I've been trying since I was a kid. Every time I'd try to read or play video games, ANYTHING that took my eyes off the outdoors, I'd get carsick. I found car trips very boring because the only thing I could do to entertain myself was listen to music and look out the window.
I fell in love with driving simply because it gives me something FUN to do when I'm in a vehicle.
What if the library didn't serve beer, but had a section dedicated to people who wanted to bring their own beer. But one beer company decided that even though the library lets you drink the beer in there, they don't want you drinking THEIR beer in a library. So if Blizzard catches you drinking their beer in a Linux environment, they are going to ban you from playing Diablo 3.
Your analogy doesn't hold water (or beer!) because you glossed over one tiny little important detail:
"Drinking Diablo 3 Beer requires a connection to the Internet, and requires you to use an officially licensed Diablo 3 Smart Beer Mug (TM) to consume. You authorize Blizzard to use the sensors on the Diablo 3 Smart Beer Mug to verify the smoothness of any beer prior to consumption. You also authorize Blizzard to seize your account if you present any brew that fails quality tests.
Those November numbers are for Japan. There is a Christmas season there, but it's not nearly as insane as the Christmas shopping rush in the US.
And let me put this in perspective: assuming the November numbers are bloated by a Japanese Christmas shopping season, then the comparison makes Japan look even worse.
If this is one of the best months in Japan, and it's 10x smaller than the sales from one of the worst months in the US (spring downturn), then you can clearly see how insignificant Japan is (especially since we have not even gotten into the European market, which is almost as big as the US).
Yes, The Xbox moves less than 1k a week, but the best home consoles in the region barely move 5k units a week. That's not a very lucrative market. And yes, the portable numbers are much higher, but that still doesn't come close to the US market (roughly 333k 3DS units sold per-month since launch).
See there difference there? For home consoles, Japan is a drop in the bucket. It's no wonder Microsoft completely ceded the market - until they have a portable there's no point in even trying.
It's a short-term success, but in the long-term it's going to cost Nintendo. The Wiimote is the only widely-supported control system on the platform, and for many games it's too limiting.
For games that require fast action, most players I've met get frustrated quickly. Motion control waggles are always a balance between dead-zone and live-zone, and since too much dead-zone frustrates players, they push the live-zone to the bleeding edge. This means as players get tired or stressed / move faster they start to miss motions, which makes them lose.
A game pad is more forgiving, with (mostly) digital button presses. It's also less likely to tire you out in 20 minutes.
And the reason for these higher-bandwidth DDR chips is not to keep CPUs fed - it's for feeding the newly-integrated bandwidth-hungry on-die GPUs.
CPU performance these days is usually more tied to latency than bandwidth, and since the memory+cache subsystem is already quite fast new modules make little difference.
Yes, the market is ripe for revolution, but it won't happen unless Apple convinces the car makers to let them do it, or build their own car.
The percentage of people who replace factory stereos today is the lowest it's ever been, and that's because the quality and features included in factory stereos has never been higher. Also thanks to integration game, most factory stereos do more than just play music. If you remove your factory stereo you might lose other important features in the process.
Unless Apple makes a move to offer a scalable, mufti-function OEM solution that car makers can customize and ship with pride, the best that's going to happen is people will continue to use the iPod/iPhone integration already included in many factory decks.
Says the guy, who probably slashed his fingers taking out ISA, PCI or AGP cards from his custom made tower PC.
Your point? Expansion slots are about the ability to customize, not about your computer arriving in a 1500-piece puzzle set box. OEM computers come set-up for you, and expansion slots give you the power to customize...they don't REQUIRE you to do anything with them.
IKEA is targeting this thing at idiots who don't give a shit about technology or image quality and just want something pretty that "just works," and yet there will probably be "assembly required." Does this sound like sane marketing to you?
but it lags in performance by an order of magnitude.
This is just not true. A single channel of Thunderbolt does 10Gbps bi-directional. A single channel of USB 3 does 4.0 Gbps bi-directional. That's a factor of 2.5x, not 10x.
If Intel is going to push it, it'll catch on. So far they haven't, but looks like that may change.
I can't see them pushing it with any zeal now that the 70-series chipsets feature native USB 3. It doesn't help that Intel has also shipped the best USB 3 controller in existence. When USB 3 satisfies your average user's high-speed expansion needs, there's not much reason for Thunderbolt on mainstream platforms.
Thunderbolt silicon probably won't be integrated anytime soon (adding cost), and the $50 active cables aren't helping things (you can get 6-foot USB 3 cables for around 10 bucks). Given that USB 3 is now universal on all mainstream PCs sold, it's going to be hell justifying the extra cost of Thunderbolt.
I always wondered why it took WDC over two years to design the thing. Guess I know now!
I found it strange because Intel managed to produce the 8086 (similar in complexity) in less time, and this was while Intel was distracted with the already-delayed iAPX 432, which was their feature product. The late release of the 65C816 meant it was all but forgotten as the market moved on to the 286 and 68000 series.
He did allow Chuck to design the Commodore PET, but this was only after Chuck witnessed the Apple prototype and finally convinced Jack that the calculator market was dead.
Jack was a smart businessman who could run a tight ship, but he was a poor prognosticator of the tech industry. Most of his products he pushed were derivatives made more efficiently, and he (and Commodore management once the company grew) had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the next big new thing.
Hell, the legendary Commodore 64 chipset was only as amazing as it was because Jack wanted a game console. Never mind the fact that the console market was saturated, at the VIC-20 was the same price - Jack wanted to be the best console maker, and that was that. And when the console market caved he was left with a game chipset, and he still had to be convinced by an internal team of the best engineers at Commodore to turn it into a product.
Yes, this book details Jack purposefully not paying suppliers, nice to hear it repeated from someone first-hand. According to the book they made a point of not paying suppliers, especially if they were interested in acquiring the company. When the company was cash-strapped and desperate, Commodore would buy them out.
It made more money on the short-term, but was bad for the long-run because it burned bridges in the industry. This made it hard for Jack to get now-wary suppliers and dealers to help him grow his business when he saw an opportunity for a new market/device.
Sorry, I just don't buy that a significant percentage of players will have the patience to hand-optimize assembler. And an event-based scripting language could certainly handle situations where you want the ship to do X at time Y with circumstances Z.
Anyway, the high-level OSes and scripting languages will be born, but they won't get much further. A high percentage of Open Source projects are abandoned before maturity, and I can imagine that people will abandon this thing in droves once they figure out how much it feels like work.
Sitting through countless meetings about IDDs and requirements, players will quickly realize how stupid this is when they're paying a monthly fee to play a "game" that isn't really a game.
In the end this is all you're going to use your emulated CPU for - scripting events. And while people will argue until their throat hurts that scripting is so much more limited than a real CPU, please remember one crucial fact: this IS NOT a real CPU.
This is a simulated CPU crafted by the game designer, and any use you get out of this CPU will be limited by (1) the architecture/memory and (2) the I/O provided to interface with various aspects of the game.
Why not just use a scripting language with defined interfaces and put a limit on the maximum program length (to simulate the intended limitations of the 64k ram, etc)? There's no reason you can't design-in similar limitation to keep players on their toes. You will also entice an entirely new set of players into the game who can comprehend how a simple script works, but stare glass-eyed at you when you mention non-maskable interrupts or twos-complement arithmetic.
Besides, everyone knows that some community member(s) will release a high-level language and compiler (of questionable quality and support) as soon as the game is launched, so why bother making this pretty CPU emulator if few players will ever see? I say the creator should just save himself the trouble of player backlash about a crappy community-supported IDE that he can't fix, and just do it himself.
In 1993 computers were still disgustingly expensive ($2000+ with a monitor), and that was for a 386 that would choke on anything but text pages (in terms of online rendering). Modems were still incredibly slow and internet providers outside academia were incredibly hard to come by (most people used AOL). In this time period people were mostly buying computers, recognizing that they couldn't do anything fun without upgrading to a CD-ROM and a sound card, and upgrading with a Multimedia kit and playing The Seventh Guest and mucking around on Encarta (included in most upgrade kits).
You're thinking of the time frame of 1996 onwards, when people actually had more powerful processors to choose from (486 or Pentium-based PCs), faster modems became inexpensive (14.4 and faster), and real consumer internet providers began to surface.
Except you need the consoles to pay for your $4.99 game port.
GTA 3 was bought-and-paid-for several times over by PC and console sales, to the point that the port only has to cover the conversion costs. If you get rid of consoles entirely, the price of NEW AAA single-player games with depth (AKA NOT ANGRY BIRDS) will skyrocket to $50+, just like they do on any other platform.
For any multiplayer PvP or Coop game a minimum player base is critical. Games that require people will be completely abandoned if there are not enough players. Just ask anyone how hard it is to seed and fill a 64-player BF3 server from nothing - unless you actively have players connect and then sit idle, or you fake the reported player count the server will stay perpetually empty. And then magically once it hits a critical number of players it can stay full for long periods of time.
Making it free to play keeps the servers full, and keeps your game relevant.
The Classic Controller spells out exactly why Nintendo has lost the true gamer crowd:
1. The original design was crap and hard to use. They took three years to fix that load of crap.
2. Now that it's not "the standard" controller that ships with the system, game developers are not supporting it. Only about ~140 games support the Classic Controller, out of well over 1000 Wii games released...and only a tiny fraction of that ~140 support the Gamecube controller.
This means that if you don't like waggles replacing button presses, and if you'd rather use the analog stick than flail your arms about: tough shit. You are no-longer officially supported.
Nope, Common Sense 2012 Platinum here. Haven't had any infection in well over half a decade.
You and I used to be on the same page. I was smart and never got infected for years despite having no running virus scanner. I would verify every few months by running an online virus check, and that was that.
But two years ago I started reading about hackers compromising websites and ad networks and injecting their own exploits into an otherwise trusted webpage. Even tools like Noscript couldn't keep you %100 safe because of potential exploits in Javascript and PDF (unless you wanted to live in the dark ages of the web).
No amount of Common Sense could save you from this attack, and you had no idea when it could strike. I installed Microsoft Security Essentials, and I'm glad now that I did: a few months ago it caught a drive-by download exploit from a website I trusted. I'm very happy to have that level of protection on the Wild Wild Web.
People who buy cheap machines from OEMs that come laden with crapware. After the 6 month "free trial" the software pops-up a big glaring "you're not protected anymore please pay" sign, and most people probably give in.
I just encountered TWO different "free trial" antivirus programs installed on a family member's cheap E-Machines POS (they really cashed-in there). I removed both and replaced it with MSE.
The sad thing is, you can get a crapware-free PC, but the price premium is astounding. I'm constantly amazed just how much companies like Symantec pay to put their shitty "free trial that is not a free trial" products on PCs. And since people insist on paying the least they can (insert above family member here), they will always be flooded with crapware.
Slashdot Mirror
I always thought it looked more like a Waffle Iron.
Uhh, no.
I've been trying since I was a kid. Every time I'd try to read or play video games, ANYTHING that took my eyes off the outdoors, I'd get carsick. I found car trips very boring because the only thing I could do to entertain myself was listen to music and look out the window.
I fell in love with driving simply because it gives me something FUN to do when I'm in a vehicle.
What if the library didn't serve beer, but had a section dedicated to people who wanted to bring their own beer. But one beer company decided that even though the library lets you drink the beer in there, they don't want you drinking THEIR beer in a library. So if Blizzard catches you drinking their beer in a Linux environment, they are going to ban you from playing Diablo 3.
Your analogy doesn't hold water (or beer!) because you glossed over one tiny little important detail:
"Drinking Diablo 3 Beer requires a connection to the Internet, and requires you to use an officially licensed Diablo 3 Smart Beer Mug (TM) to consume. You authorize Blizzard to use the sensors on the Diablo 3 Smart Beer Mug to verify the smoothness of any beer prior to consumption. You also authorize Blizzard to seize your account if you present any brew that fails quality tests.
Thank you for giving us your money!"
Those November numbers are for Japan. There is a Christmas season there, but it's not nearly as insane as the Christmas shopping rush in the US.
And let me put this in perspective: assuming the November numbers are bloated by a Japanese Christmas shopping season, then the comparison makes Japan look even worse.
If this is one of the best months in Japan, and it's 10x smaller than the sales from one of the worst months in the US (spring downturn), then you can clearly see how insignificant Japan is (especially since we have not even gotten into the European market, which is almost as big as the US).
Competitive? They don't even sell 1k a week in Japan.
And the Japanese market doesn't matter, because it's overshadowed by the USA and Europe.
Take a look at these November 2011 numbers for Japan:
PS3: 22,919
Wii: 11,782
Xbox 360: 1,531
3DS: 103,962
Yes, The Xbox moves less than 1k a week, but the best home consoles in the region barely move 5k units a week. That's not a very lucrative market. And yes, the portable numbers are much higher, but that still doesn't come close to the US market (roughly 333k 3DS units sold per-month since launch).
Now take a look at these US numbers for March 2012: (not the same month but they're both recent and off-peak so it's comparable).
Xbox 360: 371,000
PS3: 337,000
Wii: 175,000
See there difference there? For home consoles, Japan is a drop in the bucket. It's no wonder Microsoft completely ceded the market - until they have a portable there's no point in even trying.
but to call the Wii a failure is just dishonest.
It's a short-term success, but in the long-term it's going to cost Nintendo. The Wiimote is the only widely-supported control system on the platform, and for many games it's too limiting.
For games that require fast action, most players I've met get frustrated quickly. Motion control waggles are always a balance between dead-zone and live-zone, and since too much dead-zone frustrates players, they push the live-zone to the bleeding edge. This means as players get tired or stressed / move faster they start to miss motions, which makes them lose.
A game pad is more forgiving, with (mostly) digital button presses. It's also less likely to tire you out in 20 minutes.
Absolutely correct.
And the reason for these higher-bandwidth DDR chips is not to keep CPUs fed - it's for feeding the newly-integrated bandwidth-hungry on-die GPUs.
CPU performance these days is usually more tied to latency than bandwidth, and since the memory+cache subsystem is already quite fast new modules make little difference.
Yes, the market is ripe for revolution, but it won't happen unless Apple convinces the car makers to let them do it, or build their own car.
The percentage of people who replace factory stereos today is the lowest it's ever been, and that's because the quality and features included in factory stereos has never been higher. Also thanks to integration game, most factory stereos do more than just play music. If you remove your factory stereo you might lose other important features in the process.
Unless Apple makes a move to offer a scalable, mufti-function OEM solution that car makers can customize and ship with pride, the best that's going to happen is people will continue to use the iPod/iPhone integration already included in many factory decks.
Go for the gold...
Go for the gold...
Go for the ...aww, he missed!
Says the guy, who probably slashed his fingers taking out ISA, PCI or AGP cards from his custom made tower PC.
Your point? Expansion slots are about the ability to customize, not about your computer arriving in a 1500-piece puzzle set box. OEM computers come set-up for you, and expansion slots give you the power to customize...they don't REQUIRE you to do anything with them.
IKEA is targeting this thing at idiots who don't give a shit about technology or image quality and just want something pretty that "just works," and yet there will probably be "assembly required." Does this sound like sane marketing to you?
but it lags in performance by an order of magnitude.
This is just not true. A single channel of Thunderbolt does 10Gbps bi-directional. A single channel of USB 3 does 4.0 Gbps bi-directional. That's a factor of 2.5x, not 10x.
And yes, thanks to the new bi-directional bus (USB 2 was shared) USB 3 can already reach 2.5 Gbps in real-world tests. Also being introduced right now are improved UASP (SCSI scheduling) protocols to utilize the same percentage of the bus as Firewire did. Support for UASP is already shipping in products like Asmedia controllers and Intel's 70-series chpsets.
If Intel is going to push it, it'll catch on. So far they haven't, but looks like that may change.
I can't see them pushing it with any zeal now that the 70-series chipsets feature native USB 3. It doesn't help that Intel has also shipped the best USB 3 controller in existence. When USB 3 satisfies your average user's high-speed expansion needs, there's not much reason for Thunderbolt on mainstream platforms.
Thunderbolt silicon probably won't be integrated anytime soon (adding cost), and the $50 active cables aren't helping things (you can get 6-foot USB 3 cables for around 10 bucks). Given that USB 3 is now universal on all mainstream PCs sold, it's going to be hell justifying the extra cost of Thunderbolt.
I always wondered why it took WDC over two years to design the thing. Guess I know now!
I found it strange because Intel managed to produce the 8086 (similar in complexity) in less time, and this was while Intel was distracted with the already-delayed iAPX 432, which was their feature product. The late release of the 65C816 meant it was all but forgotten as the market moved on to the 286 and 68000 series.
He's not. That's Chuck Peddle's baby.
He did allow Chuck to design the Commodore PET, but this was only after Chuck witnessed the Apple prototype and finally convinced Jack that the calculator market was dead.
Jack was a smart businessman who could run a tight ship, but he was a poor prognosticator of the tech industry. Most of his products he pushed were derivatives made more efficiently, and he (and Commodore management once the company grew) had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the next big new thing.
Hell, the legendary Commodore 64 chipset was only as amazing as it was because Jack wanted a game console. Never mind the fact that the console market was saturated, at the VIC-20 was the same price - Jack wanted to be the best console maker, and that was that. And when the console market caved he was left with a game chipset, and he still had to be convinced by an internal team of the best engineers at Commodore to turn it into a product.
Yes, this book details Jack purposefully not paying suppliers, nice to hear it repeated from someone first-hand. According to the book they made a point of not paying suppliers, especially if they were interested in acquiring the company. When the company was cash-strapped and desperate, Commodore would buy them out.
It made more money on the short-term, but was bad for the long-run because it burned bridges in the industry. This made it hard for Jack to get now-wary suppliers and dealers to help him grow his business when he saw an opportunity for a new market/device.
Sorry, I just don't buy that a significant percentage of players will have the patience to hand-optimize assembler. And an event-based scripting language could certainly handle situations where you want the ship to do X at time Y with circumstances Z.
Anyway, the high-level OSes and scripting languages will be born, but they won't get much further. A high percentage of Open Source projects are abandoned before maturity, and I can imagine that people will abandon this thing in droves once they figure out how much it feels like work.
Sitting through countless meetings about IDDs and requirements, players will quickly realize how stupid this is when they're paying a monthly fee to play a "game" that isn't really a game.
In the end this is all you're going to use your emulated CPU for - scripting events. And while people will argue until their throat hurts that scripting is so much more limited than a real CPU, please remember one crucial fact: this IS NOT a real CPU.
This is a simulated CPU crafted by the game designer, and any use you get out of this CPU will be limited by (1) the architecture/memory and (2) the I/O provided to interface with various aspects of the game.
Why not just use a scripting language with defined interfaces and put a limit on the maximum program length (to simulate the intended limitations of the 64k ram, etc)? There's no reason you can't design-in similar limitation to keep players on their toes. You will also entice an entirely new set of players into the game who can comprehend how a simple script works, but stare glass-eyed at you when you mention non-maskable interrupts or twos-complement arithmetic.
Besides, everyone knows that some community member(s) will release a high-level language and compiler (of questionable quality and support) as soon as the game is launched, so why bother making this pretty CPU emulator if few players will ever see? I say the creator should just save himself the trouble of player backlash about a crappy community-supported IDE that he can't fix, and just do it himself.
And not only will Windows automatically update, it will also automatically restart to install that update if you wait too long to do it.
It seems to wait until the wee hours of the morning to do this, which makes the most sense.
In 1993 computers were still disgustingly expensive ($2000+ with a monitor), and that was for a 386 that would choke on anything but text pages (in terms of online rendering). Modems were still incredibly slow and internet providers outside academia were incredibly hard to come by (most people used AOL). In this time period people were mostly buying computers, recognizing that they couldn't do anything fun without upgrading to a CD-ROM and a sound card, and upgrading with a Multimedia kit and playing The Seventh Guest and mucking around on Encarta (included in most upgrade kits).
You're thinking of the time frame of 1996 onwards, when people actually had more powerful processors to choose from (486 or Pentium-based PCs), faster modems became inexpensive (14.4 and faster), and real consumer internet providers began to surface.
you just don't need the consoles anymore
Except you need the consoles to pay for your $4.99 game port.
GTA 3 was bought-and-paid-for several times over by PC and console sales, to the point that the port only has to cover the conversion costs. If you get rid of consoles entirely, the price of NEW AAA single-player games with depth (AKA NOT ANGRY BIRDS) will skyrocket to $50+, just like they do on any other platform.
Heshopolis is off the hook baby!
Go on! Hump her! Make a bear-affe... or a giraffabear!
For any multiplayer PvP or Coop game a minimum player base is critical. Games that require people will be completely abandoned if there are not enough players. Just ask anyone how hard it is to seed and fill a 64-player BF3 server from nothing - unless you actively have players connect and then sit idle, or you fake the reported player count the server will stay perpetually empty. And then magically once it hits a critical number of players it can stay full for long periods of time.
Making it free to play keeps the servers full, and keeps your game relevant.
The Classic Controller spells out exactly why Nintendo has lost the true gamer crowd:
1. The original design was crap and hard to use. They took three years to fix that load of crap.
2. Now that it's not "the standard" controller that ships with the system, game developers are not supporting it. Only about ~140 games support the Classic Controller, out of well over 1000 Wii games released...and only a tiny fraction of that ~140 support the Gamecube controller.
This means that if you don't like waggles replacing button presses, and if you'd rather use the analog stick than flail your arms about: tough shit. You are no-longer officially supported.
Nope, Common Sense 2012 Platinum here. Haven't had any infection in well over half a decade.
You and I used to be on the same page. I was smart and never got infected for years despite having no running virus scanner. I would verify every few months by running an online virus check, and that was that.
But two years ago I started reading about hackers compromising websites and ad networks and injecting their own exploits into an otherwise trusted webpage. Even tools like Noscript couldn't keep you %100 safe because of potential exploits in Javascript and PDF (unless you wanted to live in the dark ages of the web).
No amount of Common Sense could save you from this attack, and you had no idea when it could strike. I installed Microsoft Security Essentials, and I'm glad now that I did: a few months ago it caught a drive-by download exploit from a website I trusted. I'm very happy to have that level of protection on the Wild Wild Web.
Who still pays for antivirus?
People who buy cheap machines from OEMs that come laden with crapware. After the 6 month "free trial" the software pops-up a big glaring "you're not protected anymore please pay" sign, and most people probably give in.
I just encountered TWO different "free trial" antivirus programs installed on a family member's cheap E-Machines POS (they really cashed-in there). I removed both and replaced it with MSE.
The sad thing is, you can get a crapware-free PC, but the price premium is astounding. I'm constantly amazed just how much companies like Symantec pay to put their shitty "free trial that is not a free trial" products on PCs. And since people insist on paying the least they can (insert above family member here), they will always be flooded with crapware.