My point is that you can't just write down the timezone. You can assume local time, but if something happens in the hour that overlaps during DST, you must note whether it is the first time the clock struck 11:30 or the second time. "11:30pm PST" doesn't tell you what time something happened if it is the night DST starts because there were 2 "11:30pm PST"s that night, one hour apart.
You could also just mark the time in UTC. And in fact most computer logs do just that to greatly simplify things. And that is my point. It is so much simpler to use a time system that is consistent. It is not simple to change tradition, but if DST was not already our tradition keeping track of time would be simpler.
1. I disagree with your ridiculous claim that changing clocks is zero work.
2. The trial thing was just 1 example. Every single thing which is based on time must correctly handle the fact that it becomes disrupted twice a year every year. It is bad enough that we have natural changes to our time system from leap year and small changes to the length of a day, without introducing more artificial changes needlessly.
3. If the goal was to have daylight hours in the evening rather than the morning, then we would be doing DST the other way around (i.e. Fall forward/spring back), because currently DST causes even less evening hours of daylight in the evening in the winter than we would get without it.
4. I didn't know you suggested moving clocks 4 hours, and I wasn't trying to make it look absurd. I was trying to show that current DST is not implemented in a way to achieve it's goals even if we assumed they were goals worth wanting.
5. If you want to preserve daylight hours in the evening, and If you want the clocks shifted by 4 hours, I hope you realize that that this will leave winter with 8 hours less daylight in the evening compared with summer (e.g. 4pm vs. midnight sunsets).
Like I said, neither option is impossible to deal with. Both require some work. I am arguing that one requires less work.
"Everyone remember to set you clocks back an hour", is just as much work as "Everyone remember to set your alarm for 9am instead of 8am now". The difference is that a lot of infrastructure can be simplified, and a lot of little things become less error prone.
Losing an hour in the spring and getting an extra hour in the summer means that every time based log looks something like this twice a year:
11:58: A
11:59: B
12:00: C
11:01: D
11:02: E
When did the murder occur? 11:30pm. Was that the first time it was 11:30 that fall night or the second time? Oh that's a good question, I didn't think to write that down. I guess this trial is fucked.
Furthermore, the sunrise shifts by as much as 4 hours over the year, and we only shift by an hour for DST. Even with DST there is a 3 hour difference between sunrise in winter and in summer. If it was really so advantageous to have the sin rise at the same time everyday, why wouldn't we set our clock forward 3 times and back 3 times over the course of the year? Or at least set it forward 2 hours ahead and 2 hours back? The current implementation is inconsistent with the goal of keeping the sunrise at the same time.
If I didn't know anything about human culture, I would have no idea to expect the sun to be directly over me if a clock said 12:00. There is no reason people can't get used to a different set of numbers for when things normally happen. In Europe and the military they have a 24 hour clock.
For people who aren't concerned with other places (i.e. their whole world is their town, they could get used to using zulu time within one generation.
For people who travel, and participate in the global economy, I think it would be more valuable to have a sense of simultaneity. When someone says "The teleconference is on Wednesday at 17:00", everyone knows when that is. If you want to know what time of day it will be for someone else, then you have to do a timezone calculation.
I think this is a better system than someone saying (The teleconference is on Wednesday 17:00 Madrid time) and everyone who is not in Madrid needs to figure out what time it will be in their timezone. You get to know that in Mardid it will be early evening without any calculations, but that information is less useful in my opinion.
Neither daylight savings nor the absence of daylight savings is extremely difficult to manage. It is that daylight savings is more difficult to manage correctly than simply changing the times you do things.
We could for example change the size of a liter of water to double the amount in summer time. People need to drink more water in summer because it's hotter. If we double the amount of a liter in the summer then we can always drink 1 liter of water and be safe from heat stroke. We could even call them "summer liters", to avoid confusion.
This is completely doable. We already have a bunch of weird units. one more won't do too much harm. We could manage it. But the point is that it would ultimately make things more confusing and create more work than just keeping the units the same and acknowledging that most people need to drink more units of water in the summer.
Having common units of measurement that don't change makes things simpler. Converting between units requires effort and introduces a risk of making mistakes.
You could do it in are many inconvenient ways to do it, but we could also just do the same thing without changing clocks at all. We just decree that in fall and winter everyone does everything one hour later. If you go to school at 8am normally, then you go at 9am. If you go to work at 6am, then you go to work at 7am. You do exactly what we are doing now, without changing any clocks.
I agree. You can change the times at which things happen to make them more convenient( e.g. go to school after the sun rises), without changing the time.
Let's say I need to cut a piece of wood that's one foot long. Oops actually it needs to be a little shorter. I don't go out and get a ruler with shorter feet, I just cut the wood at 11-inches on a standard ruler that doesn't change. Daylight "savings" is much more inconvenient than the fact that I might have to get up at a different time. Also, it doesn't save any daylight at all. It just *attempts* to keep the sunrise somewhat similar while drastically changing the time at which sunset happens. Why we would care so much more about sunrise than sunset or even consistency of time in this modern world, I am not sure.
1, Being able to do a software upgrade without rebooting (i.e. no downtime) can be done now, but it costs more. Most companies are not willing to make this tradeoff because they don't see zero downtime as valuable enough.
2. Even if computers (and networks) were so fast that they could transmit an entire ubuntu release, install it, and reboot in 1 nanosecond, that would mean that other computers would be fast enough to notice the 1 nanosecond downtime of the computer performing the upgrade.
I wasn't suggesting that you were implying they were hardcore lefties were hypocrites. I was just pointing out that all actually poor people don't love walmart. I don't even care about people who dislike walmart shopping there. I don't find it necessarily hypocritical. For one thing, one of the primary complaints of walmart is that it drives out other businesses (leaving only walmart to shop at). While this may be true, I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing. But even for someone who doesn't like walmart, I wouldn't hold it against them for shopping there, if it was their only alternative.
I hate AT&T, but if they managed to eliminate all the other cell phone carriers I'd probably get an AT&T phone if my alternative was no cell phone, or only carriers with even more terrible service. I might admire someone willing to take a stand and boycott AT&T, but I wouldn't consider anyone a hypocrite for not boycotting. Each person can decide what level of activism they are willing to adopt and what they are willing to sacrifice for it. Some people just can't afford to take as many stands as they might like if they did not have other things to worry about. We all pick our battles.
That's a pretty broad generalization. For one thing, many hardcore leftists are actually poor. Many of my friends fall into this category. Also many of the people complaining about Walmart's business practices are it's employees and contractors who tend not to be high up on the socio-economic scale.
I personally don't find many of these complaints very interesting because nobody is forced to work at walmart or be one of their contractors. If the best job you can find is working for/at walmart, you should be grateful they are there, because you'd have even worse options without them.
It's $3 for checks under $1000 and $6 for checks over $1000.
The reason I say it's a good deal, is not that I think it's fine to pay $3 per paycheck. That's stupid when you can just open a bank account. The reason banks offer free checking, is because they get to invest the money remaining in your account and keep the profit, and maybe pay you a small interest rate. They make their money (just not directly from you). Walmart is essentially running a bank where every time money is deposited via check, it is completely withdrawn as cash. They don't get to invest your money, they just charge a fee. If every Wells Fargo customer did this, they'd have to charge you $3 too.
Wii alone supports slideshows (Photo Channel), Netflix, Hulu Plus, and YouTube. This leaves "etc."; please elaborate.
I know that, only about half my friends own a game console. They do however all own laptops.
Provided you live alone. If you live with someone else in the house, you need two devices anyway, and it's cheaper to make the one connected to the TV a limited-purpose device.
So these 2 people are sharing a computer to do homework?
It is worthwhile when the context is specifically the difference between two computers on the one hand and one computer and one console on the other.
Well for one thing you can't have a conversation on slashdot on a typical console. You can list the things you *can* do on a console. You can not even list the things you can do on a general purpose PC. It's easier to list the things you *can't* do, which is play console specific video games, and even then you can play older console specific games on emulators.
In my experience, usually only one child will have a computer-mediated assignment due the day after it is assigned. For assignments with longer due dates, they can take turns over the weekend.
That's pretty convenient for your argument that it is common for 2 people to want to play video games and do homework at the same time, but uncommon for 2 people to want to do homework at the same time.
Nobody buys games without knowing pretty much exactly what they are getting these days. When I was a kid I'd go to the store and just pick an NES game to buy that I had never played before once a year. Sometimes it came out good, but sometimes the game I blindly bought sucked. Now kids can just look up online reviews. They can watch people playing the games on youtube. There is no need to ever buy a shitty game anymore regardless of how much crap there is out there. And for that exact reason that the stuff we consider crap nowadays is orders of magnitude better than crap from 20 or 30 years ago. There is much more competition, consumers are smarter, and the bar is higher. We don't need lockouts to be forced into making good "choices".
You only need to connect 2 cables: power, hdmi. Network keyboard and mouse can be wireless if the hassle is just too great.
Plus if you consider the immense financial burden of the extra couple $hundred the average person was unwilling to spend on a 2nd "tv computer", imagine how happy they will be saving another couple $hundred from not having to buy a console. It may very well be enough savings to make them willing to change cables frequently, or just do all their computing/gaming in one place.
There are poor people who benefit from saving money only having 1 device.
There are wealthier people who benefit from having 2 computers rather than moving 1 around.
The amount of people willing to spend $1500 for a computer and a console but not $2000 for 2 computers because it's just too expensive is pretty small.
There are reasons to buy a console other than price. I suspect most people have a computer and a console because that was the best option 5 years ago when it made more sense.
Technically they are, but the median home user does not understand this. The median home user has a mental set against connecting "a computer" to "a television".
I don't believe this is true. Almost everyone I know already does this at least on a temporary basis for slideshows, netflix, hulu, youtube, etc. Most of my friends are 40+
Currently it's far cheaper for the second device to be a closed device (namely a game console) than for the second device to be an open device (namely a PC).
And having 1 device that can do both is cheaper than having 2.
What exactly are the benefits to the median home user that would justify 1. paying the substantial premium for a general-purpose computer as the second device over a closed second device, and 2. fussing with antivirus on the general-purpose computer?
I don't feel like its worthwhile to enumerate all the things computers can do beyond homework and facebook, or how these are things a "median home user" might value. I also accept your implication that the only feature of a general purpose computer that an average consumer is willing to pay a premium for is homework or facebook.
2. a household has both someone who wants to watch video or play a video game and someone who wants to do homework.
What about a household with 2 people who need to do homework at the same time?
I feel like $3-$6 is quite reasonable. That's about how much an ATM charges to withdraw money. I don't think walmart is actually as evil as people think. There are companies whose success I feel is much more detrimental to the community as a whole, particularly those which have no bid contracts with the government.
Also, the steambox is pretty small. It doesn't seem hard at all to carry around. If I only had $1000 to spend on devices, I might very well rather have a steambox than a crappy computer and a crappy console, and just carry this box between rooms.
I can see this being especially convenient once network/wireless communications are good enough to carry high quality video signals. You would not have to plug in anything except power. If the video can go over a network straight to the TV, then you don't even need to have the box near the TV. It can just be in a closet somewhere.
1. TVs and computer screens are basically the same thing at this point, they are just different sizes. I actually watch most of my TV on a smaller LCD on my desk.
2. for someone who wants a big television *and* a smaller computer screen at a desk, that person will either need 2 devices *or* will need to carry devices back and forth (assuming they are far enough away) regardless of whether these devices are consoles or regular computers.
3. There are more benefits to a general purpose computer than just doing your homework and facebook.
4. There is no reason you can't do your homework on a 60" TV. Screens are screens. If it has enough resolution to read wikipedia articles and run MS office, you can do your homework on it. You could probably even do your homework on a modern mobile phone if you had a way to free your hands to use a keyboard and mouse, while the screen was held close enough to your face to read small text.
I think people just get used to things. People develop their habits and when new technology comes around that opens new possibilities, it takes a while for people to learn how to exploit them. There was a time when big TV screens did not have high enough resolution to read small text. There was a time when TVs could not be connected to general purpose computers. Maybe everyone is used to doing homework at a desk. That doesn't mean a new generation of people will be used to that, or that people can't change. Afterall, I learned to watch TV at my desk.
Developing games for a console also requires "financial stability" and a "dedicated secure office" (source: warioworld.com)
While that maybe true for some consoles today, I don't think that will be true for all consoles for all eternity. There are new conoles coming out that run steam and android. I don't think these systems will require those things because they haven't when they weren't console based.
If new console makers can offer better games at lower prices (i.e. because the developers have less hoops to jump through) then I think the market will reward that. It already has for steam and android, and I don't see why that can't succeed on a console.
Yes. An operating system that allows self-signed code to run, such as GNU/Linux or Windows or Mac OS X or Android, guarantees a larger selection of games than an operating system that allows only code signed by the device's manufacturer to run, especially when the manufacturer has a policy of refusing to sign code from (say) a home-based family business. This is why the console I'm supporting in the next generation is Ouya. On the other hand, a lot of people appear to consider the benefit of not having to fuss with antivirus software worth the lack of selection.
Yes. A lot of people don't want to put a typical tower PC next to the TV.
When I said "does the OS really matter?" I meant that the OS isn't tied to the hardware. Whatever aesthetic preferences a person has about their television area is separate from what kind of software they want (restrictive/safe or free/less safe).
The PlayStation 3 was ridiculed for costing 599 USD at launch. The Piston will cost nearly twice that.
The PS3 launched in 2006. Surely there has been some inflation since then (e.g. maybe 15%?) . Also the PS3 did a lot more than just play games. It was also a blu-ray player, so many people justified spending this much. I bought one for $400 and I use it almost entirely as a media player. I am assuming the steambox will do a lot more than a normal console. If you can use it as a PC that might justify the cost. I just spent $1000 on a new pc. If I wanted a portable one, I moght have gone in for one of these steamboxes.
Wii beat PS3 early on in part because $249 is far cheaper than $599
I think the main draw of the wii wasn't the price, but the novelty. People really liked the controllers. In fact a lot of people who were not even in the market for a console based system bought one because they enjoyed playing it much more than a traditional system. I'll bet most people who bought wiis wouldn't rather have a ps3 even though it was more expensive (excluding the option of selling the ps3, buying another wii, and keeping the remaining money).
I think people will buy systems that they think are fun, and I think the wii is a good example of that. If a new system is fun, people will eventually figure it out by word of mouth (i.e. friends, internet articles, etc) even without traditional advertising.
Except that they never actually had to install any physical telecommunications equipment. They provide an overlay network. It is a network that uses the existing phone and internet networks to provide functionality. They take advantage of the fact that communication over a phone handset is fundamentally no different than sending bits over the internet. An actual telecom company provides access to some public resource that they were granted stewardship over by a government (e.g. phone lines, fiber cables, wireless spectrum, etc). In some cases they actually own those resources. This just seems like another case of a European government trying to shakedown a rich company for money, (e.g. Microsoft, etc).
If I was skype I would just turn off access to France and let the people fire their politicians then turn it back on.
It won't be long before Europe declares wikipedia and youtube public utilities and start trying to extort money from them too
It doesn't seem like astroturfing is a big problem. The reviews are all still from registered amazon accounts. I haven't seen any evidence of companies leaving a bunch of fake reviews under zombie amazon accounts.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no unethical treatment of elephants in Estonia.
My point is that you can't just write down the timezone. You can assume local time, but if something happens in the hour that overlaps during DST, you must note whether it is the first time the clock struck 11:30 or the second time. "11:30pm PST" doesn't tell you what time something happened if it is the night DST starts because there were 2 "11:30pm PST"s that night, one hour apart.
You could also just mark the time in UTC. And in fact most computer logs do just that to greatly simplify things. And that is my point. It is so much simpler to use a time system that is consistent. It is not simple to change tradition, but if DST was not already our tradition keeping track of time would be simpler.
1. I disagree with your ridiculous claim that changing clocks is zero work.
2. The trial thing was just 1 example. Every single thing which is based on time must correctly handle the fact that it becomes disrupted twice a year every year. It is bad enough that we have natural changes to our time system from leap year and small changes to the length of a day, without introducing more artificial changes needlessly.
3. If the goal was to have daylight hours in the evening rather than the morning, then we would be doing DST the other way around (i.e. Fall forward/spring back), because currently DST causes even less evening hours of daylight in the evening in the winter than we would get without it.
4. I didn't know you suggested moving clocks 4 hours, and I wasn't trying to make it look absurd. I was trying to show that current DST is not implemented in a way to achieve it's goals even if we assumed they were goals worth wanting.
5. If you want to preserve daylight hours in the evening, and If you want the clocks shifted by 4 hours, I hope you realize that that this will leave winter with 8 hours less daylight in the evening compared with summer (e.g. 4pm vs. midnight sunsets).
Like I said, neither option is impossible to deal with. Both require some work. I am arguing that one requires less work.
"Everyone remember to set you clocks back an hour", is just as much work as "Everyone remember to set your alarm for 9am instead of 8am now". The difference is that a lot of infrastructure can be simplified, and a lot of little things become less error prone.
Losing an hour in the spring and getting an extra hour in the summer means that every time based log looks something like this twice a year:
11:58: A
11:59: B
12:00: C
11:01: D
11:02: E
When did the murder occur? 11:30pm. Was that the first time it was 11:30 that fall night or the second time? Oh that's a good question, I didn't think to write that down. I guess this trial is fucked.
Furthermore, the sunrise shifts by as much as 4 hours over the year, and we only shift by an hour for DST. Even with DST there is a 3 hour difference between sunrise in winter and in summer. If it was really so advantageous to have the sin rise at the same time everyday, why wouldn't we set our clock forward 3 times and back 3 times over the course of the year? Or at least set it forward 2 hours ahead and 2 hours back? The current implementation is inconsistent with the goal of keeping the sunrise at the same time.
If I didn't know anything about human culture, I would have no idea to expect the sun to be directly over me if a clock said 12:00. There is no reason people can't get used to a different set of numbers for when things normally happen. In Europe and the military they have a 24 hour clock.
For people who aren't concerned with other places (i.e. their whole world is their town, they could get used to using zulu time within one generation.
For people who travel, and participate in the global economy, I think it would be more valuable to have a sense of simultaneity. When someone says "The teleconference is on Wednesday at 17:00", everyone knows when that is. If you want to know what time of day it will be for someone else, then you have to do a timezone calculation.
I think this is a better system than someone saying (The teleconference is on Wednesday 17:00 Madrid time) and everyone who is not in Madrid needs to figure out what time it will be in their timezone. You get to know that in Mardid it will be early evening without any calculations, but that information is less useful in my opinion.
Neither daylight savings nor the absence of daylight savings is extremely difficult to manage. It is that daylight savings is more difficult to manage correctly than simply changing the times you do things.
We could for example change the size of a liter of water to double the amount in summer time. People need to drink more water in summer because it's hotter. If we double the amount of a liter in the summer then we can always drink 1 liter of water and be safe from heat stroke. We could even call them "summer liters", to avoid confusion.
This is completely doable. We already have a bunch of weird units. one more won't do too much harm. We could manage it. But the point is that it would ultimately make things more confusing and create more work than just keeping the units the same and acknowledging that most people need to drink more units of water in the summer.
Having common units of measurement that don't change makes things simpler. Converting between units requires effort and introduces a risk of making mistakes.
You could do it in are many inconvenient ways to do it, but we could also just do the same thing without changing clocks at all. We just decree that in fall and winter everyone does everything one hour later. If you go to school at 8am normally, then you go at 9am. If you go to work at 6am, then you go to work at 7am. You do exactly what we are doing now, without changing any clocks.
I agree. You can change the times at which things happen to make them more convenient( e.g. go to school after the sun rises), without changing the time.
Let's say I need to cut a piece of wood that's one foot long. Oops actually it needs to be a little shorter. I don't go out and get a ruler with shorter feet, I just cut the wood at 11-inches on a standard ruler that doesn't change. Daylight "savings" is much more inconvenient than the fact that I might have to get up at a different time. Also, it doesn't save any daylight at all. It just *attempts* to keep the sunrise somewhat similar while drastically changing the time at which sunset happens. Why we would care so much more about sunrise than sunset or even consistency of time in this modern world, I am not sure.
1, Being able to do a software upgrade without rebooting (i.e. no downtime) can be done now, but it costs more. Most companies are not willing to make this tradeoff because they don't see zero downtime as valuable enough.
2. Even if computers (and networks) were so fast that they could transmit an entire ubuntu release, install it, and reboot in 1 nanosecond, that would mean that other computers would be fast enough to notice the 1 nanosecond downtime of the computer performing the upgrade.
I wasn't suggesting that you were implying they were hardcore lefties were hypocrites. I was just pointing out that all actually poor people don't love walmart. I don't even care about people who dislike walmart shopping there. I don't find it necessarily hypocritical. For one thing, one of the primary complaints of walmart is that it drives out other businesses (leaving only walmart to shop at). While this may be true, I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing. But even for someone who doesn't like walmart, I wouldn't hold it against them for shopping there, if it was their only alternative.
I hate AT&T, but if they managed to eliminate all the other cell phone carriers I'd probably get an AT&T phone if my alternative was no cell phone, or only carriers with even more terrible service. I might admire someone willing to take a stand and boycott AT&T, but I wouldn't consider anyone a hypocrite for not boycotting. Each person can decide what level of activism they are willing to adopt and what they are willing to sacrifice for it. Some people just can't afford to take as many stands as they might like if they did not have other things to worry about. We all pick our battles.
That's a pretty broad generalization. For one thing, many hardcore leftists are actually poor. Many of my friends fall into this category. Also many of the people complaining about Walmart's business practices are it's employees and contractors who tend not to be high up on the socio-economic scale.
I personally don't find many of these complaints very interesting because nobody is forced to work at walmart or be one of their contractors. If the best job you can find is working for/at walmart, you should be grateful they are there, because you'd have even worse options without them.
It's $3 for checks under $1000 and $6 for checks over $1000.
The reason I say it's a good deal, is not that I think it's fine to pay $3 per paycheck. That's stupid when you can just open a bank account. The reason banks offer free checking, is because they get to invest the money remaining in your account and keep the profit, and maybe pay you a small interest rate. They make their money (just not directly from you). Walmart is essentially running a bank where every time money is deposited via check, it is completely withdrawn as cash. They don't get to invest your money, they just charge a fee. If every Wells Fargo customer did this, they'd have to charge you $3 too.
Wii alone supports slideshows (Photo Channel), Netflix, Hulu Plus, and YouTube. This leaves "etc."; please elaborate.
I know that, only about half my friends own a game console. They do however all own laptops.
Provided you live alone. If you live with someone else in the house, you need two devices anyway, and it's cheaper to make the one connected to the TV a limited-purpose device.
So these 2 people are sharing a computer to do homework?
It is worthwhile when the context is specifically the difference between two computers on the one hand and one computer and one console on the other.
Well for one thing you can't have a conversation on slashdot on a typical console. You can list the things you *can* do on a console. You can not even list the things you can do on a general purpose PC. It's easier to list the things you *can't* do, which is play console specific video games, and even then you can play older console specific games on emulators.
In my experience, usually only one child will have a computer-mediated assignment due the day after it is assigned. For assignments with longer due dates, they can take turns over the weekend.
That's pretty convenient for your argument that it is common for 2 people to want to play video games and do homework at the same time, but uncommon for 2 people to want to do homework at the same time.
I am going to just pretend you didn't say that
Nobody buys games without knowing pretty much exactly what they are getting these days. When I was a kid I'd go to the store and just pick an NES game to buy that I had never played before once a year. Sometimes it came out good, but sometimes the game I blindly bought sucked. Now kids can just look up online reviews. They can watch people playing the games on youtube. There is no need to ever buy a shitty game anymore regardless of how much crap there is out there. And for that exact reason that the stuff we consider crap nowadays is orders of magnitude better than crap from 20 or 30 years ago. There is much more competition, consumers are smarter, and the bar is higher. We don't need lockouts to be forced into making good "choices".
Less than 5 minutes?
You only need to connect 2 cables: power, hdmi. Network keyboard and mouse can be wireless if the hassle is just too great.
Plus if you consider the immense financial burden of the extra couple $hundred the average person was unwilling to spend on a 2nd "tv computer", imagine how happy they will be saving another couple $hundred from not having to buy a console. It may very well be enough savings to make them willing to change cables frequently, or just do all their computing /gaming in one place.
There are poor people who benefit from saving money only having 1 device.
There are wealthier people who benefit from having 2 computers rather than moving 1 around.
The amount of people willing to spend $1500 for a computer and a console but not $2000 for 2 computers because it's just too expensive is pretty small.
There are reasons to buy a console other than price. I suspect most people have a computer and a console because that was the best option 5 years ago when it made more sense.
Technically they are, but the median home user does not understand this. The median home user has a mental set against connecting "a computer" to "a television".
I don't believe this is true. Almost everyone I know already does this at least on a temporary basis for slideshows, netflix, hulu, youtube, etc. Most of my friends are 40+
Currently it's far cheaper for the second device to be a closed device (namely a game console) than for the second device to be an open device (namely a PC).
And having 1 device that can do both is cheaper than having 2.
What exactly are the benefits to the median home user that would justify 1. paying the substantial premium for a general-purpose computer as the second device over a closed second device, and 2. fussing with antivirus on the general-purpose computer?
I don't feel like its worthwhile to enumerate all the things computers can do beyond homework and facebook, or how these are things a "median home user" might value. I also accept your implication that the only feature of a general purpose computer that an average consumer is willing to pay a premium for is homework or facebook.
2. a household has both someone who wants to watch video or play a video game and someone who wants to do homework.
What about a household with 2 people who need to do homework at the same time?
I like to stack all my parentheses at the beginning of the file and all the semi colons at the end of the file ke this:
(){(){}}
void foo
if bar != 0
bar++
return bar
;;
The code doesn't compile or even convey any semantic correctness, but it is more aesthetically pleasing.
I feel like $3-$6 is quite reasonable. That's about how much an ATM charges to withdraw money. I don't think walmart is actually as evil as people think. There are companies whose success I feel is much more detrimental to the community as a whole, particularly those which have no bid contracts with the government.
Also, the steambox is pretty small. It doesn't seem hard at all to carry around. If I only had $1000 to spend on devices, I might very well rather have a steambox than a crappy computer and a crappy console, and just carry this box between rooms.
I can see this being especially convenient once network/wireless communications are good enough to carry high quality video signals. You would not have to plug in anything except power. If the video can go over a network straight to the TV, then you don't even need to have the box near the TV. It can just be in a closet somewhere.
1. TVs and computer screens are basically the same thing at this point, they are just different sizes. I actually watch most of my TV on a smaller LCD on my desk.
2. for someone who wants a big television *and* a smaller computer screen at a desk, that person will either need 2 devices *or* will need to carry devices back and forth (assuming they are far enough away) regardless of whether these devices are consoles or regular computers.
3. There are more benefits to a general purpose computer than just doing your homework and facebook.
4. There is no reason you can't do your homework on a 60" TV. Screens are screens. If it has enough resolution to read wikipedia articles and run MS office, you can do your homework on it. You could probably even do your homework on a modern mobile phone if you had a way to free your hands to use a keyboard and mouse, while the screen was held close enough to your face to read small text.
I think people just get used to things. People develop their habits and when new technology comes around that opens new possibilities, it takes a while for people to learn how to exploit them. There was a time when big TV screens did not have high enough resolution to read small text. There was a time when TVs could not be connected to general purpose computers. Maybe everyone is used to doing homework at a desk. That doesn't mean a new generation of people will be used to that, or that people can't change. Afterall, I learned to watch TV at my desk.
Everybody knows it goes: long pope, short pope, long pope, short pope....
Developing games for a console also requires "financial stability" and a "dedicated secure office" (source: warioworld.com)
While that maybe true for some consoles today, I don't think that will be true for all consoles for all eternity. There are new conoles coming out that run steam and android. I don't think these systems will require those things because they haven't when they weren't console based.
If new console makers can offer better games at lower prices (i.e. because the developers have less hoops to jump through) then I think the market will reward that. It already has for steam and android, and I don't see why that can't succeed on a console.
Yes. An operating system that allows self-signed code to run, such as GNU/Linux or Windows or Mac OS X or Android, guarantees a larger selection of games than an operating system that allows only code signed by the device's manufacturer to run, especially when the manufacturer has a policy of refusing to sign code from (say) a home-based family business. This is why the console I'm supporting in the next generation is Ouya. On the other hand, a lot of people appear to consider the benefit of not having to fuss with antivirus software worth the lack of selection.
Yes. A lot of people don't want to put a typical tower PC next to the TV.
When I said "does the OS really matter?" I meant that the OS isn't tied to the hardware. Whatever aesthetic preferences a person has about their television area is separate from what kind of software they want (restrictive/safe or free/less safe).
The PlayStation 3 was ridiculed for costing 599 USD at launch. The Piston will cost nearly twice that.
The PS3 launched in 2006. Surely there has been some inflation since then (e.g. maybe 15%?) . Also the PS3 did a lot more than just play games. It was also a blu-ray player, so many people justified spending this much. I bought one for $400 and I use it almost entirely as a media player. I am assuming the steambox will do a lot more than a normal console. If you can use it as a PC that might justify the cost. I just spent $1000 on a new pc. If I wanted a portable one, I moght have gone in for one of these steamboxes.
Wii beat PS3 early on in part because $249 is far cheaper than $599
I think the main draw of the wii wasn't the price, but the novelty. People really liked the controllers. In fact a lot of people who were not even in the market for a console based system bought one because they enjoyed playing it much more than a traditional system. I'll bet most people who bought wiis wouldn't rather have a ps3 even though it was more expensive (excluding the option of selling the ps3, buying another wii, and keeping the remaining money).
I think people will buy systems that they think are fun, and I think the wii is a good example of that. If a new system is fun, people will eventually figure it out by word of mouth (i.e. friends, internet articles, etc) even without traditional advertising.
Except that they never actually had to install any physical telecommunications equipment. They provide an overlay network. It is a network that uses the existing phone and internet networks to provide functionality. They take advantage of the fact that communication over a phone handset is fundamentally no different than sending bits over the internet. An actual telecom company provides access to some public resource that they were granted stewardship over by a government (e.g. phone lines, fiber cables, wireless spectrum, etc). In some cases they actually own those resources. This just seems like another case of a European government trying to shakedown a rich company for money, (e.g. Microsoft, etc).
If I was skype I would just turn off access to France and let the people fire their politicians then turn it back on.
It won't be long before Europe declares wikipedia and youtube public utilities and start trying to extort money from them too
It doesn't seem like astroturfing is a big problem. The reviews are all still from registered amazon accounts. I haven't seen any evidence of companies leaving a bunch of fake reviews under zombie amazon accounts.