In >80% of the US market currently, the customer is functionally given three choices: Dialup, Monopoly ISP (Cox, Comcrap, AT&T, etc), or NOTHING. They don't have a "choice" at all.
For example: no DSL is built to my home. Verizon can't/won't build out FiOS because, they claim, they don't "own the physical phone lines" so while I could switch to them as my phone provider, they have no ownership/authorization to push FiOS. Functionally, I am limited to Dialup, Comcrap, or NOTHING and even the dialup companies are dying fast.
The 'net cannot stay neutral WITHOUT legislation when you have big companies like Cox and Comcrap that have monopoly status over far too many of their customers. Hell, that's how we got this fucking-stupid "250 GB" traffic cap setup as well.
In an actual competitive market, the customer can go to the best provider. In a monopoly market, the customer is inevitably given the "choice" of either crap service or no service. Unfortunately, government regulation to protect consumer rights (which was signed away by both Clinton and Bush, little by little) is necessary because otherwise the market devolves into monopoly control everywhere, and the only "competition" happens on the fringe edges where you might have two big mostly-monopolies trying to horn in on each other's monopoly turf.
Microsoft offers a ton of user-standard ones (government, military, their own, etc). Ask the user to pick from those or offer the user the chance to specify their own.
But there are hundreds of thousands of stupid drivers out there, who I don't trust to drive in broad daylight, let alone darkness. Bad drivers can't cope with the tunnel-vision of their own headlights.
You have just made a great argument for increasing the stringency and difficulty of drivers' testing to weed out the bad drivers, and no argument whatsoever for the need for more illumination than modern bright-as-day halogen headlights that are standard in almost all cars now provide.
The lights are there for a reason
Yes, because we are wasteful and irrationally afraid of this thing called "dark."
It's to prevent accidents from stupid drivers, who slipped through the cracks of a broken licensing system. Find a way to get bad drivers off the road, and I'll concede to putting in less lights....
MS and Sony (and Nintendo) should make a series of simple alterations to their programming and production line machines, as follows:
#1 - When you hit the power button, it goes OFF. Not just "low power", and certainly not Sony's PS3 "still burning more energy than a 75W light bulb" mode.
I recognize this will lose the remote-control ease of "powering up" the device using the Home/Xbox/Power button from the controller. Tough. Get up and walk the fucking five feet to the box to turn it on. I also recognize that this may not be possible with the current already-installed base (though I bet the PS3 could spin down a hell of a lot more than it does).
But even if you can't do this to the currently-installed base, you can CERTAINLY do this next one:
#2 - Enough with the damn system clock. If you want to have a clock, have it ping an NTP server somewhere (heck, give the user a choice of which government or private-industry one they want to ping) for the time when it comes up. If it comes up without a clock and the user doesn't bother with the setting, the user obviously doesn't worry enough about it to care. The only thing you use it for anyways is marking a time/datestamp on savegames, which could just as easily be stored as the amount of gameplay time spent in the game rather than time/datestamping. Not only that, but your system clocks suck and have to be regularly reset anyways. Neither the Wii, nor Xbox360, nor PS3 is programmed to be a PVR or anything like that, so they have no reason to have a clock. At all.
Same thing for so many other devices: there is no reason for my coffee maker, or my toaster, or anything else to know what time it is. None. At all. I am not, I swear to god am NOT, going to put two pieces of toast in the toaster when I leave for work, then call home and enter a six-digit code from my cell phone when I'm 10 minutes away just so I have hot toast waiting after I walk in the door. And even if I did, that function would STILL not require my toaster to know what time it was, only that it had just received a code saying "toast. Now." And when I consider that the amount of energy my toaster expended simply waiting for that command could probably toast a whole fucking loaf, even having it networked in the first place is a waste of energy.
Added bonus: users could just hit the power switch on their surge protector to REALLY cut everything off if they want to, without having to worry about resetting the clocks later. The one reason I don't do this nowin my living room is that it's annoying enough to have to reset clocks after a 5-minute power outage, I don't want to have to do every time just to play a game. I do, on the other hand, do this for my various kitchen gadgets that have "standby" modes and they've never missed a beat (even found, after much research, a microwave model where I don't have to reset the fucking clock just to cook something).
We waste far too much power on "standby" modes for everything, and it's getting annoyingly hard to even find a device that truly turns OFF any more.
Finally, a note to EVERY company that makes products:
I DO NOT NEED TO HAVE A GLOWING RED LIGHT JUST TO KNOW MY DEVICE IS TURNED OFF.
I mean seriously, my living room looks like it's fucking christmas even when everything's turned off. I kill the lights and the collection of little red LED's from my TV, stereo system, and vcr/dvd player/game systems is collectively bright enough for me to see my black cat sneaking around to try to run between my legs and trip me while I go upstairs to bed. My various electronic devices stare out at me in the night like a deranged collection of fruit fuckers.
If it's on, I expect a status light perhaps. A happy little, not-too-bright green light or a system clock (for an older VCR or Tivo or something) saying "yeah, I'
What Microsoft should really have considered was why, even before they released it, customers were ready to say NO to Vista.
It's been a huge albatross around their neck. It's Windows ME 2.0, has gotten the same response (and even MS eventually had to list Windows ME as "Do Not Use") and yet the consumer is getting fucked by MS's trying to kill off XP and force them to install the Vista Virus instead.
The "Aero" interface is a standing joke; the supposed "security" of Vista is laughable compared to simply keeping XP properly updated and behind a NAT at home; and the performance hit it takes to run is incredible. Vista is half as fast as XP on the same hardware, that's reason enough not to use it even before all the other crap and nonsense.
When the vendors are starting to play the "Vista yay" games while everyone else is rolling back Vista to XP at first opportunity.
Example: NVidia fucked over the consumer by making their newest stereo3D drivers not just Vista-only, but also by removing LCD shutter support (meaning you're limited to color-distorting anaglyph red/blue glasses, or really crapass zalman monitors).
Those were just the three examples that came to mind most readily, but there are plenty of others industry-wide.
Squaresoft and Nintendo alike are both big on "padding the gameplay hours" with meaningless/annoying crap. Activision's put out their fair share of "unlock, unlock, unlock" titles.
It's an odd industry. We are burdened at once with the following problems:
- Shovelware (crap games or, worse, crap games based on movie/tv licenses). - Endless reiterations of sports titles (Madden 2015, just an updated roster and now you can see the fibers in the shoelace, but the gameplay is still ass) - Endless games that run a formerly great series into the ground. - "Padded" games, where the gameplay is mostly solid but they skimped on making the world interesting/entertaining, and just put a bunch of "run from point A to point B, on foot" quests or "hey Link, go collect the 8 Pieces of Crap" quests into the game without much imagination. - "Fake Replayability" games featuring 18 zillion characters to unlock just to play the same levels over and over and over and over and over and over again. - The ultimate metagame, "how do I get around the DRM this time... and when will someone manage to patch the latest "update" version so that we can play in decent framerate without the drm infestation."
And of course, you can't trust any of the "reviews" anymore, because the companies simply cut off their access if they ever write an honest review of any of these titles, and all the honest reviewers were fired long ago.
In the old days, many games had replayability because that was all they had space for. Early Atari, NES titles were almost universally replayable because they were designed that way.
These days, game companies seem to think that "replayability" is a buzzword, just like they think that padding "Hours of gameplay" with pointless and boring stuff (think the stupid "sail the world and haul shit up from the ocean for 100 hours" bit before you get to the end of Celda:The Wind Breaker, thank god nintendo finally learned their lesson for Twilight Princess). Or, they make a game that's short, and only kind of fun, but with a number of "unlockable" characters to play through each of which has more absurd unlock requirements tied to the previous (Viewtiful Joe, Devil May Cry, I'm looking at you).
After finishing these games once, I'm done. I see no reason to "replay" them, and so I sell them off and get new games. If they had been made to be more fun and less aggravating, that wouldn't be the case.
Here's a hint: if you feel the need to pad your "gameplay hours" or stick extra nonsense-characters in for "replayability", you're doing something wrong and need to fix your game instead.
- Does it do overscan correction in software? My TV has two settings, "black edging" (~3-4% on all edges) and "lose 5% under the bezel", and regrettably the ATi drivers don't accomplish this all that well. XBMC has very solid software-based overscan correction.
- Can it upsample audio to 5.1, either dolby or dts? I've got an Audigy2 with the front panel outputs and would love to be able to push true 5.1 through the sound system like my current Xbox (XBMC converted) does.
Those are the two main things I'm looking at needing. I have an old Xbox that handles a lot of this well (softmod, XBMC) but it lacks the power to handle true HDTV-encoded (720p and up) content. If I could get my PVR box to do this fully, I'd be a really happy user.
My point was that your specific problem was foretold and you either didn't do your research or ignored it. For years now, anyone making or building a MythTV machine has known that using ATi cards would present problems. But instead of owning up to it, you blamed the developers who have tried to help the situation.
Know what? I've had dozens of linux nerds like you bugging me about how their software was "superior" and how I should convert MY box to it. Every time, they give me the same crap assurances like that asswad previously who pointed me to wiki pages he obviously hadn't even read and that are horribly outdated.
MY point is, whether or not you can point your fingers and blame ATi or anyone else, the failure of Linux/MythTV to run correctly on pretty ubiquitous hardware is Linux's problem.
I don't know about all your Linux attempts, but if they're like your MythTV attempts, ignoring general advice will not make your Linux experience any more pleasant than Windows.
I have not "ignored general advice." I have ignored STUPID advice from people who are self-assured, annoying, and convinced that everyone's system should be an exact carbon copy of theirs. I have ignored people who say that I'm not giving MythTV a "fair shake" if I don't shell out tons of cash and rebuild my already-working system just to install it.
The conversation (which I have had NUMEROUS times with brain-dead linuxites like yourself) goes as follows.
Me: "This is what I've got doing my recording. It works pretty well."
Linuxite: "Dude, you should TOTALLY be using MythTV instead, it's open source and it'd go in your system no problem! You could even record multiple shows that way and everything. And if you've got any problems at all all you have to do is go on ForumXYZ and the wiki and they'll get it all fixed up!"
Me: "Hey guys, I'm having problems with this, here's my hardware configuration, here's the distribution I'm using, here are the errors I'm seeing."
Somebody Like Phoenixwade: "How DARE you use ATi, don't you know they're the devil? You need to spend $400 each on a pair of Happauge cards and a motherboard of X spec and then you need to blip fraggle toggle the command line and zorp waggle blizzle the driver and..."
My assessment is not "dishonest", you annoying ass. It is based PRECISELY on the legions of linux nerds who keep telling me I should convert my system, which works perfectly well, over to the software they claim is superior. And no, in these economic times, I am not going to waste $500+ just to try them out. It either works on the hardware I already own, the hardware I know for a fact works correctly with the software I currently use, or it is flawed on that basis.
Honestly, you are the kind of user I'd tell to box up your computer and take it back to the store.
Honestly, you're the kind of jerk who should never be let around another human being.
Are you sure you didn't already blow some money? Did the aforementioned hardware just fall out of the sky into your lap?
Pretty close, actually. I got a hell of a deal.
Before I buy hardware, I check to see if it might work.
Funny. Mine's worked fine in the system I set up for years now. I try Linux because I'm giving them a fair shake to SEE if their claims hold up... and they don't.
When we talk about video capture, you damn well know that the industry has been compromised by HDMI and related concepts, so you have to be very careful before spending money. And if you don't know, maybe you're part of the problem: if people like you would pay attention to the industry's hostility toward customers, and choose too pirate instead, they might decide to stop telling customers to go away.
So you're complaining that MythTV doesn't work well when you used cards (ATI) that do not have very good Linux support. When I built my DVR, I researched the type of card to use. By far, everyone said not to use ATi as there wasn't very much support. Not that some people couldn't get it to work, but that the support was lacking. There are other cards that you could have used. I would say rather it's a testament to Linux that it works at all.
And my counterpoint is: the linux nerds who keep bugging me about "you should use our software its so much betterz"... I've given them their fair shot. I've had my stable, reliable machine through years of (inexpensive) upgrades myself. It works well. Linux, on the other hand, has NOT served it well despite numerous attempts (probably FAR more than I should have wasted my time on) attempting to give them a fair shake.
The Slashdot crowd loves to sit around and attack Microsoft. I don't exactly love some of the things they've done myself. What I do know, however, is that on my MS-based setup my box works fine and Linux has never even come close to functionality or ease of use.
THAT is what Linux needs to get past if they want decent market share. Get back to basics, get functionality solid and as easy to use as possible, rather than having to hunt through ridiculous amounts of message-board posts and wiki hunting to find "instructions" for distributions 2-3 generations back that no longer even work for the latest distro.
The point is not "to buy compatible hardware from the start."
I've run this box for years, through various iterations. Every time I mention what I have set up, some linuxtard has to bitch and moan about why I'm not using MythTV/MythBuntu/etc instead because "oh itz so much bettor the linuz guyz rox."
The point is, I built my box, I have used the software I wanted, and I gave the Linux guys their fair shot at earning their chops by seeing whether or not their supposedly "superior" software would run well on my setup.
IT DOESN'T. NEVER HAS.
Every time I've taken them up on their bet, sure enough, it fails. Just like the dork above who got modded "insightful" above for providing wiki-links that provide "proof" in his mind that the stuff is "well supported"... when what they ACTUALLY say is (A) here's a bunch of hoops to jump through and (B) once you've jumped through the hoops, MAYBE it'll work, MAYBE it won't, and the instructions are also based on distributions 2-3 generations old and don't work on the (not precisely recent) Ubuntu 8.10 even.
Meh. I've tried a number of the various MythTV flavors and it all comes down to the stupidity that the "We're Linux, We Can Fix Anything" crowd insists that I blow upwards of $800 buying new hardware to get it to work.
Keep in mind: I've got an Athlon X2, 4 GB of RAM slotted, and the "incompatible" parts are (a) my video board and tv capture board (ATi All-In-Wonder 9600XT and HDTV Wonder respectively) and my remote control (Remote Wonder 2).
They work fine. I'm currently looking at XBMC's windows port as the 'replacement' for the aging ATi interface, but that interface has served me well and solidly for a few years now. MythTV, on the other hand, has not had support for my hardware in any of the flavors I've tried and has been annoying to get running even just to play back things I previously recorded.
If I had a no-name brand capture card from some fly-by-night taiwanese company, this might make sense, but there is NO excuse for Linux not supporting hardware from one of the two big players in the industry. I can stick to other solutions and be happy, and they can sit around congratulating each other on adding little bits of chrome to the interface while not paying attention to the big picture issue, which is that they can only grow their user base by making their software friendly to as much hardware as possible (especially when it's made by one of the "big 2").
There's always the Michelle Obama / Hillary Clinton route... fake going for a law degree while working on finding an up-and-coming shyster for her MRS.
Sure, you have to sell out your principles and basically be an incredibly high-priced whore, but hey, it pays well.
Google should really be responsible for testing its own links and purging/fixing the latest scam, "referrer redirect" hijacks.
It's a form of attack wherein a hijacked website works correctly... as long as your Referrer string doesn't include certain key words ("Google", "Yahoo", "MSN", etc). The trick being, the website won't know they have been hacked because if they get a notice saying they have, then test their own homepage directly, it still works. If you have a referrer, you get redirected to a drive-by download page (for something like "Windows Antivirus 2009" or similar).
Why is this insidious? Because it gets around a lot of the "known registry", "anti-phishing" plugins.
Google served up the link; they should have a responsibility to do a periodic check that the links they serve aren't going to a bad place, and inform the victim if they've been referrer-redirect hijacked.
If you're buying "bleeding edge" you're not going to be satisfied with your purchase 2-3 years from now (about my replacement cycle for my personal box, and even then a lot of my components like hard drive / sound card / DVD drive tend to last through 3-4 iterations), unless your tastes suddenly radically change and you're no longer interested in the "bleeding edge" games you were trying to run.
Plus, consider the following two options:
#1 - "Bleeding edge" rig. Blow $900 on processor, $1200 on dual video boards, $400 on RAM, $800 or so on miscellaneous other components. Total system cost around $3000.
#2 - "Decent Gaming" rig, single $300 video board, $200 processor, etc. Total cost: $900 if you really push your luck.
I'll take my $2000, buy more games, take girlfriend to dinner, stick some in a rainy-day fund, etc. One of these years you need to run the numbers and then you'll figure out that the "savings" you claim are there from buying at bleeding edge aren't really there at all. Even if I spend $900 every 2 years upgrading my PC, it takes me 5-6 years to equal the cost of your rig, and I guarantee you're going to turn around and want to rebuild to get back to the bleeding edge because you'll be "disappointed" that your 2-3 year old "bleeding edge" machine is only getting 15 fps in the timedemo mode of CallOfUnrealCrysisDoomQuakeTournament 3: Yet Another Non-Scaling Tech Demo Masquerading As A Game.
The two companies take turns one-upping each other for the bleeding edge, but every time (10 years running) I've specced out a mid-range (home gamer, single CPU motherboard) to low-end (grandma's email/photo machine) machine, AMD's been the way to go. It's a lot like trying to decide which company's video boards to pick if you're trying to make a game machine without breaking the bank.
Some people are Intel partisans, some people AMD partisans. Benching them and looking at spec, I've consistently found that AMD's got faster chips (for the same $) up to the "sweet spot" in the curve where price starts shooting upwards during the times I've been buying, but I also know there were times I was not in the market when Intel had done a price cut and AMD hadn't caught up.
I'm not going to call someone an idiot for their CPU choice, as it's a long-term purchase decision that has to be balanced with other factors (motherboard choice, RAM, video board, power concerns, cooling solution, etc) anyways. In fact, I recommend consumers try to stay OFF the "bleeding edge" because they're basically throwing money away on it; even if you buy the latest, hottest chip right from the factory it's obsolete by the time you get it home. Your best bet is looking at the curve, because there's always a spot (usually between $150 and $250) where the price starts to jump up exponentially for only an incrementally "faster" product. Buy at the spot beyond which the relationship between price and performance fails to be linear and you'll turn out pretty happy.
I had a lot of these when I was a kid - both the real, and the knock-off types. I can't remember how many times something fell apart because I'd accidentally gotten a knock-off brick in a bad spot and it didn't hold properly. The knock-offs just can't hold properly when you use them to make a hinge...
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You could call the US market an "Oligopoly."
But that's understating the case.
In >80% of the US market currently, the customer is functionally given three choices: Dialup, Monopoly ISP (Cox, Comcrap, AT&T, etc), or NOTHING. They don't have a "choice" at all.
For example: no DSL is built to my home. Verizon can't/won't build out FiOS because, they claim, they don't "own the physical phone lines" so while I could switch to them as my phone provider, they have no ownership/authorization to push FiOS. Functionally, I am limited to Dialup, Comcrap, or NOTHING and even the dialup companies are dying fast.
The 'net cannot stay neutral WITHOUT legislation when you have big companies like Cox and Comcrap that have monopoly status over far too many of their customers. Hell, that's how we got this fucking-stupid "250 GB" traffic cap setup as well.
In an actual competitive market, the customer can go to the best provider. In a monopoly market, the customer is inevitably given the "choice" of either crap service or no service. Unfortunately, government regulation to protect consumer rights (which was signed away by both Clinton and Bush, little by little) is necessary because otherwise the market devolves into monopoly control everywhere, and the only "competition" happens on the fringe edges where you might have two big mostly-monopolies trying to horn in on each other's monopoly turf.
Microsoft offers a ton of user-standard ones (government, military, their own, etc). Ask the user to pick from those or offer the user the chance to specify their own.
But there are hundreds of thousands of stupid drivers out there, who I don't trust to drive in broad daylight, let alone darkness. Bad drivers can't cope with the tunnel-vision of their own headlights.
You have just made a great argument for increasing the stringency and difficulty of drivers' testing to weed out the bad drivers, and no argument whatsoever for the need for more illumination than modern bright-as-day halogen headlights that are standard in almost all cars now provide.
The lights are there for a reason
Yes, because we are wasteful and irrationally afraid of this thing called "dark."
It's to prevent accidents from stupid drivers, who slipped through the cracks of a broken licensing system. Find a way to get bad drivers off the road, and I'll concede to putting in less lights....
See above. Driving is a privilege, not a right.
Perhaps you should do some more research?
Here's an easy solution.
MS and Sony (and Nintendo) should make a series of simple alterations to their programming and production line machines, as follows:
#1 - When you hit the power button, it goes OFF. Not just "low power", and certainly not Sony's PS3 "still burning more energy than a 75W light bulb" mode.
I recognize this will lose the remote-control ease of "powering up" the device using the Home/Xbox/Power button from the controller. Tough. Get up and walk the fucking five feet to the box to turn it on. I also recognize that this may not be possible with the current already-installed base (though I bet the PS3 could spin down a hell of a lot more than it does).
But even if you can't do this to the currently-installed base, you can CERTAINLY do this next one:
#2 - Enough with the damn system clock. If you want to have a clock, have it ping an NTP server somewhere (heck, give the user a choice of which government or private-industry one they want to ping) for the time when it comes up. If it comes up without a clock and the user doesn't bother with the setting, the user obviously doesn't worry enough about it to care. The only thing you use it for anyways is marking a time/datestamp on savegames, which could just as easily be stored as the amount of gameplay time spent in the game rather than time/datestamping. Not only that, but your system clocks suck and have to be regularly reset anyways. Neither the Wii, nor Xbox360, nor PS3 is programmed to be a PVR or anything like that, so they have no reason to have a clock. At all.
Same thing for so many other devices: there is no reason for my coffee maker, or my toaster, or anything else to know what time it is. None. At all. I am not, I swear to god am NOT, going to put two pieces of toast in the toaster when I leave for work, then call home and enter a six-digit code from my cell phone when I'm 10 minutes away just so I have hot toast waiting after I walk in the door. And even if I did, that function would STILL not require my toaster to know what time it was, only that it had just received a code saying "toast. Now." And when I consider that the amount of energy my toaster expended simply waiting for that command could probably toast a whole fucking loaf, even having it networked in the first place is a waste of energy.
Added bonus: users could just hit the power switch on their surge protector to REALLY cut everything off if they want to, without having to worry about resetting the clocks later. The one reason I don't do this nowin my living room is that it's annoying enough to have to reset clocks after a 5-minute power outage, I don't want to have to do every time just to play a game. I do, on the other hand, do this for my various kitchen gadgets that have "standby" modes and they've never missed a beat (even found, after much research, a microwave model where I don't have to reset the fucking clock just to cook something).
We waste far too much power on "standby" modes for everything, and it's getting annoyingly hard to even find a device that truly turns OFF any more.
Finally, a note to EVERY company that makes products:
I DO NOT NEED TO HAVE A GLOWING RED LIGHT JUST TO KNOW MY DEVICE IS TURNED OFF.
I mean seriously, my living room looks like it's fucking christmas even when everything's turned off. I kill the lights and the collection of little red LED's from my TV, stereo system, and vcr/dvd player/game systems is collectively bright enough for me to see my black cat sneaking around to try to run between my legs and trip me while I go upstairs to bed. My various electronic devices stare out at me in the night like a deranged collection of fruit fuckers.
If it's on, I expect a status light perhaps. A happy little, not-too-bright green light or a system clock (for an older VCR or Tivo or something) saying "yeah, I'
Pray tell, what alternate universe are you from wherein this is true?
I've done the test on brand new boxes we get in. Quad-core (not simply dual), 4GB RAM. Vista is STILL slower than XP even on these beasts.
Or are you talking Vista 64-bit Edition, aka "I'm not compatible with jack crap and not even NVidia or ATi have fully working drivers for me" edition?
What Microsoft should really have considered was why, even before they released it, customers were ready to say NO to Vista.
It's been a huge albatross around their neck. It's Windows ME 2.0, has gotten the same response (and even MS eventually had to list Windows ME as "Do Not Use") and yet the consumer is getting fucked by MS's trying to kill off XP and force them to install the Vista Virus instead.
The "Aero" interface is a standing joke; the supposed "security" of Vista is laughable compared to simply keeping XP properly updated and behind a NAT at home; and the performance hit it takes to run is incredible. Vista is half as fast as XP on the same hardware, that's reason enough not to use it even before all the other crap and nonsense.
Ironically, that's not what I was saying at all, you insufferable little troll.
I don't consider Vista a "disaster" due to this. If you'll notice, Vista is getting the support instead of Windows XP all of a sudden.
THAT is what I consider to be a disaster.
Now, if you want to know why you shouldn't use Vista, I'm sure a million Slashdot readers will be happy to help you understand.
When the vendors are starting to play the "Vista yay" games while everyone else is rolling back Vista to XP at first opportunity.
Example: NVidia fucked over the consumer by making their newest stereo3D drivers not just Vista-only, but also by removing LCD shutter support (meaning you're limited to color-distorting anaglyph red/blue glasses, or really crapass zalman monitors).
check it out.
Next time I upgrade, unless they fix this, NVidia will not even be considered.
Those were just the three examples that came to mind most readily, but there are plenty of others industry-wide.
Squaresoft and Nintendo alike are both big on "padding the gameplay hours" with meaningless/annoying crap. Activision's put out their fair share of "unlock, unlock, unlock" titles.
It's an odd industry. We are burdened at once with the following problems:
- Shovelware (crap games or, worse, crap games based on movie/tv licenses).
- Endless reiterations of sports titles (Madden 2015, just an updated roster and now you can see the fibers in the shoelace, but the gameplay is still ass)
- Endless games that run a formerly great series into the ground.
- "Padded" games, where the gameplay is mostly solid but they skimped on making the world interesting/entertaining, and just put a bunch of "run from point A to point B, on foot" quests or "hey Link, go collect the 8 Pieces of Crap" quests into the game without much imagination.
- "Fake Replayability" games featuring 18 zillion characters to unlock just to play the same levels over and over and over and over and over and over again.
- The ultimate metagame, "how do I get around the DRM this time... and when will someone manage to patch the latest "update" version so that we can play in decent framerate without the drm infestation."
And of course, you can't trust any of the "reviews" anymore, because the companies simply cut off their access if they ever write an honest review of any of these titles, and all the honest reviewers were fired long ago.
In the old days, many games had replayability because that was all they had space for. Early Atari, NES titles were almost universally replayable because they were designed that way.
These days, game companies seem to think that "replayability" is a buzzword, just like they think that padding "Hours of gameplay" with pointless and boring stuff (think the stupid "sail the world and haul shit up from the ocean for 100 hours" bit before you get to the end of Celda:The Wind Breaker, thank god nintendo finally learned their lesson for Twilight Princess). Or, they make a game that's short, and only kind of fun, but with a number of "unlockable" characters to play through each of which has more absurd unlock requirements tied to the previous (Viewtiful Joe, Devil May Cry, I'm looking at you).
After finishing these games once, I'm done. I see no reason to "replay" them, and so I sell them off and get new games. If they had been made to be more fun and less aggravating, that wouldn't be the case.
Here's a hint: if you feel the need to pad your "gameplay hours" or stick extra nonsense-characters in for "replayability", you're doing something wrong and need to fix your game instead.
Thanks, I'll give it a look!
A few questions since you say you use it:
- Does it do overscan correction in software? My TV has two settings, "black edging" (~3-4% on all edges) and "lose 5% under the bezel", and regrettably the ATi drivers don't accomplish this all that well. XBMC has very solid software-based overscan correction.
- Can it upsample audio to 5.1, either dolby or dts? I've got an Audigy2 with the front panel outputs and would love to be able to push true 5.1 through the sound system like my current Xbox (XBMC converted) does.
Those are the two main things I'm looking at needing. I have an old Xbox that handles a lot of this well (softmod, XBMC) but it lacks the power to handle true HDTV-encoded (720p and up) content. If I could get my PVR box to do this fully, I'd be a really happy user.
My point was that your specific problem was foretold and you either didn't do your research or ignored it. For years now, anyone making or building a MythTV machine has known that using ATi cards would present problems. But instead of owning up to it, you blamed the developers who have tried to help the situation.
Know what? I've had dozens of linux nerds like you bugging me about how their software was "superior" and how I should convert MY box to it. Every time, they give me the same crap assurances like that asswad previously who pointed me to wiki pages he obviously hadn't even read and that are horribly outdated.
MY point is, whether or not you can point your fingers and blame ATi or anyone else, the failure of Linux/MythTV to run correctly on pretty ubiquitous hardware is Linux's problem.
I don't know about all your Linux attempts, but if they're like your MythTV attempts, ignoring general advice will not make your Linux experience any more pleasant than Windows.
I have not "ignored general advice." I have ignored STUPID advice from people who are self-assured, annoying, and convinced that everyone's system should be an exact carbon copy of theirs. I have ignored people who say that I'm not giving MythTV a "fair shake" if I don't shell out tons of cash and rebuild my already-working system just to install it.
Fuck you.
No, seriously, fuck you.
The conversation (which I have had NUMEROUS times with brain-dead linuxites like yourself) goes as follows.
Me: "This is what I've got doing my recording. It works pretty well."
Linuxite: "Dude, you should TOTALLY be using MythTV instead, it's open source and it'd go in your system no problem! You could even record multiple shows that way and everything. And if you've got any problems at all all you have to do is go on ForumXYZ and the wiki and they'll get it all fixed up!"
Me: "Hey guys, I'm having problems with this, here's my hardware configuration, here's the distribution I'm using, here are the errors I'm seeing."
Somebody Like Phoenixwade: "How DARE you use ATi, don't you know they're the devil? You need to spend $400 each on a pair of Happauge cards and a motherboard of X spec and then you need to blip fraggle toggle the command line and zorp waggle blizzle the driver and..."
My assessment is not "dishonest", you annoying ass. It is based PRECISELY on the legions of linux nerds who keep telling me I should convert my system, which works perfectly well, over to the software they claim is superior. And no, in these economic times, I am not going to waste $500+ just to try them out. It either works on the hardware I already own, the hardware I know for a fact works correctly with the software I currently use, or it is flawed on that basis.
Honestly, you are the kind of user I'd tell to box up your computer and take it back to the store.
Honestly, you're the kind of jerk who should never be let around another human being.
Are you sure you didn't already blow some money? Did the aforementioned hardware just fall out of the sky into your lap?
Pretty close, actually. I got a hell of a deal.
Before I buy hardware, I check to see if it might work.
Funny. Mine's worked fine in the system I set up for years now. I try Linux because I'm giving them a fair shake to SEE if their claims hold up... and they don't.
When we talk about video capture, you damn well know that the industry has been compromised by HDMI and related concepts, so you have to be very careful before spending money. And if you don't know, maybe you're part of the problem: if people like you would pay attention to the industry's hostility toward customers, and choose too pirate instead, they might decide to stop telling customers to go away.
Uhm... WTF?
So you're complaining that MythTV doesn't work well when you used cards (ATI) that do not have very good Linux support. When I built my DVR, I researched the type of card to use. By far, everyone said not to use ATi as there wasn't very much support. Not that some people couldn't get it to work, but that the support was lacking. There are other cards that you could have used. I would say rather it's a testament to Linux that it works at all.
And my counterpoint is: the linux nerds who keep bugging me about "you should use our software its so much betterz"... I've given them their fair shot. I've had my stable, reliable machine through years of (inexpensive) upgrades myself. It works well. Linux, on the other hand, has NOT served it well despite numerous attempts (probably FAR more than I should have wasted my time on) attempting to give them a fair shake.
The Slashdot crowd loves to sit around and attack Microsoft. I don't exactly love some of the things they've done myself. What I do know, however, is that on my MS-based setup my box works fine and Linux has never even come close to functionality or ease of use.
THAT is what Linux needs to get past if they want decent market share. Get back to basics, get functionality solid and as easy to use as possible, rather than having to hunt through ridiculous amounts of message-board posts and wiki hunting to find "instructions" for distributions 2-3 generations back that no longer even work for the latest distro.
The point is not "to buy compatible hardware from the start."
I've run this box for years, through various iterations. Every time I mention what I have set up, some linuxtard has to bitch and moan about why I'm not using MythTV/MythBuntu/etc instead because "oh itz so much bettor the linuz guyz rox."
The point is, I built my box, I have used the software I wanted, and I gave the Linux guys their fair shot at earning their chops by seeing whether or not their supposedly "superior" software would run well on my setup.
IT DOESN'T. NEVER HAS.
Every time I've taken them up on their bet, sure enough, it fails. Just like the dork above who got modded "insightful" above for providing wiki-links that provide "proof" in his mind that the stuff is "well supported"... when what they ACTUALLY say is (A) here's a bunch of hoops to jump through and (B) once you've jumped through the hoops, MAYBE it'll work, MAYBE it won't, and the instructions are also based on distributions 2-3 generations old and don't work on the (not precisely recent) Ubuntu 8.10 even.
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/ATI_HDTV_Wonder
Instructions fail for 8.10.
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/ATI_Remote_Wonder_II
Again, instructions fail for 8.10.
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/ATI_All-in-Wonder_HowTo_(English)
All the page says is "will not work, will not record."
How do you call that "supported"???
Meh. I've tried a number of the various MythTV flavors and it all comes down to the stupidity that the "We're Linux, We Can Fix Anything" crowd insists that I blow upwards of $800 buying new hardware to get it to work.
Keep in mind: I've got an Athlon X2, 4 GB of RAM slotted, and the "incompatible" parts are (a) my video board and tv capture board (ATi All-In-Wonder 9600XT and HDTV Wonder respectively) and my remote control (Remote Wonder 2).
They work fine. I'm currently looking at XBMC's windows port as the 'replacement' for the aging ATi interface, but that interface has served me well and solidly for a few years now. MythTV, on the other hand, has not had support for my hardware in any of the flavors I've tried and has been annoying to get running even just to play back things I previously recorded.
If I had a no-name brand capture card from some fly-by-night taiwanese company, this might make sense, but there is NO excuse for Linux not supporting hardware from one of the two big players in the industry. I can stick to other solutions and be happy, and they can sit around congratulating each other on adding little bits of chrome to the interface while not paying attention to the big picture issue, which is that they can only grow their user base by making their software friendly to as much hardware as possible (especially when it's made by one of the "big 2").
There's always the Michelle Obama / Hillary Clinton route... fake going for a law degree while working on finding an up-and-coming shyster for her MRS.
Sure, you have to sell out your principles and basically be an incredibly high-priced whore, but hey, it pays well.
Google should really be responsible for testing its own links and purging/fixing the latest scam, "referrer redirect" hijacks.
It's a form of attack wherein a hijacked website works correctly... as long as your Referrer string doesn't include certain key words ("Google", "Yahoo", "MSN", etc). The trick being, the website won't know they have been hacked because if they get a notice saying they have, then test their own homepage directly, it still works. If you have a referrer, you get redirected to a drive-by download page (for something like "Windows Antivirus 2009" or similar).
Why is this insidious? Because it gets around a lot of the "known registry", "anti-phishing" plugins.
Google served up the link; they should have a responsibility to do a periodic check that the links they serve aren't going to a bad place, and inform the victim if they've been referrer-redirect hijacked.
If you're buying "bleeding edge" you're not going to be satisfied with your purchase 2-3 years from now (about my replacement cycle for my personal box, and even then a lot of my components like hard drive / sound card / DVD drive tend to last through 3-4 iterations), unless your tastes suddenly radically change and you're no longer interested in the "bleeding edge" games you were trying to run.
Plus, consider the following two options:
#1 - "Bleeding edge" rig. Blow $900 on processor, $1200 on dual video boards, $400 on RAM, $800 or so on miscellaneous other components. Total system cost around $3000.
#2 - "Decent Gaming" rig, single $300 video board, $200 processor, etc. Total cost: $900 if you really push your luck.
I'll take my $2000, buy more games, take girlfriend to dinner, stick some in a rainy-day fund, etc. One of these years you need to run the numbers and then you'll figure out that the "savings" you claim are there from buying at bleeding edge aren't really there at all. Even if I spend $900 every 2 years upgrading my PC, it takes me 5-6 years to equal the cost of your rig, and I guarantee you're going to turn around and want to rebuild to get back to the bleeding edge because you'll be "disappointed" that your 2-3 year old "bleeding edge" machine is only getting 15 fps in the timedemo mode of CallOfUnrealCrysisDoomQuakeTournament 3: Yet Another Non-Scaling Tech Demo Masquerading As A Game.
The two companies take turns one-upping each other for the bleeding edge, but every time (10 years running) I've specced out a mid-range (home gamer, single CPU motherboard) to low-end (grandma's email/photo machine) machine, AMD's been the way to go. It's a lot like trying to decide which company's video boards to pick if you're trying to make a game machine without breaking the bank.
Some people are Intel partisans, some people AMD partisans. Benching them and looking at spec, I've consistently found that AMD's got faster chips (for the same $) up to the "sweet spot" in the curve where price starts shooting upwards during the times I've been buying, but I also know there were times I was not in the market when Intel had done a price cut and AMD hadn't caught up.
I'm not going to call someone an idiot for their CPU choice, as it's a long-term purchase decision that has to be balanced with other factors (motherboard choice, RAM, video board, power concerns, cooling solution, etc) anyways. In fact, I recommend consumers try to stay OFF the "bleeding edge" because they're basically throwing money away on it; even if you buy the latest, hottest chip right from the factory it's obsolete by the time you get it home. Your best bet is looking at the curve, because there's always a spot (usually between $150 and $250) where the price starts to jump up exponentially for only an incrementally "faster" product. Buy at the spot beyond which the relationship between price and performance fails to be linear and you'll turn out pretty happy.
Funny. My TYCO blocks barely held on to each other.
I had a lot of these when I was a kid - both the real, and the knock-off types. I can't remember how many times something fell apart because I'd accidentally gotten a knock-off brick in a bad spot and it didn't hold properly. The knock-offs just can't hold properly when you use them to make a hinge...