PC game companies write their products for the lowest common denominator: keyboard and mouse. Gamepad support is an afterthought, and it often shows.
Not that I can blame them; even using a simple gamepad in Windows means mucking about with drivers.
Any noisier than Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 fans?
Often, yes. If nothing else, a standard desktop has more fans (CPU, GPU, PSU) than a console. Granted, my old 360 has more than one fan, but you'd never notice the quiet squirrelcage in the power brick unless you were looking for it, which brings me to my next point...
More home-theater-appropriate cases are available.
What you are referring to are essentially custom order items through specialty boutiques. Meanwhile, I can think of at least half a dozen retail shelves that have consoles on them within ten miles of where I sit.
When literally working "off the shelf," you're stuck with comparing consoles with general-purpose desktops, which are designed to be desktops.
PCs need to be replaced with a new model every 3-4 years.
Source?
ATI and nVidia.
There are exceptions of course. Why did the Nintendo DS replace the Game Boy Advance after about 3 1/2 years (second quarter 2001 to fourth quarter 2004)?
They didn't. The GBA was sold concurrently with the DS and DS Lite (note the timing of the GB micro).
Of course, if you want to use that standard to define "replacement," we can talk about the frequency with which versions of DirectX (and compatible GPUs) are similarly "replaced."
It would appear that the Modern UI-style Start Screen of Windows 8 actually makes it easier to launch games using a controller.
Setting aside for the moment that we're suddenly living in a world where the steps to play a game are more complicated than "Insert game, turn on," does the Windows 8 UI even accept a gamepad as input out of the box?
I do not know what grades they are receiving for these posts. Slashdot, is what I am seeing the exception, or the norm? Is the bar being lowered for university students, or am I just expecting too much?
Lowered compared to what? The proliferation of these online courses means that you are now being exposed to the writing of your classmates in ways you were not before; in a physical classroom, you'd come to know your peers more by their speaking than their writing (unless you sat between two teenaged girls...), and only your instructor would have exposure to the class's writing as a whole.
Also, you neglected to mention what kind of admissions process your current school has. Just because it is a public institution doesn't mean they don't have a relatively open-door policy (e.g. a community college).
Personally, I'm taking some graduate courses online, from a school with just such an open acceptance policy, and the writing of my peers does make me wince (hopefully this changes after my first semester). But I think I wince more for their laziness than lack of skill, as just about all of their mistakes would be caught by Microsoft Word or a similarly robust word processor.
But what really irks me is their habit of treating everything like an essay question on a standardized test, complete with standardized response format. What is supposed to be a prompt for online discussion and academic discourse (literally we're told to "respond with a paragraph or two, about 100 words"), and everyone responds with a canned response, with the first sentence always being the prompt (question) rearranged into the form of a statement (often right after quoting the question itself), followed by five or more paragraphs that must have been at least as painful to write as it is to read.
The worst is that it makes me self-conscious of my conversational tone, leaving me to wonder if I'm supposed to be writing like that.
I am a university professor. What you are witnessing is the disintegration of American secondary education.
Except OP's class isn't Associate's level. His classmates have presumably taken (and passed) requisite college-level ("post-secondary") writing courses.
About 3000 years or so of cultural heritage, combined with general apathy on the subject from the public at large. The alliteration doesn't hurt, either.
It's well known that the late Admiral Ozzel came out of hyperpsace too close to the system and cost them the element of surprise. He's as clumsy as he was stupid....
The leader of a huge coalition, preparing for a moderately sized assault, mis-clicked and accidentally warped himself into enemy territory without his support fleet,
Just because central heating drives down the relative humidity to 50% indoors doesn't mean it's not also near 100% outdoors, where colder temperatures give much higher relative humidity for the same humidity ratio.
Worth a shot. Seems like very time I go to the grocery store, someone is in front of me loading up on Oreos, Doritos, soda, and ice cream and putting it on the food stamp card.
The most calories for the least amount of money. Also, the least amount of necessary preparation time, as many of those recipients work more hours than you do.
if you've learned your lesson and aren't going to do it again.
And you get to decide for yourself whether you've "learned your lesson," based on your own standards?
I'd rather you try to convince a judge a of that. After all, we're talking about the same personal standards that led you to think to try it to begin with.
It's something that MMO players have had to deal with for some time,
When last I heard, Ultima Online and EverQuest are still going. Hell, if you really want to kick it old-school, MadMaze has outlived Prodigy itself.
If anything, I suspect this speaks more to Zynga's business model of relying on microtransactions rather than such online-based games as a whole. I'm not certain of the causal relationship between a game's failure and going "free-to-play," but it's hard to deny a correlation.
Spam is a problem where false positives generally cost less than false negatives. If there are "few" too many, it is almost always an acceptable loss compared to the alternative.
So, if there is *one* low-rate (one message per day) zombie spambox connected somewhere in Comcast LA's AS, the reasonable thing for a blacklist maintainer to do is to blacklist *every* Comcast customer in LA?
Yes. It's not worth anybody's time and effort to sort through sock puppets beyond that scale. Questions of who is responsible for what falls into the category of "Not my fucking problem."
We have already long since learned that the chainsaw really is preferable to the scalpel when dealing with spam.
The MFR simply makes the product. The owner still carries full weight and responsibility for proper use and misuse. Shouldnt have to have a law to state that.
With respect to guns, the proper, intended use of the product is to put holes into people.
Why should they be shielded from liability any more than tobacco companies?
Slashdot Mirror
PCs support USB gamepads.
PC game companies write their products for the lowest common denominator: keyboard and mouse. Gamepad support is an afterthought, and it often shows.
Not that I can blame them; even using a simple gamepad in Windows means mucking about with drivers.
Any noisier than Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 fans?
Often, yes. If nothing else, a standard desktop has more fans (CPU, GPU, PSU) than a console. Granted, my old 360 has more than one fan, but you'd never notice the quiet squirrelcage in the power brick unless you were looking for it, which brings me to my next point...
More home-theater-appropriate cases are available.
What you are referring to are essentially custom order items through specialty boutiques. Meanwhile, I can think of at least half a dozen retail shelves that have consoles on them within ten miles of where I sit.
When literally working "off the shelf," you're stuck with comparing consoles with general-purpose desktops, which are designed to be desktops.
PCs need to be replaced with a new model every 3-4 years.
Source?
ATI and nVidia.
There are exceptions of course. Why did the Nintendo DS replace the Game Boy Advance after about 3 1/2 years (second quarter 2001 to fourth quarter 2004)?
They didn't. The GBA was sold concurrently with the DS and DS Lite (note the timing of the GB micro).
Of course, if you want to use that standard to define "replacement," we can talk about the frequency with which versions of DirectX (and compatible GPUs) are similarly "replaced."
It would appear that the Modern UI-style Start Screen of Windows 8 actually makes it easier to launch games using a controller.
Setting aside for the moment that we're suddenly living in a world where the steps to play a game are more complicated than "Insert game, turn on," does the Windows 8 UI even accept a gamepad as input out of the box?
I do not know what grades they are receiving for these posts. Slashdot, is what I am seeing the exception, or the norm? Is the bar being lowered for university students, or am I just expecting too much?
Lowered compared to what? The proliferation of these online courses means that you are now being exposed to the writing of your classmates in ways you were not before; in a physical classroom, you'd come to know your peers more by their speaking than their writing (unless you sat between two teenaged girls...), and only your instructor would have exposure to the class's writing as a whole.
Also, you neglected to mention what kind of admissions process your current school has. Just because it is a public institution doesn't mean they don't have a relatively open-door policy (e.g. a community college).
Personally, I'm taking some graduate courses online, from a school with just such an open acceptance policy, and the writing of my peers does make me wince (hopefully this changes after my first semester). But I think I wince more for their laziness than lack of skill, as just about all of their mistakes would be caught by Microsoft Word or a similarly robust word processor.
But what really irks me is their habit of treating everything like an essay question on a standardized test, complete with standardized response format. What is supposed to be a prompt for online discussion and academic discourse (literally we're told to "respond with a paragraph or two, about 100 words"), and everyone responds with a canned response, with the first sentence always being the prompt (question) rearranged into the form of a statement (often right after quoting the question itself), followed by five or more paragraphs that must have been at least as painful to write as it is to read.
The worst is that it makes me self-conscious of my conversational tone, leaving me to wonder if I'm supposed to be writing like that.
I am a university professor. What you are witnessing is the disintegration of American secondary education.
Except OP's class isn't Associate's level. His classmates have presumably taken (and passed) requisite college-level ("post-secondary") writing courses.
Why is that stupid term "Sixth Sense" still used?
About 3000 years or so of cultural heritage, combined with general apathy on the subject from the public at large. The alliteration doesn't hurt, either.
Have fun tilting at those windmills.
Why print out the collider when you can print out the hadrons themselves?
"It's not a bug, it's a feature!"
--Google.
It's well known that the late Admiral Ozzel came out of hyperpsace too close to the system and cost them the element of surprise. He's as clumsy as he was stupid....
FTFY
Seriously: does the OP even read Slashdot?
So if someone lives in a country where most devices come without Google Play Store... where should he get apps instead?
Amazon.
The leader of a huge coalition, preparing for a moderately sized assault, mis-clicked and accidentally warped himself into enemy territory without his support fleet,
UI issue leads to massive server load.
Just because central heating drives down the relative humidity to 50% indoors doesn't mean it's not also near 100% outdoors, where colder temperatures give much higher relative humidity for the same humidity ratio.
Worth a shot. Seems like very time I go to the grocery store, someone is in front of me loading up on Oreos, Doritos, soda, and ice cream and putting it on the food stamp card.
The most calories for the least amount of money. Also, the least amount of necessary preparation time, as many of those recipients work more hours than you do.
Then pay for their legal defense.
if you've learned your lesson and aren't going to do it again.
And you get to decide for yourself whether you've "learned your lesson," based on your own standards?
I'd rather you try to convince a judge a of that. After all, we're talking about the same personal standards that led you to think to try it to begin with.
And avoid patent trolling by Sony? Yes.
It's something that MMO players have had to deal with for some time,
When last I heard, Ultima Online and EverQuest are still going. Hell, if you really want to kick it old-school, MadMaze has outlived Prodigy itself.
If anything, I suspect this speaks more to Zynga's business model of relying on microtransactions rather than such online-based games as a whole. I'm not certain of the causal relationship between a game's failure and going "free-to-play," but it's hard to deny a correlation.
ME came out after 2000 and before XP.
Here, let me fix that for you:
By that logic...
Windows 2000: rocks
Windows XP: sucks
Windows Vista: rocks
Windows 7: sucks
Windows 8: rocks
everything that's being used to force... microsoft accounts on people..
Microsoft has been pushing OS and Microsoft Passport integration since XP, if you haven't been paying attention.
Yeah, kind of a bad sign when you buy your Fleshlight a Mac.
How many false positives do you get though?
Spam is a problem where false positives generally cost less than false negatives. If there are "few" too many, it is almost always an acceptable loss compared to the alternative.
So, if there is *one* low-rate (one message per day) zombie spambox connected somewhere in Comcast LA's AS, the reasonable thing for a blacklist maintainer to do is to blacklist *every* Comcast customer in LA?
Yes. It's not worth anybody's time and effort to sort through sock puppets beyond that scale. Questions of who is responsible for what falls into the category of "Not my fucking problem."
We have already long since learned that the chainsaw really is preferable to the scalpel when dealing with spam.
USB easily; a DualShock 2 controller is lousy for picking letters at any decent speed.
The MFR simply makes the product.
The owner still carries full weight and responsibility for proper use and misuse.
Shouldnt have to have a law to state that.
With respect to guns, the proper, intended use of the product is to put holes into people.
Why should they be shielded from liability any more than tobacco companies?
there is no reason most govenment employees need a pc connected to the internet.
What makes "government employees" fundamentally different from "private sector employees?"