Having just hit my 5th year in SL yesterday, what we call a "Rezday" I really ought to respond.
It's not 50+ year old women....it's 25-35 year old women.:-) They're probably the biggest subgroup of users now, and drive the SL economy, and everyone knows it.
The report you saw probably dealt with the amount of time a new user stays after first logging in, the retention rate is low, in part because SL is very complex and there's not really any handholding quest givers like WoW has, so newbies are overwhelmed. If they're lucky, they'll run into a friendly oldbie who can give them pointers, or have come in with the help of a friend. If they make it over what some of us call "The Hump" then they tend to have long sessions, probably averaging and hour and a half to two hours. But the real heavy users can probably doing the equivalent of "serious but not hardcore" WoW hours.
UMD was a stopgap until they had PSN ready and flash came down in price. They needed good capacity, cheap...and a disc format was the only choice..Having MD in the PSP would have made it even bigger and people were already complainging about the size of the thing compared to the GBA.
Actually, in some ways, the PSP IS more powerful than the PS2. It's CPU is faster and it can do some things in hardware that the PS2 has to do in software less efficiently. But the PS2 CAN do such things in software because of the programmable VU's, which the PSP does not have.
but are there any news articles about use of the Xbox 360 controller among PC gamers?
Not that I'm aware of, but the 360 Pad does seem to be the gamepad of choice amongst a majority PC gamers that use one, with the various Playstation-foo Dual Shocks being a strong second.
Since he mentioned "Shackles" I figured he wouldn't be a Steam user. 200 Euros is 290 US dollars, that's almost enough for a PS3 or Xbox 360 let alone a Wii. All 3 have "stores" where you can get games for less than the price of some retail games.
Also, using a console means you have less need for Windows, so you can use Linux. I am always surprised how the PC gaming proponents on Slashdot co-exist with the Linux proponents. You'd think the Linux people would be promoting console gaming.
And yes, I've played nethack on a PS2 and PS3, so there, I made the obvious "console gaming" joke already.
Your problem isn't that the games are actually expensive...the problem is you live in Europe. So you get VAT, import duties, and exchange rate issues.. Not to mention the costs of translation to all the different languages.
And even after you buy that 200Euro video card, you still have to buy games, right?
I was about to mention Nethack as well. I can't stand vi-key movement controls in it...and I even use vim as my editor. That's right...I use my cursor keys in vim.
NES and SNES, yes, via composite and S-Video respectively. How it looks depends on the TV's scaler. Personally I think they benefit from the better color modern LCD's put out.
Obligatory XKCD reference. Hand coding? we had to use butterflies....theyd flap their wings to cause atmospheric distrubances to focus cosmic rays on the single bit at a time on the platter we wanted to flip.
It was pretty obvious from its UI and interface design that Oblivion was already primarily targeted at consoles. You really think someone would make a 640x480 UI system if they were targeting PC's in 2006? Even the mod that upped the UI resolution in Oblivion I thought of as merely an aesthetic thing rather than a "requirement".
I'm a console gamer and I played the PS3 version, and the UI bothered me. I think that you're right that it was designed with the idea of being playable on a PS3 connected to an SD set, which was not necessarily a bad thing, but they should have had a setting that let me say: "Hey, got an HD set here, you can shrink the font some to put more info on the screen."
OK, first off, I don't count the ability to tether a portable console to a TV to be a feature. I consider that one of the dumbest features imaginable.
Funny thing is, some people demanded the feature, because they knew that the PSP's UMD video was actually stored as 720x480 on the UMD, and that other PMP's like the Archos devices had that feature.
The extra RAM and microphone are also entirely useless. Games can't use them. They're meaningless.
There's a setting on the 2000 and 3000 models that lets games use it as cache so they don't hit the UMD as often. It also helps the web browser. The microphone CAN be used in games that have voice chat, or with Talkman.
And the PSP-3000 is on display at most "big box" stores. I've seen the screen and the artifacts it generates. It's awful. It's easily the worst screen I've ever seen. It renders the entire thing completely unplayable.
Don't judge the 3000 by those demo units, they aren't REAL PSP 3000's. I owned a 1000 model and the 3000's screen really is much better.
Compare to the PSP. From PSP-1000 to PSP-2000, the console was slighty smaller. And nothing else. From the PSP-2000 to PSP-3000, they introduced a broken screen that added weird artifacts that Sony has never fixed and... nothing else.
The PSP 2000 and 3000 have more RAM than the 1000, the 2000 and 3000 both have TV out, which the 1000 doesn't, the 3000 can even output to SD sets. The 2000 and 3000 can also do skype, the 1000 can't. the 3000 even has a built in microphone.
The 3000 screen is MUCH better than the 1000 screen, it has better color and it's brighter. There are no artifacts, just some stupidly anal fanboys who "think" they see artifacts, just to have something complain about.
No need to use a "spin", just use the standard DVD and choose to install the XFCE group. Why they don't make the DVD the default download instead of the CD I'll never know. We constantly see people over on the Fedora Forum posting on how their new Fedora install doesn't have Open/Libre office, and then they mention they installed the CD.
I updated from F14 to F15 and made sure I had XFCE installed, just in case Gnome 3 wasn't for me. It wasn't.
Admittedly there are tweaks you can do to make it more "normal" but yeah it's very iOS-y. Fallback mode isn't a solution because you lose some functionality that way, and you can't theme fall back mode to look more Gnome 2-ish. As far as I know there IS a way to add app launchers to either the top bar or bottom bar thingy.
I had no problem with wired networking at all on F15.
What pocket-size music playing device do you have instead, and what software do you currently use to sync to that?
I'm not the person you're responding to, but I decided to answer. I have a PSP (and an old V3xx Razr), and I use either the terminal or nautilus. Being of an older generation I think in terms of Albums, not singles.
Which distro? Even in the distros that insist on "free software only" like Fedora, there's usually a third party repository that lets you easily install mp3 support and whatnot.
PSN is Sony's property, if you want to use it, you play by their rules. If they change the rules, we may think it sucks, but it's their playground, their rules.
Of course, there's also another solution, the "Get a second PS3 solution". Some people did that. Some people even did that for the PS2 Linux kit, since a Linux formatted PS2 HD couldn't be used with PS2 games that used it. Course, to get the HD In the US, you had to get FFXI and to use it you either had to swap hard drives (annoying) or get another PS2.
every 2D game I tried on YDL was fine. It was even possible to run Runescape on it. It could easily handle your average SNES style platformer if that's what you're getting at.
Slashdot Mirror
Having just hit my 5th year in SL yesterday, what we call a "Rezday" I really ought to respond.
It's not 50+ year old women....it's 25-35 year old women. :-) They're probably the biggest subgroup of users now, and drive the SL economy, and everyone knows it.
The report you saw probably dealt with the amount of time a new user stays after first logging in, the retention rate is low, in part because SL is very complex and there's not really any handholding quest givers like WoW has, so newbies are overwhelmed. If they're lucky, they'll run into a friendly oldbie who can give them pointers, or have come in with the help of a friend. If they make it over what some of us call "The Hump" then they tend to have long sessions, probably averaging and hour and a half to two hours. But the real heavy users can probably doing the equivalent of "serious but not hardcore" WoW hours.
Yes, Fedora 32-bit packages are i686.
UMD was a stopgap until they had PSN ready and flash came down in price. They needed good capacity, cheap...and a disc format was the only choice. .Having MD in the PSP would have made it even bigger and people were already complainging about the size of the thing compared to the GBA.
Actually, in some ways, the PSP IS more powerful than the PS2. It's CPU is faster and it can do some things in hardware that the PS2 has to do in software less efficiently. But the PS2 CAN do such things in software because of the programmable VU's, which the PSP does not have.
but are there any news articles about use of the Xbox 360 controller among PC gamers?
Not that I'm aware of, but the 360 Pad does seem to be the gamepad of choice amongst a majority PC gamers that use one, with the various Playstation-foo Dual Shocks being a strong second.
Since he mentioned "Shackles" I figured he wouldn't be a Steam user. 200 Euros is 290 US dollars, that's almost enough for a PS3 or Xbox 360 let alone a Wii. All 3 have "stores" where you can get games for less than the price of some retail games.
Also, using a console means you have less need for Windows, so you can use Linux. I am always surprised how the PC gaming proponents on Slashdot co-exist with the Linux proponents. You'd think the Linux people would be promoting console gaming.
And yes, I've played nethack on a PS2 and PS3, so there, I made the obvious "console gaming" joke already.
Your problem isn't that the games are actually expensive...the problem is you live in Europe. So you get VAT, import duties, and exchange rate issues.. Not to mention the costs of translation to all the different languages.
And even after you buy that 200Euro video card, you still have to buy games, right?
What is with your focus on everything being for everyone?
Tepples has Aspergers and IIRC used to babysit to make money before he got some job placement assistance.
I was about to mention Nethack as well. I can't stand vi-key movement controls in it...and I even use vim as my editor. That's right...I use my cursor keys in vim.
NES and SNES, yes, via composite and S-Video respectively. How it looks depends on the TV's scaler. Personally I think they benefit from the better color modern LCD's put out.
Obligatory XKCD reference. Hand coding? we had to use butterflies....theyd flap their wings to cause atmospheric distrubances to focus cosmic rays on the single bit at a time on the platter we wanted to flip.
http://xkcd.com/378/
It was pretty obvious from its UI and interface design that Oblivion was already primarily targeted at consoles. You really think someone would make a 640x480 UI system if they were targeting PC's in 2006? Even the mod that upped the UI resolution in Oblivion I thought of as merely an aesthetic thing rather than a "requirement".
I'm a console gamer and I played the PS3 version, and the UI bothered me. I think that you're right that it was designed with the idea of being playable on a PS3 connected to an SD set, which was not necessarily a bad thing, but they should have had a setting that let me say: "Hey, got an HD set here, you can shrink the font some to put more info on the screen."
And never go against someone who's read or seen The Princess Bride a thousand times, when death is on the line.
OK, first off, I don't count the ability to tether a portable console to a TV to be a feature. I consider that one of the dumbest features imaginable.
Funny thing is, some people demanded the feature, because they knew that the PSP's UMD video was actually stored as 720x480 on the UMD, and that other PMP's like the Archos devices had that feature.
http://www.gamespot.com/forums/topic/25667977
The extra RAM and microphone are also entirely useless. Games can't use them. They're meaningless.
There's a setting on the 2000 and 3000 models that lets games use it as cache so they don't hit the UMD as often. It also helps the web browser. The microphone CAN be used in games that have voice chat, or with Talkman.
And the PSP-3000 is on display at most "big box" stores. I've seen the screen and the artifacts it generates. It's awful. It's easily the worst screen I've ever seen. It renders the entire thing completely unplayable.
Don't judge the 3000 by those demo units, they aren't REAL PSP 3000's. I owned a 1000 model and the 3000's screen really is much better.
Compare to the PSP. From PSP-1000 to PSP-2000, the console was slighty smaller. And nothing else. From the PSP-2000 to PSP-3000, they introduced a broken screen that added weird artifacts that Sony has never fixed and... nothing else.
The PSP 2000 and 3000 have more RAM than the 1000, the 2000 and 3000 both have TV out, which the 1000 doesn't, the 3000 can even output to SD sets. The 2000 and 3000 can also do skype, the 1000 can't. the 3000 even has a built in microphone.
The 3000 screen is MUCH better than the 1000 screen, it has better color and it's brighter. There are no artifacts, just some stupidly anal fanboys who "think" they see artifacts, just to have something complain about.
No need to use a "spin", just use the standard DVD and choose to install the XFCE group. Why they don't make the DVD the default download instead of the CD I'll never know. We constantly see people over on the Fedora Forum posting on how their new Fedora install doesn't have Open/Libre office, and then they mention they installed the CD.
I updated from F14 to F15 and made sure I had XFCE installed, just in case Gnome 3 wasn't for me. It wasn't.
Admittedly there are tweaks you can do to make it more "normal" but yeah it's very iOS-y. Fallback mode isn't a solution because you lose some functionality that way, and you can't theme fall back mode to look more Gnome 2-ish. As far as I know there IS a way to add app launchers to either the top bar or bottom bar thingy.
I had no problem with wired networking at all on F15.
Oh god yes. SL is a beast that wants as much hardware as you can throw at it.
Alt-key is strafe. I got some kind of weird graphic glitching with disappearing enemies and very bad sound.
What pocket-size music playing device do you have instead, and what software do you currently use to sync to that?
I'm not the person you're responding to, but I decided to answer. I have a PSP (and an old V3xx Razr), and I use either the terminal or nautilus. Being of an older generation I think in terms of Albums, not singles.
Which distro? Even in the distros that insist on "free software only" like Fedora, there's usually a third party repository that lets you easily install mp3 support and whatnot.
One's biological arms aren't the equivalent of Linux on the PS3, that's a pretty bad analogy.
PSN is Sony's property, if you want to use it, you play by their rules. If they change the rules, we may think it sucks, but it's their playground, their rules.
Of course, there's also another solution, the "Get a second PS3 solution". Some people did that. Some people even did that for the PS2 Linux kit, since a Linux formatted PS2 HD couldn't be used with PS2 games that used it. Course, to get the HD In the US, you had to get FFXI and to use it you either had to swap hard drives (annoying) or get another PS2.
every 2D game I tried on YDL was fine. It was even possible to run Runescape on it. It could easily handle your average SNES style platformer if that's what you're getting at.
You post on Slashdot, a site with a supposedly heavy Linux readership, nuff said.