1. Take a brand new Computer that has XP and a fast core 2 duo (Researching the fact that you aren't buying a non-upgradable lump of garbage like HP/Dell). ~$600 2. Upgrade RAM to 2 GB ~$60 pessimistically 3. Get a smoking graphics card ~200-250
Total price: $900 or 30% more than what you were going to pay for anyways; That and a few days of passive specs analysis and 10 minutes installation time.
"upgrade at least once every 3 years" If you're telling me that better games hit PC's more often, then point proven. If you're telling me that The same games you're running on your 3 year obsolete PC are now magically able to run on your 6 year old console, you're missing the point. Consoles are early into this generation and PC graphics have already long past their hardware specs. There is nowhere for consoles to grow for another 4 years in your words.
But for PC's, if you really want a super duper bleeding edge piece of gaming godness, you can, but by no means do 'most' game devs shove ridiculously high requirements down your throat.
I have a good rig in my eyes and I've spent a total of maybe $1000 over the 5 years that I've had it. That is not to say that all I do is game day in and out, it gets good use for many things like hi-def video (as its also a PVR / media PC).
"Heck, the wii demonstrates that you can make a compelling gaming environment on pretty low end hardware"
I absolutely love my Wii to death for the games that I play on it, but lets be frank, the CPU/GPU/lack of substantial storage hold it back from competing seriously in many gaming market segments.
What I can agree to is that Linux gaming really isn't there yet, both in developer support and in market share. Developers interested in Linux work should take the approach of companies like ID/Epic and use/develop technology platforms which makes cross-platform porting simple. Since you need OpenGL pipelines for PS3's anyways, why not spend a little developer time to release an unsupported Linux client? Better yet, if there's a big pull on Linux then you may want to consider actually supporting it. But at this point I'd say Linux gamers will settle for 99% working binaries over waiting a year for Wine support.
Of course there is, that's why Microsoft opened their token Richmond development branch, because it would take imported labor a lot longer to be approved for US entry, so they have the Canadian (gov. more laissez faire on immigration) branch to put them somewhere until they're finally allowed to work in the states legally.
Oh the irony, The US seizing properties from people for bypassing an embargo put in place by America as a result of Cuba seizing properties from America.... its like one big circle of hate.
Which has multiple solutions for an in-place upgrade if windows can't do it alone on reboot.
Windows is bad and all, but the registry is one of the few pieces of Windows that just works as intended. Its a data repository. How applications use that repository is their own business.
Oh my god, a comment that actually makes sense and doesn't pander to the lowest common Slashdot denominator? Give this person a cookie.
PS: The patent could be remarkably weak for all I know the only difference between prior art and innovation could be: The ability to scan and copy 'image' for archival purposes VS. The ability to scan and copy 'check' for archival purposes.
Wow, there are so many identical comments to this for the story. I can't explain why everyone's lost their sanity on this issue.
1. As a counter point to your asinine statement, is J. D. Salinger not a real artist because he only wrote one full length novel (and a few short stories)? No, I think he deserves his credit for writing one of, if not the great novel of the 1900's.
2. If a crappy artist writes one song that hits it big, its not like they're going to be able to pack up and move to the Bahamas to live like a king/queen off their royalties. If the song's a one hit wonder then most likely the buzz and the royalties will fizzle away as time forgets them. It will not encourage one hit wonders to just give up and live like fat cows.
3. What this law will do is increase the number of beneficiaries (be it corporations or next of kin) soaking up the rewards from the artist once they've passed away, or transferred ownership.
If the EU is really itching to help out the starving artists, why not set lifetime (or last alive in terms of a group composition) copyrights so that when all members of the composition are dead, the piece is opened into the public domain, and make the benefits of the creation non-transferable. This will mean that artists can't cut and run while music barons stockpile collections of original content to be sold to the highest bidder (PS: I know next to nothing about the music industry so this last point may be completely off).
You do have a point about the hypocrisy of making the law for musicians only. I don't believe in the law 'as described on Slashdot', but its even worse that they're trying to benefit one medium over any other.
Re:My only suggestion for X
on
X Power Tools
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
There will always be problematic hardware that needs more than just using auto-probed settings using than using/proc and EDID settings. My issue is a minor one, but a major head-ache. I've got a TV as my monitor, and like many many TV's on the market, the TV overscan/underscan issues. The only way to property configure that monitor is for someone to manually plug in settings to come up with a few 'magic' resolutions that will 'just work' out of the box of any new distribution.
But I do agree, most of whats currently inside Xogr.conf can be auto-probed. Maybe we should loosen up the constraints on required sections of Xorg.conf and allow for more 'probe and attach everything I have' configurations, but I wouldn't consider removing the file entirely.
Re:So when do we get its successor?
on
X Power Tools
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Quite a bit of XP's 2d drawing functions are accelerated using video card driver supports. All the blitting, etc.. which may be supported in Linux drivers was pretty much stock in every well used Windows graphics driver since 2k.
You ever run into the issue that Firefox scrolling is sooo slow? Its probably because the scrolling routines aren't being 2d accelerated like they should be.
Putting too much in user space might seem like a good compromise, but depending on how often you context switch to achieve this separation, the trade offs could be quite inhibitive. I'm not much of a driver programmer and I've never even looked at a graphics driver implementation, but given the cursory glance at the ATI released register mappings, I imagine that the setup and maintenance of said buffers requires quite a bit of hand-holding.
There were a lot of movie / TV tie-in games like there has been in every console since, but I remember that some of those tie-in games were actually pretty good. Batman, Duck tales, hmm.. hard to remember back that for.. They were actually fun to play. Most movie tie-ins out there today are shoddy after-thoughts for marketing or to further their their franchise names.
For all the uneducated masses like me who didn't know what the hell CV standed for, it stands for "curriculum vitæ" or everyone else in the english world just says Resume.
Lets start suing GFX companies, mainframe, and firewall makers who use software to restrict what features are exposed to the end product. This is nothing new to Apple. If Apple advertised support for protected WMA then someone may have a ledge to grab onto, but instead they use the ploy that if a device -can- support something then it must.
I should sue Nintendo to force them to accept playing my home-brew games. They're illegally locking my right to run my own programmed games on their system even though the system has the ability to play it!! Get your torches.
The PS3 development port was farmed out to another company. Due to the heavy lock-in to DirectX or the non-Valve company doing the work, the port to PS3 has been panned as having very poor graphics performance.
Valve really needs to take the finger out of its ass and support OpenGL officially, because DirectX 10 is a wash for at least 2 more years (until Vista / DX10 maybe hits critical mass) and since all OpenGL (OSX/Linux/PS3) market segments are growing, if just a little.
Their inferiority on these platforms will eventually stifle their profit centers enough to show a hole. So their real option is to protect MS's market position by explicitly NOT supporting other platforms or to embrace OpenGL with open arms. This compromise is probably the 'least' beneficial for them in the long run.
Their roots are well entrenched in Microsoft technologies and a port to OpenGL was either untenable for their staff or more likely undesirable for the MS loving Bellevue development shop. They make good games, but their directx / windows lockin means that I won't be playing their games when I finally bury my last windows installation. A true shame.
That is until I hit a brick wall with 2000 on something called ATI Driver 8.43 and another something called Enemy Territory Quake Wars. You basically need the latest ATI drivers to play the game without getting immediate crash dialog.
My solution was to install Fedora 8 on my spare Linux partition and use the Linux client. With some tinkering on the config file, I get pretty good performance out of the game. I had a brief experience installing XP on another partition which ended in SP2 upgrade, SP2 downgrade, system unbootable.
Fedora 8 PS: Sapphire x800pro couldn't run the installer X server and had to be installed in text mode. This is fine for a Linux guru like me, but not for most 'trying the waters' types. Please fall back to VESA if the radeon drivers barf please!!
Fedora 8 PPS: It would be -really- cool if you'd allow grey library support for packages like ATI / Nvidia at install time without too much hassle. I don't know you're legal position of explicitly embedding links to "not legal in USA" repositories, but it would REALLY improve the end user experience.
Game reviews are almost purely based on subjective measures just like movies, fine dining, and so many other facets of our lives. There can never be a 'perfect' rating system to a subjective 'opinion' period, end nadda just stop trying. When someone to say 1-100, or 1-10, or 1-4, or Good-Bad, or just a blurb without any rating at all, etc.. are the best, what are you really basing your 'opinions' on? The rating of a subjective rating system are also just as subjective and the ratings themselves, so to argue over the topic at all seems ridiculous and ultimately unsatisfactory for all.
If a reviewer likes to make non-scored reviews of games and there are people that want to read non-scored reviews, they're most likely going to read his/her review. If nobody wants to read about a 1-1000 scale review then the reviewer won't get much ink.
The 'problem' is that whenever YOU disagree with someone's personal opinion of a game, you decry them as playing up the numbers, or perfection not being perfect, etc.. but what it really comes down to is that you don't judge the score in the same way the reviewer does. I talked to a friend once that would NEVER rate a movie 10/10 on IMDB because there could only be 1 movie that could ever reach 10/10 and he hadn't seen that movie yet. To some, 10/10 means 10% of all movies put out. Some would just say 10/10 means that they left the movie happy (regardless of the cinematic value of the piece).
You can 'solve' subjectivity. All you need is a world's worth of borg implants.
Panning one side of the argument doesn't make me or anyone else a hater as you put it. I can fully well believe that someone in their right mind and body could believe that there is a super duper beyond universal creator. That falls beyond current scientific and spiritual understanding. But if someone of faith blithely says something disagreeable to common scientific understanding (like the earth is 6000 years old), I can call them down all I want and not feel bad for it. Now most of the articles and politics of Evo / Creationism are in my mind pretty dumb (6000 year old variety) so I'm sure you hear a lot of Theist bashing. Just think that the 'Science' minded folk like myself are crapping on someone's inflammatory statements about something that couldn't possibly be true, we aren't necessarily attacking a soft hypothetical theistic position, but the (in our minds) open / shut case of theistic fervor.
Tolerance is a two way street and unfortunately for you, science's idealistic (can never be perfected, but that is the ultimate intent) objectivity is more respected on Slashdot than a purely subjective religious faith.
PS: If you'd like to admit it or not, most people with religious convictions were born and raised with that religion fostered and enforced into them by family members. There are pretty small numbers of spontaneous conversions and a quite a bit larger number of marriage conversions, but by in large what your parent believe in is what you believe in.
I hope this brain child never hits the light of day, at least not for a long time.
Why "Built-in HD-DVD" is dumb Having built in HD-DVD drive will allow MS to push HD-DVD storage enabled games that utilize the extra capacity. This will piss off all the existing users from playing those games and force them to upgrade their systems. The only saving grace on MS side would be to make it ABSOLUTELY clear that the upgraded HD drive will NEVER be used for game content.
Why "HD tuner" aka QAM is dumb The HiDef TV market is currently locked into Encrypted QAM in North America and the only way to bypass the "rent/buy box from provider" is to use a cablecard decoder which is very broken and restricted to 'certified' hardware. There may be some channels broadcasted over the air unencrypted but you can be damn sure that all cable companies will switch to encrypted sooner or later, and at their whim. I'll put hd-cable to the same place in my heart as Hidef cable. In the cold. Call me back when there are open(non-private-key-encumbered) pervasive standards to
PAL and NTSC are locked into 1/2 the frequencies of their terrestrial power. PAL is euro power of 50hz or 25 full frames / sec. NTSC is power of 60hz, but with some slight timing issues this ended up as 29.97 full frames / sec.
Since NTSC countries record TV programs at 29.97 and EURO zone TV programs record programs for 25fps there is an inherent problem with requiring either one of the other group to finalize on a different standard. The end result is something that just doesn't look right. The 'better' compromise would be to force support for both standards going ahead in the future or drop both standards and use film's standard 24fps =)
"That's just flat out wrong, it's 2x 640p resolution, or 1280p equivalent scaled down to 1080i."
If you read the original Halo team rebuke, you'd know that the '640p' renderers are OVERLAYED: one on top of the other, which makes your point pretty pointless. Plus even if you had '640p' * 2 renderer it would still only render 1/2 of the required 1280p
Note: doubling must be done on both X and Y axis, for example 4x as much processing is required to move from 720p to a 1080p signal |-------| | | | X | ? | 640 | |-------| | 1280 | X | ? | 640 | |-------| | |
The sad part is that I spent this long describing how its not native HD and I really couldn't care less if it was native HD or not. It either looks good or it doesn't. Anyone that bitches needlessly about HD and non-HD or kinda HD aren't spending enough time playing the game they're glaming/panning, me included =/
"Okay...you should know I can't play on more than 16 player servers for BF 2142 with my 3x the price of the 360 laptop. Your point is lost once price is factored in."
If you bought a 'Laptop' to play games then you weren't thinking very clearly at all. If you bought a laptop for more than gaming then you're price argument misrepresents the 'value' of the purchase. Why not spend $600 on a perfectly acceptible custom built desktop PC and play pretty much anything out there? You may need to update this or that component every few years, but you won't be stuck with a lump of useless laptop when you realize you can't upgrade it. PS: Buy custom because many vendor PC's also use incompatible form factors to force full system updates (which definitely aren't necessary).
Just FYI, I paid $500cdn for my current PC, play Team fortress 2 on my 720p TV with as many players as the server can throw at me. If you want to play with 16 players thats your business but thats personally too few unless you're really working within a guild that has solid players that you can work with.
Borealis is probably the result of a portal experiment gone awry. The events taking place in Portal are definitely going on after HL1 since the computer makes several references to how bad it is outside and that its safer in here. The computer could have been lying, but then again there's no real counter point to staying in there and dieing.
The 'Borealis' incident could've happened any time, HL1 up to the start of HL2. My conjecture is that the protagonist in Portal could very well have caused the disaster as revenge for being their lab rat. It would make for an interesting Portal 2 and it would allow for HL2e3 cross-overs that you'd like to see when Gordon explores the wreckage of the ship.
Slashdot Mirror
"I'm looking at a $1000-1500 box at a minimum"
1. Take a brand new Computer that has XP and a fast core 2 duo (Researching the fact that you aren't buying a non-upgradable lump of garbage like HP/Dell). ~$600
2. Upgrade RAM to 2 GB ~$60 pessimistically
3. Get a smoking graphics card ~200-250
Total price: $900 or 30% more than what you were going to pay for anyways; That and a few days of passive specs analysis and 10 minutes installation time.
"upgrade at least once every 3 years"
If you're telling me that better games hit PC's more often, then point proven. If you're telling me that The same games you're running on your 3 year obsolete PC are now magically able to run on your 6 year old console, you're missing the point. Consoles are early into this generation and PC graphics have already long past their hardware specs. There is nowhere for consoles to grow for another 4 years in your words.
But for PC's, if you really want a super duper bleeding edge piece of gaming godness, you can, but by no means do 'most' game devs shove ridiculously high requirements down your throat.
I have a good rig in my eyes and I've spent a total of maybe $1000 over the 5 years that I've had it. That is not to say that all I do is game day in and out, it gets good use for many things like hi-def video (as its also a PVR / media PC).
"Heck, the wii demonstrates that you can make a compelling gaming environment on pretty low end hardware"
I absolutely love my Wii to death for the games that I play on it, but lets be frank, the CPU/GPU/lack of substantial storage hold it back from competing seriously in many gaming market segments.
What I can agree to is that Linux gaming really isn't there yet, both in developer support and in market share. Developers interested in Linux work should take the approach of companies like ID/Epic and use/develop technology platforms which makes cross-platform porting simple. Since you need OpenGL pipelines for PS3's anyways, why not spend a little developer time to release an unsupported Linux client? Better yet, if there's a big pull on Linux then you may want to consider actually supporting it. But at this point I'd say Linux gamers will settle for 99% working binaries over waiting a year for Wine support.
Of course there is, that's why Microsoft opened their token Richmond development branch, because it would take imported labor a lot longer to be approved for US entry, so they have the Canadian (gov. more laissez faire on immigration) branch to put them somewhere until they're finally allowed to work in the states legally.
Cuba's already got a gigantic tourist economy, its just from Europe, Canada, Americans on non-connecting out-of-country flights, etc..
Oh the irony, The US seizing properties from people for bypassing an embargo put in place by America as a result of Cuba seizing properties from America.... its like one big circle of hate.
The flying spaghetti monster has always sought to be taught in Florida classrooms, and thanks to some foresight by genius politicians, he can!
The supreme court can only interpret laws, they can't create them. Try picking up the phone and calling your local congressman/woman.
5 seconds of googling turned up:
http://www.motherboard.windowsreinstall.com/winxp.htm
Which has multiple solutions for an in-place upgrade if windows can't do it alone on reboot.
Windows is bad and all, but the registry is one of the few pieces of Windows that just works as intended. Its a data repository. How applications use that repository is their own business.
Oh my god, a comment that actually makes sense and doesn't pander to the lowest common Slashdot denominator? Give this person a cookie.
PS: The patent could be remarkably weak for all I know the only difference between prior art and innovation could be: The ability to scan and copy 'image' for archival purposes VS. The ability to scan and copy 'check' for archival purposes.
Wow, there are so many identical comments to this for the story. I can't explain why everyone's lost their sanity on this issue.
1. As a counter point to your asinine statement, is J. D. Salinger not a real artist because he only wrote one full length novel (and a few short stories)? No, I think he deserves his credit for writing one of, if not the great novel of the 1900's.
2. If a crappy artist writes one song that hits it big, its not like they're going to be able to pack up and move to the Bahamas to live like a king/queen off their royalties. If the song's a one hit wonder then most likely the buzz and the royalties will fizzle away as time forgets them. It will not encourage one hit wonders to just give up and live like fat cows.
3. What this law will do is increase the number of beneficiaries (be it corporations or next of kin) soaking up the rewards from the artist once they've passed away, or transferred ownership.
If the EU is really itching to help out the starving artists, why not set lifetime (or last alive in terms of a group composition) copyrights so that when all members of the composition are dead, the piece is opened into the public domain, and make the benefits of the creation non-transferable. This will mean that artists can't cut and run while music barons stockpile collections of original content to be sold to the highest bidder (PS: I know next to nothing about the music industry so this last point may be completely off).
You do have a point about the hypocrisy of making the law for musicians only. I don't believe in the law 'as described on Slashdot', but its even worse that they're trying to benefit one medium over any other.
There will always be problematic hardware that needs more than just using auto-probed settings using than using /proc and EDID settings. My issue is a minor one, but a major head-ache. I've got a TV as my monitor, and like many many TV's on the market, the TV overscan/underscan issues. The only way to property configure that monitor is for someone to manually plug in settings to come up with a few 'magic' resolutions that will 'just work' out of the box of any new distribution.
But I do agree, most of whats currently inside Xogr.conf can be auto-probed. Maybe we should loosen up the constraints on required sections of Xorg.conf and allow for more 'probe and attach everything I have' configurations, but I wouldn't consider removing the file entirely.
Quite a bit of XP's 2d drawing functions are accelerated using video card driver supports. All the blitting, etc.. which may be supported in Linux drivers was pretty much stock in every well used Windows graphics driver since 2k.
You ever run into the issue that Firefox scrolling is sooo slow? Its probably because the scrolling routines aren't being 2d accelerated like they should be.
Putting too much in user space might seem like a good compromise, but depending on how often you context switch to achieve this separation, the trade offs could be quite inhibitive. I'm not much of a driver programmer and I've never even looked at a graphics driver implementation, but given the cursory glance at the ATI released register mappings, I imagine that the setup and maintenance of said buffers requires quite a bit of hand-holding.
Mod this guy up. You took the words out of my mouth.
Considering that Daemon tools still runs on Vista, I don't think that anti-piracy measures was the main point of the driver signing.
There were a lot of movie / TV tie-in games like there has been in every console since, but I remember that some of those tie-in games were actually pretty good. Batman, Duck tales, hmm.. hard to remember back that for.. They were actually fun to play. Most movie tie-ins out there today are shoddy after-thoughts for marketing or to further their their franchise names.
Notes 8.0 already supports OpenOffice docs (built-in editors), so no big breakthrough there.
For all the uneducated masses like me who didn't know what the hell CV standed for, it stands for "curriculum vitæ" or everyone else in the english world just says Resume.
Lets start suing GFX companies, mainframe, and firewall makers who use software to restrict what features are exposed to the end product. This is nothing new to Apple. If Apple advertised support for protected WMA then someone may have a ledge to grab onto, but instead they use the ploy that if a device -can- support something then it must.
I should sue Nintendo to force them to accept playing my home-brew games. They're illegally locking my right to run my own programmed games on their system even though the system has the ability to play it!! Get your torches.
The PS3 development port was farmed out to another company. Due to the heavy lock-in to DirectX or the non-Valve company doing the work, the port to PS3 has been panned as having very poor graphics performance.
Valve really needs to take the finger out of its ass and support OpenGL officially, because DirectX 10 is a wash for at least 2 more years (until Vista / DX10 maybe hits critical mass) and since all OpenGL (OSX/Linux/PS3) market segments are growing, if just a little.
Their inferiority on these platforms will eventually stifle their profit centers enough to show a hole. So their real option is to protect MS's market position by explicitly NOT supporting other platforms or to embrace OpenGL with open arms. This compromise is probably the 'least' beneficial for them in the long run.
Their roots are well entrenched in Microsoft technologies and a port to OpenGL was either untenable for their staff or more likely undesirable for the MS loving Bellevue development shop. They make good games, but their directx / windows lockin means that I won't be playing their games when I finally bury my last windows installation. A true shame.
haha, I'm one of those 1793 people.
That is until I hit a brick wall with 2000 on something called ATI Driver 8.43 and another something called Enemy Territory Quake Wars. You basically need the latest ATI drivers to play the game without getting immediate crash dialog.
My solution was to install Fedora 8 on my spare Linux partition and use the Linux client. With some tinkering on the config file, I get pretty good performance out of the game. I had a brief experience installing XP on another partition which ended in SP2 upgrade, SP2 downgrade, system unbootable.
Fedora 8 PS: Sapphire x800pro couldn't run the installer X server and had to be installed in text mode. This is fine for a Linux guru like me, but not for most 'trying the waters' types. Please fall back to VESA if the radeon drivers barf please!!
Fedora 8 PPS: It would be -really- cool if you'd allow grey library support for packages like ATI / Nvidia at install time without too much hassle. I don't know you're legal position of explicitly embedding links to "not legal in USA" repositories, but it would REALLY improve the end user experience.
Game reviews are almost purely based on subjective measures just like movies, fine dining, and so many other facets of our lives. There can never be a 'perfect' rating system to a subjective 'opinion' period, end nadda just stop trying. When someone to say 1-100, or 1-10, or 1-4, or Good-Bad, or just a blurb without any rating at all, etc.. are the best, what are you really basing your 'opinions' on? The rating of a subjective rating system are also just as subjective and the ratings themselves, so to argue over the topic at all seems ridiculous and ultimately unsatisfactory for all.
If a reviewer likes to make non-scored reviews of games and there are people that want to read non-scored reviews, they're most likely going to read his/her review. If nobody wants to read about a 1-1000 scale review then the reviewer won't get much ink.
The 'problem' is that whenever YOU disagree with someone's personal opinion of a game, you decry them as playing up the numbers, or perfection not being perfect, etc.. but what it really comes down to is that you don't judge the score in the same way the reviewer does. I talked to a friend once that would NEVER rate a movie 10/10 on IMDB because there could only be 1 movie that could ever reach 10/10 and he hadn't seen that movie yet. To some, 10/10 means 10% of all movies put out. Some would just say 10/10 means that they left the movie happy (regardless of the cinematic value of the piece).
You can 'solve' subjectivity. All you need is a world's worth of borg implants.
Panning one side of the argument doesn't make me or anyone else a hater as you put it. I can fully well believe that someone in their right mind and body could believe that there is a super duper beyond universal creator. That falls beyond current scientific and spiritual understanding. But if someone of faith blithely says something disagreeable to common scientific understanding (like the earth is 6000 years old), I can call them down all I want and not feel bad for it. Now most of the articles and politics of Evo / Creationism are in my mind pretty dumb (6000 year old variety) so I'm sure you hear a lot of Theist bashing. Just think that the 'Science' minded folk like myself are crapping on someone's inflammatory statements about something that couldn't possibly be true, we aren't necessarily attacking a soft hypothetical theistic position, but the (in our minds) open / shut case of theistic fervor.
Tolerance is a two way street and unfortunately for you, science's idealistic (can never be perfected, but that is the ultimate intent) objectivity is more respected on Slashdot than a purely subjective religious faith.
PS: If you'd like to admit it or not, most people with religious convictions were born and raised with that religion fostered and enforced into them by family members. There are pretty small numbers of spontaneous conversions and a quite a bit larger number of marriage conversions, but by in large what your parent believe in is what you believe in.
I hope this brain child never hits the light of day, at least not for a long time.
Why "Built-in HD-DVD" is dumb
Having built in HD-DVD drive will allow MS to push HD-DVD storage enabled games that utilize the extra capacity. This will piss off all the existing users from playing those games and force them to upgrade their systems. The only saving grace on MS side would be to make it ABSOLUTELY clear that the upgraded HD drive will NEVER be used for game content.
Why "HD tuner" aka QAM is dumb
The HiDef TV market is currently locked into Encrypted QAM in North America and the only way to bypass the "rent/buy box from provider" is to use a cablecard decoder which is very broken and restricted to 'certified' hardware. There may be some channels broadcasted over the air unencrypted but you can be damn sure that all cable companies will switch to encrypted sooner or later, and at their whim. I'll put hd-cable to the same place in my heart as Hidef cable. In the cold. Call me back when there are open(non-private-key-encumbered) pervasive standards to
PAL and NTSC are locked into 1/2 the frequencies of their terrestrial power.
PAL is euro power of 50hz or 25 full frames / sec.
NTSC is power of 60hz, but with some slight timing issues this ended up as 29.97 full frames / sec.
Since NTSC countries record TV programs at 29.97 and EURO zone TV programs record programs for 25fps there is an inherent problem with requiring either one of the other group to finalize on a different standard. The end result is something that just doesn't look right. The 'better' compromise would be to force support for both standards going ahead in the future or drop both standards and use film's standard 24fps =)
"That's just flat out wrong, it's 2x 640p resolution, or 1280p equivalent scaled down to 1080i."
If you read the original Halo team rebuke, you'd know that the '640p' renderers are OVERLAYED: one on top of the other, which makes your point pretty pointless. Plus even if you had '640p' * 2 renderer it would still only render 1/2 of the required 1280p
Note: doubling must be done on both X and Y axis, for example 4x as much processing is required to move from 720p to a 1080p signal
|-------| | |
| X | ? | 640 |
|-------| | 1280
| X | ? | 640 |
|-------| | |
The sad part is that I spent this long describing how its not native HD and I really couldn't care less if it was native HD or not. It either looks good or it doesn't. Anyone that bitches needlessly about HD and non-HD or kinda HD aren't spending enough time playing the game they're glaming/panning, me included =/
"Okay...you should know I can't play on more than 16 player servers for BF 2142 with my 3x the price of the 360 laptop. Your point is lost once price is factored in."
If you bought a 'Laptop' to play games then you weren't thinking very clearly at all. If you bought a laptop for more than gaming then you're price argument misrepresents the 'value' of the purchase. Why not spend $600 on a perfectly acceptible custom built desktop PC and play pretty much anything out there? You may need to update this or that component every few years, but you won't be stuck with a lump of useless laptop when you realize you can't upgrade it. PS: Buy custom because many vendor PC's also use incompatible form factors to force full system updates (which definitely aren't necessary).
Just FYI, I paid $500cdn for my current PC, play Team fortress 2 on my 720p TV with as many players as the server can throw at me. If you want to play with 16 players thats your business but thats personally too few unless you're really working within a guild that has solid players that you can work with.
*Spoilers ?*
Borealis is probably the result of a portal experiment gone awry. The events taking place in Portal are definitely going on after HL1 since the computer makes several references to how bad it is outside and that its safer in here. The computer could have been lying, but then again there's no real counter point to staying in there and dieing.
The 'Borealis' incident could've happened any time, HL1 up to the start of HL2. My conjecture is that the protagonist in Portal could very well have caused the disaster as revenge for being their lab rat. It would make for an interesting Portal 2 and it would allow for HL2e3 cross-overs that you'd like to see when Gordon explores the wreckage of the ship.