Classic arcade-style games such as those available on Virtual Console or Xbox Live Arcade
Or various PSN titles. Or various stuff downloadable on the Wii. Or a full complement of pirated MAME roms.
First-person shooters such as Halo
These are plentiful on the PC; they're just less likely to support gamepads or split-screen cooperative play. However, see Serious Sam and Left 4 Dead.
Yes, this is my point exactly.
PC-based FPS shooters, in particular, really want a keyboard and mouse.
Weapon racing like Mario Kart
Sega and Sonic All Stars Racing, Blur
Modern racing games don't work with a keyboard and mouse, because a keyboard is too binary and a mouse is not self-centering. Steering wheels and joysticks/thumbsticks self-center and are proportional ("analog") in their input, like cars do, and while these can be made to work with a PC, they are the default scenario on a console.
Also, Blur sucks; it is not enjoyable to me.
I recently bought an Xbox just to play Forza on my BFT without driver issues, framerate issues, or gameplay issues. I would not derive the same pleasure from Forza were it available on a PC, because I'd be investing too much time making it operate smoothly and consistently (which I find to be very important attributes in driving simulation games, much moreso than graphics quality).
One-on-one karate in a flat ring
Street Fighter IV
I'm not gathering my friends around my 24" desktop monitor in my cramped office, when we can so much more comfortably combat eachother from the couch in front of the 52" screen in the living room, and I'm not putting together a living room PC rig just for one game, and I'm not lugging my desktop between rooms or stringing destructive ground-loop-ridden HDMI cables around the house so I can play a game on my PC on my BFT in my living room.
I really think you're arguing against the wrong person. I think both console games and PC games have their place, and I myself spend plenty of money supporting both of them. I recently re-purchased Dungeon Keeper 2 from GoG, for instance, and have been having a good time with that at my desk (and no, I don't want to play that from my couch: it's the wrong sort of game for that).
All things in moderation. There is no right answer to any one question.
Classic arcade-style games such as those available on Virtual Console or Xbox Live Arcade
Or various PSN titles. Or various stuff downloadable on the Wii. Or a full complement of pirated MAME roms.
First-person shooters such as Halo
These are plentiful on the PC; they're just less likely to support gamepads or split-screen cooperative play. However, see Serious Sam and Left 4 Dead.
Yes, this is my point exactly.
PC-based FPS shooters, in particular, really want a keyboard and mouse.
Weapon racing like Mario Kart
Sega and Sonic All Stars Racing, Blur
One-on-one karate in a flat ring
Street Fighter IV
I'm not gathering my friends around my 24" desktop monitor in my cramped office, when we can so much more comfortably combat eachother from the couch in front of the 52" screen in the living room, and I'm not putting together a living room PC rig just for one game, and I'm not lugging my desktop between rooms or stringing destructive ground-loop-ridden HDMI cables around the house so I can play a game on my PC on my BFT in my living room.
I really think you're arguing against the wrong person. I think both console games and PC games have their place, and I myself spend plenty of money supporting both of them. I recently re-purchased Dungeon Keeper 2 from GoG, for instance, and have been having a good time with that at my desk (and no, I don't want to play that from my couch: it's the wrong sort of game for that).
All things in moderation. There is no right answer to any one question.
yeah, i'm sure repositioning icons every 30 minutes or so will bring systems to their knees
Ever hear the story about the straw that broke the camel's back?
As I see it, with the way things stand and the direction in which they seem to be going, we generally need leaner (simpler, perhaps more clever) solutions to problems, not heavier ones.
Even if it's just a tiny bit of additional overhead. Operating systems are slow enough, these days, almost as if nobody even tries to optimize anything anymore with a grander view of things.
FFS: Why bother repositioning icons at all, if nobody is ever going to see the results of this in the first place? In the very best case, work was wasted. In the very worst case, it will be annoying to watch it happen and cause other issues.
All this work (millions of processor cycles, however instantaneous this might theoretically seem, silently occurring when all I'm trying to do is either load software or return to my desktop), just to let a game play full-screen at a different display resolution. Fuck that.
The fact that the position of desktop icons is even a factor in this discussion of full-screen gaming means that the entire philosophy is broken.
So if an indie developer has a working implementation of a video game that works wonderfully with a wireless gamepad
This does not appear to exist.
in what way would you expect him to modify the design to take full advantage of "a keyboard with lots of buttons and an accurate pointer"?
Again, I'm not a game developer. My imagination is limited in this field (we can't all be good at everything, can we?). I have no technical solutions to offer for this problem.
But if an indie game developer had a working implementation of a video game that worked wonderfully with a wireless gamepad, and wanted to also allow people to not feel disadvantaged with a keyboard/mouse combo, it does seem obvious to me that they'd somehow have to make the play experience equal between the two.
Particularly if cross-space multiplayer gaming (couch players and desk players in the same game) is to be considered a worthwhile objective, things would need to have exactly the same playability.
And even for single-player games, having a game where one style of control is greatly superior to the other will have able users clamoring to use the better of the two along with lesser enjoyment from those users who do not have the superior controls available to them.
But I see no method of doing so without intentionally either crippling or nerfing one interface or the other. Artificial limits like that tend to be very annoying and off-putting.
You ask a trick question that based on an impossible scenario. Obviously, the games that I enjoy are already available for play in the particular space in which I already enjoy playing them. If they weren't so-available, then I wouldn't have any way to know if I found the game in question enjoyable or not.
That said, much of my preference for playing a game on a game console while sitting on my couch vs. sitting in my comfortable high-back office chair at my desk is the controller that best lends itself to a particular style of game.
For top-town, puzzle, and first-person games requiring any level of rapid and accurate pointing, a keyboard and mouse (at my desk) is strongly preferable to me.
For just about everything else (including first-person games which are less twitch-based), I prefer to sit on my couch with both hands on a modern wireless controller.
At this point one might logically suggest one of the following solutions to my incongruous behavior:
- Use the keyboard and mouse on the couch - Use the wireless controller on the PC
The problem with both of these is that they are simply terrible.
On the couch, there's no good way to use a traditional mouse. And typing with a keyboard on my lap results in lousy hand/arm posture that I find to be very fatiguing. I can build, buy, or use some manner of portable desk or TV tray, but that just gives me more things to fuck with when I get up for more beer, and good usage of it does not lend itself toward comfortable couch-sitting. Fortunately there are good games designed with a handheld interface in mind, or I wouldn't do any gaming at all in my living room.
Meanwhile PC (inclusive of most "indie") games are, almost as a rule, designed to expect a keyboard with lots of buttons and an accurate pointer: Joystick-esque controls tend to be terrible on this platform at this particular point in time. I've used my PS3 controllers with my PC, and while it wasn't too horrible to get the hardware to perform flawlessly, I found myself feeling disadvantaged by doing so.
So again (again, again), I find no compelling reason to install a $599-six-years-ago PC in my living room, even though doing so would currently cost me nothing but a bit of time and some junkpile hardare. I've been there, I've done that, and I don't fucking like it.
This can change, and a tiny altruistic part of me hopes that it does, but planting a PC in my livingroom that I despise using in that environment obviously cannot do a single thing to influence the back-end politics that drive my living room gaming experience.
But does it play games "from all manner of sources"?
No, not in stock form, but I don't care.
For example, if a smaller company has developed a game for the PC, how should it go about approaching licensed PS3 game publishers so that it can have the game ported and sold on PSN?
Not my problem. I'm not a game developer, but just a dude who wants to sit on his couch with a handheld wireless controller and play a game designed for that environment with minimal fuckery on my part. I don't care about the politics at the back end. I just want to trade money for games that I enjoy in the particular space that I play them.
To be clear: I've had respectable PC rigs connected properly to the BFT and cool stereo in my living room. I've sat on my couch and tried (and failed) to enjoy playing the same games that I find fun at my desk. I find simply that doing so is sufficiently cumbersome that it's not worth doing, and that I'm much happier with the simplicity of the PS3.
Back to your original point: If I only had a six-year-old $599 PC, I don't think I'd be doing much of the sort of gaming that I enjoy at all, whether now or six years ago, and whether it were at my desk or in my living room.
Games tend to require fancier hardware as time marches on because PC games themselves tend to keep getting fancier. Other software, not so much. This is not a new concept.
Meanwhile, what are you going on about? I've already got other machines. I just don't care to do mouse/keyboard stuff in my living room.
And the PS3 a superlative fine job of movie and audio playback, with a wide variety of media from all manner of sources, legitimate or not. *shrug*
Though I admire your use of paragraphical form, the context of your prose combined with your profound lack of capitalization causes me to believe that you are nothing but a lazy stoner.
I have therefore decided to ignore everything that you wrote. Thanks for trying!
I don't need that bandwidth all of the time. Infrequently, in fact.
But when I do need it, I don't want to be bothered with stringing Ethernet cables around. (Yes, I've got proper RJ45 receptacles scattered throughout the house, and yes, it's a bother to connect to them. And some of my devices don't have Ethernet ports at all, despite their capacious storage.)
Fortunately, the inherent noise of the SSID broadcast of an otherwise-idle network is minimal. It scarcely affects my neighbors at all when the WLAN is otherwise sitting there doing nothing, channel bonding or not.
Though I understand what you say very well indeed, I fail to see the merit to anything that you describe.
As a USian, I'd like to remind folks that some of this tech once leaked over to this side of the pond.
I remember, 20 or so years ago, being at a BBS-friend's house and being totally enthralled with his then-fancy Zenith TV: Just tune to one of Ted Turner's many cable channels, push the appropriate button, and news, weather, cheesy games, and random became individually accessible...without modem or a phone line.
I always thought it was very cool tech, and I'm still not sure if it is matched in any meaningful way today.
Unfortunately, it died a weird sort of catch-22 sort of death: There weren't enough TV sets that supported it at the time that it existed to drive interest, and by the time that sets did commonly support it the services were already gone.
If I bought a PC six years ago (2006) for five hundred ninety-nine US dollars and plugged it into my TV, would I still be happy to play current (2012) games on it? I don't think so, at least not without fuckery: PCs are a constantly moving target, and game developers tend to favor faster/newer hardware over slower/older hardware.
With a six-year-old PS3, it's easy: Buy the game and play it. The hardware all works the same, and so do the games. What works on the dev workstation also works in my living room.
And a six-year-old PS3 is still a highly capable piece of AV gear which does a fine job of Blu-Ray playback with decoding support for all of the whiz-bang audio formats so they can be delivered as discrete PCM over HDMI for a modern (or not-so-modern) home theater system. A six-year-old $599 PC? Good luck with that.
I don't know the interface for Google Glass because I haven't used it myself, but here is my prediction: Whatever the fuck it is that might be useful about it, is not yet useful because operating systems and applications (as we know them) are shit for that sort of interface.
Currently, as it stands, as far as I can tell: It's all shit for VR headsets. It always has been.
Case in point: Why would I want the dock at the bottom of my view? It will cover up the thing that I'm about to step on! (This is the sort of thing that makes me wear contacts instead of glasses, even though glasses can correct more of what is wrong with my vision for less cost: I want to see what it is that I'm about to kick and/or trip over without moving my head.)
This all being the case: Perhaps Windows 8 is perfectly lousy for a direct visual interface. And...so what? Such an interface has been just-around-the-corner for a long, long time. There's no compelling reason to cater to it at this particular moment.
Naah, it's not so bad. As long as you get to choose your own adventure.
I spent a few years being IT gunther for a medium company that sells cell phones. Every few weeks, Cell Phone Dept. Lady would bring me a random newfangled device and want to get her email and such on it.
Do you: Make it work (if so, go to 3) or make it not work (go to 7)?
3: Really not so bad. Spend a bit of time understanding the new widget and its quirks, and then just make it work, and then spend a whole lot more time explaining to her how to make it work...... Go to 8.
7: LART the bitch, and then tell her it is impossible. LART again if she complains. It always felt good, and always resulted in more opportunities for additional LARTing. Repeat as useful, but then go back to 3 or go to 10.
8: Convert paycheck into rent and beer. Go to 9.
9: Rejoice in that no matter what else is going on, at least you're not being evicted and you have beer.
Wait. How smart is your gas meter to know how to round-up on a daily basis?
More importantly, why is it doing daily billing to begin with?
I have Columbia Gas. They (a couple of years ago) replaced my meter with something "smart" that they can read with a drive-by vehicle, but it still has spinny-dials that are mechanically driven by the flow of natural gas to my house. If the spinny-dials don't agree with what I'm being charged, there are instructions on the bill itself for reporting the discrepancy and being charged more properly.
IIRC, this is done by the therm, but it's averaged over a month (or however often readings actually happen). Seems fair to me.
(Disclaimer: I'm not in California. We've got plenty of fuel here, so perhaps the easiest explanation between your reported observations and my own is that Columbia Gas gives less of a shit.)
CSMA is what is/was used on old 10base2 and other non-switched Ethernet networks. It, and its associated timing vagrancies, are very likely at this point sufficiently well-understood that nothing you or I could immediately think of at this point would improve the situation at all.
For instance, IIRC, with 10base2: Wait for a clear space on the wire. Transmit a packet. If it collides, back of for a period of time (IIRC based on MAC address) and try again. Chances are good (by design) that things work fine the next time around. Rinse and repeat.
Efficiency obviously goes to hell in a hurry, but at least it works eventually.
What folks are complaining about isn't apparently related to that: The chief apparent complaint is that so-and-so used to be able to read Slashdot (or whatever) in the bathroom (or wherever), and now (given the passage of time and no other apparent changes) there's no perceptible signal there at all (as reported by the Slashdot-reading wireless widget). And, further, that replacing the router/AP seems to rectify this.
At least, that's my interpretation of the technically-vague complaint. I don't see how CSMA fits in with this scenario at all.
(It should be noted at this point that there are some wireless systems on ISM bands with hard time-based multiplexing. Motorola Canopy, for instance, can be cooperatively designed to cohabitate well with unrelated neighboring systems, but the spectral efficiency (in terms of actual data throughput) tends to be approximately (though highly predictable!) shit.)
Except for the competing theory of failing capacitors allowing for less-stable operation due to power supply wonkiness.
I've seen my share of bad caps doing all manner of strange things in modern ("digital") electronics. Things can turn very weird a long time before they outright fail.
Let's face it, unless you have better than a 150 Mb Internet connection, channel bonding will not make a lot of difference.
It may come as a surprise to you to hear this, but: Not everyone uses WiFi only for Internet access. The Internet is a network of networks, and my own network sees quite a lot of local traffic from time to time.
For the same reason I have gigabit switches in my house, I also want fast WiFi for my less-wired devices.
If the difference between channel bonding or not means waiting 10 minutes for a task to complete or 20, then I'm going to be using it and keep those 10 optional minutes of my life.
And, but, so? BMW doesn't make FWD cars under their own name, and I'm not familiar enough with Mercedes to know (except they seem to be primarily RWD), but: What, exactly, is your point other than to be uselessly snarky?
FWIW, the car in question was a 1995 Chevy Beretta in its most barren trim/accessory package. $13,995 new off the dealer lot, or somesuch, and certainly not any manner of high-end kraut-wagen: Friggin' 14" wheels with plastic covers and rear drum brakes.
Weight distribution on a Beretta is an ugly joke. Accordingly, one wouldn't expect gravity to be able to pull the rear end downhill in any sensible circumstance, but it did.
(As an aside: I currently drive a E36 BMW, but I'm certainly not rich -- I don't even qualify for "middle class" by a long shot. If you think only rich kids can drive a BMW, you haven't seriously looked at owning one yourself.)
(As another aside: Perhaps I should just killfile you as a troll. Why not?)
Slashdot Mirror
Or various PSN titles. Or various stuff downloadable on the Wii. Or a full complement of pirated MAME roms.
Yes, this is my point exactly.
PC-based FPS shooters, in particular, really want a keyboard and mouse.
Modern racing games don't work with a keyboard and mouse, because a keyboard is too binary and a mouse is not self-centering. Steering wheels and joysticks/thumbsticks self-center and are proportional ("analog") in their input, like cars do, and while these can be made to work with a PC, they are the default scenario on a console.
Also, Blur sucks; it is not enjoyable to me.
I recently bought an Xbox just to play Forza on my BFT without driver issues, framerate issues, or gameplay issues. I would not derive the same pleasure from Forza were it available on a PC, because I'd be investing too much time making it operate smoothly and consistently (which I find to be very important attributes in driving simulation games, much moreso than graphics quality).
I'm not gathering my friends around my 24" desktop monitor in my cramped office, when we can so much more comfortably combat eachother from the couch in front of the 52" screen in the living room, and I'm not putting together a living room PC rig just for one game, and I'm not lugging my desktop between rooms or stringing destructive ground-loop-ridden HDMI cables around the house so I can play a game on my PC on my BFT in my living room.
I really think you're arguing against the wrong person. I think both console games and PC games have their place, and I myself spend plenty of money supporting both of them. I recently re-purchased Dungeon Keeper 2 from GoG, for instance, and have been having a good time with that at my desk (and no, I don't want to play that from my couch: it's the wrong sort of game for that).
All things in moderation. There is no right answer to any one question.
Or various PSN titles. Or various stuff downloadable on the Wii. Or a full complement of pirated MAME roms.
Yes, this is my point exactly.
PC-based FPS shooters, in particular, really want a keyboard and mouse.
One-on-one karate in a flat ring
Street Fighter IV
I'm not gathering my friends around my 24" desktop monitor in my cramped office, when we can so much more comfortably combat eachother from the couch in front of the 52" screen in the living room, and I'm not putting together a living room PC rig just for one game, and I'm not lugging my desktop between rooms or stringing destructive ground-loop-ridden HDMI cables around the house so I can play a game on my PC on my BFT in my living room.
I really think you're arguing against the wrong person. I think both console games and PC games have their place, and I myself spend plenty of money supporting both of them. I recently re-purchased Dungeon Keeper 2 from GoG, for instance, and have been having a good time with that at my desk (and no, I don't want to play that from my couch: it's the wrong sort of game for that).
All things in moderation. There is no right answer to any one question.
[[citation needed]]
But LCDs scale for free, while CPUs and GPUs do not.
Why reinvent the wheel?
Ever hear the story about the straw that broke the camel's back?
As I see it, with the way things stand and the direction in which they seem to be going, we generally need leaner (simpler, perhaps more clever) solutions to problems, not heavier ones.
Even if it's just a tiny bit of additional overhead. Operating systems are slow enough, these days, almost as if nobody even tries to optimize anything anymore with a grander view of things.
FFS: Why bother repositioning icons at all, if nobody is ever going to see the results of this in the first place? In the very best case, work was wasted. In the very worst case, it will be annoying to watch it happen and cause other issues.
All this work (millions of processor cycles, however instantaneous this might theoretically seem, silently occurring when all I'm trying to do is either load software or return to my desktop), just to let a game play full-screen at a different display resolution. Fuck that.
The fact that the position of desktop icons is even a factor in this discussion of full-screen gaming means that the entire philosophy is broken.
This does not appear to exist.
Again, I'm not a game developer. My imagination is limited in this field (we can't all be good at everything, can we?). I have no technical solutions to offer for this problem.
But if an indie game developer had a working implementation of a video game that worked wonderfully with a wireless gamepad, and wanted to also allow people to not feel disadvantaged with a keyboard/mouse combo, it does seem obvious to me that they'd somehow have to make the play experience equal between the two.
Particularly if cross-space multiplayer gaming (couch players and desk players in the same game) is to be considered a worthwhile objective, things would need to have exactly the same playability.
And even for single-player games, having a game where one style of control is greatly superior to the other will have able users clamoring to use the better of the two along with lesser enjoyment from those users who do not have the superior controls available to them.
But I see no method of doing so without intentionally either crippling or nerfing one interface or the other. Artificial limits like that tend to be very annoying and off-putting.
And make KDE even slower? Meh.
You ask a trick question that based on an impossible scenario. Obviously, the games that I enjoy are already available for play in the particular space in which I already enjoy playing them. If they weren't so-available, then I wouldn't have any way to know if I found the game in question enjoyable or not.
That said, much of my preference for playing a game on a game console while sitting on my couch vs. sitting in my comfortable high-back office chair at my desk is the controller that best lends itself to a particular style of game.
For top-town, puzzle, and first-person games requiring any level of rapid and accurate pointing, a keyboard and mouse (at my desk) is strongly preferable to me.
For just about everything else (including first-person games which are less twitch-based), I prefer to sit on my couch with both hands on a modern wireless controller.
At this point one might logically suggest one of the following solutions to my incongruous behavior:
- Use the keyboard and mouse on the couch
- Use the wireless controller on the PC
The problem with both of these is that they are simply terrible.
On the couch, there's no good way to use a traditional mouse. And typing with a keyboard on my lap results in lousy hand/arm posture that I find to be very fatiguing. I can build, buy, or use some manner of portable desk or TV tray, but that just gives me more things to fuck with when I get up for more beer, and good usage of it does not lend itself toward comfortable couch-sitting. Fortunately there are good games designed with a handheld interface in mind, or I wouldn't do any gaming at all in my living room.
Meanwhile PC (inclusive of most "indie") games are, almost as a rule, designed to expect a keyboard with lots of buttons and an accurate pointer: Joystick-esque controls tend to be terrible on this platform at this particular point in time. I've used my PS3 controllers with my PC, and while it wasn't too horrible to get the hardware to perform flawlessly, I found myself feeling disadvantaged by doing so.
So again (again, again), I find no compelling reason to install a $599-six-years-ago PC in my living room, even though doing so would currently cost me nothing but a bit of time and some junkpile hardare. I've been there, I've done that, and I don't fucking like it.
This can change, and a tiny altruistic part of me hopes that it does, but planting a PC in my livingroom that I despise using in that environment obviously cannot do a single thing to influence the back-end politics that drive my living room gaming experience.
Everything you say is true, but: At least one Anonymous Coward thought it was cool.
No, not in stock form, but I don't care.
Not my problem. I'm not a game developer, but just a dude who wants to sit on his couch with a handheld wireless controller and play a game designed for that environment with minimal fuckery on my part. I don't care about the politics at the back end. I just want to trade money for games that I enjoy in the particular space that I play them.
To be clear: I've had respectable PC rigs connected properly to the BFT and cool stereo in my living room. I've sat on my couch and tried (and failed) to enjoy playing the same games that I find fun at my desk. I find simply that doing so is sufficiently cumbersome that it's not worth doing, and that I'm much happier with the simplicity of the PS3.
Back to your original point: If I only had a six-year-old $599 PC, I don't think I'd be doing much of the sort of gaming that I enjoy at all, whether now or six years ago, and whether it were at my desk or in my living room.
What planet are you on?
Games tend to require fancier hardware as time marches on because PC games themselves tend to keep getting fancier. Other software, not so much. This is not a new concept.
Meanwhile, what are you going on about? I've already got other machines. I just don't care to do mouse/keyboard stuff in my living room.
And the PS3 a superlative fine job of movie and audio playback, with a wide variety of media from all manner of sources, legitimate or not. *shrug*
Though I admire your use of paragraphical form, the context of your prose combined with your profound lack of capitalization causes me to believe that you are nothing but a lazy stoner.
I have therefore decided to ignore everything that you wrote. Thanks for trying!
So. Your point is that kids are still just kids, even in these modern enlightened times.
Got it.
I don't need that bandwidth all of the time. Infrequently, in fact.
But when I do need it, I don't want to be bothered with stringing Ethernet cables around. (Yes, I've got proper RJ45 receptacles scattered throughout the house, and yes, it's a bother to connect to them. And some of my devices don't have Ethernet ports at all, despite their capacious storage.)
Fortunately, the inherent noise of the SSID broadcast of an otherwise-idle network is minimal. It scarcely affects my neighbors at all when the WLAN is otherwise sitting there doing nothing, channel bonding or not.
Though I understand what you say very well indeed, I fail to see the merit to anything that you describe.
As a USian, I'd like to remind folks that some of this tech once leaked over to this side of the pond.
I remember, 20 or so years ago, being at a BBS-friend's house and being totally enthralled with his then-fancy Zenith TV: Just tune to one of Ted Turner's many cable channels, push the appropriate button, and news, weather, cheesy games, and random became individually accessible...without modem or a phone line.
I always thought it was very cool tech, and I'm still not sure if it is matched in any meaningful way today.
Unfortunately, it died a weird sort of catch-22 sort of death: There weren't enough TV sets that supported it at the time that it existed to drive interest, and by the time that sets did commonly support it the services were already gone.
If I bought a PC six years ago (2006) for five hundred ninety-nine US dollars and plugged it into my TV, would I still be happy to play current (2012) games on it? I don't think so, at least not without fuckery: PCs are a constantly moving target, and game developers tend to favor faster/newer hardware over slower/older hardware.
With a six-year-old PS3, it's easy: Buy the game and play it. The hardware all works the same, and so do the games. What works on the dev workstation also works in my living room.
And a six-year-old PS3 is still a highly capable piece of AV gear which does a fine job of Blu-Ray playback with decoding support for all of the whiz-bang audio formats so they can be delivered as discrete PCM over HDMI for a modern (or not-so-modern) home theater system. A six-year-old $599 PC? Good luck with that.
Spoken as if the Sony Glasstron is something new.
I don't know the interface for Google Glass because I haven't used it myself, but here is my prediction: Whatever the fuck it is that might be useful about it, is not yet useful because operating systems and applications (as we know them) are shit for that sort of interface.
Currently, as it stands, as far as I can tell: It's all shit for VR headsets. It always has been.
Case in point: Why would I want the dock at the bottom of my view? It will cover up the thing that I'm about to step on! (This is the sort of thing that makes me wear contacts instead of glasses, even though glasses can correct more of what is wrong with my vision for less cost: I want to see what it is that I'm about to kick and/or trip over without moving my head.)
This all being the case: Perhaps Windows 8 is perfectly lousy for a direct visual interface. And...so what? Such an interface has been just-around-the-corner for a long, long time. There's no compelling reason to cater to it at this particular moment.
Naah, it's not so bad. As long as you get to choose your own adventure.
I spent a few years being IT gunther for a medium company that sells cell phones. Every few weeks, Cell Phone Dept. Lady would bring me a random newfangled device and want to get her email and such on it.
Do you: Make it work (if so, go to 3) or make it not work (go to 7)?
3: Really not so bad. Spend a bit of time understanding the new widget and its quirks, and then just make it work, and then spend a whole lot more time explaining to her how to make it work...... Go to 8.
7: LART the bitch, and then tell her it is impossible. LART again if she complains. It always felt good, and always resulted in more opportunities for additional LARTing. Repeat as useful, but then go back to 3 or go to 10.
8: Convert paycheck into rent and beer. Go to 9.
9: Rejoice in that no matter what else is going on, at least you're not being evicted and you have beer.
10: Find another employer.
Wait. How smart is your gas meter to know how to round-up on a daily basis?
More importantly, why is it doing daily billing to begin with?
I have Columbia Gas. They (a couple of years ago) replaced my meter with something "smart" that they can read with a drive-by vehicle, but it still has spinny-dials that are mechanically driven by the flow of natural gas to my house. If the spinny-dials don't agree with what I'm being charged, there are instructions on the bill itself for reporting the discrepancy and being charged more properly.
IIRC, this is done by the therm, but it's averaged over a month (or however often readings actually happen). Seems fair to me.
(Disclaimer: I'm not in California. We've got plenty of fuel here, so perhaps the easiest explanation between your reported observations and my own is that Columbia Gas gives less of a shit.)
CSMA is what is/was used on old 10base2 and other non-switched Ethernet networks. It, and its associated timing vagrancies, are very likely at this point sufficiently well-understood that nothing you or I could immediately think of at this point would improve the situation at all.
For instance, IIRC, with 10base2: Wait for a clear space on the wire. Transmit a packet. If it collides, back of for a period of time (IIRC based on MAC address) and try again. Chances are good (by design) that things work fine the next time around. Rinse and repeat.
Efficiency obviously goes to hell in a hurry, but at least it works eventually.
What folks are complaining about isn't apparently related to that: The chief apparent complaint is that so-and-so used to be able to read Slashdot (or whatever) in the bathroom (or wherever), and now (given the passage of time and no other apparent changes) there's no perceptible signal there at all (as reported by the Slashdot-reading wireless widget). And, further, that replacing the router/AP seems to rectify this.
At least, that's my interpretation of the technically-vague complaint. I don't see how CSMA fits in with this scenario at all.
(It should be noted at this point that there are some wireless systems on ISM bands with hard time-based multiplexing. Motorola Canopy, for instance, can be cooperatively designed to cohabitate well with unrelated neighboring systems, but the spectral efficiency (in terms of actual data throughput) tends to be approximately (though highly predictable!) shit.)
Except for the competing theory of failing capacitors allowing for less-stable operation due to power supply wonkiness.
I've seen my share of bad caps doing all manner of strange things in modern ("digital") electronics. Things can turn very weird a long time before they outright fail.
It may come as a surprise to you to hear this, but: Not everyone uses WiFi only for Internet access. The Internet is a network of networks, and my own network sees quite a lot of local traffic from time to time.
For the same reason I have gigabit switches in my house, I also want fast WiFi for my less-wired devices.
If the difference between channel bonding or not means waiting 10 minutes for a task to complete or 20, then I'm going to be using it and keep those 10 optional minutes of my life.
I fully expect my neighbors to behave similarly.
Not a twist on any argument, just a jab at an ill-placed absolute statement that is obviously false.
You keep on with your bad self and keep fighting the good fight, or whatever the fuck it is that you're doing.
That's a mighty fine soapbox you've got there. I want to see you use it sometime where it matters:
"No, officer, you can't give me a ticket! I wasn't breaking any laws!"
(As folks seem to be fond of saying these days, good luck with that.)
And, but, so? BMW doesn't make FWD cars under their own name, and I'm not familiar enough with Mercedes to know (except they seem to be primarily RWD), but: What, exactly, is your point other than to be uselessly snarky?
FWIW, the car in question was a 1995 Chevy Beretta in its most barren trim/accessory package. $13,995 new off the dealer lot, or somesuch, and certainly not any manner of high-end kraut-wagen: Friggin' 14" wheels with plastic covers and rear drum brakes.
Weight distribution on a Beretta is an ugly joke. Accordingly, one wouldn't expect gravity to be able to pull the rear end downhill in any sensible circumstance, but it did.
(As an aside: I currently drive a E36 BMW, but I'm certainly not rich -- I don't even qualify for "middle class" by a long shot. If you think only rich kids can drive a BMW, you haven't seriously looked at owning one yourself.)
(As another aside: Perhaps I should just killfile you as a troll. Why not?)