Question is...are any GOOD mainstream games not available on the consoles?
Not counting the MMORPGs.
The best games I know have all been ported to consoles. Deus Ex, Portal, Braid, World of Goo, etc.
There was a time when only PCs could provide the horsepower for a good game, but the consoles caught up, and now high-horsepower games on PCs exist ~only~ to sell the latest hardware. The games themselves generally suck. I'd rather play Galaga on MAME than a monstrosity like Crysis.
Social games are different. MMORPGs like WoW remain a PC-only phenomenom because of the flexibility of the PC to edit related documents, browse game-related forums, etc.
It's all about flexibility, which the PC provides and the "post PC" device does not, at least not yet. So component vendors like Newegg are not dead yet. Ask again in 3 years.
Windows 7 & 8 are "not bloated" only if you compare them to Windows Vista, which apparently was specifically designed to be awful and make the subsequent releases look better.
I have used Windows since v3.0 in 1990. The big leap was when they built an entirely new OS, Windows NT, which was enhanced and mass-marketed as Windows 2000. Windows XP made some small improvements over Win2K. Every Windows release since XP has been a steaming pile of crap supported by $100M's of marketing, plus OEM license agreements with computer manufacturers who ~want~ Windows to suck up hardware resources and degrade over time, so the average Joe is forced to buy new hardware in a few years.
That's my analysis from a couple decades of experience with Windows. Feel free to share your own.
If Apple sold a Macbook Air with a convertible capacitive touchscreen and 3-button trackpoint, I would seriously consider it despite their price premium and maintenance issues. But they don't. So Thinkpad FTW.
I agree with you that consoles target a market that is too large to care, overall, about user-generated content. PCs are definitely about fine-grained individuality. (Which makes it somewhat ironic that Apple ran the "think different" campaign and now markets some of the most mainstream, locked-down hardware in the world...but I digress.)
There is no technical reason that consoles could not download user-generated mods and mappacks. Purely a question of demand.
Frankly I would rather download game code onto my consoles, which ONLY play games, than onto any of my PCs, which have lots of personal data.
I dunno about this. The last 2 generations of game consoles seem to fine for FPS these days.
My old PS2 takes a USB keyboard & mouse to play games like Deus Ex. I haven't tried keyboard & mouse on our XBox 360 but it has USB, so I don't see why not if the game supports it.
Ultimately the only thing you miss on a console is the absolute cutting edge of 3D rendering...which is usually engineered into crappy games (eg Crysis) solely to sell the hardware.
Right. Only the sales are falling, which is what naturally happens when a market is saturated with "good enough" product. This is despite Microsoft's herculean efforts to obsolete otherwise very capable hardware with new bloats of Windows.:p
When my iPad can drive at least three UXGA displays, work with all of my peripherals (mice, 3D mice, keyboards, hard drives, cd/dvd drives, printers, scanners, etc), provide flexible ports for eg DMX lighting control or RS232 projector control or Arduino programming or GPS logging, and transcode h264 video in real time...THEN I might be in the post-PC era.
Until then, I have plenty of uses for a PC. And newegg has a huge market for upgrades and peripherals. And in my experience they are one of the few vendors whose specialization makes them better than Amazon.
I know you're being humorous, but...I never compared the hardware.
Plus I don't think that Apple's products are all toys.
Their computers have sucked in a big way for most of the last decade. But the ipod, iphone, and ipad are excellent, perhaps even the best, "real hardware" in their categories.
Your mention of patents only shows that you are deeply and thoroughly confused by this topic.
I have filed for several registered trademarks over the years.
You cannot reasonably expect to defend a mark that is used contemporaneously in the same field.
Hell, it's hard enough when the same name is used in a radically ~different~ field. It is deeply ironic that you use "Apple" as an example. The "Apple" name was the subject of a trademark dispute between Apple Inc (the computer company) and Apple Records (Apple Corps Ltd, the Beatles' commercial conglomerate) that lasted for almost 3 decades. The dispute began in 1978 and was only settled in 2007. This is why the Beatles' songs only showed up on iTunes last year.
Facebook is not software; it is a "special-purpose investment vehicle" designed to extract a few $B from some high-net-worth shmucks before it vanishes.
If Facebook was ever forced to publicly disclose their real numbers, I think you would also have to remove them from the "successful" category.
Correct. The MultiTouch thinkpads have both a high-resolution pressure-sensitive active digitizer (Wacom), and a simpler resistive touch layer that you can poke with fingers or chopsticks or whatever. Different usage of the term, but it still refers to touch-screen technologies on a computing device.
My point was, IBM was already using "multitouch" in their press releases, brochures, websites, etc. in 2006. So there's no way that Apple could have trademarked the term in 2007.
The real story is around why the trademark application was filed at all...why it took almost 5 years to reject...and how much human potential was wasted on this idiocy.
All the limits on computation (except regarding storage) that you hear about (e.g. Landauer limit) are on irreversible computing, which is how current architecture works. It is the irreversibility of an operation that causes it to increase entropy.
No. The loss of power as heat has nothing whatsoever to do with the reversibility of computing operations.
Power is lost (and thermal entropy increased) because of the electrical resistivity of the materials from which our CPUs are made.
If you discover a room-temperature superconductor, please let the rest of the world know, because the researchers haven't found it yet. Bonus points if you can fabricate a modern CPU using that superconducting material.
...BIOS’s antiquated limitations were hampering systems...
What exactly are these limitations, in real-world terms? My systems all seem to boot & run fast right now...
If the BIOS has limitations, why not just flash an updated BIOS? All of my machines have had at least one BIOS update since manufacture. No problem.
As for the mini-OS-before-boot concept...I already have a bunch of Linux "Live CDs" that I use to partition drives, image & restore partitions, scan for viruses, etc without having to boot Windows. Why would I want to put a "pre-boot" OS on my hard drive, where it can be hacked and infected?
Someone please enlighten me if UEFI has any real-world benefits to outweigh its costs.
Busted DC jacks (and sometimes USB ports) are a huge problem. Mounting the DC jack to the case and connecting to the motherboard with a cable makes replacement easier, but it's only treating the symptom and not the problem.
Seems to me, that approach solves the problem quite well.
I've never seen a "busted" DC jack...just DC jacks that were soldered rigidly to the PCB, and broke away.
That said, the magnetic connector on the macbooks is a neat design. My only complaint is that it disconnects much too easily. I can't count the number of times that my girlfriend has been using her macbook in bed or livingroom and got a low-battery warning because she didn't realize the connector had fallen off. The battery on that machine has seen far more cycles than it had too, and is near end-of-life now.
This is surely part of Apple's master plan. Easily disconnected power = more battery cycles = shorter battery life = more high-margin battery sales. Plus if you have a Macbook Air, you have to go to the Apple store to have your battery replaced. Brilliant but slimy.
...an extraordinary challenge to provide safe and healthy homes for the world's burgeoning population...
We don't need more homes; we need a smaller population.
Treating this symptom will only make the disease worse. Give people a "safe & healthy home" and they are more likely to have more kids in it.
The smart kids at MIT should be working on global birth control education instead.
Re:Dual core is still really useful
on
Arduino Goes ARM
·
· Score: 1
However, mutiple cores are really more useful for transcoding and other "geeky" stuff. As more people rip their DVDs to save them from teh scratches of their kids or the clumsiness of their friends , or just common wear and tear, those cores will keep being more important.
Of course, they are business reasons for using them, too....
Agree with the first sentence. Video transcoding to h264 is the most processor-intensive task that any consumer is likely to throw at their cpu today.
As for ripping DVDs, a Pentium III can do this, no sweat. It's an easy job for pretty much every consumer PC made in the last decade. Transcoding to "modern" codecs is the hard part.
Business reasons? Not for the vast majority of business users. Unless they are forced to use a Microsoft OS (eg Vistam, Win 7) that is ~designed~ to overburden the hardware with no added benefit to the user.
Microsoft understands this and they made darn sure that Linux wasn't allowed to establish a beach head in netbooks. Intel could use the same tactics to fight off ARM processors.
Apparently not, since the dominant smartphone (iphone) and tablet (ipad) have sold tens (hundreds?) of millions of units running ARM processors.
Perhaps Intel should start to worry about the lower end of the processor world.
This has always belonged to the likes of Motorola and others.
Except...an entire generation of engineers cut their teeth on the Intel 8051.
Does Intel still collect licensing fees from other manufacturers who used 8051 intellectual property? I dunno. But they definitely were a player in this space, directly or indirectly, at one point.
$20-30 is a very inexpensive prototyping setup, but people can't afford to lose a whole board every time they make a little project
Why would they lose the board?
You can use the prototyping board to ~prototype~, then for the finished project, use a bare ATmega328 with a couple of filter caps, reset pullup resistor, and some headers. Maybe also an external crystal & caps if you need very fast timing (eg 250kbps serial). Total cost: $5 or less. Add a couple bucks if you want to buy ATmega328's pre-flashed with the Arduino bootloader instead of flashing them yourself.
One of the beautiful things about the Arduino ecosystem is that there are plenty of options available to hit your cost/effort target. Everything from the $30 Uno boards, to the $20 Pro SMD boards, to $10 DIY with preflashed chips and prefab PCBs (eg Boarduino), to $5 or less DIY with your own PCB or even dead-bug style.
The cost depends on how lazy you are and/or how many units you plan to make.
Re:Dual core is still really useful
on
Arduino Goes ARM
·
· Score: 1
If you're running WIndows and one of your processes explodes, like Firefox seems to almost daily, and starts trying to burn up the entire CPU, it used to be a real problem, because the user interface became unresponsive.
We run several single-core "home theater" machines for web browsing & videos, all running XPSP3 and Firefox, and I can't remember when we last had a hang like that.
Perhaps last winter or spring, and almost certainly caused by Flash, not Firefox.
Anyway, Ctrl-Alt-Del and force quit is a quick&easy solution. No need for multiple cores.
X86 has a place, ARM has a place. When you need to do some heavy number crunching, or want huge detailed 3D worlds, or need to deal with a crapload of data? Then x86 is your guy.
If you have no idea what you need the processor to crunch, then yeah, a high-power general-purpose CPU is "your guy".
But if you think about it beforehand and realize that your device needs to do 3D rendering, or H264 video decompression, or any of a number of common high-horsepower tasks, you can augment the CPU with custom silicon that beats the stuffing out of a general CPU, with less power.
That is exactly what the current crop of handheld devices do. They have special-purpose silicon to do the heavy lifting for these tasks. Hence core CPU horsepower is less relevant for the vast majority of usage.
Google the make/model of your hard drive and "TVS diode".
In most cases you can remove the hard drive from the external case, find that diode on the drive itself (near the connector), clip it off with flush cutters, and you're good to go for drive recovery.
Just make absolutely sure you use the right power supply after removing the TVS.
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Question is...are any GOOD mainstream games not available on the consoles?
Not counting the MMORPGs.
The best games I know have all been ported to consoles. Deus Ex, Portal, Braid, World of Goo, etc.
There was a time when only PCs could provide the horsepower for a good game, but the consoles caught up, and now high-horsepower games on PCs exist ~only~ to sell the latest hardware. The games themselves generally suck. I'd rather play Galaga on MAME than a monstrosity like Crysis.
Social games are different. MMORPGs like WoW remain a PC-only phenomenom because of the flexibility of the PC to edit related documents, browse game-related forums, etc.
It's all about flexibility, which the PC provides and the "post PC" device does not, at least not yet. So component vendors like Newegg are not dead yet. Ask again in 3 years.
Windows 7 & 8 are "not bloated" only if you compare them to Windows Vista, which apparently was specifically designed to be awful and make the subsequent releases look better.
I have used Windows since v3.0 in 1990. The big leap was when they built an entirely new OS, Windows NT, which was enhanced and mass-marketed as Windows 2000. Windows XP made some small improvements over Win2K. Every Windows release since XP has been a steaming pile of crap supported by $100M's of marketing, plus OEM license agreements with computer manufacturers who ~want~ Windows to suck up hardware resources and degrade over time, so the average Joe is forced to buy new hardware in a few years.
That's my analysis from a couple decades of experience with Windows. Feel free to share your own.
Totally agree.
If Apple sold a Macbook Air with a convertible capacitive touchscreen and 3-button trackpoint, I would seriously consider it despite their price premium and maintenance issues. But they don't. So Thinkpad FTW.
I agree with you that consoles target a market that is too large to care, overall, about user-generated content. PCs are definitely about fine-grained individuality. (Which makes it somewhat ironic that Apple ran the "think different" campaign and now markets some of the most mainstream, locked-down hardware in the world...but I digress.)
There is no technical reason that consoles could not download user-generated mods and mappacks. Purely a question of demand.
Frankly I would rather download game code onto my consoles, which ONLY play games, than onto any of my PCs, which have lots of personal data.
Do you know what it ~does~ mean?
No.
Fixed that for ya. :o)
Duh, obviously. Thanks for the negative. Do you know what it ~does~ mean? ;o)
I dunno about this. The last 2 generations of game consoles seem to fine for FPS these days.
My old PS2 takes a USB keyboard & mouse to play games like Deus Ex. I haven't tried keyboard & mouse on our XBox 360 but it has USB, so I don't see why not if the game supports it.
Ultimately the only thing you miss on a console is the absolute cutting edge of 3D rendering...which is usually engineered into crappy games (eg Crysis) solely to sell the hardware.
Right. Only the sales are falling, which is what naturally happens when a market is saturated with "good enough" product. This is despite Microsoft's herculean efforts to obsolete otherwise very capable hardware with new bloats of Windows. :p
When my iPad can drive at least three UXGA displays, work with all of my peripherals (mice, 3D mice, keyboards, hard drives, cd/dvd drives, printers, scanners, etc), provide flexible ports for eg DMX lighting control or RS232 projector control or Arduino programming or GPS logging, and transcode h264 video in real time...THEN I might be in the post-PC era.
Until then, I have plenty of uses for a PC. And newegg has a huge market for upgrades and peripherals. And in my experience they are one of the few vendors whose specialization makes them better than Amazon.
I know you're being humorous, but...I never compared the hardware.
Plus I don't think that Apple's products are all toys.
Their computers have sucked in a big way for most of the last decade. But the ipod, iphone, and ipad are excellent, perhaps even the best, "real hardware" in their categories.
Your mention of patents only shows that you are deeply and thoroughly confused by this topic.
I have filed for several registered trademarks over the years.
You cannot reasonably expect to defend a mark that is used contemporaneously in the same field.
Hell, it's hard enough when the same name is used in a radically ~different~ field. It is deeply ironic that you use "Apple" as an example. The "Apple" name was the subject of a trademark dispute between Apple Inc (the computer company) and Apple Records (Apple Corps Ltd, the Beatles' commercial conglomerate) that lasted for almost 3 decades. The dispute began in 1978 and was only settled in 2007. This is why the Beatles' songs only showed up on iTunes last year.
Facebook is not software; it is a "special-purpose investment vehicle" designed to extract a few $B from some high-net-worth shmucks before it vanishes.
If Facebook was ever forced to publicly disclose their real numbers, I think you would also have to remove them from the "successful" category.
Unless you work for Goldman Sachs, of course. ;o)
Correct. The MultiTouch thinkpads have both a high-resolution pressure-sensitive active digitizer (Wacom), and a simpler resistive touch layer that you can poke with fingers or chopsticks or whatever. Different usage of the term, but it still refers to touch-screen technologies on a computing device.
My point was, IBM was already using "multitouch" in their press releases, brochures, websites, etc. in 2006. So there's no way that Apple could have trademarked the term in 2007.
The real story is around why the trademark application was filed at all...why it took almost 5 years to reject...and how much human potential was wasted on this idiocy.
From TFA:
Apple originally applied for the trademark on January 9, 2007, the day the iPhone was introduced.
...and I'm writing this post on a Thinkpad X60 tablet that was marketed as a "MultiTouch" model in 2006.
It's stunning that Apple would even ~try~ to trademark a term that other manufacturers were already using in mainstream marketing & press releases.
The Apple trademark lawyers in this instance were either very stupid, very lazy, or very self-interested. ;)
All the limits on computation (except regarding storage) that you hear about (e.g. Landauer limit) are on irreversible computing, which is how current architecture works. It is the irreversibility of an operation that causes it to increase entropy.
No. The loss of power as heat has nothing whatsoever to do with the reversibility of computing operations.
Power is lost (and thermal entropy increased) because of the electrical resistivity of the materials from which our CPUs are made.
If you discover a room-temperature superconductor, please let the rest of the world know, because the researchers haven't found it yet. Bonus points if you can fabricate a modern CPU using that superconducting material.
...BIOS’s antiquated limitations were hampering systems...
What exactly are these limitations, in real-world terms? My systems all seem to boot & run fast right now...
If the BIOS has limitations, why not just flash an updated BIOS? All of my machines have had at least one BIOS update since manufacture. No problem.
As for the mini-OS-before-boot concept...I already have a bunch of Linux "Live CDs" that I use to partition drives, image & restore partitions, scan for viruses, etc without having to boot Windows. Why would I want to put a "pre-boot" OS on my hard drive, where it can be hacked and infected?
Someone please enlighten me if UEFI has any real-world benefits to outweigh its costs.
Busted DC jacks (and sometimes USB ports) are a huge problem. Mounting the DC jack to the case and connecting to the motherboard with a cable makes replacement easier, but it's only treating the symptom and not the problem.
Seems to me, that approach solves the problem quite well.
I've never seen a "busted" DC jack...just DC jacks that were soldered rigidly to the PCB, and broke away.
That said, the magnetic connector on the macbooks is a neat design. My only complaint is that it disconnects much too easily. I can't count the number of times that my girlfriend has been using her macbook in bed or livingroom and got a low-battery warning because she didn't realize the connector had fallen off. The battery on that machine has seen far more cycles than it had too, and is near end-of-life now.
This is surely part of Apple's master plan. Easily disconnected power = more battery cycles = shorter battery life = more high-margin battery sales. Plus if you have a Macbook Air, you have to go to the Apple store to have your battery replaced. Brilliant but slimy.
...an extraordinary challenge to provide safe and healthy homes for the world's burgeoning population...
We don't need more homes; we need a smaller population.
Treating this symptom will only make the disease worse. Give people a "safe & healthy home" and they are more likely to have more kids in it.
The smart kids at MIT should be working on global birth control education instead.
However, mutiple cores are really more useful for transcoding and other "geeky" stuff. As more people rip their DVDs to save them from teh scratches of their kids or the clumsiness of their friends , or just common wear and tear, those cores will keep being more important.
Of course, they are business reasons for using them, too....
Agree with the first sentence. Video transcoding to h264 is the most processor-intensive task that any consumer is likely to throw at their cpu today.
As for ripping DVDs, a Pentium III can do this, no sweat. It's an easy job for pretty much every consumer PC made in the last decade. Transcoding to "modern" codecs is the hard part.
Business reasons? Not for the vast majority of business users. Unless they are forced to use a Microsoft OS (eg Vistam, Win 7) that is ~designed~ to overburden the hardware with no added benefit to the user.
Microsoft understands this and they made darn sure that Linux wasn't allowed to establish a beach head in netbooks. Intel could use the same tactics to fight off ARM processors.
Apparently not, since the dominant smartphone (iphone) and tablet (ipad) have sold tens (hundreds?) of millions of units running ARM processors.
Perhaps Intel should start to worry about the lower end of the processor world.
This has always belonged to the likes of Motorola and others.
Except...an entire generation of engineers cut their teeth on the Intel 8051.
Does Intel still collect licensing fees from other manufacturers who used 8051 intellectual property? I dunno. But they definitely were a player in this space, directly or indirectly, at one point.
$20-30 is a very inexpensive prototyping setup, but people can't afford to lose a whole board every time they make a little project
Why would they lose the board?
You can use the prototyping board to ~prototype~, then for the finished project, use a bare ATmega328 with a couple of filter caps, reset pullup resistor, and some headers. Maybe also an external crystal & caps if you need very fast timing (eg 250kbps serial). Total cost: $5 or less. Add a couple bucks if you want to buy ATmega328's pre-flashed with the Arduino bootloader instead of flashing them yourself.
One of the beautiful things about the Arduino ecosystem is that there are plenty of options available to hit your cost/effort target. Everything from the $30 Uno boards, to the $20 Pro SMD boards, to $10 DIY with preflashed chips and prefab PCBs (eg Boarduino), to $5 or less DIY with your own PCB or even dead-bug style.
The cost depends on how lazy you are and/or how many units you plan to make.
If you're running WIndows and one of your processes explodes, like Firefox seems to almost daily, and starts trying to burn up the entire CPU, it used to be a real problem, because the user interface became unresponsive.
We run several single-core "home theater" machines for web browsing & videos, all running XPSP3 and Firefox, and I can't remember when we last had a hang like that.
Perhaps last winter or spring, and almost certainly caused by Flash, not Firefox.
Anyway, Ctrl-Alt-Del and force quit is a quick&easy solution. No need for multiple cores.
X86 has a place, ARM has a place. When you need to do some heavy number crunching, or want huge detailed 3D worlds, or need to deal with a crapload of data? Then x86 is your guy.
If you have no idea what you need the processor to crunch, then yeah, a high-power general-purpose CPU is "your guy".
But if you think about it beforehand and realize that your device needs to do 3D rendering, or H264 video decompression, or any of a number of common high-horsepower tasks, you can augment the CPU with custom silicon that beats the stuffing out of a general CPU, with less power.
That is exactly what the current crop of handheld devices do. They have special-purpose silicon to do the heavy lifting for these tasks. Hence core CPU horsepower is less relevant for the vast majority of usage.
Google the make/model of your hard drive and "TVS diode".
In most cases you can remove the hard drive from the external case, find that diode on the drive itself (near the connector), clip it off with flush cutters, and you're good to go for drive recovery.
Just make absolutely sure you use the right power supply after removing the TVS.