6. Because many Windows people already bought the game at full price and don't feel the need to rebuy.
Windows has a pretty vibrant game market, and has good digital distribution. Many of the non-cheapskate Windows users already bought the games prior to the humble bundle happening. For example I remember when the first one came out and Linux users were spraining their arms patting themselves on the backs for paying $14 for the bundle, or about $3 per game. All I could think was that the two games I wanted from it, I already owned and had paid full price for. $20 for World of Goo and $10 for Gish. I was happy with that too, felt I got my money's worth.
So I didn't buy the bundle, there was no need. I didn't want the other games.
What you have to appreciate about the slightly higher average Linux numbers is it is still highly cheapskate. Paying a couple bucks for a game is not much at all. One game at regular price can be a good bit more than that.
I think that is no small part of it. I've only ever bought one humble bundle, and that one I didn't pay much for because again, I owned many of the games. I bought the Introversion bundle because I wanted to try Darwinia. I already owned Defcon, Uplink, and Dungeons of Dreadmor. I spend quite a bit on games, but I do it outside of the humble bundle. I think you'll find many of the non-cheapskate Windows gamers are the same.
When you have DRM in a game that fails by any method other than notifying the user and refusing to run, you create problem for legit customers. I know that DRM companies would like to try and convince people that their DRM never, ever, fails on a legit copy, but it happens all the time. DRM is not perfect, it has issues. Two games I can remember that failed to function on my system were Neverwinter Nights and Civilization 4 Beyond the Sword. Both gave me a "Insert the game disc to play," error even though I had the disc in. It was an issue with the DRM that took multiple patches to fix in NWN's case and one in BTS's case.
While that was very annoying, at least I knew what was going on. I took the game back to get a new disc, just in case that was the issue (sometimes there's a production problem) and when that didn't fix it, called the publisher. When a fix came out, they let me know.
However when it is a feature that just breaks the game, you don't know why it is happening and you get mad. It is then worse if you get moron fanboys jumping down your throat claiming you "must have pirated it" when you didn't and the devs saying that it only happens on pirated copies. It also can take way longer for a fix to happen because it takes longer for devs to acknowledge and fix the problems.
So I am not a fan of what SS3 did. This game is a much better method in that the code isn't DRM, rather they released a different version on the torrent sites themselves. So it can only affect someone who downloaded a copy since it is not present in the legit version.
I am ok with DRM in games but ONLY if it is non-intrusive, if it doesn't mess with my experience. If it breaks my game, I'll get real angry, real fast.
Steam forces their own DRM, Steamworks, on all games. Unlike some other DD servers (Impulse for example) there is no capability to release a game without the built-in DRM. Publishers can use additional DRM as well, but Steamworks is mandatory.
It's pretty low key DRM over all, most people are ok with it (I am) but it is DRM. You have to have Steam running and be logged in to your account to be able to play a game. You don't have to be online, you can cache your credentials and play offline, but you must have Steam running and logged in or you cannot play a game.
Many people are ok with Steam DRM, I'm one of them, but don't be disingenuous and claim there isn't DRM. There is and it is required.
Seriously. Want to still play games, but the consoles don't do what you want? Use a computer. They are first-flight gaming platforms these days. Currently more powerful than any console, even with lower range hardware. You can also get games with whatever your DRM tolerance is. Being open platforms, developers can really do wahtever they like so you find it runs the gamut. There are some games with always-on DRM, Ubisoft is pretty (in)famous for that. There are games with DRM that requires you to go online to activate once, but then not again. There are games with DRM that kinda fades in to the background and is just part of the setup (like Steam). Finally there are games with no DRM at all.
So you can play whatever games meet your requirements in terms of level of DRM. There's nothing being forced by a larger entity, and indeed because of the varied market it is easy to vote with your dollars and developers can see the result of that.
So you don't have to wait for some alternative, there is already one here, and you probably already have the basics of what you need. A Windows PC (there just aren't many games for Linux at this point) with a reasonably modern processor is a good foundation, then knock a $100ish graphics card in and you are good to go.
Yes you can hook it to your TV and use a controller, if that is what you desire.
So first off, there are different kinds of fiber. The FTTH stuff you tend to see is PON, passive optical network. You can look on Wikipedia for a pretty good article on the details but more or less it is a shared type of connection where everyone is on the same connection. A Point to multipoint kind of deal. Well, that costs less than doing direct point-to-point fiber as you see in backbones. The downside is, of course, you are all sharing the same bandwidth. If there's 100 people on one line you all share the bandwidth (via TDMA usually). Same basic idea as cable modems.
The other thing then is oversubscribing the backhaul. When a provider gives you cheap 1 gpbs fiber, they aren't providing backhaul all the way up the chain to make sure you 1 gbps no matter what. They oversubscribe at every level. So say there's 100 people on your segment. That's 100:1 oversubscription right there. That then connects back to a datacenter and, say, 30 other segments connect to a switch, which has a 10 gbps uplink to the core. Now you are 3000:1. The core then only has so much out to the higher level of the network as so on.
Now that works fine for users. If you've ever worked in a big office environment or university it is the same way. You might have gig to your desktop, then that switch with 24 people only has gig to the floor switch, which only has gig to the main switch, and then only a gig off to the Internet. However it still can be fast. Reason is that you don't all use your connections full bore all the time. You get some data, and then it sits idle. So long as people play nice and share, it can be fast despite the oversubscription and still be cheap.
However that's a real cost difference than backbone lines. Taking something like the DoD's network where it is a dedicated OC-48 connection from each site back to some central infrastructure, and probably then larger lines between the different infrastructure sites, well that is a bunch more money.
Now as someone pointed out the DoD's net is also outdated, but there are also real cost differences for different levels of service. Also shit gets more expensive in an exponential fashion as bandwidth goes up. Getting a switch fabric that handles a few gigabits of traffic is easy. You can get a lil' 24 port 10/100 switch for like $70. You want gig? Still pretty cheap, $180ish. Ok how about 10 gig? That's more like $8000 and it doesn't even have interfaces in it, you'll have to buy SPF+ units for each port. 100gig? I don't even know, those are the "call us for pricing" kinds of switches. Easily 6 figures or more for 24 ports.
Gig technology is pretty cheap these days, so you can provide it to end users pretty cheap... so long as you do plenty of sharing on the backhaul.
Bitcoin moves like a stock (a thinly traded one at that), not like a currency. You are making false equivalence here. This caused a 1% drop in stocks for a couple minutes. Bitcoin has a bid-ask spread higher than 1%. The US Dollar didn't move at all based on this, and indeed changes in value around 2-3% per year.
The criticism of Bitcoin's volatility is highly valid when it wants to be a currency. I wouldn't use stocks as a currency due to their volatility either.
Depends on what you mean. Small compared to PCs? Yes. The PC market is huge though. Despite all the crying about it dying, it is still a massive market particularly when you consider we are talking desktops, laptops, and servers. Those datacenters are not filled with smartphones.
So it is much bigger than consoles. However the console market isn't trivial. The 360 has sold something like 76 million units, the PS3 like 70 million. So assuming the next gen consoles do similar, that's around 140 million units for AMD. Nothing to sneeze at.
However it is low margin. So Like I said, not the greatest thing in the world. An increase in PC marketshare would be much better for AMD. The console contracts aren't worthless, but aren't going to be that lucrative.
So good in that AMD got the contract. It is money, no question about it, and the console market is not small. Better (for them) they should have it than IBM or someone.
So how is it bad? Low, low margins.
Consoles are very cost driven devices. Often sold at a loss initially, and then little to no profit later. The reason is they want to pack as much hardware as they can in for as cheap as they can. Well the other side of that is they lean on suppliers, hard, to offer very low prices. They don't give their suppliers a lot of profit. They don't force them to take a loss or anything (the suppliers wouldn't agree) but it is just this side of it.
So selling 50 million units for consoles is way less profitable than selling 50 million units for laptops, desktops, servers, that kind of thing.
Hence while it is better than having no sales at all, it is not as good as taking a bigger slice of the computer market.
If you own a house, you get familiar with that kind of thing. I had to replace my A/C a couple years ago. Ran me about $7000 for a nice efficient one. Well guess what? That won't be the last time I have to replace it. So it is something I'm budgeting for. Not now, not next year, but in the future (I'm targeting 15-20 years out of this unit) I'll need to get a new one. So I'm making sure, to the best of my ability, that I'll have the money lined up. Same for other appliances, vehicle, and so on.
This is just life. Unless you rent everything, you will be replacing things and the more you own, like a house or, say, your own business, the more big ticket stuff that will involve. That means you have to plan as to the lifecycle and be ready for the expense.
Now for Windows OS related things that's pretty easy since Microsoft announces their lifecycle on OS release. So say you bought a product today that ran on Windows 7. It won't work on 8, and thus presumably later versions, and is not likely to be updated. Ok, that means that before January 14, 2020, you need to switch to something new. You have a little less than 7 years. So budget accordingly. If you software runs you $10k, then you need to save up around $1500/year (or $125/month if you like) to be ready for it.
If you can't deal with that, well life in general will cause you some headaches and you probably shouldn't be running your own business. Planning finances is a big part of it, you do have to think long term and you have to deal with some expensive shit.
They announced their end of life date on the day of release. MS sets EOL 10 years from day of release on their OSes. Now, in the case of XP, it was extended. They do that sometimes. However 10 years is the norm, it is what you can count on, so it is what you plan for. Like with Windows 8 we already know the end of support date: 10/1/2023. It is always possible that will get extended, but it very well may not. So if you put an 8 system in place now, you know when you need to start thinking upgrade (at the latest).
MS is real, real, good with the support lifecycle thing. They have a standard policy, and current information is always available on their site. So planning for when upgrades need to happen is not hard.
The XP drop dead date has been a long time in coming, and is still over a year out. There has been, and still is, plenty of time to deal with it.
We have people at the Biomedical department who are running extremely old, unsupported UNIX systems. Why? Well because that's what their special hardware requires and the software isn't being updated and doesn't support anything new. There's one particular setup that has an old Sun Ultra 5 that limps along as part of it.
You don't seem to understand that for some of this shit, the company dictates to you. Their software works only on one OS and they refuse to update it.
So you can't just switch to an X system because there isn't the software for it.
You see a lot of it online, and on/. in particular. People like to hate on the US. They want to feel, for various reasons, that the US is just a shitty place to live and that it is really bad there. They like to whine and cry about everything being awful, everything being a bad thing, make it out to be a real dystopia. It's an anti-patriotism of sorts. If you look around online you can find sites where posters are the opposite, they talk about how amazingly awesome the US is all the time and for everything. They downplay all the bad, trumpet all the good (and sometimes make good up) that kind of thing. This is the reverse of that.
It is quite annoying as it shows not only a great level of ignorance but an astounding lack of perspective about the world. But it is what it is.
They didn't mandate it, they didn't arrest/shoot anyone on the street (there were some people out and about, go look it up). It is pretty standard to want people to stay in doors in a situation like that. Not often it happens to a whole city, but on a smaller scale.
One night, like at 2 in the morning, I saw a whole hots of police cars around. Mostly spread out in the mall near my condo complex but some on the road leading to it and so on. I was worried so I called and asked what was up. Their request to me was to stay inside, don't open my door, and that the officers on scene would let me know if I needed to go anywhere (they didn't).
They were looking for someone and that was made much easier if there weren't additional people out wandering around and if there wasn't someone who could become a potential hostage. They didn't tell me I had to stay in my house. I was free to go to my car and drive off, they just asked that I did.
There was no larger announcement because, well, it was 2 in the morning. I wouldn't have even noticed had I not woke up to go to the bathroom. However what they asked anyone who called in (I may have not been the only one) was to stay in your house, unless instructed to do something else.
IBM sold them a division that builds commodity hardware. You know, the same shit you can get from, Dell, HP, Supermicro, ASUS, and so on. They just assemble tech bought form other companies. Now that isn't worthless, people buy a lot of servers, but it isn't something hard to figure out.
They didn't sell their processor division, which doesn't make i7s anyhow, that's Intel.
In terms of making their own i7, well ok, good luck. IP issues aside (they don't have an x86 or x64 license like AMD does) there's the whole thing that designing a processor is pretty hard. China decided they needed their own, home grown, processor, and by "home grown" they mean "used MIPS architecture because designing an architecture is hard." So they've thus far managed to produce a MIPS64 processor, that they don't fab (STMicro fabs it for them, they are European) that runs at 1GHz on a 65nm process.
That might be impressive (well minus the using other people's architecture thing, and the fab thing) except that Intel is making 4GHz processors on a 22nm process right now, and has a 14nm fab that is getting ready for pre-production in Arizona (will be up fully next year).
This idea you have that the US does nothing, particularly nothing high tech, is badly misguided. You might want to do a bit more research and find out all the things it does do. Processors would be a big one, being that not only is Intel a US company but most of its fabs are in the US but it is hardly the only one.
Not speaking to the business wisdom of IBM's move (IBM has been making bad decisions for awhile IMO) but stop acting like this is some super secret tech they sold. This is commodity manufacturing. For that matter it is commodity manufacturing that Lenovo already does some of. They make servers, just not many of them. This is an effort to grow their market quickly.
Quite often when you see something, even something not particularly dangerous but more annoying like an airport, that is in a populated area and say "Why the hell didn't they build it out in the middle of nowhere?" the answer is often that they did. When they built it, there was nothing around, but things grew up around it, or grew nearer and nearer to it.
You watch an area over a couple decades and it can go from "a whole lot of nothing" to "very developed".
Particularly when trying to come up with flimsy support for something they like. Somehow there are people on/. that are honestly equating the 2-3% change per YEAR the USD usually sees to the 600%ish change BTC has seen in a couple MONTHS (even worse when you consider it grew by that much, and then has shrunk a good part of that back down). Somehow, that is totally equivalent in some people's minds.
Ok that is a bit incoherent so I'm not quite sure what you are going for but best as I can tell you like bitcoin because it can destroy banks that don't play by whatever rules you think are a good idea.
Ok, well how do you feel about their ability to destroy you, or rather your finances?
Suppose you get a job that pays in BTC. You got hired April 10th and agreed to 7.4 BTC per bi-weekly pay period. That translates to just a touch over $50,000 per year at the $260 BTC price at the time. Puts you right at the median income. Not too bad.
Well today BTC is trading at $83 (for the moment, it changes rapidly, trending down currently). That means your pay is now worth about $16,000 per year, just above the poverty line for a two person family. You would have seen your real income shrink to 32% of what you thought you were getting BEFORE YOU GOT YOUR FIRST PAYCHECK.
That would have some pretty serious ability to destroy your finances right there, if the real purchasing power you have could drop that drastically, that fast. So maybe you want to rethink your "Instability is good!" position.
The US dollar, which BTCtards and gold worshipers love to hate on as being problematic, usually changes about 2-3% per year in terms of real value. Real value here means the amount that a given nominal denomination buys you. Inflation for the USD is around 2-3% normally for the past several decades. There was a time when it was up near 10%, and that was considered very problematic by the government and they worked to change it (successfully). Those are yearly changes, and are quite consistent.
Now how about BTC? Well it is known to have a 10% bid-ask spread on occasion. It has increased in value by 600% in two months time, and then fell to 50% of that in just two days.
Now THAT is some instability. It has more change in a day then the USD does in a year. It has had a bid-ask spread above high inflation for the USD. The value of BTC is extremely, EXTREMELY volatile.
If you look at the price chart of bitcoins, it doesn't look like a currency chart, it looks like what you see on a thinly traded stock, where someone is playing with it to try and game money in the short term.
Hence it really doesn't fulfill the requirements of a currency (it has other failings in that regard too). You can't very well use it as a currency with fluctuations like that. I mean, would you agree to accept your pay in bitcoins, knowing that the amount you could buy with that could change drastically paycheck to paycheck? Suppose you agreed to be paid 7.4 bitcoins per paycheck back when it was trading at $260 per coin. That's a salary of a bit over $50,000/year, not bad. How would you feel now, given that it is only worth about $84, meaning you are only making $16,000/year?
If you were to build a jammer, simplicity and reliability would be what you'd want. What that means is something that just floods the frequency range in question so that it is unusable. Simple and effective. That is, in fact, how jammers work.
To try and jam only higher level things like voice calls, while leaving alone SMS, would require a far more complex jamming solution. Something that would actually go and interact with the cell network in some way. It would take a lot more hardware, for a lot less reliable result.
So you are completely correct. There just really isn't a scenario where it would make sense to have a jammer that could only jam part of something where a jammer that jams all of something is in fact easier to make.
Devices you'd want to have for other reasons. I have a smartphone already. I need a cellphone for my job, and a smartphone is really convenient for it. So I have one. Well if it is something I'm already going to buy, then it really isn't such a big deal to have a good one.
That's the issue. Ouya doesn't compete with smartphones, it competes with consoles. It has to put up a good showing against what Nintendo, MS, and Sony offer. I won't get one to replace my smartphone because it is not a phone, nor does it go in my pocket.
So ya, my Note II cost me a hell of a lot more than $100. I paid it because games are only a minor part of what it does. The money was paid to get me phone, web, GPS, SSH, RDP, and so on in my pocket at all times.
The thing with Valve is that they are not exactly an unbiased source. For one, their engine is pretty outdated. They are all DX9 stuff in their games. Now fair enough from a market point of view (though there are been more than a couple very successful DX10+ only titles) but talking technically that is looking at things in a rather outdated fashion. DX10 changed the way you deal with graphics cards and most developers seem to think quite a bit for the better.
Also there's the fact that they are pushing Linux because they are really worried about the future of Steam. Valve makes stupid amounts of money doing very little with Steam. However if the Windows store takes off (something that is not at all certain, but could happen) their money pit dries up. Hence they are looking at bringing Steam to a new platform, that bring Linux.
Finally note that their criticism was that Windows is becoming "not open". Now maybe that will end up being the case, but it is not at this point. Steam still works real well for Windows, as do all other stores. That aside they weren't saying Linux was technically superior, at least not in that talk, they were saying that it had what they needed on a technical side.
I mean there's Intel.. wait, no, they fab their stuff almost entirely in the US, though also some in Israel. Ok well those bastards at AMD... wait, no, they use Globalfoundries who is in Germany, the US, and Singapore (the NY plant being where the new stuff comes from). Ok well IBM surely those cheap... wait, no, they are in the US as well for fabrication (NY and NJ).
So, ummm, precisely which US chip maker do you think has their stuff in China? Because I don't know of one.
Slashdot Mirror
Nothing you post on a web forum is worth any money.
6. Because many Windows people already bought the game at full price and don't feel the need to rebuy.
Windows has a pretty vibrant game market, and has good digital distribution. Many of the non-cheapskate Windows users already bought the games prior to the humble bundle happening. For example I remember when the first one came out and Linux users were spraining their arms patting themselves on the backs for paying $14 for the bundle, or about $3 per game. All I could think was that the two games I wanted from it, I already owned and had paid full price for. $20 for World of Goo and $10 for Gish. I was happy with that too, felt I got my money's worth.
So I didn't buy the bundle, there was no need. I didn't want the other games.
What you have to appreciate about the slightly higher average Linux numbers is it is still highly cheapskate. Paying a couple bucks for a game is not much at all. One game at regular price can be a good bit more than that.
I think that is no small part of it. I've only ever bought one humble bundle, and that one I didn't pay much for because again, I owned many of the games. I bought the Introversion bundle because I wanted to try Darwinia. I already owned Defcon, Uplink, and Dungeons of Dreadmor. I spend quite a bit on games, but I do it outside of the humble bundle. I think you'll find many of the non-cheapskate Windows gamers are the same.
When you have DRM in a game that fails by any method other than notifying the user and refusing to run, you create problem for legit customers. I know that DRM companies would like to try and convince people that their DRM never, ever, fails on a legit copy, but it happens all the time. DRM is not perfect, it has issues. Two games I can remember that failed to function on my system were Neverwinter Nights and Civilization 4 Beyond the Sword. Both gave me a "Insert the game disc to play," error even though I had the disc in. It was an issue with the DRM that took multiple patches to fix in NWN's case and one in BTS's case.
While that was very annoying, at least I knew what was going on. I took the game back to get a new disc, just in case that was the issue (sometimes there's a production problem) and when that didn't fix it, called the publisher. When a fix came out, they let me know.
However when it is a feature that just breaks the game, you don't know why it is happening and you get mad. It is then worse if you get moron fanboys jumping down your throat claiming you "must have pirated it" when you didn't and the devs saying that it only happens on pirated copies. It also can take way longer for a fix to happen because it takes longer for devs to acknowledge and fix the problems.
So I am not a fan of what SS3 did. This game is a much better method in that the code isn't DRM, rather they released a different version on the torrent sites themselves. So it can only affect someone who downloaded a copy since it is not present in the legit version.
I am ok with DRM in games but ONLY if it is non-intrusive, if it doesn't mess with my experience. If it breaks my game, I'll get real angry, real fast.
Steam forces their own DRM, Steamworks, on all games. Unlike some other DD servers (Impulse for example) there is no capability to release a game without the built-in DRM. Publishers can use additional DRM as well, but Steamworks is mandatory.
It's pretty low key DRM over all, most people are ok with it (I am) but it is DRM. You have to have Steam running and be logged in to your account to be able to play a game. You don't have to be online, you can cache your credentials and play offline, but you must have Steam running and logged in or you cannot play a game.
Many people are ok with Steam DRM, I'm one of them, but don't be disingenuous and claim there isn't DRM. There is and it is required.
Seriously. Want to still play games, but the consoles don't do what you want? Use a computer. They are first-flight gaming platforms these days. Currently more powerful than any console, even with lower range hardware. You can also get games with whatever your DRM tolerance is. Being open platforms, developers can really do wahtever they like so you find it runs the gamut. There are some games with always-on DRM, Ubisoft is pretty (in)famous for that. There are games with DRM that requires you to go online to activate once, but then not again. There are games with DRM that kinda fades in to the background and is just part of the setup (like Steam). Finally there are games with no DRM at all.
So you can play whatever games meet your requirements in terms of level of DRM. There's nothing being forced by a larger entity, and indeed because of the varied market it is easy to vote with your dollars and developers can see the result of that.
So you don't have to wait for some alternative, there is already one here, and you probably already have the basics of what you need. A Windows PC (there just aren't many games for Linux at this point) with a reasonably modern processor is a good foundation, then knock a $100ish graphics card in and you are good to go.
Yes you can hook it to your TV and use a controller, if that is what you desire.
So first off, there are different kinds of fiber. The FTTH stuff you tend to see is PON, passive optical network. You can look on Wikipedia for a pretty good article on the details but more or less it is a shared type of connection where everyone is on the same connection. A Point to multipoint kind of deal. Well, that costs less than doing direct point-to-point fiber as you see in backbones. The downside is, of course, you are all sharing the same bandwidth. If there's 100 people on one line you all share the bandwidth (via TDMA usually). Same basic idea as cable modems.
The other thing then is oversubscribing the backhaul. When a provider gives you cheap 1 gpbs fiber, they aren't providing backhaul all the way up the chain to make sure you 1 gbps no matter what. They oversubscribe at every level. So say there's 100 people on your segment. That's 100:1 oversubscription right there. That then connects back to a datacenter and, say, 30 other segments connect to a switch, which has a 10 gbps uplink to the core. Now you are 3000:1. The core then only has so much out to the higher level of the network as so on.
Now that works fine for users. If you've ever worked in a big office environment or university it is the same way. You might have gig to your desktop, then that switch with 24 people only has gig to the floor switch, which only has gig to the main switch, and then only a gig off to the Internet. However it still can be fast. Reason is that you don't all use your connections full bore all the time. You get some data, and then it sits idle. So long as people play nice and share, it can be fast despite the oversubscription and still be cheap.
However that's a real cost difference than backbone lines. Taking something like the DoD's network where it is a dedicated OC-48 connection from each site back to some central infrastructure, and probably then larger lines between the different infrastructure sites, well that is a bunch more money.
Now as someone pointed out the DoD's net is also outdated, but there are also real cost differences for different levels of service. Also shit gets more expensive in an exponential fashion as bandwidth goes up. Getting a switch fabric that handles a few gigabits of traffic is easy. You can get a lil' 24 port 10/100 switch for like $70. You want gig? Still pretty cheap, $180ish. Ok how about 10 gig? That's more like $8000 and it doesn't even have interfaces in it, you'll have to buy SPF+ units for each port. 100gig? I don't even know, those are the "call us for pricing" kinds of switches. Easily 6 figures or more for 24 ports.
Gig technology is pretty cheap these days, so you can provide it to end users pretty cheap... so long as you do plenty of sharing on the backhaul.
That's what it is all about. If the data on the chip doesn't match the data printed on the passport, they know a forgery has taken place.
Bitcoin moves like a stock (a thinly traded one at that), not like a currency. You are making false equivalence here. This caused a 1% drop in stocks for a couple minutes. Bitcoin has a bid-ask spread higher than 1%. The US Dollar didn't move at all based on this, and indeed changes in value around 2-3% per year.
The criticism of Bitcoin's volatility is highly valid when it wants to be a currency. I wouldn't use stocks as a currency due to their volatility either.
Depends on what you mean. Small compared to PCs? Yes. The PC market is huge though. Despite all the crying about it dying, it is still a massive market particularly when you consider we are talking desktops, laptops, and servers. Those datacenters are not filled with smartphones.
So it is much bigger than consoles. However the console market isn't trivial. The 360 has sold something like 76 million units, the PS3 like 70 million. So assuming the next gen consoles do similar, that's around 140 million units for AMD. Nothing to sneeze at.
However it is low margin. So Like I said, not the greatest thing in the world. An increase in PC marketshare would be much better for AMD. The console contracts aren't worthless, but aren't going to be that lucrative.
So good in that AMD got the contract. It is money, no question about it, and the console market is not small. Better (for them) they should have it than IBM or someone.
So how is it bad? Low, low margins.
Consoles are very cost driven devices. Often sold at a loss initially, and then little to no profit later. The reason is they want to pack as much hardware as they can in for as cheap as they can. Well the other side of that is they lean on suppliers, hard, to offer very low prices. They don't give their suppliers a lot of profit. They don't force them to take a loss or anything (the suppliers wouldn't agree) but it is just this side of it.
So selling 50 million units for consoles is way less profitable than selling 50 million units for laptops, desktops, servers, that kind of thing.
Hence while it is better than having no sales at all, it is not as good as taking a bigger slice of the computer market.
If you own a house, you get familiar with that kind of thing. I had to replace my A/C a couple years ago. Ran me about $7000 for a nice efficient one. Well guess what? That won't be the last time I have to replace it. So it is something I'm budgeting for. Not now, not next year, but in the future (I'm targeting 15-20 years out of this unit) I'll need to get a new one. So I'm making sure, to the best of my ability, that I'll have the money lined up. Same for other appliances, vehicle, and so on.
This is just life. Unless you rent everything, you will be replacing things and the more you own, like a house or, say, your own business, the more big ticket stuff that will involve. That means you have to plan as to the lifecycle and be ready for the expense.
Now for Windows OS related things that's pretty easy since Microsoft announces their lifecycle on OS release. So say you bought a product today that ran on Windows 7. It won't work on 8, and thus presumably later versions, and is not likely to be updated. Ok, that means that before January 14, 2020, you need to switch to something new. You have a little less than 7 years. So budget accordingly. If you software runs you $10k, then you need to save up around $1500/year (or $125/month if you like) to be ready for it.
If you can't deal with that, well life in general will cause you some headaches and you probably shouldn't be running your own business. Planning finances is a big part of it, you do have to think long term and you have to deal with some expensive shit.
They announced their end of life date on the day of release. MS sets EOL 10 years from day of release on their OSes. Now, in the case of XP, it was extended. They do that sometimes. However 10 years is the norm, it is what you can count on, so it is what you plan for. Like with Windows 8 we already know the end of support date: 10/1/2023. It is always possible that will get extended, but it very well may not. So if you put an 8 system in place now, you know when you need to start thinking upgrade (at the latest).
MS is real, real, good with the support lifecycle thing. They have a standard policy, and current information is always available on their site. So planning for when upgrades need to happen is not hard.
The XP drop dead date has been a long time in coming, and is still over a year out. There has been, and still is, plenty of time to deal with it.
We have people at the Biomedical department who are running extremely old, unsupported UNIX systems. Why? Well because that's what their special hardware requires and the software isn't being updated and doesn't support anything new. There's one particular setup that has an old Sun Ultra 5 that limps along as part of it.
You don't seem to understand that for some of this shit, the company dictates to you. Their software works only on one OS and they refuse to update it.
So you can't just switch to an X system because there isn't the software for it.
You see a lot of it online, and on /. in particular. People like to hate on the US. They want to feel, for various reasons, that the US is just a shitty place to live and that it is really bad there. They like to whine and cry about everything being awful, everything being a bad thing, make it out to be a real dystopia. It's an anti-patriotism of sorts. If you look around online you can find sites where posters are the opposite, they talk about how amazingly awesome the US is all the time and for everything. They downplay all the bad, trumpet all the good (and sometimes make good up) that kind of thing. This is the reverse of that.
It is quite annoying as it shows not only a great level of ignorance but an astounding lack of perspective about the world. But it is what it is.
They didn't mandate it, they didn't arrest/shoot anyone on the street (there were some people out and about, go look it up). It is pretty standard to want people to stay in doors in a situation like that. Not often it happens to a whole city, but on a smaller scale.
One night, like at 2 in the morning, I saw a whole hots of police cars around. Mostly spread out in the mall near my condo complex but some on the road leading to it and so on. I was worried so I called and asked what was up. Their request to me was to stay inside, don't open my door, and that the officers on scene would let me know if I needed to go anywhere (they didn't).
They were looking for someone and that was made much easier if there weren't additional people out wandering around and if there wasn't someone who could become a potential hostage. They didn't tell me I had to stay in my house. I was free to go to my car and drive off, they just asked that I did.
There was no larger announcement because, well, it was 2 in the morning. I wouldn't have even noticed had I not woke up to go to the bathroom. However what they asked anyone who called in (I may have not been the only one) was to stay in your house, unless instructed to do something else.
It really makes a lot of sense.
IBM sold them a division that builds commodity hardware. You know, the same shit you can get from, Dell, HP, Supermicro, ASUS, and so on. They just assemble tech bought form other companies. Now that isn't worthless, people buy a lot of servers, but it isn't something hard to figure out.
They didn't sell their processor division, which doesn't make i7s anyhow, that's Intel.
In terms of making their own i7, well ok, good luck. IP issues aside (they don't have an x86 or x64 license like AMD does) there's the whole thing that designing a processor is pretty hard. China decided they needed their own, home grown, processor, and by "home grown" they mean "used MIPS architecture because designing an architecture is hard." So they've thus far managed to produce a MIPS64 processor, that they don't fab (STMicro fabs it for them, they are European) that runs at 1GHz on a 65nm process.
That might be impressive (well minus the using other people's architecture thing, and the fab thing) except that Intel is making 4GHz processors on a 22nm process right now, and has a 14nm fab that is getting ready for pre-production in Arizona (will be up fully next year).
This idea you have that the US does nothing, particularly nothing high tech, is badly misguided. You might want to do a bit more research and find out all the things it does do. Processors would be a big one, being that not only is Intel a US company but most of its fabs are in the US but it is hardly the only one.
Not speaking to the business wisdom of IBM's move (IBM has been making bad decisions for awhile IMO) but stop acting like this is some super secret tech they sold. This is commodity manufacturing. For that matter it is commodity manufacturing that Lenovo already does some of. They make servers, just not many of them. This is an effort to grow their market quickly.
Quite often when you see something, even something not particularly dangerous but more annoying like an airport, that is in a populated area and say "Why the hell didn't they build it out in the middle of nowhere?" the answer is often that they did. When they built it, there was nothing around, but things grew up around it, or grew nearer and nearer to it.
You watch an area over a couple decades and it can go from "a whole lot of nothing" to "very developed".
Particularly when trying to come up with flimsy support for something they like. Somehow there are people on /. that are honestly equating the 2-3% change per YEAR the USD usually sees to the 600%ish change BTC has seen in a couple MONTHS (even worse when you consider it grew by that much, and then has shrunk a good part of that back down). Somehow, that is totally equivalent in some people's minds.
Ok that is a bit incoherent so I'm not quite sure what you are going for but best as I can tell you like bitcoin because it can destroy banks that don't play by whatever rules you think are a good idea.
Ok, well how do you feel about their ability to destroy you, or rather your finances?
Suppose you get a job that pays in BTC. You got hired April 10th and agreed to 7.4 BTC per bi-weekly pay period. That translates to just a touch over $50,000 per year at the $260 BTC price at the time. Puts you right at the median income. Not too bad.
Well today BTC is trading at $83 (for the moment, it changes rapidly, trending down currently). That means your pay is now worth about $16,000 per year, just above the poverty line for a two person family. You would have seen your real income shrink to 32% of what you thought you were getting BEFORE YOU GOT YOUR FIRST PAYCHECK.
That would have some pretty serious ability to destroy your finances right there, if the real purchasing power you have could drop that drastically, that fast. So maybe you want to rethink your "Instability is good!" position.
The US dollar, which BTCtards and gold worshipers love to hate on as being problematic, usually changes about 2-3% per year in terms of real value. Real value here means the amount that a given nominal denomination buys you. Inflation for the USD is around 2-3% normally for the past several decades. There was a time when it was up near 10%, and that was considered very problematic by the government and they worked to change it (successfully). Those are yearly changes, and are quite consistent.
Now how about BTC? Well it is known to have a 10% bid-ask spread on occasion. It has increased in value by 600% in two months time, and then fell to 50% of that in just two days.
Now THAT is some instability. It has more change in a day then the USD does in a year. It has had a bid-ask spread above high inflation for the USD. The value of BTC is extremely, EXTREMELY volatile.
If you look at the price chart of bitcoins, it doesn't look like a currency chart, it looks like what you see on a thinly traded stock, where someone is playing with it to try and game money in the short term.
Hence it really doesn't fulfill the requirements of a currency (it has other failings in that regard too). You can't very well use it as a currency with fluctuations like that. I mean, would you agree to accept your pay in bitcoins, knowing that the amount you could buy with that could change drastically paycheck to paycheck? Suppose you agreed to be paid 7.4 bitcoins per paycheck back when it was trading at $260 per coin. That's a salary of a bit over $50,000/year, not bad. How would you feel now, given that it is only worth about $84, meaning you are only making $16,000/year?
If you were to build a jammer, simplicity and reliability would be what you'd want. What that means is something that just floods the frequency range in question so that it is unusable. Simple and effective. That is, in fact, how jammers work.
To try and jam only higher level things like voice calls, while leaving alone SMS, would require a far more complex jamming solution. Something that would actually go and interact with the cell network in some way. It would take a lot more hardware, for a lot less reliable result.
So you are completely correct. There just really isn't a scenario where it would make sense to have a jammer that could only jam part of something where a jammer that jams all of something is in fact easier to make.
Devices you'd want to have for other reasons. I have a smartphone already. I need a cellphone for my job, and a smartphone is really convenient for it. So I have one. Well if it is something I'm already going to buy, then it really isn't such a big deal to have a good one.
That's the issue. Ouya doesn't compete with smartphones, it competes with consoles. It has to put up a good showing against what Nintendo, MS, and Sony offer. I won't get one to replace my smartphone because it is not a phone, nor does it go in my pocket.
So ya, my Note II cost me a hell of a lot more than $100. I paid it because games are only a minor part of what it does. The money was paid to get me phone, web, GPS, SSH, RDP, and so on in my pocket at all times.
The thing with Valve is that they are not exactly an unbiased source. For one, their engine is pretty outdated. They are all DX9 stuff in their games. Now fair enough from a market point of view (though there are been more than a couple very successful DX10+ only titles) but talking technically that is looking at things in a rather outdated fashion. DX10 changed the way you deal with graphics cards and most developers seem to think quite a bit for the better.
Also there's the fact that they are pushing Linux because they are really worried about the future of Steam. Valve makes stupid amounts of money doing very little with Steam. However if the Windows store takes off (something that is not at all certain, but could happen) their money pit dries up. Hence they are looking at bringing Steam to a new platform, that bring Linux.
Finally note that their criticism was that Windows is becoming "not open". Now maybe that will end up being the case, but it is not at this point. Steam still works real well for Windows, as do all other stores. That aside they weren't saying Linux was technically superior, at least not in that talk, they were saying that it had what they needed on a technical side.
I mean there's Intel.. wait, no, they fab their stuff almost entirely in the US, though also some in Israel. Ok well those bastards at AMD... wait, no, they use Globalfoundries who is in Germany, the US, and Singapore (the NY plant being where the new stuff comes from). Ok well IBM surely those cheap... wait, no, they are in the US as well for fabrication (NY and NJ).
So, ummm, precisely which US chip maker do you think has their stuff in China? Because I don't know of one.
A Kim Jong Hard-Un? :D
Not my joke Robbaz does a bit on it on his Youtube page: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1AD2LWAc9Q