Do you really want to maximise the probability that they'll all have the same design or manufacturing defect and will all fail closely spaced in time? I'd go for different makes and models.
Generally speaking, the 360 has outsold the PS3 month by month.
In the year to September, the 360 took 18% of console sales and the PS3 24%. The 360 did indeed overtake the PS3 by a small margin again last month, though people holding out for the release of the 80 GB PS3 and the boost Gears of War 2 gave to 360 sales figures undoubtedly skewed things. For the calendar year, the PS3 is well on target to have outsold the 360 overall.
It tells you that gamers have a significant investment in their gaming system beyond the hardware. They own a number of games and peripherals and have a number of friends online. It says nothing specific about the quality of the 360 experience, but says a lot about the barriers to switching systems in general.
If you look at the download size, the actual Home download was only 77mb. Similarly the central hub download was only about 24mb... from an observer using it now, yes there was an absurd amount of waiting (in particular the starting apartment felt more like a cell than a living area when I realized I could not leave until the download completed). But from a technical standpoint I think they actually broke it out pretty well so that in normal use a person would hardly notice a delay, even for a new area - under normal conditions the download of 24-77mb of content would be a matter of seconds.
Even if the download is pretty quick, the load times are very noticeable. 10 seconds or more to walk through a door to a zone you've already downloaded. The WWW and HDD icons aren't active for most of that time, so it's not a server load issue and the modest download sizes mean it's not loading vast amounts of data. Home is just slow to load, even if the downloads are tolerably quick.
Having online matchmaking move to Home only, seems very unlikely to me but not as much outside the realm of possibility...
It would seem unlikely to me too, but I'm worried about the fact that the closest equivalent to XBL's party system on PSN are the Clubs in Home (it costs money to set up a Club *sigh*). A Club does more than just allow you to handle group gaming, but that's currently the only PSN-wide way to have a group, though there are some game-specific group mechanisms. You don't need a Club to play with your friends, but if you wanted an evening where you play a few different games it's currently the most efficient mechanism (or will be once the Home patches are out for more games).
Where are the dedicated servers for Call of Duty 4 & 5, GT5p, RSV2? Warhawk is the only game I've played on my PS3 which had dedicated servers.
I have a PS3, but I play on a friends' 360 regularly. Live is so good I've got a Live account even though I don't have a 360 myself. It's just better than PSN - it's faster (updates, menus, messaging - Live itself, I don't mean the games), people actually have mics and use them, you can form groups (parties), you can see what your friends are playing, the reputation system means you can prefer and avoid players and the player matching will take that into account, the list goes on and on. PSN is lacking so many features Live has had for years it's pretty embarrassing. It does cost money, but Microsoft use that money to ensure the Live servers are fast (PSN takes an age to show your own trophies, Live is virtually instant) and they can shove money at game publishers and get early releases and exclusive content.
I fucking hate Microsoft and think the 360 isn't particularly impressive - DVDs and no mandatory hard drive sucks, everybody with a 360 I know has had the RROD at least once and worn out many controllers - but even I can see Live is just plain better than PSN. The only people who don't think so are fanboys and people who've never used it. A few games with dedicated server doesn't make up for the deficiencies, even when you take the price of Live into account.
That rambling Penny Arcade fanboy drivel is hilarious in its desperation to try trash Home. Home does generate an insane amount of terror in the fanboys of other platforms where they start lashing out incoherently.
I'm not a fanboy of any other system, the only games consoles I've ever owned have been PlayStations. Home sucks. Well, it doesn't suck if you like the idea of something like Second Life, but I don't. As a social tool for people who like decorating a virtual space and interacting with random people online rather than at their local pub it's probably fine. Some people like Habbo Hotel and Second Life and would love the idea of walking a character through a 3D environment to view a game trailer not-quite-full-screen (even if you select it). I have nothing against them if that's what they want to do, they'll probably love Home.
My worry is that Sony will make Home the preferred way to create groups, have multi-user chat, set up private games, use the Store and so on. For just doing things like that Home is absolutely terrible. It takes an order of magnitude more time to load a space in Home than it does to show a simple menu in the XMB or page in the Store. It takes an order of magnitude more time to walk an avatar across a room than it does to select something from a menu. Menus are fast and efficient, 3D environments are not. You can skip some of the walking about in Home using the menus, but you still have to wait for spaces to load.
Since Seagate bought Maxtor and Hitachi bought IBM's storage division, those three are all the major manufacturers of desktop hard drives.
Head wear is the limitation with stopping and starting typical desktop hard drives. Desktop drives typically park their heads on a laser-etched landing zone at the centre of the platters. Spinning up the drive causes wear as the heads drag on the surface until the air cushion is developed - the laser etching roughens the surface, allowing the heads to slide more easily. Most laptop drives park their heads on a ramp, so the platters can spin up with no head contact and can take an order of magnitude more cycles (specified as load/unload).
That "bullshit" improves your mood and relations with your co-workers, both of which can enhance productivity. Waiting for a computer to boot is irritating; being pissed off at your tools really doesn't help with productivity.
Seconded. I have a G3 iBook, a G5 iMac, and an Intel MacBook that suspend and restore within 1 second (with automatic hibernate if the battery dies while suspended).
It may suspend in a second, but it's still writing that hibernate information for the next minute or two. I recently did a stint at a data recovery company. The number of drives with scratched platters we had in from MacBooks which had been closed then casually chucked in a bag was remarkable. That used to be fine, that's how I treated my old iBook, but now they hibernate as well you have to be gentle with them for a minute or two after they've been closed.
Well, yes, if you don't mind having a house filled with smoke and/or co2. Boilers have exhaust vents for a reason, and they have to pump the hot gasses they produce somewhere, which is almost invariably straight outside. Home boilers are far from near perfect efficiency.
The hot gasses dump most of their heat into cold water, which is the purpose of the boiler. Better ones also have a heat exchanger (or more than one), so the residual heat in the exhaust is used to heat the incoming air. Condensing boilers cool the exhaust to the point where combustion products (water vapour) condense, allowing efficiencies approaching 90%. Not perfect, but not very far off.
I'm not mixing them. I'm comparing the typical use of each. Natural gas in the overwhelming majority of cases is a central heating unit, and most non-central installations are gas fireplaces, again the overwhelming majority of which are installed in living rooms. Electric radiator units, on the other hand, are almost all distributed systems, though central electric furnaces also exist.
"Typical" rather depends on where you are. Typical central heating in the UK is with a central gas boiler (furnace), with radiators in each room. Each radiator can be controlled individually, either with a simple valve or with a per-radiator thermostat. Unless you live in a relatively new flat (apartment), forced air is atypical here.
Unit errors aside, is the point valid, or does a PC really consume more power starting up than it would running overnight?
No, but I've never head anybody claim that it does. I've heard lots of people claim it's cheaper to leave computers on overnight, but because the computers (supposedly) last longer, rather than using less power.
You're kidding, but this is actually a good idea. I pay for broadband and then only use it to surf the web and check email for an hour or two per day. It doesn't make sense for me and all of my neighbors to do that when we could share a single connection.
Virtually every shared system in the history of the known universe has been over-subscribed. They sell more of it than they have, safe in the knowledge that everybody doesn't use all they can at once. This happens with water, electricity, gas, phone lines, bandwidth - everything. You already are sharing your connection. What you want is happening right now and you're already reaping the benefits with much, much lower prices than you would pay for a zero contention service. Please stop thinking your 10 Mbps broadband package means you are actually paying for 10 Mbps of connectivity 24/7. You aren't paying for that any more than the taxes you pay to drive your car mean the government is building roads just for you.
[...] rejecting principled support of individual rights [...]
That's an authoritarian/liberal issue and you were talking about "today's right". Though you did put "right" in quotes, so perhaps you were just talking about the USA's Republican Party.
At least sheep follow a leader with better cognitive ability then they (usually a dog).
I guess you don't get "One Man And His Dog" where you are. Actually, we don't get it here any more. It was a sheep herding competition on TV. Anyway, my point is that the sheep don't follow the dog, they do the exact opposite - they run away from the dog.
Go and search on YouTube for "sheepdog trials" to see some in action.
Today's right? Depends where you are. American's left is further right than most countries right. And please stop confusing the authoritarian-libertarian axis with the left-right axis, they are orthogonal.
That "effort to buy votes" as you so cynically call it could also be referred to as "attempting to address the desires of the nation", which is the whole fucking point of a democracy.
Nah, "for index in range(1, 100):" makes a bloated memory list of 1,2,3,4,5,6,7...99,100 whereas xrange(1,100) is memory-efficient iterator that just returns an incremented value upon each loop.
A valid concern for large lists and essential knowledge for Python programmers, but for the the 64 element list you need to represent a chess board, who really gives a shit? Just write the clean, future-proof code and let the machine do the hard work. You're trading programmer convenience for machine time by using Python anyway.
Re:This is going to backfire on MS and Rock*
on
GTA IV DLC Announced
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· Score: 1
Wearing the right clothes and driving the right car are part of the game in GTA IV too.
The plastic pedals on my Logitech Driving Force GT can be stamped on. I stamp on them regularly (though not every time, I modulate when required). The pedals on my previous wheel, a Logitech GT Force, were also plastic. They got stamped on for seven years. You can make stamp-on-able things out of plastic, you just need enough of the right sort of plastic in the right places. Metal isn't the answer, you can make weak shit out of metal too, the answer is proper design.
Almost by definition, it can't be much more expensive than fighting the lawsuit out, and it would make people feel a lot better about buying from the Rock Band franchise in the future.
I do not think that phrase means what you think it means.
They're the European Fords, which are on the whole good cars. American Fords are apparently shit, perhaps because Americans seem to tolerate cars with crappy suspension, god-awful plastics and shoddy build quality just as long as they're fucking huge and have an enormous engine with lots and lots of cylinders.
I want a good, cheap, stable, processor that's going to be able to handle every game made in the next few years (the same thing every home user wants).
Every home user? Erm, no. For most home users performance rendering web pages, using Office and displaying their photos is much more important than playing the latest 3D FPS.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you really want to maximise the probability that they'll all have the same design or manufacturing defect and will all fail closely spaced in time? I'd go for different makes and models.
Generally speaking, the 360 has outsold the PS3 month by month.
In the year to September, the 360 took 18% of console sales and the PS3 24%. The 360 did indeed overtake the PS3 by a small margin again last month, though people holding out for the release of the 80 GB PS3 and the boost Gears of War 2 gave to 360 sales figures undoubtedly skewed things. For the calendar year, the PS3 is well on target to have outsold the 360 overall.
It tells you that gamers have a significant investment in their gaming system beyond the hardware. They own a number of games and peripherals and have a number of friends online. It says nothing specific about the quality of the 360 experience, but says a lot about the barriers to switching systems in general.
If you look at the download size, the actual Home download was only 77mb. Similarly the central hub download was only about 24mb... from an observer using it now, yes there was an absurd amount of waiting (in particular the starting apartment felt more like a cell than a living area when I realized I could not leave until the download completed). But from a technical standpoint I think they actually broke it out pretty well so that in normal use a person would hardly notice a delay, even for a new area - under normal conditions the download of 24-77mb of content would be a matter of seconds.
Even if the download is pretty quick, the load times are very noticeable. 10 seconds or more to walk through a door to a zone you've already downloaded. The WWW and HDD icons aren't active for most of that time, so it's not a server load issue and the modest download sizes mean it's not loading vast amounts of data. Home is just slow to load, even if the downloads are tolerably quick.
Having online matchmaking move to Home only, seems very unlikely to me but not as much outside the realm of possibility...
It would seem unlikely to me too, but I'm worried about the fact that the closest equivalent to XBL's party system on PSN are the Clubs in Home (it costs money to set up a Club *sigh*). A Club does more than just allow you to handle group gaming, but that's currently the only PSN-wide way to have a group, though there are some game-specific group mechanisms. You don't need a Club to play with your friends, but if you wanted an evening where you play a few different games it's currently the most efficient mechanism (or will be once the Home patches are out for more games).
Where are the dedicated servers for Call of Duty 4 & 5, GT5p, RSV2? Warhawk is the only game I've played on my PS3 which had dedicated servers.
I have a PS3, but I play on a friends' 360 regularly. Live is so good I've got a Live account even though I don't have a 360 myself. It's just better than PSN - it's faster (updates, menus, messaging - Live itself, I don't mean the games), people actually have mics and use them, you can form groups (parties), you can see what your friends are playing, the reputation system means you can prefer and avoid players and the player matching will take that into account, the list goes on and on. PSN is lacking so many features Live has had for years it's pretty embarrassing. It does cost money, but Microsoft use that money to ensure the Live servers are fast (PSN takes an age to show your own trophies, Live is virtually instant) and they can shove money at game publishers and get early releases and exclusive content.
I fucking hate Microsoft and think the 360 isn't particularly impressive - DVDs and no mandatory hard drive sucks, everybody with a 360 I know has had the RROD at least once and worn out many controllers - but even I can see Live is just plain better than PSN. The only people who don't think so are fanboys and people who've never used it. A few games with dedicated server doesn't make up for the deficiencies, even when you take the price of Live into account.
I'm not a fanboy of any other system, the only games consoles I've ever owned have been PlayStations. Home sucks. Well, it doesn't suck if you like the idea of something like Second Life, but I don't. As a social tool for people who like decorating a virtual space and interacting with random people online rather than at their local pub it's probably fine. Some people like Habbo Hotel and Second Life and would love the idea of walking a character through a 3D environment to view a game trailer not-quite-full-screen (even if you select it). I have nothing against them if that's what they want to do, they'll probably love Home.
My worry is that Sony will make Home the preferred way to create groups, have multi-user chat, set up private games, use the Store and so on. For just doing things like that Home is absolutely terrible. It takes an order of magnitude more time to load a space in Home than it does to show a simple menu in the XMB or page in the Store. It takes an order of magnitude more time to walk an avatar across a room than it does to select something from a menu. Menus are fast and efficient, 3D environments are not. You can skip some of the walking about in Home using the menus, but you still have to wait for spaces to load.
Too bad all major HD manufactures claim 10,000 power cycles, and many power saving settings will turn off a HD w/o doing anything else.
That number sounded wrong, so I checked some typical 3.5" desktop hard drives. These are the first three I looked at.
Seagate 7200.10 : 50 000 start/stop cycles.
WD Caviar Blue : 50 000 start/stop cycles.
Hitachi Deskstar T7K500 : 50 000 start/stop cycles.
Since Seagate bought Maxtor and Hitachi bought IBM's storage division, those three are all the major manufacturers of desktop hard drives.
Head wear is the limitation with stopping and starting typical desktop hard drives. Desktop drives typically park their heads on a laser-etched landing zone at the centre of the platters. Spinning up the drive causes wear as the heads drag on the surface until the air cushion is developed - the laser etching roughens the surface, allowing the heads to slide more easily. Most laptop drives park their heads on a ramp, so the platters can spin up with no head contact and can take an order of magnitude more cycles (specified as load/unload).
That "bullshit" improves your mood and relations with your co-workers, both of which can enhance productivity. Waiting for a computer to boot is irritating; being pissed off at your tools really doesn't help with productivity.
Seconded. I have a G3 iBook, a G5 iMac, and an Intel MacBook that suspend and restore within 1 second (with automatic hibernate if the battery dies while suspended).
It may suspend in a second, but it's still writing that hibernate information for the next minute or two. I recently did a stint at a data recovery company. The number of drives with scratched platters we had in from MacBooks which had been closed then casually chucked in a bag was remarkable. That used to be fine, that's how I treated my old iBook, but now they hibernate as well you have to be gentle with them for a minute or two after they've been closed.
Well, yes, if you don't mind having a house filled with smoke and/or co2. Boilers have exhaust vents for a reason, and they have to pump the hot gasses they produce somewhere, which is almost invariably straight outside. Home boilers are far from near perfect efficiency.
The hot gasses dump most of their heat into cold water, which is the purpose of the boiler. Better ones also have a heat exchanger (or more than one), so the residual heat in the exhaust is used to heat the incoming air. Condensing boilers cool the exhaust to the point where combustion products (water vapour) condense, allowing efficiencies approaching 90%. Not perfect, but not very far off.
"Typical" rather depends on where you are. Typical central heating in the UK is with a central gas boiler (furnace), with radiators in each room. Each radiator can be controlled individually, either with a simple valve or with a per-radiator thermostat. Unless you live in a relatively new flat (apartment), forced air is atypical here.
Unit errors aside, is the point valid, or does a PC really consume more power starting up than it would running overnight?
No, but I've never head anybody claim that it does. I've heard lots of people claim it's cheaper to leave computers on overnight, but because the computers (supposedly) last longer, rather than using less power.
mcmonkey, meet context. Context, this is mcmonkey.
You're kidding, but this is actually a good idea. I pay for broadband and then only use it to surf the web and check email for an hour or two per day. It doesn't make sense for me and all of my neighbors to do that when we could share a single connection.
Virtually every shared system in the history of the known universe has been over-subscribed. They sell more of it than they have, safe in the knowledge that everybody doesn't use all they can at once. This happens with water, electricity, gas, phone lines, bandwidth - everything. You already are sharing your connection. What you want is happening right now and you're already reaping the benefits with much, much lower prices than you would pay for a zero contention service. Please stop thinking your 10 Mbps broadband package means you are actually paying for 10 Mbps of connectivity 24/7. You aren't paying for that any more than the taxes you pay to drive your car mean the government is building roads just for you.
[...] rejecting principled support of individual rights [...]
That's an authoritarian/liberal issue and you were talking about "today's right". Though you did put "right" in quotes, so perhaps you were just talking about the USA's Republican Party.
At least sheep follow a leader with better cognitive ability then they (usually a dog).
I guess you don't get "One Man And His Dog" where you are. Actually, we don't get it here any more. It was a sheep herding competition on TV. Anyway, my point is that the sheep don't follow the dog, they do the exact opposite - they run away from the dog.
Go and search on YouTube for "sheepdog trials" to see some in action.
Today's right? Depends where you are. American's left is further right than most countries right. And please stop confusing the authoritarian-libertarian axis with the left-right axis, they are orthogonal.
That "effort to buy votes" as you so cynically call it could also be referred to as "attempting to address the desires of the nation", which is the whole fucking point of a democracy.
Nah, "for index in range(1, 100):" makes a bloated memory list of 1,2,3,4,5,6,7...99,100 whereas xrange(1,100) is memory-efficient iterator that just returns an incremented value upon each loop.
A valid concern for large lists and essential knowledge for Python programmers, but for the the 64 element list you need to represent a chess board, who really gives a shit? Just write the clean, future-proof code and let the machine do the hard work. You're trading programmer convenience for machine time by using Python anyway.
Wearing the right clothes and driving the right car are part of the game in GTA IV too.
The plastic pedals on my Logitech Driving Force GT can be stamped on. I stamp on them regularly (though not every time, I modulate when required). The pedals on my previous wheel, a Logitech GT Force, were also plastic. They got stamped on for seven years. You can make stamp-on-able things out of plastic, you just need enough of the right sort of plastic in the right places. Metal isn't the answer, you can make weak shit out of metal too, the answer is proper design.
Almost by definition, it can't be much more expensive than fighting the lawsuit out, and it would make people feel a lot better about buying from the Rock Band franchise in the future.
I do not think that phrase means what you think it means.
They're the European Fords, which are on the whole good cars. American Fords are apparently shit, perhaps because Americans seem to tolerate cars with crappy suspension, god-awful plastics and shoddy build quality just as long as they're fucking huge and have an enormous engine with lots and lots of cylinders.
I want a good, cheap, stable, processor that's going to be able to handle every game made in the next few years (the same thing every home user wants).
Every home user? Erm, no. For most home users performance rendering web pages, using Office and displaying their photos is much more important than playing the latest 3D FPS.
Before reading your comment I had no suspicion that you did.