The GW vs WoW thing is really hard. I still have GW but every time I fire it up, I want to jump. Or I run into a small rock and my character doesn't clip around it. Sure, it's free and I don't think I've gotten into the good section yet. But GW never claimed to be a MMO. It's right on their site.
From their site and wikipedia (sorry I can't get to their site right now):
Guild Wars shares some features with massively multiplayer online role-playing games(MMORPG), however it was termed a CORPG by its developers to emphasise the differences in its approach to online role-play compared to many of its contemporaries.
Mainly because the world is instanced. Which is fine. But it's not the same. It's really apples and oranges. WoW isn't God's gift to gamers but if WoW sucks then mmos are broken. It's the closest thing to a pop-culture-MUD than anything before it. Certainly isn't an issue with my wife like FFXI was (urgh).
And as far as chapters go, it's similar to WoW's "patches". Although in GW, each chapter is a stand-alone game which is pretty cool (imo). WoW's expansion will be optional, which I think is stupid because it means the world HAS to be partitioned off and all these other design problems pop up. I know, I know... they have to keep the expansion optional not to create a s**t-storm(TM) but I just think a floating magical portal into the expansion is so clearly a tech-crutch. Perhaps the next expansion will only be accessible if you kill Tkra'dor the Doomish DVD Media Keeper for the Disc 1 drop.
Ah, whatever. I don't enjoy whining. I enjoy smiling at the good design. The way Guild Wars streams content as you play is super-cool. And the way Blizzard runs cross-platform with a massive casual user base is super-cool too. The positive aspects of tech is what blows my skirt up. ^^
I guess I believe that if either side had their answers handed to them it would play out like this:
1. Religious right (as you say) get their answer. There is a God, he appears in the sky and announces his existance, performs miracles and day-to-day life changes ala The Garden of Eden (or whatever you believe). In other words, faith/questioning is gone.
My belief is that people would change. Humans would do good and know that judgement was there. Because unlike the law, God is everywhere and there is no possibility of not being judged.
2. Environmental left (as you say) get their answer. We are screwing the Earth over and there is no possibility to colonize anything within reach. Clear science from everyone available proves that human activity is warming the earth.
My belief is that people would not change. They would act as smokers do. No judgement would fall upon them. People would drive their H2 SUVs (empty with no cargo) and easily afford the lifestyle they like the most. We would not turn off our datacenters, machines, lights, factories etc. We depend on the system and no amount of regulation and leadership would change the fact that "I need to go to work and have my latte".
This is just my belief. We've always moved forward, by matter of hope or blindness. ie: The system is too huge to tell Brazil to stop logging. ie: We'll come up with something. "Save the rainforest" is laughed at. "Treehugging" is a weak force in the world, a world in which the kudzu wins and the pansies lose in nature. God revealed would be a dramatic and powerful change while "save the earth" would easily be ignored by people who don't want to lose creature comforts.
I thought you were serious, so I guess it's not funny. Maybe "in a few generations they become glowing super-human sun-resistant mutants" would have be better. At least it's obviously exaggerated for Internet interpretation.
Wikipedia is a wiki. Everyone is admin (that's a lot of shared experience out there) except for pages that get defaced. Maybe it's not a reliable source but it's not blog.
Please keep calling me a fanboy. Please exaggerate me saying the PS3 is magic.
I'm speculating, you're speculating. We both are at fault of sorts. My only point is, as I have said, we've seen this before. The Emotion Engine wasn't completely up to the hype but it beat the PC for a while. Was it original design? Yes. Is the PS3 like a PC? No. The GPU may be related but it's also a function of the cell SPE's vs the "let's just do stuff" nature of the PC CPU.
Ars covered this before. It might sound ridiculous now, but the PS2 fight was this same deal. I guess I'll just wait for all the blog posts "omg the ps3 is sick". But that's where my fanboyism comes in I guess, regardless if all the hardware is there and everyone on the planet knows that the 360 beats most PCs and the PS3 is poised to be better than the 360. 7 cores, even if the cores aren't that fast. We'll just have to wait for real-world tests I guess.
This fight has been done. PCs are designed for general purpose, consoles are designed for massive parallel operation which is what entertainment loves. Saying "I think Sony put in a Nvidia GPU in the PS3, they are the same" is just lazy analysis. But I suppose I'm speculating. At least skim the PS2 vs PC article I linked from 2000. It's been different for a while.
Yeah, you're right about the monitor aspect. But I'm just making the point that most PCs can't even display native HD. The point on the number of pixels is a good one. However, no one is running nice and smooth at 1600x1200. Who cares, perhaps, for now, it's just a measure of the PS3's power. But good gameplay doesn't equal graphics all the time... but graphics can enable good gameplay (like if I can see emotion, or see information that would otherwise have to be written in dialog or presented in a HUD).
Pure pixels is a bad measure and I should have brought it up. On the same HDTV (1080i), the gamecube looks worse than the 360. It's a testament to the console's power. My PC's video card was $600 and it can't do the real-time motion blur that PGR3 does. Is PGR3 a good game? Maybe for people who hate Gran Turismo's realism... I think Test Drive Unlimited is a bit better of producing a decent driving sim, but then again, it's art/opinion. I can see it both ways.
- Outcome 1: The PS3 is great but no one bites like the PSP. "Whatever. $600 is too much. I'm not buying Vista or this. Technology is doing what I need it to do already." - Outcome 2: The PS3 shames everything and no one can stand to look at anything less. "Man, I wish I could use the Wiimote on the PS3. The Wii is fun but let's play MGS again, did you just see that [graphic feature]?" - Outcome 3: Somewhere in-between. Some pick their side. Some like Halo, some like the FF series. Some get all three consoles. Nothing much changes although the Internet forums make you believe that it has.
Consoles win on bang-per-buck. Your video card doesn't run by itself. Please include whole PC cost. And then talk about what PCs can do that consoles can, because it's apples and oranges. I guess people are inclined to say whatever, even though this has happened before. The PC couldn't hang with the PS2, many people bought the PS2 as their first DVD player and then the PC caught up, got DVD and passed the PS2. All the while, the PC's general purpose architecture cost people more to upgrade (see: throw out).
In some respects, the PC has the illusion of being upgradable. Motherboards cannot change CPU vendors. Video cards require different slot types and memory is hardly ever transferrable to next generation chipsets. But in some respects, the PC is more powerful because it is extendable. The console doesn't fill the workstation role. So then it goes back and forth.
PC Camp: The PS3 is too much. Sony Camp: The PS3 is more powerful than your PC. PC Camp: No it's not. Sony Camp: Yes it is, you don't even have a monitor that does 1920x1080. PC Camp: Yes I do. Sony Camp: You can't run complex games like Oblivion at that resolution. PC Camp: Yes I can. Sony Camp: You have to turn down the quality. PC Camp: No I don't. Sony Camp: Then certainly it runs slow as crap. PC Camp: No it doesn't. Sony Camp: Then you paid $5000 for your quad SLI PC that sucks in 800w. PC Camp: Ok, yeah that's me. Sony Camp: Ok, so the PS3 is a good deal. PC Camp: But I can't [insert application here] on it.
Yes and that is very true. PCs are general purpose computing devices that cost you a lot to try to compete with a dedicated, stable, simple, "designed to play" console. Oblivion just works on the 360/PS3 whereas on the PC you have to know that Nvidia can't do AA+HDR yet./casts fanboy guard/lists systems he owns (all)/realizes the consumerism future is upon us
If you have a Geforce 7950 Quad SLi setup you could easily play any game at 1920x1080 @60fps and probably could have 16xAF and 16xAA going at the same time...
Ok, good point. Let's go shopping!
- 7950GT from Newegg (times 4) = $1200 - We need a LCD monitor that can do 1920. Let's go with a Dell 24" = $1,199 - Quad pci-e motherboard = $200 - I'll assume we have a nice CPU and assume that we have nice memory that plays nice on the new chipset
Ok, we're at $2599 at the best. But then we have a PC that we can do other things with, like Folding @ Home. Oh wait, that only runs on ATI cards. Ok, well to avoid flaming anymore... I guess it comes down to a few things:
- PCs are general purpose machines that don't compete with new consoles. - Economies of scale, standard parts make consoles amazing bang-per-buck devices. - PCs have advantages over consoles in many respects but not in "just play" features. - People say their PCs do 1920. Maybe they have a really nice, old CRT? Maybe they have a 24" LCD?
The PS3's GPU is probably similar to a Geforce 7800GTX Please source this. I say that the PS3's architecture is completely different from a PC in no comparable format except real-world tests that aren't even available yet. At the very minimum, people who have seen the PS3 in person running at 1080p have said it's "amazing and fluid". I haven't seen it yet.
How do you design a game that can run on a Pentium 4 2GHz with a Radeon 9800 and still take advantage of a the high end system I described? You detect for card features, card model, opengl/dx version and whatever else you can: if (glGetString(GL_SHADING_LANGUAGE_VERSION) == "shiny happy version") {
enableBlinkyBlinky(); }
or what-not. But I think what you were trying to hit on is the question of supporting change. Which is the advantage of consoles. Me, personally, I do other stuff than games so I try to put my money into my PC. However, very rarely have I seen this so-called upgradability. I put in a new video card and then fork-lift the whole thing:
- Changing CPU vendors for the best-of-breed CPU means a new PC-stack (mb,memory) - Going from PCI to PCI-E means a new PC-stack (mb,memory,maybe cpu) - Going from integrated intel 945 to something that runs Vista's Aero might mean any of the above.
As usual, there are trade-offs. But simply saying "upgradability of PC" doesn't always work out in practice. The way it's worked for me and my friends:
- New PC - One new videocard upgrade that fits in XYZ slot - Completely new PC because majority of old parts need to be replaced completely.
And to further illustrate the real point is, PCs are more iterative. - New Console - New PC - One new videocard upgrade that fits in XYZ slot - Completely new PC because majority of old parts need to be replaced completely. - New Console... If you were to keep up with the technology. Ah whatever, time will tell. Enthusiasts don't run anything. Dreamcast was a better system and the PS2 won (much to the anger of many). The Wii might be a better system, who knows what will happen. Certainly, the "Emotion Engine" was overhyped. But in reality, it delivered more than the PC did (for a while).
You could say the same thing about your comment. Mostly because full paragraphs aren't flamey quips that are intended to start a fight. I own most things that I have opinions on (excepting the PS3) and if I was a fanboi, I wouldn't own the 360. Right?
1. The 360 can't fast forward through MP3s, so if I want it to be the center of the living room... I lose functionality that my 1990 discman had? Major oversight imho. 2. I have a 360, gamecube, ps2. I will get the Wii and the PS3. Vote with your dollar.
The PS2 was slightly ahead of the PC for about a year and then it caught up, it's the same deal with the PS3. My 7800gtx can't play oblivion at 1920x1080 and I spent $600 for it. If you can play oblivion at full HD, please post pictures or it didn't happen.
Yes, a common argument. I dunno, I bought a TV in 2001 that does 1080p for $2k. It's lasted me for 5 years, it's not the best. However, even Oblivion looks good at 1024x768. It's sometimes not the quantity of pixels that matters but the quality that matters. My same TV plays the PS2 and Gamecube at 1080p but the 360 looks better. Same TV.
Yes, you miss out on 1080p but the 360 looks better at 1080i than my Gamecube because of quality, not quantity of pixels.
Your PC is below the PS3. Please realize this. Full HD is 1920x1080p. You cannot (even with magic books) play Oblivion on a PC at full quality with all the fancy blinky stuff at this resolution. The PS3 will, for a time, trump everything that the PC has whether you assembled the pre-fab parts or not.
As far as the 360, it's more bad design. And before you flame me, ask "do I want to fast-forward MP3s on a $400 console?". The 360 can't do that and there's no goddamn good reason. It's MS. It's disconnect and it's not the center of my living room if it can only skip MP3's, no rewind, no fast-forward. Some things are nice, as usual, but they miss the polish or sell the polish in MCE edition.
Final Fantasy 11->12 vs Windows 98->XP? Some brands "reboot". One might be good, one might be the same old crap with a new name. Judge book + cover? I think it's the smallest aspect of a game. But at the same time, Final Fantasy MCMLXXXIV would be pretty absurd (if not Orwellian;P).
Your PC can't run the latest games at 1920x1080 @ 60fps. It probably will in a year. This is the PS2 vs PC all over again, PC loses for a little while...
The article from the washington post explicitly quotes Bush saying that this has nothing to do with space weapons. Yes sure, you can not believe him but that's the quote. You could not believe the original post too, if you so choose.
Personally, I think this is stupid. It makes too good of a sound bite -- like from the register: "Everyone has to use space peacefully, except us. We can do what we like, cos we were here first(*). And anyway, if you try to stop us, it won't stay peaceful for long, which would spoil the first part of our principle." *Yes, we know.
Too good of a sound bite. This is what the world wants to see, this is the image that is perceived. We don't eat our own dog food. We have nukes, we are the only ones that have ever used nukes in war and we don't want people to use nukes against us. I'm sorry, I'm ranting now. Ok, ok, dial it down...
But I seriously just wrote my congress rep about this. Big whoop, sure. First time I have written my congressperson, time to get involved. Maybe because I realized that we're dicking around with this instead of joining the Kyoto Protocol (us and Australia). I mean, what the hell is going on lately? We have bigger [f-bomb] issues, ugh.
What does that mean "makes software for nuclear power facilities", do you mean the HR system that gives you a report on how many vacation hours you have or do you mean the system that adjusts the rods, coolant and what I would consider massively critical (observation). The FAA runs assembly in a lot of it's systems, depending on as few moving parts as possible. Anything like a 9-11 system or power plant I would expect would be running something similar or QNX as an example.
In other industries there's safeguards and levels of acceptable failure. An airplane's fuel system has a more critical rating than the in-flight movie system (as an example).
I thought we were fighting both. And the war on poverty. And the war on illiteracy. And the war on AIDS, pollution, hunger, disease. No wonder why we can't keep up (.. the focus and funding).
Racist. DJ Shadow (white) brought musicianship back to sample/loop based music. Race has as much to do with it as Michael Jordan's shoes. But I suppose you don't care, which is why you didn't use a question mark or spell fantasy right.
CRT flickering and CRT headaches. And yes, I set the refresh to 85hz, some days it doesn't matter. It's just 1950s tech blinking at you, messing with your eyes. I had a 21" Viewsonic that I paid out the nose for, I don't really miss it except for it's ability to change modes... the native resolution feature of LCDs is pretty poor imho, command line needs to be 80x20 sometimes.:)
I agree with the impact of non-professionals. However, if you believe this site then this whole holy war is moot because most people probably got XP with the "computer store box". Speculation, maybe. This chart is 40k samples in size, which is not perfect.
Also, SP2 is invasive. There's no argument. There was a warning article from MS about SP2 before it came out. Maybe there is no excuse, but in shops where "the ghost image" is already bloated and dying, there is going to be major IT complications / cost.
The idea of incrementally upgrading a PC doesn't work all the time. Let's say you buy a shiny new Intel Core Duo to replace your aging K5. New motherboard, new memory, new graphics card (pci to pci-e) and a bigger power supply. Forklift upgrades is really all that happens now. How many empty computer cases does your tech friend have? That means he bought a completely new box and maybe kept the sound card and NIC (maybe). The price is one thing, but you throw a PC notebook away all the same. At least Apple encourages open standards, not so vendor lock-in. The price, sure but you only have the illusion of upgrading in the PC world. No one does that after 3 years. DDR2, PCI-E 2.0, quad-core support on a different pin configuration... all of these features just killed your entire rig.
And anything else doesn't work. Certainly there are trade-offs. A completely free market (which isn't even worth discussing because no one has that) doesn't worry about anything but price, profit, demand... and not even that on purpose. It is a giant flea market that doesn't clean up after itself.
There are trade-offs in everything *sigh*, I guess the trick is finding the thing with the least amount of negatives. All socioeconomic models suck, capitalism just sucks less. People work for themselves. People look out for themselves. The idealism is nice (and very much needed) but it's not utility. I go to work to get paid not because I had a nice dream about working last night.
Your empty view on the rich guy in the mansion is an argument in self-actualization which humans aren't deserving of. In one thing, know all things. Not, in all things know one thing. You can spend your whole life working in an art and/or science and see emerging patterns that directly relate to other patterns in fields which you know nothing about. Working down into the details provides massive amounts of high-level insight, but at the expense of time (trade off again). But as far as "being the best me that me can be"... sorry, humans don't deserve that satisfaction imho, never have, never will. Place for religion, not economics.
Slashdot Mirror
From their site and wikipedia (sorry I can't get to their site right now):
Mainly because the world is instanced. Which is fine. But it's not the same. It's really apples and oranges. WoW isn't God's gift to gamers but if WoW sucks then mmos are broken. It's the closest thing to a pop-culture-MUD than anything before it. Certainly isn't an issue with my wife like FFXI was (urgh).
And as far as chapters go, it's similar to WoW's "patches". Although in GW, each chapter is a stand-alone game which is pretty cool (imo). WoW's expansion will be optional, which I think is stupid because it means the world HAS to be partitioned off and all these other design problems pop up. I know, I know
Ah, whatever. I don't enjoy whining. I enjoy smiling at the good design. The way Guild Wars streams content as you play is super-cool. And the way Blizzard runs cross-platform with a massive casual user base is super-cool too. The positive aspects of tech is what blows my skirt up. ^^
I guess I believe that if either side had their answers handed to them it would play out like this:
1. Religious right (as you say) get their answer.
There is a God, he appears in the sky and announces his existance, performs miracles and day-to-day life changes ala The Garden of Eden (or whatever you believe). In other words, faith/questioning is gone.
My belief is that people would change. Humans would do good and know that judgement was there. Because unlike the law, God is everywhere and there is no possibility of not being judged.
2. Environmental left (as you say) get their answer.
We are screwing the Earth over and there is no possibility to colonize anything within reach. Clear science from everyone available proves that human activity is warming the earth.
My belief is that people would not change. They would act as smokers do. No judgement would fall upon them. People would drive their H2 SUVs (empty with no cargo) and easily afford the lifestyle they like the most. We would not turn off our datacenters, machines, lights, factories etc. We depend on the system and no amount of regulation and leadership would change the fact that "I need to go to work and have my latte".
This is just my belief. We've always moved forward, by matter of hope or blindness. ie: The system is too huge to tell Brazil to stop logging. ie: We'll come up with something. "Save the rainforest" is laughed at. "Treehugging" is a weak force in the world, a world in which the kudzu wins and the pansies lose in nature. God revealed would be a dramatic and powerful change while "save the earth" would easily be ignored by people who don't want to lose creature comforts.
I thought you were serious, so I guess it's not funny. Maybe "in a few generations they become glowing super-human sun-resistant mutants" would have be better. At least it's obviously exaggerated for Internet interpretation.
Wikipedia is a wiki. Everyone is admin (that's a lot of shared experience out there) except for pages that get defaced. Maybe it's not a reliable source but it's not blog.
Please keep calling me a fanboy.
Please exaggerate me saying the PS3 is magic.
I'm speculating, you're speculating. We both are at fault of sorts. My only point is, as I have said, we've seen this before. The Emotion Engine wasn't completely up to the hype but it beat the PC for a while. Was it original design? Yes. Is the PS3 like a PC? No. The GPU may be related but it's also a function of the cell SPE's vs the "let's just do stuff" nature of the PC CPU.
Ars covered this before. It might sound ridiculous now, but the PS2 fight was this same deal. I guess I'll just wait for all the blog posts "omg the ps3 is sick". But that's where my fanboyism comes in I guess, regardless if all the hardware is there and everyone on the planet knows that the 360 beats most PCs and the PS3 is poised to be better than the 360. 7 cores, even if the cores aren't that fast. We'll just have to wait for real-world tests I guess.
This fight has been done. PCs are designed for general purpose, consoles are designed for massive parallel operation which is what entertainment loves. Saying "I think Sony put in a Nvidia GPU in the PS3, they are the same" is just lazy analysis. But I suppose I'm speculating. At least skim the PS2 vs PC article I linked from 2000. It's been different for a while.
Yeah, you're right about the monitor aspect. But I'm just making the point that most PCs can't even display native HD. The point on the number of pixels is a good one. However, no one is running nice and smooth at 1600x1200. Who cares, perhaps, for now, it's just a measure of the PS3's power. But good gameplay doesn't equal graphics all the time ... but graphics can enable good gameplay (like if I can see emotion, or see information that would otherwise have to be written in dialog or presented in a HUD).
... I think Test Drive Unlimited is a bit better of producing a decent driving sim, but then again, it's art/opinion. I can see it both ways.
... now this ...
Pure pixels is a bad measure and I should have brought it up. On the same HDTV (1080i), the gamecube looks worse than the 360. It's a testament to the console's power. My PC's video card was $600 and it can't do the real-time motion blur that PGR3 does. Is PGR3 a good game? Maybe for people who hate Gran Turismo's realism
- Outcome 1: The PS3 is great but no one bites like the PSP. "Whatever. $600 is too much. I'm not buying Vista or this. Technology is doing what I need it to do already."
- Outcome 2: The PS3 shames everything and no one can stand to look at anything less. "Man, I wish I could use the Wiimote on the PS3. The Wii is fun but let's play MGS again, did you just see that [graphic feature]?"
- Outcome 3: Somewhere in-between. Some pick their side. Some like Halo, some like the FF series. Some get all three consoles. Nothing much changes although the Internet forums make you believe that it has.
I'm exhausted. Mac/PCs wars
Consoles win on bang-per-buck. Your video card doesn't run by itself. Please include whole PC cost. And then talk about what PCs can do that consoles can, because it's apples and oranges. I guess people are inclined to say whatever, even though this has happened before. The PC couldn't hang with the PS2, many people bought the PS2 as their first DVD player and then the PC caught up, got DVD and passed the PS2. All the while, the PC's general purpose architecture cost people more to upgrade (see: throw out).
/casts fanboy guard /lists systems he owns (all) /realizes the consumerism future is upon us
In some respects, the PC has the illusion of being upgradable. Motherboards cannot change CPU vendors. Video cards require different slot types and memory is hardly ever transferrable to next generation chipsets. But in some respects, the PC is more powerful because it is extendable. The console doesn't fill the workstation role. So then it goes back and forth.
PC Camp: The PS3 is too much.
Sony Camp: The PS3 is more powerful than your PC.
PC Camp: No it's not.
Sony Camp: Yes it is, you don't even have a monitor that does 1920x1080.
PC Camp: Yes I do.
Sony Camp: You can't run complex games like Oblivion at that resolution.
PC Camp: Yes I can.
Sony Camp: You have to turn down the quality.
PC Camp: No I don't.
Sony Camp: Then certainly it runs slow as crap.
PC Camp: No it doesn't.
Sony Camp: Then you paid $5000 for your quad SLI PC that sucks in 800w.
PC Camp: Ok, yeah that's me.
Sony Camp: Ok, so the PS3 is a good deal.
PC Camp: But I can't [insert application here] on it.
Yes and that is very true. PCs are general purpose computing devices that cost you a lot to try to compete with a dedicated, stable, simple, "designed to play" console. Oblivion just works on the 360/PS3 whereas on the PC you have to know that Nvidia can't do AA+HDR yet.
If you have a Geforce 7950 Quad SLi setup you could easily play any game at 1920x1080 @60fps and probably could have 16xAF and 16xAA going at the same time...
... I guess it comes down to a few things:
... If you were to keep up with the technology. Ah whatever, time will tell. Enthusiasts don't run anything. Dreamcast was a better system and the PS2 won (much to the anger of many). The Wii might be a better system, who knows what will happen. Certainly, the "Emotion Engine" was overhyped. But in reality, it delivered more than the PC did (for a while).
Ok, good point. Let's go shopping!
- 7950GT from Newegg (times 4) = $1200
- We need a LCD monitor that can do 1920. Let's go with a Dell 24" = $1,199
- Quad pci-e motherboard = $200
- I'll assume we have a nice CPU and assume that we have nice memory that plays nice on the new chipset
Ok, we're at $2599 at the best. But then we have a PC that we can do other things with, like Folding @ Home. Oh wait, that only runs on ATI cards. Ok, well to avoid flaming anymore
- PCs are general purpose machines that don't compete with new consoles.
- Economies of scale, standard parts make consoles amazing bang-per-buck devices.
- PCs have advantages over consoles in many respects but not in "just play" features.
- People say their PCs do 1920. Maybe they have a really nice, old CRT? Maybe they have a 24" LCD?
The PS3's GPU is probably similar to a Geforce 7800GTX
Please source this. I say that the PS3's architecture is completely different from a PC in no comparable format except real-world tests that aren't even available yet. At the very minimum, people who have seen the PS3 in person running at 1080p have said it's "amazing and fluid". I haven't seen it yet.
How do you design a game that can run on a Pentium 4 2GHz with a Radeon 9800 and still take advantage of a the high end system I described?
You detect for card features, card model, opengl/dx version and whatever else you can:
if (glGetString(GL_SHADING_LANGUAGE_VERSION) == "shiny happy version") {
enableBlinkyBlinky();
}
or what-not. But I think what you were trying to hit on is the question of supporting change. Which is the advantage of consoles. Me, personally, I do other stuff than games so I try to put my money into my PC. However, very rarely have I seen this so-called upgradability. I put in a new video card and then fork-lift the whole thing:
- Changing CPU vendors for the best-of-breed CPU means a new PC-stack (mb,memory)
- Going from PCI to PCI-E means a new PC-stack (mb,memory,maybe cpu)
- Going from integrated intel 945 to something that runs Vista's Aero might mean any of the above.
As usual, there are trade-offs. But simply saying "upgradability of PC" doesn't always work out in practice. The way it's worked for me and my friends:
- New PC
- One new videocard upgrade that fits in XYZ slot
- Completely new PC because majority of old parts need to be replaced completely.
And to further illustrate the real point is, PCs are more iterative.
- New Console
- New PC
- One new videocard upgrade that fits in XYZ slot
- Completely new PC because majority of old parts need to be replaced completely.
- New Console
You could say the same thing about your comment. Mostly because full paragraphs aren't flamey quips that are intended to start a fight. I own most things that I have opinions on (excepting the PS3) and if I was a fanboi, I wouldn't own the 360. Right?
1. The 360 can't fast forward through MP3s, so if I want it to be the center of the living room... I lose functionality that my 1990 discman had? Major oversight imho.
2. I have a 360, gamecube, ps2. I will get the Wii and the PS3. Vote with your dollar.
The PS2 was slightly ahead of the PC for about a year and then it caught up, it's the same deal with the PS3. My 7800gtx can't play oblivion at 1920x1080 and I spent $600 for it. If you can play oblivion at full HD, please post pictures or it didn't happen.
Yes, a common argument. I dunno, I bought a TV in 2001 that does 1080p for $2k. It's lasted me for 5 years, it's not the best. However, even Oblivion looks good at 1024x768. It's sometimes not the quantity of pixels that matters but the quality that matters. My same TV plays the PS2 and Gamecube at 1080p but the 360 looks better. Same TV.
Yes, you miss out on 1080p but the 360 looks better at 1080i than my Gamecube because of quality, not quantity of pixels.
Your PC is below the PS3. Please realize this. Full HD is 1920x1080p. You cannot (even with magic books) play Oblivion on a PC at full quality with all the fancy blinky stuff at this resolution. The PS3 will, for a time, trump everything that the PC has whether you assembled the pre-fab parts or not.
As far as the 360, it's more bad design. And before you flame me, ask "do I want to fast-forward MP3s on a $400 console?". The 360 can't do that and there's no goddamn good reason. It's MS. It's disconnect and it's not the center of my living room if it can only skip MP3's, no rewind, no fast-forward. Some things are nice, as usual, but they miss the polish or sell the polish in MCE edition.
Final Fantasy 11->12 vs Windows 98->XP? Some brands "reboot". One might be good, one might be the same old crap with a new name. Judge book + cover? I think it's the smallest aspect of a game. But at the same time, Final Fantasy MCMLXXXIV would be pretty absurd (if not Orwellian ;P).
Your PC can't run the latest games at 1920x1080 @ 60fps. It probably will in a year. This is the PS2 vs PC all over again, PC loses for a little while ...
The article from the washington post explicitly quotes Bush saying that this has nothing to do with space weapons. Yes sure, you can not believe him but that's the quote. You could not believe the original post too, if you so choose.
...
Personally, I think this is stupid. It makes too good of a sound bite -- like from the register:
"Everyone has to use space peacefully, except us. We can do what we like, cos we were here first(*). And anyway, if you try to stop us, it won't stay peaceful for long, which would spoil the first part of our principle."
*Yes, we know.
Too good of a sound bite. This is what the world wants to see, this is the image that is perceived. We don't eat our own dog food. We have nukes, we are the only ones that have ever used nukes in war and we don't want people to use nukes against us. I'm sorry, I'm ranting now. Ok, ok, dial it down
But I seriously just wrote my congress rep about this. Big whoop, sure. First time I have written my congressperson, time to get involved. Maybe because I realized that we're dicking around with this instead of joining the Kyoto Protocol (us and Australia). I mean, what the hell is going on lately? We have bigger [f-bomb] issues, ugh.
[encouraging the OT]
"Ronald Reagan."
Heel plz?
What does that mean "makes software for nuclear power facilities", do you mean the HR system that gives you a report on how many vacation hours you have or do you mean the system that adjusts the rods, coolant and what I would consider massively critical (observation). The FAA runs assembly in a lot of it's systems, depending on as few moving parts as possible. Anything like a 9-11 system or power plant I would expect would be running something similar or QNX as an example.
In other industries there's safeguards and levels of acceptable failure. An airplane's fuel system has a more critical rating than the in-flight movie system (as an example).
I thought we were fighting both. And the war on poverty. And the war on illiteracy. And the war on AIDS, pollution, hunger, disease. No wonder why we can't keep up (.. the focus and funding).
Racist. DJ Shadow (white) brought musicianship back to sample/loop based music. Race has as much to do with it as Michael Jordan's shoes. But I suppose you don't care, which is why you didn't use a question mark or spell fantasy right.
CRT flickering and CRT headaches. And yes, I set the refresh to 85hz, some days it doesn't matter. It's just 1950s tech blinking at you, messing with your eyes. I had a 21" Viewsonic that I paid out the nose for, I don't really miss it except for it's ability to change modes ... the native resolution feature of LCDs is pretty poor imho, command line needs to be 80x20 sometimes. :)
You're absolutely right. And I just lost all motivation to keep reading my obj-c book. Which I suppose, supports your point again.
I agree with the impact of non-professionals. However, if you believe this site then this whole holy war is moot because most people probably got XP with the "computer store box". Speculation, maybe. This chart is 40k samples in size, which is not perfect.
Also, SP2 is invasive. There's no argument. There was a warning article from MS about SP2 before it came out. Maybe there is no excuse, but in shops where "the ghost image" is already bloated and dying, there is going to be major IT complications / cost.
When you fire, the bullet goes up the Y. Does that count? :P
The idea of incrementally upgrading a PC doesn't work all the time. Let's say you buy a shiny new Intel Core Duo to replace your aging K5. New motherboard, new memory, new graphics card (pci to pci-e) and a bigger power supply. Forklift upgrades is really all that happens now. How many empty computer cases does your tech friend have? That means he bought a completely new box and maybe kept the sound card and NIC (maybe). The price is one thing, but you throw a PC notebook away all the same. At least Apple encourages open standards, not so vendor lock-in. The price, sure but you only have the illusion of upgrading in the PC world. No one does that after 3 years. DDR2, PCI-E 2.0, quad-core support on a different pin configuration ... all of these features just killed your entire rig.
"Capitalism is a lie"
... and not even that on purpose. It is a giant flea market that doesn't clean up after itself.
... sorry, humans don't deserve that satisfaction imho, never have, never will. Place for religion, not economics.
And anything else doesn't work. Certainly there are trade-offs. A completely free market (which isn't even worth discussing because no one has that) doesn't worry about anything but price, profit, demand
There are trade-offs in everything *sigh*, I guess the trick is finding the thing with the least amount of negatives. All socioeconomic models suck, capitalism just sucks less. People work for themselves. People look out for themselves. The idealism is nice (and very much needed) but it's not utility. I go to work to get paid not because I had a nice dream about working last night.
Your empty view on the rich guy in the mansion is an argument in self-actualization which humans aren't deserving of. In one thing, know all things. Not, in all things know one thing. You can spend your whole life working in an art and/or science and see emerging patterns that directly relate to other patterns in fields which you know nothing about. Working down into the details provides massive amounts of high-level insight, but at the expense of time (trade off again). But as far as "being the best me that me can be"