I was referring to the cost of Cobra. I was referring to him not being able to bend far enough to take the huuuuuge price you have to pay to keep your insurance via Cobra (most of which I understand it the employer portion which is no longer being payed).
I'm not going to cram my current desktop rig into my home theater, because it's a powerful machine that is capable of doing far more than spitting out a movie or playing a Steam library.
You can play all your Windows and Mac games on your SteamOS machine, too. Just turn on your existing computer and run Steam as you always have - then your SteamOS machine can stream those games over your home network straight to your TV!
What impy is referring to is say for example, you're in a vehicle. The vehicle (and you) are moving in the game, but your head (and body) is not so won't be experiencing the actual acceleration.
Or for a FPS you might jump down a ledge (in game) but again, the whole time your feet are firmly planted on the ground in RL.
You would need a system with actuators to jostle and tilt you in the right directions to simulate that. Something like this .
If I recall the earlier specs, it had a gyro and accelerometer (like a modern smart phone) so it could track your head *movements* but it had not reliable way to position your head in 3D space (any effort to do so would require initial calibration (tell the SW my head is right now 5 ft from the floor) and go from there and hope the errors don't creep up over time.
The external camera they added (which gets pointed to the user) seems to be a more robust way to determining the exact location of your head and thus matching it to the virtual world would be easier (and more accurate). The separate reference point eliminates creep up errors (accelerometer detected.5cm down but only 4.998 up when you slouched and re-straightened).
Quick google search yielded this: http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/133905-oculus-rift-is-the-world-finally-ready-for-virtual-reality-games
The reason many people can’t read or watch a video in the car is that focusing in on the page or screen tells your body that it’s perfectly stable and unmoving. Your vestibular system, however, still senses the movement and vibration of the vehicle. This creates cognitive dissonance. Scientists believe that the nausea we feel as a result is an evolutionary adaptation to eating bad or toxic food. If one system is reporting movement and the other isn’t, it’s time to pull the big Reverse lever and send your dinner back.
So in short, the better they can match RL movement to the VR world (not just lag, but precision of movement and overall head location) the lesser the chance of nausea.
20 minutes in Half Life got me feeling quite queezy
And I believe this is why the consumer version has been delayed. They've identified possible sources for the VR nausea (lag, lack of head *position* tracking) and are working to resolve them.
I'm OK with the delays while they iron out these issues as I'd prefer a VR headset that has a lasting market presence to one that is introduced and in bargain bins in 3 months due to wide spread reports of users getting sick with minimal use.
That said... I'm am seriously giddy about this thing.
using whatever format they find optimizes their [battery life|thermal envelope
I think that's the point of getting hardware vendors on board. From TFS:
hardware vendors will start supporting the royalty-free VP9 codecs. These hardware vendors include major names like ARM, Broadcom, Intel, LG, Marvell, MediaTek, Nvidia, Panasonic, Philips, Qualcomm, RealTek, Samsung, Sigma, Sharp, Sony and Toshiba."
Previous open standards didn't include hardware vendor support, so decoding was not done optimally and fully in hardware.
Valve is also putting their weight behind this and getting other developers to release their games for Steam OS (and Linux). Metro Last Light is one of the most recent AAA titles. Check for yourself the current steam Linux catalog (hint, you won't find Free Civ on there).
As far as the OS, it's a component in the (not yet released) Steam Machines. When released, consumers will be able to pick one up for $499 pre-built, with a Steam controller .
The OS *by itself* is aimed at fans, early adopters, beta testers, whatever you want to call them. However it's just one part of a larger puzzle that Valve has been putting together piece by piece over the past few years (SteamOS + Controller + Steam Machines + Big Picture Mode + Family Sharing + Trading Cards + Achievements + Social + Steam Workshop + Porting Source to Linux + Optimizing Linux AMD/nVidia/intel drivers + Porting the Steam Client to Linux).
How many of those 9,000 windows steam games run on the consoles? (BTW it's closer to 3,000 - 3,500 unique windows games - excluding DLC).
Somebody that already has a gaming PC (presumably with Steam) isn't the target demographic of this push. Folks who want console level convenience but would be open to saving money buying on Steam are. And what will they see when Steam Machines launch early next year?
PS4 169 Total Games released and announced XBONE 77 Total Games released and announced Steam Machine 300+ games already released (and purchasable) *and* more coming soon.
Then look at the other features you'll get with a Steam Machine (and Steam):
* Steam Sales
* Steam gifting (give your grandkids a Steam Machine then send them games through steam from your home PC/Tablet/Phone, etc)
* Access to player mods (Steam Workshop)
* Free online play (MMO's w/ monthly fees not included)
* Equal or better hardware depending on your budget
* Upgradeable hardware
* Made with COTS HW -> easily fixable
* Games you purchased on your Steam Machine are tied to your account, *not* your machine. On the road? Open your laptop and pick up on your games where you left off.
* Ability to play 3rd party/unlicensed titles without jailbreaking
* Compatibility with PC hardware (that works with Linux). Mouse and KB anyone?
* Compatibility with XBOX 360 and PS3 controllers (and surely XBOne and PS4 to come)
* Full desktop mode!
* Controller that's nearly as precise as using a mouse (and miles ahead of the console controlers.
* Devs can issue patches for free! (looking at you Microsoft)
My first android phone (G1 - 2008 ) had better specs than the beast of a computer I built in 1998) for 1/10th the price!
1998 - Pentium II 300 PC w/ Hitachi 17" monitor $5500 MIPS: 380 Ram: 128 MB Storage: 6GB SCSI drive + 1GB Jaz drive Screen: 1600 x 1200 24 bit color Networking: Ethernet + 56k modem Other Accessories: Cheapo microphone Other Benefits: Upgradeable. Built in anti-theft (heavy as hell).
2008 - G1 $480 + $20 (SD card) MIPS: 630 RAM: 192 MB Storage: 192 MB + SD (8GB) Screen: 320 x 480 16 bit color (only spec it really loses on) Networking: Wifi + GPRS + EDGE Other Accessories: Camera, GPS, accelerometer, compass, microphone Other Benefits: Fits in the palm of my frikkin' hand! Makes calls!
That phone was my "Holy shit, I'm living in the future!" moment. Don't get me started on the current smart phones out now.
The car owner walks out with their family, a suitcase full of whatever clothes they can gather, food for the trip, toys, and of course the family albums.
A sudden panic overtakes him as he realizes his car is no longer where he left it. He frantically looks up and down the street to no avail. Finally he pickups up his phone to call the police when he sees a message:
Message from: FamilyCarAutodrive. Received at 8:01pm. "I told you motherfuckers I was out of here at 8'o'clock!"
There was a lot of hype about VR stuff in the 90s, and the whole thing did not get much traction.
They're developing consumer versions that are far superior (and cheaper) than the $1000 minimum 256 color, low FoV junk from the 90's (looking at you VFX-1!). Better, professional units quickly went up to the 10s of thousands of dollars.
Are things significantly better now?
The reason why it's better now is due to cheap high resolution displays (thanks to phones and tablets) and precise accelerometers and gyros.
On the Occulus Rift side, they sidestepped the old design requiring two separate screens by using one screen split between your two eyes and using optics to make the narrow (per eye) screen appear wide. Also the optics concentrate more pixels in the center of your field of view (where you need them most). The distortions created by this are counteracted in software. So this new approach + cheaper displays + cheaper sensors = time for cheap and awesome consumer VR headsets!
splitting the cost of all of it between four guys for 8-10 months was reasonable
Seems reasonable. And for short term stuff (table for thanksgiving, big TV for Superbowl, bed for temporary guests, etc) it's fine. However the vast majority of people don't use it like this.
That said at 8 months (and a usual term of 24 months Rent to Own) you've paid up 8/24 = 1/3rd of the inflated cost. So for my example of the living room set, you and your roommates would have paid $1000 of a $1500 (full retail) living room set. At 10 months you would have paid $1250 (sale price for the item at a regular furniture store).
If you must have "new" stuff and you don't want to deal with selling/donating it at the end of the school year then it'll work. However if you don't mind used, you can furnish an entire (temporary/first) apartment for much less and make back some money at the end by re-selling or donating (and getting a tax break).
As an example my roommate and I furnished our apartment with about $200 from the salvation army, $100 for my waterbed (no bed bugs!), and whatever he spent on his bed. The $200 from the Salvation Army got us a living room set, entertainment center, desks, second couch (we went during the weekend auctions). At the end we just re-donated the stuff.
It's a rent to own store and from a brief stint working in one (quite a few years ago) I can say that most of the clients were people who had bad credit and too poor or unable to save enough to buy *new* furniture/electronics outright.
How it works? They take full MSRP (which usually gives you 100% markup) double *that* price then divide up into payments. So as an example a living room set with a $1500 MSRP (which probably cost them $700) would end up being $125 a month OR $57.70 a week (Easy Payments!). If the customer paid through the two years required to own it they would have paid $3000 for a couch they could have gotten for sale elsewhere for about $1200.
The horrendous markup is more visible in electronics (a PS2 in it's day would have cost someone close to $1000 by the end of the year rent-to-own period).
You are totally correct. The best situation for a consumer in that situation is to get furniture from either Goodwill, the Salvation Army, Craigslist, or the local newspaper classifieds. If they still want *new* furniture, then they can enjoy the used stuff till they save enough to buy what they really want outright (and re-sell the used item).
Working that job made me realize that schools *must* have a personal finances class which goes over budgeting, avoiding scams, and setting up an affordable household.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps we should just fork slashdot and name it **Plusdot**.
Yes! As a convenience we could require users to login via google+ !
I was referring to the cost of Cobra. I was referring to him not being able to bend far enough to take the huuuuuge price you have to pay to keep your insurance via Cobra (most of which I understand it the employer portion which is no longer being payed).
You could have kept your employer plan through COBRA. Why did you not do it?
Due to a pre-existing condition, he couldn't bend over far enough.
There's still potential for the Ouya 1.0, the Tegra 3 chip it uses has been demonstrated (by nVidia) to be perfectly capable of game streaming.
So if steam machines pick up, with proper support, the Ouya 1.0s could easily become the streaming machines of choice.
I'm not going to cram my current desktop rig into my home theater, because it's a powerful machine that is capable of doing far more than spitting out a movie or playing a Steam library.
Well for you there's In-home Streaming
Per Valve:
You can play all your Windows and Mac games on your SteamOS machine, too. Just turn on your existing computer and run Steam as you always have - then your SteamOS machine can stream those games over your home network straight to your TV!
The streaming function doesn't require a beefy machine ( even Tegra 3/4 devices can handle it).
reduced travel times *and* reduced in-state traffic fatalities.
In an accident, the vehicle occupants are ejected clear across the state border.
Ha ha! Your fatality now, Wyoming!
What impy is referring to is say for example, you're in a vehicle. The vehicle (and you) are moving in the game, but your head (and body) is not so won't be experiencing the actual acceleration. Or for a FPS you might jump down a ledge (in game) but again, the whole time your feet are firmly planted on the ground in RL. You would need a system with actuators to jostle and tilt you in the right directions to simulate that. Something like this .
The reason many people can’t read or watch a video in the car is that focusing in on the page or screen tells your body that it’s perfectly stable and unmoving. Your vestibular system, however, still senses the movement and vibration of the vehicle. This creates cognitive dissonance. Scientists believe that the nausea we feel as a result is an evolutionary adaptation to eating bad or toxic food. If one system is reporting movement and the other isn’t, it’s time to pull the big Reverse lever and send your dinner back.
So in short, the better they can match RL movement to the VR world (not just lag, but precision of movement and overall head location) the lesser the chance of nausea.
20 minutes in Half Life got me feeling quite queezy
And I believe this is why the consumer version has been delayed. They've identified possible sources for the VR nausea (lag, lack of head *position* tracking) and are working to resolve them.
I'm OK with the delays while they iron out these issues as I'd prefer a VR headset that has a lasting market presence to one that is introduced and in bargain bins in 3 months due to wide spread reports of users getting sick with minimal use. That said... I'm am seriously giddy about this thing.
Motionjoy bad! Scarlett Crush Productions DS3 driver is where it's at! Even supports up to 4 controllers!
There's various solutions already for getting the DS3 to work under LInux
using whatever format they find optimizes their [battery life|thermal envelope
I think that's the point of getting hardware vendors on board. From TFS:
hardware vendors will start supporting the royalty-free VP9 codecs. These hardware vendors include major names like ARM, Broadcom, Intel, LG, Marvell, MediaTek, Nvidia, Panasonic, Philips, Qualcomm, RealTek, Samsung, Sigma, Sharp, Sony and Toshiba."
Previous open standards didn't include hardware vendor support, so decoding was not done optimally and fully in hardware.
They said the machine couldn't bore through it.
Maybe they ran into a pocket of old discarded Nokia 3310s.
The minimum wage is/was *supposed* to be for kids in or just out of high school, college students, etc.
.85 MW .70 MW
If this is the case, then why was the law not written to reflect this?
Minimum Wage = MW
Under 22 Wage =
Under 18 Wage =
It's 300 Linux games on Steam. This doesn't count any non-steam games.
Valve is also putting their weight behind this and getting other developers to release their games for Steam OS (and Linux). Metro Last Light is one of the most recent AAA titles. Check for yourself the current steam Linux catalog (hint, you won't find Free Civ on there).
As far as the OS, it's a component in the (not yet released) Steam Machines. When released, consumers will be able to pick one up for $499 pre-built, with a Steam controller .
The OS *by itself* is aimed at fans, early adopters, beta testers, whatever you want to call them. However it's just one part of a larger puzzle that Valve has been putting together piece by piece over the past few years (SteamOS + Controller + Steam Machines + Big Picture Mode + Family Sharing + Trading Cards + Achievements + Social + Steam Workshop + Porting Source to Linux + Optimizing Linux AMD/nVidia/intel drivers + Porting the Steam Client to Linux).
Come January the pieces come together.
Honestly, didn't know they changed their minds after seven and a half years!
Still good they saw the light, would have been awesome if they didn't do it near the end of the console's life...
How many of those 9,000 windows steam games run on the consoles? (BTW it's closer to 3,000 - 3,500 unique windows games - excluding DLC).
Somebody that already has a gaming PC (presumably with Steam) isn't the target demographic of this push. Folks who want console level convenience but would be open to saving money buying on Steam are. And what will they see when Steam Machines launch early next year?
PS4 169 Total Games released and announced
XBONE 77 Total Games released and announced
Steam Machine 300+ games already released (and purchasable) *and* more coming soon.
Then look at the other features you'll get with a Steam Machine (and Steam):
* Steam Sales
* Steam gifting (give your grandkids a Steam Machine then send them games through steam from your home PC/Tablet/Phone, etc)
* Access to player mods (Steam Workshop)
* Free online play (MMO's w/ monthly fees not included)
* Equal or better hardware depending on your budget
* Upgradeable hardware
* Made with COTS HW -> easily fixable
* Games you purchased on your Steam Machine are tied to your account, *not* your machine. On the road? Open your laptop and pick up on your games where you left off.
* Ability to play 3rd party/unlicensed titles without jailbreaking
* Compatibility with PC hardware (that works with Linux). Mouse and KB anyone?
* Compatibility with XBOX 360 and PS3 controllers (and surely XBOne and PS4 to come)
* Full desktop mode!
* Controller that's nearly as precise as using a mouse (and miles ahead of the console controlers.
* Devs can issue patches for free! (looking at you Microsoft)
and some games.
The games they've got. Over 300 last I checked + "more AAA titles coming soon".
do people really need a $500 video card?
People running 4k displays or multi-monitor displays with the latest games do.
you need to like lick and kill games.
Man, these next gen control schemes are getting out of hand.
My first android phone (G1 - 2008 ) had better specs than the beast of a computer I built in 1998) for 1/10th the price!
1998 - Pentium II 300 PC w/ Hitachi 17" monitor $5500
MIPS: 380
Ram: 128 MB
Storage: 6GB SCSI drive + 1GB Jaz drive
Screen: 1600 x 1200 24 bit color
Networking: Ethernet + 56k modem
Other Accessories: Cheapo microphone
Other Benefits: Upgradeable. Built in anti-theft (heavy as hell).
2008 - G1 $480 + $20 (SD card)
MIPS: 630
RAM: 192 MB
Storage: 192 MB + SD (8GB)
Screen: 320 x 480 16 bit color (only spec it really loses on)
Networking: Wifi + GPRS + EDGE
Other Accessories: Camera, GPS, accelerometer, compass, microphone
Other Benefits: Fits in the palm of my frikkin' hand! Makes calls!
That phone was my "Holy shit, I'm living in the future!" moment. Don't get me started on the current smart phones out now.
Stop Dave.... Dave... Pull over...
The car owner walks out with their family, a suitcase full of whatever clothes they can gather, food for the trip, toys, and of course the family albums.
A sudden panic overtakes him as he realizes his car is no longer where he left it. He frantically looks up and down the street to no avail. Finally he pickups up his phone to call the police when he sees a message:
Message from: FamilyCarAutodrive. Received at 8:01pm. "I told you motherfuckers I was out of here at 8'o'clock!"
There was a lot of hype about VR stuff in the 90s, and the whole thing did not get much traction.
They're developing consumer versions that are far superior (and cheaper) than the $1000 minimum 256 color, low FoV junk from the 90's (looking at you VFX-1!). Better, professional units quickly went up to the 10s of thousands of dollars.
Are things significantly better now?
The reason why it's better now is due to cheap high resolution displays (thanks to phones and tablets) and precise accelerometers and gyros.
On the Occulus Rift side, they sidestepped the old design requiring two separate screens by using one screen split between your two eyes and using optics to make the narrow (per eye) screen appear wide. Also the optics concentrate more pixels in the center of your field of view (where you need them most). The distortions created by this are counteracted in software. So this new approach + cheaper displays + cheaper sensors = time for cheap and awesome consumer VR headsets!
splitting the cost of all of it between four guys for 8-10 months was reasonable
Seems reasonable. And for short term stuff (table for thanksgiving, big TV for Superbowl, bed for temporary guests, etc) it's fine. However the vast majority of people don't use it like this.
That said at 8 months (and a usual term of 24 months Rent to Own) you've paid up 8/24 = 1/3rd of the inflated cost. So for my example of the living room set, you and your roommates would have paid $1000 of a $1500 (full retail) living room set. At 10 months you would have paid $1250 (sale price for the item at a regular furniture store).
If you must have "new" stuff and you don't want to deal with selling/donating it at the end of the school year then it'll work. However if you don't mind used, you can furnish an entire (temporary/first) apartment for much less and make back some money at the end by re-selling or donating (and getting a tax break).
As an example my roommate and I furnished our apartment with about $200 from the salvation army, $100 for my waterbed (no bed bugs!), and whatever he spent on his bed. The $200 from the Salvation Army got us a living room set, entertainment center, desks, second couch (we went during the weekend auctions). At the end we just re-donated the stuff.
It's a rent to own store and from a brief stint working in one (quite a few years ago) I can say that most of the clients were people who had bad credit and too poor or unable to save enough to buy *new* furniture/electronics outright.
How it works? They take full MSRP (which usually gives you 100% markup) double *that* price then divide up into payments. So as an example a living room set with a $1500 MSRP (which probably cost them $700) would end up being $125 a month OR $57.70 a week (Easy Payments!). If the customer paid through the two years required to own it they would have paid $3000 for a couch they could have gotten for sale elsewhere for about $1200.
The horrendous markup is more visible in electronics (a PS2 in it's day would have cost someone close to $1000 by the end of the year rent-to-own period).
You are totally correct. The best situation for a consumer in that situation is to get furniture from either Goodwill, the Salvation Army, Craigslist, or the local newspaper classifieds. If they still want *new* furniture, then they can enjoy the used stuff till they save enough to buy what they really want outright (and re-sell the used item).
Working that job made me realize that schools *must* have a personal finances class which goes over budgeting, avoiding scams, and setting up an affordable household.