"Statistically nobody wants to connect a PC or Mac to a television to play a video game,
You are correct, unless you have a $1500+ TV most TV's still suck ass in terms of picture quality, refresh rate, etc compared to a modestly price 24" monitor.
Other than party/music games my one and only console sees zero use. A PC is still the only way to play if you want the good stuff.
You can't raise resolution of games until the monitor itself can display it, which means consoles will be out in the cold for a long time to come, but games on the PC have already sped on past 1080p. Nothing like playing a game at 5700x1200. Which you can do right now with three 24" 1900x1200 monitors.
It's back on, at least in little spurts. Go over to Dell's website. They have a 27" 2560x1450 monitor for under $1000 now. Which is better than the 2560x1600 which has been sitting at $1500 plus for several years now.
I think that once the thin is in race is over, should be soon I'm seeing 50" TVs now that less than 3cm thick, they'll get back to ramping up the graphics.
Personally I'm wanting three of those 27" monitors run off one of ATI's high end offering. Would be very sweet.
The tech has gotten cheaper and more mature. ATI has eyefinity cards that can run games at 5700x1200 or 5700x2400 resolution, for under $250-500 (using multiple monitors) people have just stopped updating their machines.
We had this problem a long time ago about the time the Quake game engine ruled the roost. Everyone was playing Half-Life, Counter Strike, and Team Fortress. They would run on a sub $100 graphics card. These days its about the same.
It's not even really a developement cost that is at issue. Companies are so scared to challenging their customer base and are happy to just print money. Look at WOW, Valve, etc. I used to play EVE online and they more or less just rolled over with upgrade plans when large portions of their users screamed about a Dx9 card being the minimum to play the game.
Everyone goes on and on about improving content and gameplay and screw graphics, but I hate to tell you graphics IS CONTENT AND GAMEPLAY!
Remeber way back when playing a game walking through a forrest ment a half dozen trees and big open areas were completely devoid of all vegetation. Ask any FPS gamer how much they enjoyed trying to run and gun against snipers in that! Now you can not only walk through a forrest, but have streams, rocks, undergrowth, and destructable objects, you can do it for miles! If that doesn't sound like fertile ground for both gameplay and content. Give Bad Company 2 a try to see what a forrest full of trees does for gameplay. Give Fallout 3 a look to see what it does for story telling.
I would like to see games push the boundards a little more, but in defense of the cheap/broke gamers, maybe the rollout can go a little slower. On the other hand people hanging on to 5 year machines that could be upgraded for the price of a couple of dinners and trip to the movies I loose all sympathy.
Until games are to the point where I can walk into a room of my house marked "holo deck" graphics are not yet good enough.
I wouldn't want to eat a poor person way to high in carcinogens and cholesterol.
People in the US don't starve to death anymore, at least not due to the availability or affordability of food. Being hungry is not the same thing as starving.
Other than a scant few percentages of the population, whom I have absolutely no issue with helping, most people are quite capable of feeding themselves without government handouts. My beefs is watching the increase in handouts just going up and up every year. It's gotten to the point where all the younger guys at work are complaining that they only get $8000-9000 back (all their taxes+earned income credit). When you add all their pay and extras up and subtract those things I pay out it ends up being practically the same. Why should I bother even put in the exrtra effort if they are just going to hand it to someone else?
Where's my handout? Where's my rebate?
No the only thing I get the priveledge of doing is going to work and paying taxes.
Nope all our wars to date (Iraq, Afghanstan, and now Libya) costs total about $1.2 trillion over 10 YEARS!
We are overspending by that much in far less than a year
So do the math you fucking moron.
I get so sick of liberal idiots that think if we just got rid of the military "it'll all be ok".
If we spent on the military and in NASA what we spend on welfare and medicare in the US. We could replace every aircraft and ship in inventory with new equipment EVERY YEAR. We could build a new space station in orbit EVERY YEAR. We could build a new moon base EVERY YEAR. We could take a trip to Mars EVERY YEAR, and the sad part is we would have money left over.
The kicker is we would still have all the cash left over we spend on the military now plus all the extra money our skyrocketing economy would be pouring into our pockets.
That is what we spend in the US EVERY YEAR on the poor, the sick, and the lazy....and what have those people contributed to the world besides crime and cranking out babies who turn into even more poor, sick, and lazy people.
The poor pay no taxes in the US of any type and then on top of that receive direct payments in the form of cash and services which completely offset any of the local and state taxes before you start frothing at the mouth over that..
The only "backs" the budget is on are those that work.
We could tax those paying taxes now at 100% tax rate and we'd still have a budget shortfall.
Stop paying for the poor "aka the useless dreggs of society" and magically the budget becomes a surplus.
Have you bought anything from Amazon lately? I bought eight packs of plastic floor tiles for my garage. They shipped from 4 different places. New Jersey, California, Kentucky, and I want to say Texas. Saying nothing crossed state lines is a bit of a stretch. Then on top of that I'm located in Florida and my bank is located in Texas. Absolutely nothing local about any of the purchases made.
And if all that is required is http packets cross state lines then they could route all their data into Canada and thne back.
I see your point. Illegal is too angry and not very accurate.
A better description would be: The offspring of Spaniards that committed the genocide of nearly every indigenous people on two major land masses while spreading the word of God that he loves them even as they are being tortured and murdered, who sometimes illegally emigrate to the US by sneaking across the border with Mexico, while having anchor babies (though they still love them) to secure social services and annoy white people while taking jobs they are no longer interested in (at least not for $5 an hour)
The same goes for Mexican-American, Latino, Hispanic, Chicano. Again a better description would be some guy or girl who may or may not actually be from outside of the United States, but based on superficial appearances likes to claim that he actually is from somplace else for some odd reason or another or just doesn't just think being a regular ol' American is good enough for him.
That sounds about right. Simple democracies, 1 man 1 vote, have never worked beyond the smallest of groups, and never at a country level.
A portion of every population is bat shit crazy and just outright evil. A large protion of every population is uninformed. An even larger portion is uninterested they've got better things to do.
Personally I'd like to see the government just spend all its time squashing the first group and leave the other 75% of us alone.
" I think the bigger issue is the ready availability of like-minded communities that will reinforce your beliefes, no matter how outrageous and outlandish they are."
The problem is not so much of self reenforcement, but that both sides scream their view point using repetition as their only argument on subject without any real facts.
For the simple minded that is good enough. For those of us with a brain cell or three we just learn to tune such people out very quickly.
"Yes slashdot is segregated politically at least when it comes to mods. Most of them have american viewpoints (i.e. pro capitalist, pro free market, pro libertarian, anti-left). Slashdot is heavily weighted towards americanized views of things.
That's funny as an American with a pro capitalist, pro free market, pro libertarian, anti-left, and certainly VERY pro-gun shoot the criminals, view point. I find most of the people on this site to be just the opposite and European to boot.
Maybe it's just that you are not going to get responses from those that agree with you (dirty pinko commi Euro trash););)
I'm going to call you a name because you disagree with me.
The troll calling the troll green.
I haven't been trained to hate anyone who suggests that CO2 can have a negative impact on the climate I just hate hypocrites.
Take your own advice to reduce your CO2 emissions by stop breathing so much (at all) please.
I'm going to go driving around in my truck and look for an endangered animal to kick.
100 cubic inches....sounds like the size engine they stick on motorcycles these days. Actually nearly everyone talks in CCs these days.
My truck a Toyota Tacoma, the equivalent to your Hi-Lux has a 2.7L engine. I wish I could get the diesel version you guys have available(twice the mileage), but the politicians in charge of such things are gits and keep blocking them from coming to market over here. I also have a 1000cc Yamaha FZ1 (Fazer). Top speed on that bad boy is around 180mph or about 300kph.
I did get a kick out of driving in Europe and England while living there for 3 years. Some of the most competent/polite drivers (England and Germany) you'll ever meet.
The US is very much like England is at the moment which is still in transition itself, thought farther along.
More and more things are metric with a Standard conversion marked on it. (Rather than a stadard with a metric conversion.) The only real hold outs are home/building construction, weights, and road speeds/distances. Most every consumer item now is metric, China is forcing that one along.
I give it another 20 years and the US will finally be 100% metric for all new things. Personally I say about damn time. Studying engineering in school it sucked having to learn standard and metric and having to deal with the constant conversions.
Go to Europe some time. As much as they like to play the cool card they have just as many hicks, urban trash, and all around loosers just like good ol U S of A.
Just smile and ask them how they like spending $9 a gallon for gas for their 4 cylinder micros.
You could have some fun with recharging by mandating the ultra caps as battery packs and then have some pick up points on the track to add enough juice in the them for say a lap or two. It would add an interesting twist to the race.
:) I can give you 1,000mbit connection all to yourself over a wire which you can plug into your desktop/laptop.
Or I can give you a 300mbit wirelss connection that you have to share with every office drone within 300ft who is watchin youtube on their portable and non-portable devices.
Even with a thousand fold improvement in wireless bandwidth the unwashed masses will still be bringing the network to its knees while the wired network won't even break a sweat with 10 times the traffic.
Maybe what they really need is a very short distance wireless router that covers the distance of say a room or four cubicals or maybe not much beyond your own cubical/office. You'd get the benefit of being wirelss without the downside of sharing.
Of course the bean counters will just say plug your damn device in instead of having to spend an extra 100-200$ per employee so they can be lazy.
An iPad is not a real device, it's a toy. Besides exactly how much "data" do you need to send it?......... oh wait you are talking about watching movies/video at work not actually doing "work" because anything else doesn't actually take up that much bandwidth for more than a minute or two.
The only thing thin devices like iPads may be usefull for someday is running remotely software on a hardwired server or a desktop and then streaming it to it.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow you actually used W ME? The only people I ever knew who used that aborted fetus were people that bought Packard Bells.
You are correct, unless you have a $1500+ TV most TV's still suck ass in terms of picture quality, refresh rate, etc compared to a modestly price 24" monitor.
Other than party/music games my one and only console sees zero use. A PC is still the only way to play if you want the good stuff.
uh....skype maybe. Just because MS got a hold of it means its down the tubes just yet.
You can't raise resolution of games until the monitor itself can display it, which means consoles will be out in the cold for a long time to come, but games on the PC have already sped on past 1080p. Nothing like playing a game at 5700x1200. Which you can do right now with three 24" 1900x1200 monitors.
I think that once the thin is in race is over, should be soon I'm seeing 50" TVs now that less than 3cm thick, they'll get back to ramping up the graphics.
Personally I'm wanting three of those 27" monitors run off one of ATI's high end offering. Would be very sweet.
We had this problem a long time ago about the time the Quake game engine ruled the roost. Everyone was playing Half-Life, Counter Strike, and Team Fortress. They would run on a sub $100 graphics card. These days its about the same.
It's not even really a developement cost that is at issue. Companies are so scared to challenging their customer base and are happy to just print money. Look at WOW, Valve, etc. I used to play EVE online and they more or less just rolled over with upgrade plans when large portions of their users screamed about a Dx9 card being the minimum to play the game.
Everyone goes on and on about improving content and gameplay and screw graphics, but I hate to tell you graphics IS CONTENT AND GAMEPLAY!
Remeber way back when playing a game walking through a forrest ment a half dozen trees and big open areas were completely devoid of all vegetation. Ask any FPS gamer how much they enjoyed trying to run and gun against snipers in that! Now you can not only walk through a forrest, but have streams, rocks, undergrowth, and destructable objects, you can do it for miles! If that doesn't sound like fertile ground for both gameplay and content. Give Bad Company 2 a try to see what a forrest full of trees does for gameplay. Give Fallout 3 a look to see what it does for story telling.
I would like to see games push the boundards a little more, but in defense of the cheap/broke gamers, maybe the rollout can go a little slower. On the other hand people hanging on to 5 year machines that could be upgraded for the price of a couple of dinners and trip to the movies I loose all sympathy.
Until games are to the point where I can walk into a room of my house marked "holo deck" graphics are not yet good enough.
People in the US don't starve to death anymore, at least not due to the availability or affordability of food. Being hungry is not the same thing as starving.
Other than a scant few percentages of the population, whom I have absolutely no issue with helping, most people are quite capable of feeding themselves without government handouts. My beefs is watching the increase in handouts just going up and up every year. It's gotten to the point where all the younger guys at work are complaining that they only get $8000-9000 back (all their taxes+earned income credit). When you add all their pay and extras up and subtract those things I pay out it ends up being practically the same. Why should I bother even put in the exrtra effort if they are just going to hand it to someone else?
Where's my handout? Where's my rebate?
No the only thing I get the priveledge of doing is going to work and paying taxes.
So yes you are right I am the idiot.
At least my head is screwed on straight.
We are overspending by that much in far less than a year
So do the math you fucking moron.
I get so sick of liberal idiots that think if we just got rid of the military "it'll all be ok".
If we spent on the military and in NASA what we spend on welfare and medicare in the US. We could replace every aircraft and ship in inventory with new equipment EVERY YEAR. We could build a new space station in orbit EVERY YEAR. We could build a new moon base EVERY YEAR. We could take a trip to Mars EVERY YEAR, and the sad part is we would have money left over.
The kicker is we would still have all the cash left over we spend on the military now plus all the extra money our skyrocketing economy would be pouring into our pockets.
That is what we spend in the US EVERY YEAR on the poor, the sick, and the lazy....and what have those people contributed to the world besides crime and cranking out babies who turn into even more poor, sick, and lazy people.
It is fucking madness.
[/rant]
The only "backs" the budget is on are those that work.
We could tax those paying taxes now at 100% tax rate and we'd still have a budget shortfall.
Stop paying for the poor "aka the useless dreggs of society" and magically the budget becomes a surplus.
Funny how tha works out.
And if all that is required is http packets cross state lines then they could route all their data into Canada and thne back.
Wow! That is damn funny.
A better description would be: The offspring of Spaniards that committed the genocide of nearly every indigenous people on two major land masses while spreading the word of God that he loves them even as they are being tortured and murdered, who sometimes illegally emigrate to the US by sneaking across the border with Mexico, while having anchor babies (though they still love them) to secure social services and annoy white people while taking jobs they are no longer interested in (at least not for $5 an hour)
The same goes for Mexican-American, Latino, Hispanic, Chicano. Again a better description would be some guy or girl who may or may not actually be from outside of the United States, but based on superficial appearances likes to claim that he actually is from somplace else for some odd reason or another or just doesn't just think being a regular ol' American is good enough for him.
Precision is important.
Junk food has been around as far back as someone said hey I'm hungry and in a bit of a hurry.
Beer was probably the first "junk" food along with cheese and meat on a stick.
A portion of every population is bat shit crazy and just outright evil. A large protion of every population is uninformed. An even larger portion is uninterested they've got better things to do.
Personally I'd like to see the government just spend all its time squashing the first group and leave the other 75% of us alone.
The problem is not so much of self reenforcement, but that both sides scream their view point using repetition as their only argument on subject without any real facts.
For the simple minded that is good enough. For those of us with a brain cell or three we just learn to tune such people out very quickly.
That's funny as an American with a pro capitalist, pro free market, pro libertarian, anti-left, and certainly VERY pro-gun shoot the criminals, view point. I find most of the people on this site to be just the opposite and European to boot.
Maybe it's just that you are not going to get responses from those that agree with you (dirty pinko commi Euro trash) ;) ;)
The troll calling the troll green.
I haven't been trained to hate anyone who suggests that CO2 can have a negative impact on the climate I just hate hypocrites.
Take your own advice to reduce your CO2 emissions by stop breathing so much (at all) please.
I'm going to go driving around in my truck and look for an endangered animal to kick.
My truck a Toyota Tacoma, the equivalent to your Hi-Lux has a 2.7L engine. I wish I could get the diesel version you guys have available(twice the mileage), but the politicians in charge of such things are gits and keep blocking them from coming to market over here. I also have a 1000cc Yamaha FZ1 (Fazer). Top speed on that bad boy is around 180mph or about 300kph.
I did get a kick out of driving in Europe and England while living there for 3 years. Some of the most competent/polite drivers (England and Germany) you'll ever meet.
The US is very much like England is at the moment which is still in transition itself, thought farther along.
More and more things are metric with a Standard conversion marked on it. (Rather than a stadard with a metric conversion.) The only real hold outs are home/building construction, weights, and road speeds/distances. Most every consumer item now is metric, China is forcing that one along.
I give it another 20 years and the US will finally be 100% metric for all new things. Personally I say about damn time. Studying engineering in school it sucked having to learn standard and metric and having to deal with the constant conversions.
Just smile and ask them how they like spending $9 a gallon for gas for their 4 cylinder micros.
You could have some fun with recharging by mandating the ultra caps as battery packs and then have some pick up points on the track to add enough juice in the them for say a lap or two. It would add an interesting twist to the race.
Or I can give you a 300mbit wirelss connection that you have to share with every office drone within 300ft who is watchin youtube on their portable and non-portable devices.
Even with a thousand fold improvement in wireless bandwidth the unwashed masses will still be bringing the network to its knees while the wired network won't even break a sweat with 10 times the traffic.
Maybe what they really need is a very short distance wireless router that covers the distance of say a room or four cubicals or maybe not much beyond your own cubical/office. You'd get the benefit of being wirelss without the downside of sharing.
Of course the bean counters will just say plug your damn device in instead of having to spend an extra 100-200$ per employee so they can be lazy.
They do not hold up well and are constantly ordering more of the cards as they only last for about 20-30 uses before they fall apart.
The only thing thin devices like iPads may be usefull for someday is running remotely software on a hardwired server or a desktop and then streaming it to it.
I didn't until I came accross it on another website about ten minutes ago.