Another example to DVDs would be channels like UKTV Gold, that they flog off their old content to. So, we've already paid for the BBC, but to watch it, we have to pay to watch UKTV Gold. And we get adverts on that channel on top of that.
If TV Licensing think you might have a TV
And just to add, their criterion for this is "If the person has an address in our database".
although somehow we're not allowed access to shows for more than about a week after broadcast
Indeed - personally I think all BBC produced content should be available for free, for licence payers at least. I also find it frustrating that they eagerly send takedown notices to YouTube, when the material that was there isn't available online from the BBC.
And given the UK Government's plans to disconnect people for downloading, I'd like to know how this will work for someone downloading programmes shown on the BBC, that they already pay for.
I'm sure the American courts are outraged at how generous that is - given the going rate of $80,000 per person per mp3, a mere $5000 per person for a whole day's worth of downloading is a bargain!
E.g., one million people downloading just a single mp3 in a day ought to come to $80 billion. Spread that over a year, and they're looking at $29 trillion. Which isn't much, I mean, it's only about 50% of the entire World's GDP.
People might choose it, but as long as it's good enough for its purpose, there isn't a need for that. Consider, is space flight with computers unfeasible, because we can't recall the probes back to upgrade the computers?
It wouldn't be so bad if they did apply it equally to big businesses.
For example, maybe the record companies would think twice, if say, EMI got cut off due to filesharing (as recently occurred, due to Lily Allen's "mix tapes" found to be on their servers).
Also note that, even according to the UK Government's own figures (which is hardly going to be biased in favour of p2p, given it wanting to also introduce these laws), the alleged damages from software piracy by businesses in 144 times greater than alleged damages for music, TV and films over p2p (source: the Government consultation document on this proposed law).
But I suspect it'll be one rule for them, and another for the rest of us.
And indeed, I looked again - see my other comment, showing as of the start of this year, Nokia at 38.6%, Apple at 1%, with a whole load of other companies in between, also far above Apple ( http://www.mobileburn.com/news.jsp?Id=6191 ).
So let's try your statement again:
"If the Iphone is so good, why are people buying 38x as many Nokia phones?"
Nokia made their product off their tech. It's not as popular as the iPhone.
This, ladies and gentlemen, should be held up as a sad example of the effect of Apple-only coverage here on Slashdot for the mobile phone market. This poster actually believes that Apple have a bigger share of the market than Nokia. We are actually getting to the stage where, as a result, some geeks have less knowledge of the mobile phone market than lay people.
Nokia - 38.6% Samsung - 16.2% Motorola - 8.3% LG - 8.3% Sony Ericson - 8% RIM - 1.9% Apple - 1%
That, ladies and gentlemen, is the reality of the market (if you disagree, make sure you have a reference). You wouldn't know it from Slashdot (when was the last time we had a story about Samsung?)
And to counter the standard replies, please avoid: * "I'm going to redefine the definition of the market so it includes Apple and some smaller players." * "I'm going to redefine market share to mean something other than sales, e.g., to mean how much I and Slashdot talk about it." * "I'm going to ignore your citation, and respond with anecdotal evidence of how I and my friends all seem to have Iphones, therefore it must be more popular, and I get modded up +5 insightful for it."
As for your comments about patents, agreed - now please go and say the same thing to Apple, who also use patents against other companies.
Interesting - I wish we heard more about stuff like this on Slashdot. To think this was once a place where alternative and open systems were publicised, instead of now just being press releases about a closed locked down platform.
Citation needed? You're comparing a single model, to an entire company's range (the "iPhone" is not a single model, although this is a common tactic that Apple use, so they can make it look good by comparing their entire product range, to just single phones from other companies).
However, Nokia's phone sales are immensely larger than Apple's, last time I looked. Feel free to prove me wrong and you right with a reliable source.
Nokia is just angry that they are profits are down and Apple's profits are up.
No, it says their share fell - but they still have a whopping 35%, even in just the smartphones market, whatever that is. Given that Nokia have a presence in all markets, where as Apple only occupy the high end, it suggests their lead overall will be even greater, something Apple can only dream of. The 7.4 million Iphone sales is a footnote in the mobile phone market - I imagine most of their revenue these days come from the Ipod.
It's debateable whether the Iphone even counts as a smartphone (go on, give me a definition that includes the Iphone, but doesn't include so-called "feature phones"?), in which case, Apple's share is rather small.
Let's not forget that Apple have sued other companies over patents too, so your claim that it's about being "angry" applies to them also.
Just to add - I don't know how this system will work, but if they went the UK route, then it would simply be illegal to distribute an application without approval.
So it'll take years to go through them? No problem to the Government, as you won't be able to have the applications at all until they've been approved.
And of course, the person wanting to distribute will have to pay for the privilege of being censored (as is currently the case with the BBFC).
(The flip side is that the Video Recordings Act 1984 was recently found to have never been enacted in the UK, so it is legal to distribute without classification after all - though AFAIK nobody's tried this yet, and the Government has promised "emergency legislation"(!) to introduce such a law. It's apparently an "emergency" that an adult might see something that the Government/BBFC think you shouldn't.)
And god knows how many apps for the 2 billion Java phones out there, as well as all the phones that have been around for years before the Iphone. Of course, it's understandable we wouldn't know about them, as Slashdot only gives coverage to one mobile phone, and otherwise ignores the industry.
(Even censorship stories now have to have the "On Your Iphone" tag, as if to hype it up?)
But in that case, that's true of Robotron true. And true of millions of shoot 'em ups and other games before Doom, that also didn't have an in-game story, and only bothered with a "backstory" either printed in the manual, or on the intro screen.
If you want games without backstories, or at least very limited ones, I suspect that some stategy games might be ones to look at - did Civilization have a story?
Rubbish - sales figures show otherwise. It only went stopped because Commodore went bust - and since they made PCs too, you can't blame that on the Amiga either. I can't believe it's 2009, and there are still anti-Amiga trolls around - having fun with your 286 DOS PC?
You also fail at basic logic - if your point is "A implies B", then arguing that B is true does not prove A.
All platforms that were around back then are long gone. MacOS was ditched by Apple themselves, because it couldn't cut it, and the hardware replaced with standard PC hardware. The "Windows" of today derives from NT, not DOS.
Even if you look at PC hardware, today's computers aren't really anymore closely related to a 1990s PC, than they are to any other platform of that era (if anything, arguably the Amiga has more in common). The only things that have survived from the PC back then is legacy crap that any sane person would be embarrassed to still want.
So by your logic, all platforms have failed, and none of them were good computers, and they couldn't cut it in the marketplace. The only thing in common with machines today is the name - and if you're going to be so petty as to try to claim that means that somehow some platforms "won" whilst others lost, as if that the success of Windows NT today somehow means that you were right to opt for an expensive DOS based 286, when the rest of us were enjoying graphical cheap multitasking GUI machines (ironically the very thing that people now enjoy on so-called "PCs"), then I'm going to slap an Amiga sticker on my quad core PC. Take that, DOS-boy.
and that was thanks to Quake making 3D accelerators mandatory. Like I said, any halfway decent office machine could play Doom, but to get the "ooh" factor in Quake you HAD TO get a 3D gaming card, and thus an industry was born.
Remember how quickly after Quake that reviews were talking about how a game ONLY had software acceleration, with the reviewers looking down their nose at anything that didn't hit the GPU?
Originally, Quake didn't support hardware acceleration - this didn't arrive until 1997.
And to be honest, I think the credit should go to the hardware manufacturers for making the cards in the first place. By that time, it was clear there was a market for 3D games, and there were plenty of other 3D games as well. ID helped, sure - it is true that games drive the need for technology, and ID have played a part of this - but the revolution would still have happened without Quake.
Yes, but it really perfected the hell out of co-operative multi-tasking. It's not like us Mac users were just sitting there waiting for some program to finish until we could use another-- it had multi-tasking, just not pre-emptive multi-tasking.
Right, it didn't have pre-emptive multitasking, which is still shit. Even Windows 95 got that in 1995 - and Mac users had the cheek to say it was comparable to "Mac 89"! It's the standard Apple tactic - just like the long-winded explanations that a smartphone doesn't need copy-and-paste. Please, just admit that it didn't have it.
And, lo and behold, despite it's weaknesses, the Mac (even the Classic Mac) survived a shitload longer than Amiga did. So Apple must have been doing something right.
What on earth?
First of all, I don't see why you say "even" the Classic Mac, since that's the only thing we're talking about. OS X is a different platform, and today's Mac hardware is entirely different (basically PC hardware).
So you claim that classic Macs have "survived a shitload longer than Amiga did"? On what basis? As you may have seen by the recent Slashdot story, the Amiga operating system and hardware continued to be developed.
If you mean by users, I don't see your evidence for that. There might be more classic Macs still kicking around, but only because more were sold to businesses, where as the Amiga was mainly used in the home market, which was much smaller back then.
Come on, let's see your evidence?
So Apple must have been doing something right.
Compared to whom? Commodore went bust in 1994. So your point is that Apple are doing better than a company that no longer exists? Well sure, I'll grant you that!
Commodore must have made something good to make a platform that is still used and developed 15 years later, despite years of inactivity and support. The fact that MacOS was ditched by Apple itself, to make way for PC hardware running a new OS - I'm not sure how that version of events somehow makes classic MacOS look better than AmigaOS...
The only things that Apple did right that Commodore did wrong were to do with marketing - which Apple are brilliant at, and Commodore were hopeless at - not technological achievements. Classic Macs were a joke, and the Mac brandname would be all forgotten had Apple not decided to retain the trademark for their new range of OS X PCs.
Wait - so the expensive plug in cards that the PC needed to get to match the Amiga count as standard, but the Amiga video toaster counts as "specialised support hardware"? Righty ho.
Not sure why that would be. I've been using PCs starting from the 8086 and was never impressed by the Amiga. It felt like a cheap computer with a couple of graphical gimmicks but not much real processing power.
"Cheap"? I'm curious that doing the same thing for less money is seen as a bad thing. Anyhow, I guess you must now think the Amiga is a great platform, as the PC is cheap in comparison...
And the Amiga had plenty of processing power (it used the 680x0 series as used by many platforms), and also got extra graphical power via additional graphics chips. Yes that's right - just like PCs do today. Relying on so called "graphical gimmicks" is still being used by PCs today, to get the most out of the hardware.
I don't know if the Amiga was the "first" multimedia computer (first to popularise, I'd say), but decent graphics and sound were for a long time an afterthought on the PC (consider how in the 1990s there was the whole "multimedia PC" marketing, as if it was something new). Things that we take for granted today.
PCs also had shit for operating systems, for the especially the 80s, and even the 90s. Even when PCs were just as good, or even better, from a hardware point of view, they weren't a viable platform for me until Windows 9x at the earliest (which I used reluctantly) and PCs had the necessary 64MB of RAM or so to run the thing comfortable. I didn't consider things to be an improvement until Windows 2000 came along.
The original point wasn't about quality, it was about Doom being the game that made people go out and buy PCs as a gaming machine. That wasn't true of Civilization, no matter how many more colours it might have had!
(And although the PC got 256 colours before the Amiga, overall issues such as "quality" were debateable - many PCs were still selling without sound cards in 1991 IIRC, for example.)
Plus, lack of loading time thanks to that little thing called hard drive was quite marvelous for us at the time
Funny, Civilization worked fine from my Amiga hard disk.
I'll grant you that the PC had started to get a bit of an edge, in that it got 256 colours before the Amiga did, so yes, the Amiga had lost the massive lead it had back in 1985. But at that point it was still the Amiga that everyone was using in the home.
People didn't start buying expensive PCs just to get a few more colours in Civilization(!) where as this did happen with Doom (although it also helped that Commodore had gone bust by that time, leaving no competition for the PC, especially as the next generation of consoles such as the Playstation hadn't yet appeared).
go ahead and tell me you were playing Ultima 7 or Ultima Underworld on your Amiga in 1992 too.
Sure, there were some PC only games just as there were Amiga only games. But by 1992, the Amiga had 256 colours (as well as 18 bit colour) anyway.
I'm sure it's unfathomable for some people, but there's a reason why the amiga owners in our group all wanted (and ended up owning) a PC.
Core 2 Duo 2.2GHz, 3GB RAM (compared with 2GB for the Mac), 250GB hard drive (compared with 160GB), and much smaller, with the conveience of being laptop (plus no need to buy a separate monitor), and all for £435. That was just something I found with a quick search.
And there are plenty of small form factor desktop PCs.
You want an ugly beige box that is noisy and cheap.
Ah yes, nothing like unsourced ignorance to get modded up. Firstly you can get a PC laptop which is smaller, prettier, quieter, and still cheaper. But you can get PCs in whatever form you want. Noisy? There's no noise coming out of my PC - most noise problems are due to a separate graphics card, which the so-called "Mini" doesn't have, and most PCs don't need anyway (they also have quiet integrated graphics as standard).
For heaven's sake! Macs these days are PCs, so how can you still claim they are different, such as being magically quieter?
And how on earth is the Mac Mini any different to the "ugly beige boxes" that PCs are?! Or are you going to tell me it's different because it has an Apple sticker on it?
And if you reply, make sure you have decent citations like I do, not made up claims.
Indeed, I feel old. But wait - actually on the first page, he goes all the way back to Wolfenstein!
I also love this ill-defined statement that he starts the
The father of modern gaming is, I hope we can all agree, Doom.
So like, any game before Doom is too old to be "modern", but any game after Doom isn't the "father", as it didn't come "first" (it's an "Apple first" - first, except for all the ones before it).
I presume he means the first FPS, though he's still wrong (e.g., Wolfenstein).
One could just as easily declare Quake to be the father of modern gaming. Or I don't know - Civilization or Alien Breed 3D.
He goes onto say:
It took us from the age when games were monochrome, squinty affairs played by people with milkbottles for spectacles, to a time when it was actually cool to spend ages hooking up a modem connection between two PCs
Complete nonsense! Why does someone who obviously has no idea of the history of computer games (as if he was in his mid-20s, as you say) get to be a tech writer? By the early 1980s, games were leaving the monochrome era.
Slashdot Mirror
£115.
£142.50, I think you'll find.
Another example to DVDs would be channels like UKTV Gold, that they flog off their old content to. So, we've already paid for the BBC, but to watch it, we have to pay to watch UKTV Gold. And we get adverts on that channel on top of that.
If TV Licensing think you might have a TV
And just to add, their criterion for this is "If the person has an address in our database".
although somehow we're not allowed access to shows for more than about a week after broadcast
Indeed - personally I think all BBC produced content should be available for free, for licence payers at least. I also find it frustrating that they eagerly send takedown notices to YouTube, when the material that was there isn't available online from the BBC.
And given the UK Government's plans to disconnect people for downloading, I'd like to know how this will work for someone downloading programmes shown on the BBC, that they already pay for.
Yeah, why not AmigaOS? Or BeOS?
I'm sure the American courts are outraged at how generous that is - given the going rate of $80,000 per person per mp3, a mere $5000 per person for a whole day's worth of downloading is a bargain!
E.g., one million people downloading just a single mp3 in a day ought to come to $80 billion. Spread that over a year, and they're looking at $29 trillion. Which isn't much, I mean, it's only about 50% of the entire World's GDP.
People might choose it, but as long as it's good enough for its purpose, there isn't a need for that. Consider, is space flight with computers unfeasible, because we can't recall the probes back to upgrade the computers?
It wouldn't be so bad if they did apply it equally to big businesses.
For example, maybe the record companies would think twice, if say, EMI got cut off due to filesharing (as recently occurred, due to Lily Allen's "mix tapes" found to be on their servers).
Also note that, even according to the UK Government's own figures (which is hardly going to be biased in favour of p2p, given it wanting to also introduce these laws), the alleged damages from software piracy by businesses in 144 times greater than alleged damages for music, TV and films over p2p (source: the Government consultation document on this proposed law).
But I suspect it'll be one rule for them, and another for the rest of us.
And indeed, I looked again - see my other comment, showing as of the start of this year, Nokia at 38.6%, Apple at 1%, with a whole load of other companies in between, also far above Apple ( http://www.mobileburn.com/news.jsp?Id=6191 ).
So let's try your statement again:
"If the Iphone is so good, why are people buying 38x as many Nokia phones?"
Fixed that for you.
Nokia made their product off their tech. It's not as popular as the iPhone.
This, ladies and gentlemen, should be held up as a sad example of the effect of Apple-only coverage here on Slashdot for the mobile phone market. This poster actually believes that Apple have a bigger share of the market than Nokia. We are actually getting to the stage where, as a result, some geeks have less knowledge of the mobile phone market than lay people.
A quick Google shows some actual figures from 2009 - http://www.mobileburn.com/news.jsp?Id=6191 :
Nokia - 38.6%
Samsung - 16.2%
Motorola - 8.3%
LG - 8.3%
Sony Ericson - 8%
RIM - 1.9%
Apple - 1%
That, ladies and gentlemen, is the reality of the market (if you disagree, make sure you have a reference). You wouldn't know it from Slashdot (when was the last time we had a story about Samsung?)
And to counter the standard replies, please avoid:
* "I'm going to redefine the definition of the market so it includes Apple and some smaller players."
* "I'm going to redefine market share to mean something other than sales, e.g., to mean how much I and Slashdot talk about it."
* "I'm going to ignore your citation, and respond with anecdotal evidence of how I and my friends all seem to have Iphones, therefore it must be more popular, and I get modded up +5 insightful for it."
As for your comments about patents, agreed - now please go and say the same thing to Apple, who also use patents against other companies.
Interesting - I wish we heard more about stuff like this on Slashdot. To think this was once a place where alternative and open systems were publicised, instead of now just being press releases about a closed locked down platform.
Citation needed? You're comparing a single model, to an entire company's range (the "iPhone" is not a single model, although this is a common tactic that Apple use, so they can make it look good by comparing their entire product range, to just single phones from other companies).
However, Nokia's phone sales are immensely larger than Apple's, last time I looked. Feel free to prove me wrong and you right with a reliable source.
Nokia is just angry that they are profits are down and Apple's profits are up.
No, it says their share fell - but they still have a whopping 35%, even in just the smartphones market, whatever that is. Given that Nokia have a presence in all markets, where as Apple only occupy the high end, it suggests their lead overall will be even greater, something Apple can only dream of. The 7.4 million Iphone sales is a footnote in the mobile phone market - I imagine most of their revenue these days come from the Ipod.
It's debateable whether the Iphone even counts as a smartphone (go on, give me a definition that includes the Iphone, but doesn't include so-called "feature phones"?), in which case, Apple's share is rather small.
Let's not forget that Apple have sued other companies over patents too, so your claim that it's about being "angry" applies to them also.
Of course - if Nokia spends money on R&D, it must be throwing it down the toilet, because everyone knows that only Apple can innovate!
(I love how the only time we get a story on Slashdot about market leader Nokia is when the story also mentions the almighty Jphone.)
Just to add - I don't know how this system will work, but if they went the
UK route, then it would simply be illegal to distribute an application without approval.
So it'll take years to go through them? No problem to the Government, as you won't be able to have the applications at all until they've been approved.
And of course, the person wanting to distribute will have to pay for the privilege of being censored (as is currently the case with the BBFC).
(The flip side is that the Video Recordings Act 1984 was recently found to have never been enacted in the UK, so it is legal to distribute without classification after all - though AFAIK nobody's tried this yet, and the Government has promised "emergency legislation"(!) to introduce such a law. It's apparently an "emergency" that an adult might see something that the Government/BBFC think you shouldn't.)
And god knows how many apps for the 2 billion Java phones out there, as well as all the phones that have been around for years before the Iphone. Of course, it's understandable we wouldn't know about them, as Slashdot only gives coverage to one mobile phone, and otherwise ignores the industry.
(Even censorship stories now have to have the "On Your Iphone" tag, as if to hype it up?)
But in that case, that's true of Robotron true. And true of millions of shoot 'em ups and other games before Doom, that also didn't have an in-game story, and only bothered with a "backstory" either printed in the manual, or on the intro screen.
If you want games without backstories, or at least very limited ones, I suspect that some stategy games might be ones to look at - did Civilization have a story?
Rubbish - sales figures show otherwise. It only went stopped because Commodore went bust - and since they made PCs too, you can't blame that on the Amiga either. I can't believe it's 2009, and there are still anti-Amiga trolls around - having fun with your 286 DOS PC?
You also fail at basic logic - if your point is "A implies B", then arguing that B is true does not prove A.
All platforms that were around back then are long gone. MacOS was ditched by Apple themselves, because it couldn't cut it, and the hardware replaced with standard PC hardware. The "Windows" of today derives from NT, not DOS.
Even if you look at PC hardware, today's computers aren't really anymore closely related to a 1990s PC, than they are to any other platform of that era (if anything, arguably the Amiga has more in common). The only things that have survived from the PC back then is legacy crap that any sane person would be embarrassed to still want.
So by your logic, all platforms have failed, and none of them were good computers, and they couldn't cut it in the marketplace. The only thing in common with machines today is the name - and if you're going to be so petty as to try to claim that means that somehow some platforms "won" whilst others lost, as if that the success of Windows NT today somehow means that you were right to opt for an expensive DOS based 286, when the rest of us were enjoying graphical cheap multitasking GUI machines (ironically the very thing that people now enjoy on so-called "PCs"), then I'm going to slap an Amiga sticker on my quad core PC. Take that, DOS-boy.
Yes, and? Your point, Captain Obvious?
Yes, Commodore went bust, which made it hard for the Amiga to do very well after that, which isn't very surprising.
and that was thanks to Quake making 3D accelerators mandatory. Like I said, any halfway decent office machine could play Doom, but to get the "ooh" factor in Quake you HAD TO get a 3D gaming card, and thus an industry was born.
Remember how quickly after Quake that reviews were talking about how a game ONLY had software acceleration, with the reviewers looking down their nose at anything that didn't hit the GPU?
Originally, Quake didn't support hardware acceleration - this didn't arrive until 1997.
And to be honest, I think the credit should go to the hardware manufacturers for making the cards in the first place. By that time, it was clear there was a market for 3D games, and there were plenty of other 3D games as well. ID helped, sure - it is true that games drive the need for technology, and ID have played a part of this - but the revolution would still have happened without Quake.
Yes, but it really perfected the hell out of co-operative multi-tasking. It's not like us Mac users were just sitting there waiting for some program to finish until we could use another-- it had multi-tasking, just not pre-emptive multi-tasking.
Right, it didn't have pre-emptive multitasking, which is still shit. Even Windows 95 got that in 1995 - and Mac users had the cheek to say it was comparable to "Mac 89"! It's the standard Apple tactic - just like the long-winded explanations that a smartphone doesn't need copy-and-paste. Please, just admit that it didn't have it.
And, lo and behold, despite it's weaknesses, the Mac (even the Classic Mac) survived a shitload longer than Amiga did. So Apple must have been doing something right.
What on earth?
First of all, I don't see why you say "even" the Classic Mac, since that's the only thing we're talking about. OS X is a different platform, and today's Mac hardware is entirely different (basically PC hardware).
So you claim that classic Macs have "survived a shitload longer than Amiga did"? On what basis? As you may have seen by the recent Slashdot story, the Amiga operating system and hardware continued to be developed.
If you mean by users, I don't see your evidence for that. There might be more classic Macs still kicking around, but only because more were sold to businesses, where as the Amiga was mainly used in the home market, which was much smaller back then.
Come on, let's see your evidence?
So Apple must have been doing something right.
Compared to whom? Commodore went bust in 1994. So your point is that Apple are doing better than a company that no longer exists? Well sure, I'll grant you that!
Commodore must have made something good to make a platform that is still used and developed 15 years later, despite years of inactivity and support. The fact that MacOS was ditched by Apple itself, to make way for PC hardware running a new OS - I'm not sure how that version of events somehow makes classic MacOS look better than AmigaOS...
The only things that Apple did right that Commodore did wrong were to do with marketing - which Apple are brilliant at, and Commodore were hopeless at - not technological achievements. Classic Macs were a joke, and the Mac brandname would be all forgotten had Apple not decided to retain the trademark for their new range of OS X PCs.
Wait - so the expensive plug in cards that the PC needed to get to match the Amiga count as standard, but the Amiga video toaster counts as "specialised support hardware"? Righty ho.
Not sure why that would be. I've been using PCs starting from the 8086 and was never impressed by the Amiga. It felt like a cheap computer with a couple of graphical gimmicks but not much real processing power.
"Cheap"? I'm curious that doing the same thing for less money is seen as a bad thing. Anyhow, I guess you must now think the Amiga is a great platform, as the PC is cheap in comparison...
And the Amiga had plenty of processing power (it used the 680x0 series as used by many platforms), and also got extra graphical power via additional graphics chips. Yes that's right - just like PCs do today. Relying on so called "graphical gimmicks" is still being used by PCs today, to get the most out of the hardware.
I don't know if the Amiga was the "first" multimedia computer (first to popularise, I'd say), but decent graphics and sound were for a long time an afterthought on the PC (consider how in the 1990s there was the whole "multimedia PC" marketing, as if it was something new). Things that we take for granted today.
PCs also had shit for operating systems, for the especially the 80s, and even the 90s. Even when PCs were just as good, or even better, from a hardware point of view, they weren't a viable platform for me until Windows 9x at the earliest (which I used reluctantly) and PCs had the necessary 64MB of RAM or so to run the thing comfortable. I didn't consider things to be an improvement until Windows 2000 came along.
The original point wasn't about quality, it was about Doom being the game that made people go out and buy PCs as a gaming machine. That wasn't true of Civilization, no matter how many more colours it might have had!
(And although the PC got 256 colours before the Amiga, overall issues such as "quality" were debateable - many PCs were still selling without sound cards in 1991 IIRC, for example.)
Plus, lack of loading time thanks to that little thing called hard drive was quite marvelous for us at the time
Funny, Civilization worked fine from my Amiga hard disk.
I'll grant you that the PC had started to get a bit of an edge, in that it got 256 colours before the Amiga did, so yes, the Amiga had lost the massive lead it had back in 1985. But at that point it was still the Amiga that everyone was using in the home.
People didn't start buying expensive PCs just to get a few more colours in Civilization(!) where as this did happen with Doom (although it also helped that Commodore had gone bust by that time, leaving no competition for the PC, especially as the next generation of consoles such as the Playstation hadn't yet appeared).
go ahead and tell me you were playing Ultima 7 or Ultima Underworld on your Amiga in 1992 too.
Sure, there were some PC only games just as there were Amiga only games. But by 1992, the Amiga had 256 colours (as well as 18 bit colour) anyway.
I'm sure it's unfathomable for some people, but there's a reason why the amiga owners in our group all wanted (and ended up owning) a PC.
What year did they switch to the PC?
Please link to me to a PC that is a Core 2 Duo 2.5Ghz or better (ie not an Atom) that is also the size of Mac Mini for under $600.
Nice try, but false. The $599 Mac Mini comes with a 2.26GHz processor. The 2.53GHz one is a whopping $799: http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_mac/family/mac_mini?mco=MTAyNTQwMjg
I'm in the UK - here a Mac Mini starts at £499. For less than that, you can get laptops. E.g., see http://www.dabs.com/products/dell-vostro-1015-core-2-duo-t6670-3gb-250gb-dvdrw-windows-vb-xp-65PQ.html?refs=403550000 :
Core 2 Duo 2.2GHz, 3GB RAM (compared with 2GB for the Mac), 250GB hard drive (compared with 160GB), and much smaller, with the conveience of being laptop (plus no need to buy a separate monitor), and all for £435. That was just something I found with a quick search.
And there are plenty of small form factor desktop PCs.
You want an ugly beige box that is noisy and cheap.
Ah yes, nothing like unsourced ignorance to get modded up. Firstly you can get a PC laptop which is smaller, prettier, quieter, and still cheaper. But you can get PCs in whatever form you want. Noisy? There's no noise coming out of my PC - most noise problems are due to a separate graphics card, which the so-called "Mini" doesn't have, and most PCs don't need anyway (they also have quiet integrated graphics as standard).
For heaven's sake! Macs these days are PCs, so how can you still claim they are different, such as being magically quieter?
And how on earth is the Mac Mini any different to the "ugly beige boxes" that PCs are?! Or are you going to tell me it's different because it has an Apple sticker on it?
And if you reply, make sure you have decent citations like I do, not made up claims.
So Amiga announced a bunch of new Amigas.
Cool.
But wait - it's fair game to flame away because they don't offer what some people want, once in a blue moon there's story.
Indeed, I feel old. But wait - actually on the first page, he goes all the way back to Wolfenstein!
I also love this ill-defined statement that he starts the
The father of modern gaming is, I hope we can all agree, Doom.
So like, any game before Doom is too old to be "modern", but any game after Doom isn't the "father", as it didn't come "first" (it's an "Apple first" - first, except for all the ones before it).
I presume he means the first FPS, though he's still wrong (e.g., Wolfenstein).
One could just as easily declare Quake to be the father of modern gaming. Or I don't know - Civilization or Alien Breed 3D.
He goes onto say:
It took us from the age when games were monochrome, squinty affairs played by people with milkbottles for spectacles, to a time when it was actually cool to spend ages hooking up a modem connection between two PCs
Complete nonsense! Why does someone who obviously has no idea of the history of computer games (as if he was in his mid-20s, as you say) get to be a tech writer? By the early 1980s, games were leaving the monochrome era.