That's fine if that's what Dell wants to do. It'd be useless marketting crap like ATi with it's DirectX 9+++++ support.
The key here, is Dell is sort of certifying that games with a "level 3" sticker will run on that machine.
The days of requirements like "DirectX 8 compatible video card with Hardware T&L, 16-bit DirectX compatible sound card, (or my favorite) 2ghz Intel Processor or equivalent" have to end if gaming in the PC is to survive.
Face it, gaming alone practically drives sales of those beefy home computers. People are getting fed up and buying XBoxes instead, and not worrying about the 300mhz P2 they use to get their email.
Drives sales for them, makes the experience of buying games less painless for moms and dads, increases the PC gaming market, which attracts developers. It's win-win-win-win all around as I see it.
If you're a geek with a hardon for specs and benchmarks, you don't buy your PC from Dell anyways so whats the difference?
They are, this has nothing to do with geeks who know how to put in their own video cards, and everything to do with non-techies not buying a new PC, but an XBox instead because their fed-up with bullshit minimum requirement specs and a crappy game experience on the PC.
Sales of high end PCs are dropping off, people aren't upgrading, they don't need to. The PC is for browsing the web and email, the PS2/XBox is for games.
They need PC Gaming to regain it's strength with the non-geek crowd, because gaming drives a hell of a lot of sales.
No, the levels are defined. To be, say, level 4, you need to have DirectX features X,Y,Z in hardware and Q megs of video ram.
So the box sitting next to you is a level 1, end of story.
Guess which one I feel is faster? The "level 1" computer -- I don't use it for 3D work.
Well, considering this whole thing is about GAMES, that computer is a level 1. Guess which one runs Doom 3 faster?
This is about games. I'll say it again. This is about games, and trying to stop the erosion of the PC game market as people just get fed up with all the geekery bullshit and just go buy a PS2 or XBox.
Maybe the submitter missed that. But this has been covered before, and it's all about simplifying the answer to the question "Will this game work on my computer?", because the clerk at Best Buy isn't intelligent enough to answer it correctly.
And "minimum requirements" on the box even if the user is technically versed enough to know what "Hardware T&L is" and whether his computer has it, are still shit.
Make it easier to buy and play PC games, entice the gaming crowd back to the PC, which will entice top tier developers back to the PC.
No, the weakest link in the system would be your rating. If you have a GeForce 6800 GTX or whatever the fastest thing is, and a 1ghz celeron with 128 megs of ram, you have a lower levelled system.
The idea is that Dell and Compaq don't decide the level, MS does.
Personally, I like the idea. Knowing if a game is going to run on your machine is a pain sometimes even for geeks. Hell, look at all that Doom 3 stuff. Runs "great" on a GeForce 3 my fucking ass..
I have a friend who picked up NFS:Hot Pursuit 2 for his kid, for PC. He couldn't get it to run on his older Compaq. The "minimum requirements" might as well be greek to him when it says stuff like "DirectX 7 Capable Video Card". He ended up smashing the machine in frustration and buying an XBox.
Lots of regular folk ditched PC gaming entirely for the same reasons.
I'm all for something that makes PC game buying more sensible and practical for regular folks, increasing the market, and then bringing some developer mindshare back to the table.
1. The use of words to express something different from and often opposite to their literal meaning.
2. An expression or utterance marked by a deliberate contrast between apparent and intended meaning.
3. A literary style employing such contrasts for humorous or rhetorical effect. See Synonyms at wit1.
That depends if you're standing in line for the Sailor Moon film festival, or whether you're using it to store your collection of emo music while you mope at the mall.
Which are the bigger losers? I've always found that the "in crowd" are lamer than the people too lame to be in the "in crowd", if you know what I'm saying.
Remember when preppy was "cool"? Everyone was running around in Polo and Vuarnet shirts? Then "urban" became cool and everyone started wearing their pants around their knees with their underpants showing?
I vote for the man I think is best fit to be president, just as the founding fathers intended.
Do *you* see anything in the Declaration of Independance or the Constitution about the country being run by "the lesser of two evils"?
People used to write in their candidates name. Now we have convoluded laws in every state to keep everyone but Dems or Reps off the ballot. It's a complete perversion of what the founding fathers created.
They've been feeding you the line that voting for anyone but a rep or dem is a wasted vote. And the American people (yourself included, aparently) have bought it like a bunch of gullible morons.
Why bother with two nearly identical parties? Why not just say "a vote for anyone other than Bush is wasted"?
When the votes start getting tallied up, and 3rd parties or independants are getting 30, 40, 50+ percent of the vote, that sends a LOUD AND CLEAR message.
The message, is this: "You are president by purely a game of numbers, the majority of the citizens are sick of your policies and want change."
3rd party votes count, they've always counted. They scared the 2 major parties so much that they've twisted and warped the system to include 3rd parties as much as possible. Why? They're scared of them.
There've been plenty of 3rd party/independant congressmen, senators and governors. But when presidential elections come around, all of a sudden people tell you 3rd party votes are wasted?
Bah. The lesser of two evils still sucks. If you vote for Kerry, you send the message that you approve of Kerry and his positions, regardless of the fact that you merely voted because you don't like Bush.
Whore your vote out if you want, I vote for who I want to see run the country, not for who I don't.
I'm tired of "which of these two is less of an asshole" elections.
Kerry won't change anything Bush has done, and you're a fool to think he will. Reps and Dems are the same for all intents and purposes.
The entire world is moving away from socialism, these nutjobs want to move towards it.
The Green's are made up largely of former members of the Communist or Socialist parties. Same shit, new name to try and trick people. (Gator becomes Claria).
People hear "communist" and it conjures up pictures of standing in line in freezing rain for toilet paper. People hear "green" and they think they're saving whales and fixing the ozone layer.
The Green Party has real solutions to our society's complex problems. The Greens will create jobs, address racism, protect the environment, improve education, repair our healthcare system and protect public resources.
The only solution to big government is bigger government! Woooooohoooo
"Address racism"? What does that mean? "Hi Racism, My name is Jim! Nice to meet you", or more ridiculous "hate crime" laws?
You know that the whole process is digital.. They take your photo, crop it, and print your license right in front of you.
You need something with a GUI and some photoshopping tools to do it, you also need to drive specialized hardware to print out the stickers and licenses and whatnot.
Last time I went to the DMV they used Mac's for this. Vendor lock-in is only bad when it's MSFT, or didn't you read the slashbot handbook?
It's a priveledge given them to encourage good behaviour.
They'd rather have all those cons zoned out watching Joe Millionaire than to have them sharpening shivs or "circling the wagons" around the latest pasty white computer hacker who wrote a really neato VBScript worm.
TV is also a primary source of information in the event of a natural disaster, or even something as mundane as knowing which schools are closed if it snows.
Though, I agree it isn't a right. And American government isn't supposed to be the type of government that buys you the stuff you can't afford.
A digital tuner with analog out could be produced quite cheaply.
Hell, it's basically a DVD player without all the (relatively expensive) DVD mechanisms, with a slightly fancier decoding engine. If I can get a cheap DVD player for around 50 bucks, I would expect a DTV tuner to cost less than that.
Once a good cheap DTV to Analog chip hits mass production, the market will flood with cheap devices, and people will start to switch on their own. But not until then.
They aren't permanently sold, they're licensed. The FCC is taking back VHF and UHF, after all. They couldn't do that if they were "owned" like property.
And they do pay licensing fees, application fees, they pay a huge fee to petition the FCC to increase their broadcast power and range, for instance.
Slashdot Mirror
That is, when does the average human eye stop distinguishing them as seperate points?
I can tell 300 DPI from 600 DPI on a printout, but above that it looks about the same to me.
Linux is a clone, not a child or derivative, though.
That's fine if that's what Dell wants to do. It'd be useless marketting crap like ATi with it's DirectX 9+++++ support.
The key here, is Dell is sort of certifying that games with a "level 3" sticker will run on that machine.
The days of requirements like "DirectX 8 compatible video card with Hardware T&L, 16-bit DirectX compatible sound card, (or my favorite) 2ghz Intel Processor or equivalent" have to end if gaming in the PC is to survive.
Face it, gaming alone practically drives sales of those beefy home computers. People are getting fed up and buying XBoxes instead, and not worrying about the 300mhz P2 they use to get their email.
Drives sales for them, makes the experience of buying games less painless for moms and dads, increases the PC gaming market, which attracts developers. It's win-win-win-win all around as I see it.
If you're a geek with a hardon for specs and benchmarks, you don't buy your PC from Dell anyways so whats the difference?
CTSS was one of the first time-sharing operating systems and a direct ancestor of Linux
I thought we were trying to fight Darl et al on the grounds that Linux is completely free of any legacy UNIX code.
It's a clone, not a descendant.
I hope these are just paranoid delusions ...
They are, this has nothing to do with geeks who know how to put in their own video cards, and everything to do with non-techies not buying a new PC, but an XBox instead because their fed-up with bullshit minimum requirement specs and a crappy game experience on the PC.
Sales of high end PCs are dropping off, people aren't upgrading, they don't need to. The PC is for browsing the web and email, the PS2/XBox is for games.
They need PC Gaming to regain it's strength with the non-geek crowd, because gaming drives a hell of a lot of sales.
No, the levels are defined. To be, say, level 4, you need to have DirectX features X,Y,Z in hardware and Q megs of video ram.
So the box sitting next to you is a level 1, end of story.
Guess which one I feel is faster? The "level 1" computer -- I don't use it for 3D work.
Well, considering this whole thing is about GAMES, that computer is a level 1. Guess which one runs Doom 3 faster?
This is about games. I'll say it again. This is about games, and trying to stop the erosion of the PC game market as people just get fed up with all the geekery bullshit and just go buy a PS2 or XBox.
Maybe the submitter missed that. But this has been covered before, and it's all about simplifying the answer to the question "Will this game work on my computer?", because the clerk at Best Buy isn't intelligent enough to answer it correctly.
And "minimum requirements" on the box even if the user is technically versed enough to know what "Hardware T&L is" and whether his computer has it, are still shit.
Make it easier to buy and play PC games, entice the gaming crowd back to the PC, which will entice top tier developers back to the PC.
Honestly this smacks of marketing speak that is designed to sell discrete "game" packages
Uh, that's exactly what it is. They're trying to simplify the process of a non-technical person asking "Will this run on my computer?"
It's not a bad idea. Slashdotters are just knee-jerking because it's MSFT's idea.
No, the weakest link in the system would be your rating. If you have a GeForce 6800 GTX or whatever the fastest thing is, and a 1ghz celeron with 128 megs of ram, you have a lower levelled system.
The idea is that Dell and Compaq don't decide the level, MS does.
Personally, I like the idea. Knowing if a game is going to run on your machine is a pain sometimes even for geeks. Hell, look at all that Doom 3 stuff. Runs "great" on a GeForce 3 my fucking ass..
I have a friend who picked up NFS:Hot Pursuit 2 for his kid, for PC. He couldn't get it to run on his older Compaq. The "minimum requirements" might as well be greek to him when it says stuff like "DirectX 7 Capable Video Card". He ended up smashing the machine in frustration and buying an XBox.
Lots of regular folk ditched PC gaming entirely for the same reasons.
I'm all for something that makes PC game buying more sensible and practical for regular folks, increasing the market, and then bringing some developer mindshare back to the table.
It depends how the PC is put together.
Basically what happens is the +5 and ground get shorted.
So the PC can have electronics to detect the short and disable the USB port - more likely in an expensive machine, or a server.
Or, the PC can detect the short and power down, which calls for cheaper electronics.
Or, the PC can do nothing about it, the +5 rail will suck juice until the PSU shuts itself down, hopefully before your mobo melts.
My motherboard will shut down (supposedly safely) if the power rails fluctuate too far out of range.
Almost any PSU will shut down (usually safely) if you short the rails together. Try it! It's fun.
irony:
1. The use of words to express something different from and often opposite to their literal meaning.
2. An expression or utterance marked by a deliberate contrast between apparent and intended meaning.
3. A literary style employing such contrasts for humorous or rhetorical effect. See Synonyms at wit1.
That depends if you're standing in line for the Sailor Moon film festival, or whether you're using it to store your collection of emo music while you mope at the mall.
Which are the bigger losers? I've always found that the "in crowd" are lamer than the people too lame to be in the "in crowd", if you know what I'm saying.
Remember when preppy was "cool"? Everyone was running around in Polo and Vuarnet shirts? Then "urban" became cool and everyone started wearing their pants around their knees with their underpants showing?
I've got underpants made out of punchcards, with vaccuum tubes as buttons!
Trust me, noone who wears a USB dongle around their neck is getting the hot cheerleader. They'd be lucky to get the ugly homosexual.
And the word "irony" doesn't mean what you think it does.
I vote for the man I think is best fit to be president, just as the founding fathers intended.
Do *you* see anything in the Declaration of Independance or the Constitution about the country being run by "the lesser of two evils"?
People used to write in their candidates name. Now we have convoluded laws in every state to keep everyone but Dems or Reps off the ballot. It's a complete perversion of what the founding fathers created.
They've been feeding you the line that voting for anyone but a rep or dem is a wasted vote. And the American people (yourself included, aparently) have bought it like a bunch of gullible morons.
Why bother with two nearly identical parties? Why not just say "a vote for anyone other than Bush is wasted"?
Fuck the current american "biocrasy".
Bullshit.
When the votes start getting tallied up, and 3rd parties or independants are getting 30, 40, 50+ percent of the vote, that sends a LOUD AND CLEAR message.
The message, is this: "You are president by purely a game of numbers, the majority of the citizens are sick of your policies and want change."
3rd party votes count, they've always counted. They scared the 2 major parties so much that they've twisted and warped the system to include 3rd parties as much as possible. Why? They're scared of them.
There've been plenty of 3rd party/independant congressmen, senators and governors. But when presidential elections come around, all of a sudden people tell you 3rd party votes are wasted?
Bah. The lesser of two evils still sucks. If you vote for Kerry, you send the message that you approve of Kerry and his positions, regardless of the fact that you merely voted because you don't like Bush.
Whore your vote out if you want, I vote for who I want to see run the country, not for who I don't.
I'm tired of "which of these two is less of an asshole" elections.
Kerry won't change anything Bush has done, and you're a fool to think he will. Reps and Dems are the same for all intents and purposes.
That's ridiculous. Thats just perpetuating the myth that a third party vote is wasted, and that there are only two parties to choose from.
They are so by definition.
The entire world is moving away from socialism, these nutjobs want to move towards it.
The Green's are made up largely of former members of the Communist or Socialist parties. Same shit, new name to try and trick people. (Gator becomes Claria).
People hear "communist" and it conjures up pictures of standing in line in freezing rain for toilet paper. People hear "green" and they think they're saving whales and fixing the ozone layer.
The Green Party has real solutions to our society's complex problems. The Greens will create jobs, address racism, protect the environment, improve education, repair our healthcare system and protect public resources.
The only solution to big government is bigger government! Woooooohoooo
"Address racism"? What does that mean? "Hi Racism, My name is Jim! Nice to meet you", or more ridiculous "hate crime" laws?
...or are you really batshit crazy?
Wonder why so many of them are unemployed?
Would you hire an "IT professional" who's answer to every single problem was "throw it all away and start from scratch with my favorite OS?"
Can you edit photos on that mainframe?
You know that the whole process is digital.. They take your photo, crop it, and print your license right in front of you.
You need something with a GUI and some photoshopping tools to do it, you also need to drive specialized hardware to print out the stickers and licenses and whatnot.
Last time I went to the DMV they used Mac's for this. Vendor lock-in is only bad when it's MSFT, or didn't you read the slashbot handbook?
probably means re-installing Windows, but have they considered Linux?
BEGIN LINUX CONSIDERATION
Q) Does it have the custom software we need?
A) No
Q) Do we have the budget, time, or employees with the skill to write it?
A) No
END LINUX CONSIDERATION
Sorry guys, that's just how the real world works.
It's a priveledge given them to encourage good behaviour.
They'd rather have all those cons zoned out watching Joe Millionaire than to have them sharpening shivs or "circling the wagons" around the latest pasty white computer hacker who wrote a really neato VBScript worm.
TV is also a primary source of information in the event of a natural disaster, or even something as mundane as knowing which schools are closed if it snows.
Though, I agree it isn't a right. And American government isn't supposed to be the type of government that buys you the stuff you can't afford.
A digital tuner with analog out could be produced quite cheaply.
Hell, it's basically a DVD player without all the (relatively expensive) DVD mechanisms, with a slightly fancier decoding engine. If I can get a cheap DVD player for around 50 bucks, I would expect a DTV tuner to cost less than that.
Once a good cheap DTV to Analog chip hits mass production, the market will flood with cheap devices, and people will start to switch on their own. But not until then.
They aren't permanently sold, they're licensed. The FCC is taking back VHF and UHF, after all. They couldn't do that if they were "owned" like property.
And they do pay licensing fees, application fees, they pay a huge fee to petition the FCC to increase their broadcast power and range, for instance.