, pushing it as a significant peripheral to enhance their brand.
I think that the ability to watch DVD/netflix/blu-ray/networked avis & m4v files on your big screen has gone a long way towards promoting the popularity of consoles like the ps3 and the 360. internet connectivity allowing you to download demos, extra content, and classic games, online matching services matching you with online opponents... these are ALL notes that the consoles cribbed directly from the PC gaming arena.
I think it's fair to say that the only reason that consoles do so well compared to PCs is because they slowly are becoming PCs.
I mentioned this in another thread, but I don't think we should even view IOS/Android games as competing against triple-A blockbuster titles. Mainly because I don't WANT them to try and migrate to a middle ground. I don't want the $15 or $20 game that's halfway between game dev story and Mass effect. Give me the two extremes. Do you want to have captain america at the multiplex and then come home to watch a hilarious amateur-but-well-done youtube series like epic mealtime or my drunk kitchen.. or do you want some semi-professional middle ground full of low-budget artistic crap nobody wants to see? Sure sometimes you get Juno or Clerks, but most of the time you get navel-gazing pretentious tripe that only Roger Ebert can sit through.
I'll take the former. keep cheap mobile gaming and expensive console/pc blockbusters separate.
If you want to kill flash games though, I'm ok with that.
On the contrary, I bet Nintendo thought they had bottled lightning with the new take on the virtual boy.
Look at it this way. Nintendo had tried motion control before (who had a power glove? I did! looked awesome, worked like complete shit), and it was a dismal failure. They tried it again with newer technology and hit the unexpected console home run of the decade with the Wii. they had console shortages like 3 holiday seasons in a row. You'll never convince me that they didn't purposely orchestrate the lack of supply to drive up demand, but you have to admit that the constant demand over that long a time period was unprecedented. I'm sure Nintendo was just trying to do the same thing again with the 3DS.
I love my PSP. It is fantastic, one of the best electronics items I ever purchased... and I never use it anywhere but the shitter anymore. it's just too bulky to carry around when I've already got two cell phones (personal and business) on me as well as my rooted nook (which is now more than half a portable game console itself with cyanogen 7 on it).
I can't see why I'd buy the new one PSP. not without some killer app that I can't get for android (or windows). maybe i'd buy it to pack for trips to see family or something like that, but for those trips I can usually get away with bringing my laptop. Between laptop and nook, I've got most entertainment options covered, or at least enough to last through half a week at the in-laws.
As for control scheme, you're right... as long as you're gaming the way we've been gaming for the past 30 years. I never even tried putting an emulator on my phone or tablet, because the controls would be absurd. I don't even like emulation gaming on my computer, having never found a controller I like (I did eventually get a usb adapter for ps2 controllers. that was ok, when it worked.) I tend to prefer my emulation either on my psp or my ps3. But if you're playing a game designed from the outset for touchscreen, it's really not so bad. Take a look at Battleheart. That would actually be a much worse game on D-pad/joypad and buttons. you could do ok with it on mouse, but it shines with touchpad. you could never play robodefense fast enough with dpad/mouse unless you had korean starcraft reflexes. There's nothing wrong with touchscreen interface as long as the game lends itself to the interface (aside from devices that have generally bad/unresponsive touchscreens of course. Can't blame the games for that though).
As recently as 6 months ago, I'd have said that portable gaming isn't going anywhere. but now with smartphones getting larger screens and cpu/gpus at least as powerful as the computers I had a few yeas ago, and their big brother tablets getting so much software written for them... man it has got to be a scary time to produce a handheld console.
A friend of my sister-in-law had rectal cancer. I met him a few times. Pastor (not that I hold that against him) and semi-professional wrestler (yeah, really. interesting combination). He was a pretty cool guy. Nerd-at-heart, had a bathroom devoted to batman and everything. He held on nearly a year, through multiple treatments. it was a shame.
My Aunt had pancreatic cancer. She was diagnosed the day after thanksgiving. she was dead the week after christmas. Pancreatic cancer is NASTY. If there's a worse form of cancer, I haven't encountered it.
I actually bake most of my food in the oven... but you need microwaves because stoufers macaroni and cheese just tastes better when nuked, I can't explain why. Also because you need the radiation to kill most of the more virulent ingredients in hot pockets before you injest them.
Why do you need a protocol that allows people to send data over an unreliable network?
to play world of warcraft, and download porn. sheesh, when was the last time that you saw two strangers (both good looking) having live anal sex in front of you? I can't attest for your life, but it doesn't happen in mine very often, so I need the internet.
Why do we need all of this?
because the alternative is cave painting and I'm pretty sure that we exhausted the entertainment value of that back around the time we bothered to invent geometry so we could build pyramids to screw with the minds of our future descendents.
There are few very good games on my droid / rooted nook that I quite enjoy. Robodefense. battleheart. game dev story. they're cheap, they're addictive, and they're fun.
They're not even close to the same thing as starcraft, mass effect, world of warcraft, modern warfare, etc.
They're almost different genres, and I think that's how we should see them. They're as different from one-another as holywood blockbuster movies are from semi-professional youtube videos. Why can't I go to the theater to watch Captain America and then come home and watch epic mealtime, and enjoy both on their own merits? why try and make one into the other?
Keep em separate. enjoy them both on their own merits. don't try and merge them.
Until replicators exist, and you can instantly generate anything you want, there will continue to be some sort of money to exchange for goods and services.
without money, you can not obtain these goods and services. specifically, you will not be able to procure food, shelter, clothing, or the other requirements of life.
Without these items, you will die. money is required to live.
Note: there are places where you can obtain food and clothing without you yourself exchanging money for them, and similarly there are places where you can live on a temporary basis without paying. However, somebody paid for that food that you ate. It was still purchased. Money was still required. The building you're in still cost money in materials and labor to construct. Money was still required. Somebody purchased the clothes that were donated to you.
The one exception is if you are yourself growing the food you eat, building your own house, and weaving your own clothes. If so, congratulations you are Amish. I dig your hat.
Compared to my PSP or my DS, I hate gaming on my phone. The controls blow, the screen is miniscule, the hardware is mediocre (new games are choppy on my 1.5 year old phone, never had that problem on the psp or ds because they're static targets), the battery life is appalling, and the signal-to-noise ratio of bad games vs good games is so low that it makes even the wii library look like a hit-factory. Finding a good game is hard, even with review sites ("Four Point Scale" issues galore). You'll go through a dozen tower defense games before you find robodefense. you'll go through a dozen rpgs before you find battleheart. etc. etc.
But I must admit that it's pretty damn convenient, and that seems to be trumping all. I game on it more often than the other two put together (and then some) just because it's already on my hip and I don't want to carry around more than I have to.
A new portable gaming console is going to have to be something very, very special to compete against that. The 3ds isn't it. the 3ds is a gimmick, nothing more.
I certainly agree. My house sports no less than 6 computers between myself and my wife, without even counting limited use computers like smartphones, tablets, consoles, etc. That includes at least one computer whose primary function is netflix and facebook (because it sits next to my wife's work computer).
I figured that for people that already have a grip with spending money (note, i'm not referring to all linux users by any stretch of the imagination, just the ones above bitching about the cost of windows), recommending an entire second system isn't too fesible.
I second the ps3. Technically it can still run linux! yes yes, I know, lame joke.
In all seriousness though, couldn't you VMware/virtualbox windows for that purpose? In fact, don't you already? I did... until I switched back to windows when win7 came out and was actually worth a damn as an OS.
and me with no mod points. I have been criticizing the college system for two decades as mostly good advertising, along with hiring managers with the "well I went through it so dammit they should too" mentality.
for most professions (not all, but most), 90% of your classes in college mean jack shit towards your profession -unless- your profession is teaching, in which case you will then teach students the same crap you yourself didn't need to learn.
I'm really wondering what the internet and the information age is going to do to traditional university education. Today, you can learn anything you want from your own desk. You don't need to pay $20,000 a year in tuition. you don't need to pay half as much again in board and books. You don't have to go by the contrived, busy-work centric, once-size-fits-all lesson plans of professors who really just want their pet research projects funded and could give less of a crap about the classes they're forced to teach. want to learn something? Pull up a half a dozen web pages, pdfs, instructional videos, ebooks, design deconstructions and analyses, etc.
In almost every field, once you get into the real world you find that experience trumps the piece of paper. When it comes down to "this guys has a piece of paper saying he's spent the last 4-6 years learning theory" vs "this guy has a piece of paper saying he's spent the last 4-6 years doing this job", the latter wins.
Slashdot Mirror
I do.
when I say "9 times out of 10 i get better discussion" I'm talking about topics that would warrant discussion.
I think that a lot of my friends just "skim" facebook for interesting stuff, but dig in to google+ because there's less there, so you have more time to peruse each post.
It's like the tabloids at the supermarket. you're standing in line there, maybe you see that lindsey lohan has done something stupid or one of the kardashians is pregnant or tom cruise has been proven to be a robot or something. maybe you'll even pick up one and look at it for a few seconds... but there's so much garbage there that you just skim it and ignore most of it.
if instead of 15 tabloids you had, say, 2 newspapers, you'd probably spend a lot more time looking at a given article in the time available to you.
Honestly, I've found that very few of my facebook friends have much to say really. everything is in 1 or 2 sentence bites at best. occasionally somebody's post may have a good comments section where you can have a lively debate, but not often. I'm guessing that facebook limits you to about 4 or 5 sentences in your inital post to discourage people from posting 30-page spam updates or something like that, but considering that they auto-shorten anything beyond about 3 lines anyway, what's the point? I very much enjoy that Google+ will let my inital post be whatever the hell I want it to be.
I must admit that I post most of my geek stuff on Google+ and most of my generic "hey look at this link!" stuff on facebook.
9 times out of 10 I get better discussion off my google+ list, even though my google+ list is almost exclusively a subset of my facebook list.
I tried following Wil and then noticed that 3/4 of my feed was Wil Wheaton. That seemed like too much.
maybe time to re-add him now that I have a few more people there.
It was never said. It just makes the most sense, so fans latch on to it.
For instance, it is the only way that neo having powers "outside" the matrix (or what the characters in the movie understand to be the matrix) makes any sense whatsoever.
Armageddon is a fun film.
Dumb? yes.
Over the top? sure.
Full of un-necessary "Micheal Bay Explosions"? quite so.
But it's fun, nonetheless. And fun is entertaining.
I know, right!
Next, he'll be asking for real time mpeg encoding.
sure it could, it'd just be flickery as all hell. remember mega man?
by "complexity", I meant complexity of design, plot, and pacing. not graphics or collision physics.
something like, say, the legend of zelda, super mario bros 3, or final fantasy. they have a lot more substance than just about anything you can get on a portable today, but they're nowhere near a mass effect, a starcraft II, etc.
My favorite android games are Battleheart, Robodefense, and Game Dev Story. I've had fun with others, including the ubiquitous Angry Birds series. Also a bunch of the little cheapie games are worth throwing on there. I had fun with jewels, simon, etc. My wife plays words with friends and stair dismount a lot. I must admit that stair dismount is viciously good fun. Zombieville is a pretty good little action game, but suffers a bit from bad controls.
For ebooks, The Nook android app for it is damn near as nice as the full nook firmware. The title/menu navigation is a bit slower (maybe it's just cause I have like 150 books in the same directory), but the actual reading experience may be even better. I've tried aldiko, the other popular reader software, and I like the nook for android better.
I'm a big fan of the Winamp app for android. I tried poweramp, which seems to get all the press... and it was nice, but I'm not paying for it when winamp is 95% as good and also free. I got the album art grabber app to help download album covers. I installed rockbox's android port on my droid, but didn't like it enough to try it on my nook. it has a great back end, but it's still unstable and the UI leaves a lot to be desired after the polish seen in winamp and poweramp.
I have both Astro file manager and ES File explorer on there. ES is probably the better file manager, but I use astro out of habit. Astro will also install .apk files for you, no need to download a dedicated apk installer. Maybe ES will do the same, I haven't tried yet.
of course you've got apps like yahoo and aim messenger, facebook, google+, etc. For some reason I have problems installing the latter 2 on my nook. the market pages for them are missing a download button. i see everything except a button to get them. maybe 1 out of 10 apps I want have that problem on my nook (no problems at all on my droid). I don't know if it's a configuration problem, a cyanogen problem, or what... but there are other sources (.apk files mostly) for apps you can't get off the market.
also, dolphin browser is fairly superior experience to the built-in webkit-based browser that android comes with. the only thing dolphin is missing is an easy way to change tabs without scrolling all the way to the top, but perhaps I just haven't dug deep enough into the configuration yet to find it. I haven't tried the firefox android port yet.
If the market can support all 3 "levels" of game, great, but I see a lot of talk about how "the market has to change, ios/android games are a wake up call to the industry" etc. with the game of convincing blizzard, bioware, infinity ward, 2k studios, turn 10, etc that they should be moving in that direction, and abandon the high concept, high polish, big budget, big development team projects.
I think that is entirely the wrong lesson to learn from this. I think the right lesson to learn is that there may be markets that are untapped, and to try and satisfy those markets on their own terms, not try and hybrid yourself into that market by force.
If there is a 3rd level, midway between angry birds and civ 5, where we get games with the complexity of, say, NES games... I'll be interested to see what we get at that level. But I don't think our best development teams need to aim for that goal blindly, which is what a lot of people seem to suggest is prudent.
It was an officially licensed nintendo product. It was all over the pages of Nintendo's own magazine, Nintendo Power, with all sort of articles and commentary devoted to it. Nintendo created a "gaming series" designation specifically for the power glove games. it was featured prominently in the nintendo-produced movie "the wizard".
I think it's safe to say that even if it was manufactured by Mattel, it still had PLENTY of official Nintendo marketing dollars behind it, pushing it as a significant peripheral to enhance their brand.
I think that the ability to watch DVD/netflix/blu-ray/networked avis & m4v files on your big screen has gone a long way towards promoting the popularity of consoles like the ps3 and the 360. internet connectivity allowing you to download demos, extra content, and classic games, online matching services matching you with online opponents... these are ALL notes that the consoles cribbed directly from the PC gaming arena.
I think it's fair to say that the only reason that consoles do so well compared to PCs is because they slowly are becoming PCs.
I mentioned this in another thread, but I don't think we should even view IOS/Android games as competing against triple-A blockbuster titles. Mainly because I don't WANT them to try and migrate to a middle ground. I don't want the $15 or $20 game that's halfway between game dev story and Mass effect. Give me the two extremes. Do you want to have captain america at the multiplex and then come home to watch a hilarious amateur-but-well-done youtube series like epic mealtime or my drunk kitchen.. or do you want some semi-professional middle ground full of low-budget artistic crap nobody wants to see? Sure sometimes you get Juno or Clerks, but most of the time you get navel-gazing pretentious tripe that only Roger Ebert can sit through.
I'll take the former. keep cheap mobile gaming and expensive console/pc blockbusters separate.
If you want to kill flash games though, I'm ok with that.
On the contrary, I bet Nintendo thought they had bottled lightning with the new take on the virtual boy.
Look at it this way. Nintendo had tried motion control before (who had a power glove? I did! looked awesome, worked like complete shit), and it was a dismal failure. They tried it again with newer technology and hit the unexpected console home run of the decade with the Wii. they had console shortages like 3 holiday seasons in a row. You'll never convince me that they didn't purposely orchestrate the lack of supply to drive up demand, but you have to admit that the constant demand over that long a time period was unprecedented. I'm sure Nintendo was just trying to do the same thing again with the 3DS.
I love my PSP. It is fantastic, one of the best electronics items I ever purchased... and I never use it anywhere but the shitter anymore. it's just too bulky to carry around when I've already got two cell phones (personal and business) on me as well as my rooted nook (which is now more than half a portable game console itself with cyanogen 7 on it).
I can't see why I'd buy the new one PSP. not without some killer app that I can't get for android (or windows). maybe i'd buy it to pack for trips to see family or something like that, but for those trips I can usually get away with bringing my laptop. Between laptop and nook, I've got most entertainment options covered, or at least enough to last through half a week at the in-laws.
As for control scheme, you're right... as long as you're gaming the way we've been gaming for the past 30 years. I never even tried putting an emulator on my phone or tablet, because the controls would be absurd. I don't even like emulation gaming on my computer, having never found a controller I like (I did eventually get a usb adapter for ps2 controllers. that was ok, when it worked.) I tend to prefer my emulation either on my psp or my ps3. But if you're playing a game designed from the outset for touchscreen, it's really not so bad. Take a look at Battleheart. That would actually be a much worse game on D-pad/joypad and buttons. you could do ok with it on mouse, but it shines with touchpad. you could never play robodefense fast enough with dpad/mouse unless you had korean starcraft reflexes. There's nothing wrong with touchscreen interface as long as the game lends itself to the interface (aside from devices that have generally bad/unresponsive touchscreens of course. Can't blame the games for that though).
As recently as 6 months ago, I'd have said that portable gaming isn't going anywhere. but now with smartphones getting larger screens and cpu/gpus at least as powerful as the computers I had a few yeas ago, and their big brother tablets getting so much software written for them... man it has got to be a scary time to produce a handheld console.
A friend of my sister-in-law had rectal cancer. I met him a few times. Pastor (not that I hold that against him) and semi-professional wrestler (yeah, really. interesting combination). He was a pretty cool guy. Nerd-at-heart, had a bathroom devoted to batman and everything. He held on nearly a year, through multiple treatments. it was a shame.
My Aunt had pancreatic cancer. She was diagnosed the day after thanksgiving. she was dead the week after christmas. Pancreatic cancer is NASTY. If there's a worse form of cancer, I haven't encountered it.
Why do you need microwaves?
I actually bake most of my food in the oven... but you need microwaves because stoufers macaroni and cheese just tastes better when nuked, I can't explain why. Also because you need the radiation to kill most of the more virulent ingredients in hot pockets before you injest them.
Why do you need a protocol that allows people to send data over an unreliable network?
to play world of warcraft, and download porn. sheesh, when was the last time that you saw two strangers (both good looking) having live anal sex in front of you? I can't attest for your life, but it doesn't happen in mine very often, so I need the internet.
Why do we need all of this?
because the alternative is cave painting and I'm pretty sure that we exhausted the entertainment value of that back around the time we bothered to invent geometry so we could build pyramids to screw with the minds of our future descendents.
There are few very good games on my droid / rooted nook that I quite enjoy. Robodefense. battleheart. game dev story. they're cheap, they're addictive, and they're fun.
They're not even close to the same thing as starcraft, mass effect, world of warcraft, modern warfare, etc.
They're almost different genres, and I think that's how we should see them. They're as different from one-another as holywood blockbuster movies are from semi-professional youtube videos. Why can't I go to the theater to watch Captain America and then come home and watch epic mealtime, and enjoy both on their own merits? why try and make one into the other?
Keep em separate. enjoy them both on their own merits. don't try and merge them.
Best answer so far.
wow. half-again and you're in orbit.
where do you need to go that fast?
"When the bomb absolutely has to be anywhere in the world in 30 minutes or less, DARPA is there!"
Site slashdotted in under 5 minutes.
Until replicators exist, and you can instantly generate anything you want, there will continue to be some sort of money to exchange for goods and services.
without money, you can not obtain these goods and services. specifically, you will not be able to procure food, shelter, clothing, or the other requirements of life.
Without these items, you will die. money is required to live.
Note: there are places where you can obtain food and clothing without you yourself exchanging money for them, and similarly there are places where you can live on a temporary basis without paying. However, somebody paid for that food that you ate. It was still purchased. Money was still required. The building you're in still cost money in materials and labor to construct. Money was still required. Somebody purchased the clothes that were donated to you.
The one exception is if you are yourself growing the food you eat, building your own house, and weaving your own clothes. If so, congratulations you are Amish. I dig your hat.
Compared to my PSP or my DS, I hate gaming on my phone. The controls blow, the screen is miniscule, the hardware is mediocre (new games are choppy on my 1.5 year old phone, never had that problem on the psp or ds because they're static targets), the battery life is appalling, and the signal-to-noise ratio of bad games vs good games is so low that it makes even the wii library look like a hit-factory. Finding a good game is hard, even with review sites ("Four Point Scale" issues galore). You'll go through a dozen tower defense games before you find robodefense. you'll go through a dozen rpgs before you find battleheart. etc. etc.
But I must admit that it's pretty damn convenient, and that seems to be trumping all. I game on it more often than the other two put together (and then some) just because it's already on my hip and I don't want to carry around more than I have to.
A new portable gaming console is going to have to be something very, very special to compete against that. The 3ds isn't it. the 3ds is a gimmick, nothing more.
I certainly agree. My house sports no less than 6 computers between myself and my wife, without even counting limited use computers like smartphones, tablets, consoles, etc. That includes at least one computer whose primary function is netflix and facebook (because it sits next to my wife's work computer).
I figured that for people that already have a grip with spending money (note, i'm not referring to all linux users by any stretch of the imagination, just the ones above bitching about the cost of windows), recommending an entire second system isn't too fesible.
I second the ps3. Technically it can still run linux! yes yes, I know, lame joke.
In all seriousness though, couldn't you VMware/virtualbox windows for that purpose?
In fact, don't you already? I did... until I switched back to windows when win7 came out and was actually worth a damn as an OS.
and me with no mod points. I have been criticizing the college system for two decades as mostly good advertising, along with hiring managers with the "well I went through it so dammit they should too" mentality.
for most professions (not all, but most), 90% of your classes in college mean jack shit towards your profession -unless- your profession is teaching, in which case you will then teach students the same crap you yourself didn't need to learn.
I'm really wondering what the internet and the information age is going to do to traditional university education. Today, you can learn anything you want from your own desk. You don't need to pay $20,000 a year in tuition. you don't need to pay half as much again in board and books. You don't have to go by the contrived, busy-work centric, once-size-fits-all lesson plans of professors who really just want their pet research projects funded and could give less of a crap about the classes they're forced to teach. want to learn something? Pull up a half a dozen web pages, pdfs, instructional videos, ebooks, design deconstructions and analyses, etc.
In almost every field, once you get into the real world you find that experience trumps the piece of paper. When it comes down to "this guys has a piece of paper saying he's spent the last 4-6 years learning theory" vs "this guy has a piece of paper saying he's spent the last 4-6 years doing this job", the latter wins.
At least until you want to get into management...