I cut my original response in half. I was starting to bring up that fact as well. Having Peltier units installed would and have one go bad would reduce repairing your A/C unit to something akine to changing a light bulb. That and the fact that you would have quite a few of them installed would prevent a total loss of your cooling system should one fail.
After looking online at a few sites I did find some interesting peltier coolers that might do a good job, but you are still talking about 500-1500 watts to do the job.
Well duh not thinking too well this morning, just remembered that the trend of auto is going towards hybride which happen to have 5000-15000watt generators built in. Maybe they're going to be practical after all.
It would be interesting to have them installed in a vehicle with a roof covered in solar cells. They could left on to keep things from heating too much while you were gone. Due to there nature they could also be intergrated into places such as the floor or the roof where they wouldn't take up much in the way of space.
Don't see how it is going to "save" fuel since taping into the electrical system puts a load all the same on the engine. Instead of the AC/pump getting the load the Alternator does.
Of course it is possible that the Peltier chips are more efficient, but considering the ones found on most electric coolers are around 60watts each I doubt it, considering you'd need 10-20 of them to keep up with the heat (the summers in CA are tough).
The real advantage would be that they are simple and wouldn't need to be connected directly to the engine. So if 1-5 broke you might not even notice.
That is a good example, I generalized a bit too much. That simply a strong case where he'll never ever get out of prison. In the end he still will only be punished once.;) For such upstanding human beings such as himself they ought to put him in an ER and have them kill him and revive him 48 times in some extremely painfull wide awake lucid manner.
Actually the death penalty is propperly adjusted for the scope of the "minor" crime, it's just that we have a tradition of only punishing the worse one once and then each one after that is not punished.
Much like murder, whether you kill 1 person or twenty the punishment is based on how horrible the worse one is, not on how many you killed.
I've had a similar idea for putting an end to all the big dollar white collar crime in coorporations. You figure it out like this. Take the amount stollen say $5 billion and divide it by the average livespan in the US and the average wage. So stealling that amount of money would be equivalent to "murdering" 31 people and so all those Enron execs would be the death penalty or life in prison for stealing that much time away from society.
Of course if we applied this theory to law for all things that "steal" our time away. Then slashdot editors would be before the world court for crimes against humanity for just one month's worth a dupe articles.
Because Amtrak either needs to be well funded or left to die. The first isn't going to happen so it might as well be the second. From the debris the more valueable and profitable lines could be reopened by private companies and run more efficiently. Then you might see a change in how they work. Until then don't hold your breath.
My one and only experience of riding a train from Kansas City to St Louis a few years ago, was not bad, but if given the choice I would have taken a flight or driven again. To fly takes about 45 minutes, security and check in is easy for week day flights. By car it takes about 4 1/2 - 5 1/2. The train took almost 8 hours. Basically all the freight along the line had priority over us $25 ticket passengers, so we kept getting side tracked for 15minutes at a time to wait for them to pass. The ride should have been the same or faster than a car, and had it been I would be more than happy to take the trip by train every time.
Because they are way too slow. The other responder's ankle comment is right on the money. There is also the simple fact most controllers just don't have enough buttons. Most of the newer FPS can require upwards of 10-15 keys to take advantage of most of the controls.
I'm looking forward to the xbox 360 and ps3 to roll out FPS that can have players using both consels and PC's. It'll be like lambs to the slaughter for all the game controller users.
I agree with you. I don't mind the side stuff, I just ignore it anyway. The only time I will tolerate being actively advertised to is when I'm the one actually out looking for goods and services such as doing web searches.
Advertise to me when I'm interested, if it's relevent and at the right price you'll be amazed at how affective your (adverts) add campaign will be.
Well my original post was much more rude, but I deleted it to give it another go.
First off, I'm not a recruiter though I am in the Air Force and have been so for 10 years. Recruiters don't "prey" on poor kids, but yes they do find many potential recruites in that population. When compared to their options getting sent to Iraq to fight has a much higher life expectancy than staying home and getting involved to crime and drugs.
Actually recruiters rather go after the middle class kids since most of your lower class have to many educational problems and past criminal behaivor. Most are turned away as unexceptable as they can't pass minimum standards. Turns out the Army doesn't want to deal with them either and could easily fill their quotas plus some if they where willing to snatch up every poor 17-20 year old that applied.
The military has always been a stepping stone to move out of dead end social/economic situation. In my case it was either go on unemployment/welfare or go back and live with the parents, neither were viable options in my mind, so instead I joined the Air Force. Out of the deal I've gotten two college degrees and enough certifications/licenses in aviation (pilot and mechanic) as well as SCUBA to choke a very hungry donkey. By the time I'm done, 10 more years to go, I'll have a retirement check, a Masters degree, and my transport pilot rating. Not to bad of a deal at all.
Opportunities are what you make of them. The military is a very good opportunity for the poor if they can even get it in the first place. The rich will always avoid the military unless it has something they want. It wouldn't be too hard though to get them to join. Just bring back the death tax and make it 75% for those that don't serve (on the kids not the parents) and make public service (military, police, fire, etc ala Heinland) a requirement to hold public office. The rich kids would be flooding the recruiters then.
It would probably be much cheaper to simply make an express elevator on earth that recreates the micro-gravity. I can see most of this research being put to use out in the asteroid belt, but that's considerably farther down the road.
You obviously are an engineer (you said so), but then again so is a janitor. I will be nice though and give you credit for making it through dif eq and physics.
From where I'm sitting It's kind of obvious you don't work on flight controls, because your response sounds like it's straight out of a Popular Science article. If you were such the expert then why did you pick F117 or the B2 as an example? For one neither are used by the Navy, so your chances to have any real knowledge of either are about zero. Why didn't you pick something something Navy with the latest flight controls such as the F-18 Hornet/Super Hornet, the cancelled A-12, or the controls upgrade to the venerable F-14? I can answer that, you probably didn't work on those either. Also there is the little known fact to the lay community that being an aviation engineer doesn't automatically mean you work on anything to do with flight. Most aviation engineers typically work on everything but flight, such as LRU's, software, and the all important toilet (F18/F117 don't have them B2's do.).
Also thanks for the wonderfull insight
So "stability" is a very complex issue - and depending on WHICH planes we're talking about, it's VERY true that some planes are not flyable without computers.
The whole "its very complex statement" is the standard indicator of someone on/. that is talking out their ass even as you did manage to be right in a limited way on how modern electronic flight controls are important to the operation of the latest high performance aircraft.
Funny how the EuroFighter, JSF and numerous other unstable-by-design aircraft would fall out of the sky if it wasn't for the computers constantly making tiny adjustments and generally flying the plane in the first place.
That's a misconception. They always talk about how hard/impossible a plane would be to fly if it weren't for the computers.
Unstable in the aviation world does not have the same meaning that non-pilot types give it.
Stable means the design causes the plane to try to return to it's orginal attitude after disturbed by: wind, an input by the pilot etc. So if I bank the plane to turn, when I let go of the controls eventually the plane will level itself...most of the time. In certain situations even stable designs become unstable and will not self recover. For training, safety sake, and to reduce pilot load this design makes sense, but high performance this design will never be.
An unstable design if put in the same situation, banking the wings and then letting go of the controls will result in the plan most likely to either hold that position or to continue to steepen the turn. During manuevering this is very desireable, but eventually without input by the pilot the plane will get itself into trouble.
Now jump in with electronic flight control systems. They can duplicate the same built in stability a Cesna has and make the plane easy and docile to fly, or I can press a button and put it into a high performance moden and be highly manueverable. I can have multiple modes each being usefull in certain situations. For example I can have it dampen airframe oscilations that can lower the life of my airframe, and those same sensors can be used to detect and put corrections in for wind to help me hold a course. I may simply want it to hold the plane in what ever attitude I put it in so it flies more like a plane in a video game, (even unstable designs will have some attitudes it will try to correct itself in so that can hinder you) Add in an autopilot and a GPS and now I can simply give the plane waypoints to fly. Throw in a few more tricks and I can get the plane to take off, fly to a destination, and land in weather most pilots would say forget it. I can turn off nearly all the systems and fly the plane manually without much difficulty, but my life would be a bit more difficult.
This is my take on flying: flying a plane is alot like driving fast in light traffic in a manual car, in bad weather, listening to 4-5 passengers talking, talking on 2 cell phones to different people every 10 minutes, looking at a map, and of course trying to keep the car on the road, a road that you may or or may not even be able to see, and finally a road that can be driven in any direction at multiple altitudes.
If you were a military pilot add in freaks shooting at you while doing all these things.
These systems definitely improve the pilots control and precision and give him a chance to set down a few of the items they are juggling to be able to rest or concentrate on fewer things. This expands the envelope a pilot can opperate in.
I'll give you one point though. You are correct in most modern aircraft if you were to suddenly take away all of the electronic flight systems the plane would fall out of the sky, but to get all those systems to shut down at once (most primary systems are at least triple redundant)usually means something so drastic had happened that the plane would have come down whether or not those systems were functioning.
Don't forget all the story lines in the comic books and the games.
Once movies start costing a few hundred thousand to make, you'll see some crazy bastard sell the idea to make/remake a 30-40 sequel pack of movies covering the entire Skywalker timeline from Anakin through Anakin the second (Solo's kid) and all the side stories. Of course it will still be rereleased 1 week later with the special edition in the brand new nano format pack, (a small storage dot on a Special Edition Pepsi can) and of course be edited and narated by a Clone of the late great Lucas.
Until they put the hardware for larger, more expanisve worlds. The discs are not the choke point preventing the consels from doing just that. Even the new toys coming out from all the big players will be sorely short on the RAM needed, and I can't see the read/write speed being more than 2-4x faster that current media which meaning your are going to see some abysmal load times for anything expansive.
100gb is alot for a game. Even the biggest ones out now are less than 5gb. What it would be nice for 100gb would be being able to buy a game library that has ever single title to come out for the last 10 years, or a music library with every song from a particular 10 year period or genre, or 10-20 movies on one disc.
What they really need to add is a couple small raided hard drives in the consels along with a nice big stack of RAM to make the big games humm. Then you could have your 100gb disks for "loading" the game to the consel and your expansive worlds would come to life.
The problem with the PC platform is that software is designed to run on 'most' PCs out there....the basic game running underneath it is still constrained by the weakest PC in their target market.
EQ2 is a perfect example of that, but what's interesting about that is the "basic game" underneath hasn't really changed all that much since the mid 90's. Most of the "gild" as you described it is the advancement in the game.
If you crank everything down to minimum settings on EQ2 is looks suspiciously alot like EQ1. Muddled textures, flat lighting, low polygon counts, unsmooth animation, limited number of characters on the screen at once, no flora, no shadowing, etc etc.
Turn it all up and now you realize why you ungraded your computer every couple of years. To run near the highest settings you don't need the latest and the greatest something 2 years old will run it just fine. In others words most of your parts will be out of the bargin bin.
As far as high-spec PC's are concerned, do you remember when the last Xbox came out. MS was bragging how they had the latest GPU and it was better than anything available for the PC, aka the GF3, and PC's got it a whole 6 months later. The same thing is happening with the 360.
People forget most gaming PC's are already multi-core or multi-PU machines. The 360 has 6 non-dedicated, your typical gaming PC has 3. 2 dedicated (video and sound) and one CPU. By this time next year that'll jump to something between 4-7.
As I said before, the 360/PC agrument will be all the rage on the boards just like with the Xbox. And it'll rage on for about 2 years or so, right up until a low end PC cheap price surpasses it, just like the original Xbox. To say the 360 is going to superior to all comers for some time, is silly. High end PC's are already walking away from it as we speak.
360 - multicore CPU
PC - got it
360 - game and VOIP
PC - have it
360 - advanced physics
PC - old news
360- accelerated physics?
PC - I'll have it about the same time you will.
A physics accelerator card is due for fall release from a company called Ageia (http://www.ageia.com/). Epic has already jumped on board with support with it in it's Unreal engine. Should be pretty interesting to see what it can do.
360 - dedicated video with high speed RAM
PC - very old news
360 - media center functions with TV/HDTV support and external harddrives
PC - yawn
360 - USB mouse and key board support
PC - you're joking right?
PC- my turn
PC - Multi monitor diplays?
360 - I can't do that.
PC - dual dedicated GPU's?
360 - errrrr no.
PC - greater than TV rezs
360 - nope
PC - future dedicated PPU?
360 - nope
PC - large amounts of RAM?
360 - no
PC - RAID hardrive configurations?
360 - no
PC - any expansion slots or upgradeable?
360 - does USB count?
PC - no
PC - components that are upgraded in the market at least anually?
360- no
PC - custom cases?
360 - no
PC - custom software?
360 - not without modding me or violating my user agreement
PC - digital recording/encoding/editing?
360 - sorry no
PC - can you do anything but play games/media?
360 - nope I'm a one trick Pony
PC - Smiles, pats 360 on it's head and goes to the fridge for another beer...shakes his head
Kids these days they think they are so hot
Don't get me wrong, I just love bashing on the "PC gaming is dead crowd" I think the 360 is going to be pretty slick, but it'll never knock the PC off it's spot. The PC is just to flexable and usefull to die out even in the gaming world. I will though be picking up a 360 for the living room, and move my noisier media server PC to the garage
He's is hitting right in the bullseye, but for only one group of gamer, the veterans. Been there done that, and we are frankly very bored.
The whole gaming experience for me peaked around Unreal Tournament and it's been cooling off ever since. Sure voice chat is cool, and the graphics, and online gaming, and the new vehicles, and the new weapons, and the new physics. My younger coworkers get me started into something new and talk trash until a few rounds go by and I dial in the old skills and show them not to mess with the "old man" Sorry guys I've been playing this "new game" for the better part of a decade. You are not going to catch up any time soon, so run along and play.
I'm finally to the point where I'm not finding anything inspiring enough to want to keep upgrading my computer, except for bittorrent. Just bought yet another hard drive.
The videogame market is not going to die out, but they are rapidly loosing the interest of their demography that can afford to pay for the expensive toys.
I think that will change once the mod community matures and once the media companies create better and more affordable tools. That will hopefully bring back the days when a couple of people with a great idea can in a relatively short amount of time create the next great game with their weekend efforts, much like what is happening with the movie industry.
Until then I've gone off into several new/old hobbies scuba diving, digital photography, and light aircraft pilot. The challenges are stimulating and the graphics are smooth and photorealistic. Now if I could just get used to that big yellow thing in the sky.
Well that was the trailer and even the show had its share of hightech worlds, it just happened that most of the time they hid out on the fringes which had a definite wild west feel to them.
Even the train robbery episode, if i do recall had a maglev train, which was a nice tip of the hat to sci-fi and western themes.
Wanna bet. It's called don't buy it. Last time I checked MS hadn't bought out all the hardware vendors yet. I bet you this thing is mostly being developed for the new Xbox to rat out people who mod their rig.
On the PC side of the house the only place this will take hold are those that think Dell's are computers, and personally those people need all the help they can get.
Actually that is why the comercial weather sites are getting worked up into a fit. Each upgrade to the site has been making the data more and more useable by a large portion of the population.
You can get fairly accurate (compared to the commercial ones) local forcasts now in english, and with a minimal amount of training make heads and tails of the better naval and aviation sites.
Yawn, who collects MP3's anymore? After 200gb I got bored. Now that would make a nice dent in my DVD collection storage space though.:D
Besides if it has a burn rate of less than 1gps one would grow old and be denied social security long before one of these discs was complete.
I don't have much faith in yet another optical format, after being jerked around by the last 23 or (in just the last two years). I'll stick with flash memory and harddrives for my portable needs.
Between cheap (as in low quality) equipment, name brand seems to have little impact, and the bazillion formats and standards, both hardware and software, I've only had a few optical devices that have been rock solid over the years.
They seem to act up after about a year of use, probably dust and part wear. Typically 1 in 10 of movie DVD's will just flat out not work reguardless of what player is being used. Though in those cases I've always been able to rip the DVD to my computer to watch it from the harddrive even though I couldn't play it straight from the DVD in the same drive.
There has also been the joy of burning a DVD only to find out that the format is not readable by their drive or DVD player. Not usually a problem with my fellow computer nuts, but frustrating when you want to send video to family and friends.
I've come to absolutely loath any form of optical media and treat it as an unreliable form of storage. I've never had a disc go bad on me yet, but I've had to play the game of musical drives many times to find one that would read it.
I say "Nuts" (just got done watching Band of Brothers) to optical media. Let them drown in the sess pool of formats and incompatible hardware.
My solution has been CF chips and a portable harddrive for file transfers and file backup. Less headaches all the way around.
Slashdot Mirror
After looking online at a few sites I did find some interesting peltier coolers that might do a good job, but you are still talking about 500-1500 watts to do the job.
Well duh not thinking too well this morning, just remembered that the trend of auto is going towards hybride which happen to have 5000-15000watt generators built in. Maybe they're going to be practical after all.
It would be interesting to have them installed in a vehicle with a roof covered in solar cells. They could left on to keep things from heating too much while you were gone. Due to there nature they could also be intergrated into places such as the floor or the roof where they wouldn't take up much in the way of space.
Of course it is possible that the Peltier chips are more efficient, but considering the ones found on most electric coolers are around 60watts each I doubt it, considering you'd need 10-20 of them to keep up with the heat (the summers in CA are tough).
The real advantage would be that they are simple and wouldn't need to be connected directly to the engine. So if 1-5 broke you might not even notice.
Goodbye Scotty, Thank you so much for all the fond childhood memories.
That is a good example, I generalized a bit too much. That simply a strong case where he'll never ever get out of prison. In the end he still will only be punished once. ;) For such upstanding human beings such as himself they ought to put him in an ER and have them kill him and revive him 48 times in some extremely painfull wide awake lucid manner.
Much like murder, whether you kill 1 person or twenty the punishment is based on how horrible the worse one is, not on how many you killed.
I've had a similar idea for putting an end to all the big dollar white collar crime in coorporations. You figure it out like this. Take the amount stollen say $5 billion and divide it by the average livespan in the US and the average wage. So stealling that amount of money would be equivalent to "murdering" 31 people and so all those Enron execs would be the death penalty or life in prison for stealing that much time away from society.
Of course if we applied this theory to law for all things that "steal" our time away. Then slashdot editors would be before the world court for crimes against humanity for just one month's worth a dupe articles.
A member of Parliment can't be a jedi, since everyone knows only members of the Imperial Navy speak with an English acent, he is an imposter.
My one and only experience of riding a train from Kansas City to St Louis a few years ago, was not bad, but if given the choice I would have taken a flight or driven again. To fly takes about 45 minutes, security and check in is easy for week day flights. By car it takes about 4 1/2 - 5 1/2. The train took almost 8 hours. Basically all the freight along the line had priority over us $25 ticket passengers, so we kept getting side tracked for 15minutes at a time to wait for them to pass. The ride should have been the same or faster than a car, and had it been I would be more than happy to take the trip by train every time.
I'm looking forward to the xbox 360 and ps3 to roll out FPS that can have players using both consels and PC's. It'll be like lambs to the slaughter for all the game controller users.
Advertise to me when I'm interested, if it's relevent and at the right price you'll be amazed at how affective your (adverts) add campaign will be.
First off, I'm not a recruiter though I am in the Air Force and have been so for 10 years. Recruiters don't "prey" on poor kids, but yes they do find many potential recruites in that population. When compared to their options getting sent to Iraq to fight has a much higher life expectancy than staying home and getting involved to crime and drugs.
Actually recruiters rather go after the middle class kids since most of your lower class have to many educational problems and past criminal behaivor. Most are turned away as unexceptable as they can't pass minimum standards. Turns out the Army doesn't want to deal with them either and could easily fill their quotas plus some if they where willing to snatch up every poor 17-20 year old that applied.
The military has always been a stepping stone to move out of dead end social/economic situation. In my case it was either go on unemployment/welfare or go back and live with the parents, neither were viable options in my mind, so instead I joined the Air Force. Out of the deal I've gotten two college degrees and enough certifications/licenses in aviation (pilot and mechanic) as well as SCUBA to choke a very hungry donkey. By the time I'm done, 10 more years to go, I'll have a retirement check, a Masters degree, and my transport pilot rating. Not to bad of a deal at all.
Opportunities are what you make of them. The military is a very good opportunity for the poor if they can even get it in the first place. The rich will always avoid the military unless it has something they want. It wouldn't be too hard though to get them to join. Just bring back the death tax and make it 75% for those that don't serve (on the kids not the parents) and make public service (military, police, fire, etc ala Heinland) a requirement to hold public office. The rich kids would be flooding the recruiters then.
It would probably be much cheaper to simply make an express elevator on earth that recreates the micro-gravity. I can see most of this research being put to use out in the asteroid belt, but that's considerably farther down the road.
From where I'm sitting It's kind of obvious you don't work on flight controls, because your response sounds like it's straight out of a Popular Science article. If you were such the expert then why did you pick F117 or the B2 as an example? For one neither are used by the Navy, so your chances to have any real knowledge of either are about zero. Why didn't you pick something something Navy with the latest flight controls such as the F-18 Hornet/Super Hornet, the cancelled A-12, or the controls upgrade to the venerable F-14? I can answer that, you probably didn't work on those either. Also there is the little known fact to the lay community that being an aviation engineer doesn't automatically mean you work on anything to do with flight. Most aviation engineers typically work on everything but flight, such as LRU's, software, and the all important toilet (F18/F117 don't have them B2's do.).
Also thanks for the wonderfull insight
So "stability" is a very complex issue - and depending on WHICH planes we're talking about, it's VERY true that some planes are not flyable without computers.
The whole "its very complex statement" is the standard indicator of someone on /. that is talking out their ass even as you did manage to be right in a limited way on how modern electronic flight controls are important to the operation of the latest high performance aircraft.
That's a misconception. They always talk about how hard/impossible a plane would be to fly if it weren't for the computers.
Unstable in the aviation world does not have the same meaning that non-pilot types give it.
Stable means the design causes the plane to try to return to it's orginal attitude after disturbed by: wind, an input by the pilot etc. So if I bank the plane to turn, when I let go of the controls eventually the plane will level itself...most of the time. In certain situations even stable designs become unstable and will not self recover. For training, safety sake, and to reduce pilot load this design makes sense, but high performance this design will never be.
An unstable design if put in the same situation, banking the wings and then letting go of the controls will result in the plan most likely to either hold that position or to continue to steepen the turn. During manuevering this is very desireable, but eventually without input by the pilot the plane will get itself into trouble.
Now jump in with electronic flight control systems. They can duplicate the same built in stability a Cesna has and make the plane easy and docile to fly, or I can press a button and put it into a high performance moden and be highly manueverable. I can have multiple modes each being usefull in certain situations. For example I can have it dampen airframe oscilations that can lower the life of my airframe, and those same sensors can be used to detect and put corrections in for wind to help me hold a course. I may simply want it to hold the plane in what ever attitude I put it in so it flies more like a plane in a video game, (even unstable designs will have some attitudes it will try to correct itself in so that can hinder you) Add in an autopilot and a GPS and now I can simply give the plane waypoints to fly. Throw in a few more tricks and I can get the plane to take off, fly to a destination, and land in weather most pilots would say forget it. I can turn off nearly all the systems and fly the plane manually without much difficulty, but my life would be a bit more difficult.
This is my take on flying: flying a plane is alot like driving fast in light traffic in a manual car, in bad weather, listening to 4-5 passengers talking, talking on 2 cell phones to different people every 10 minutes, looking at a map, and of course trying to keep the car on the road, a road that you may or or may not even be able to see, and finally a road that can be driven in any direction at multiple altitudes.
If you were a military pilot add in freaks shooting at you while doing all these things.
These systems definitely improve the pilots control and precision and give him a chance to set down a few of the items they are juggling to be able to rest or concentrate on fewer things. This expands the envelope a pilot can opperate in.
I'll give you one point though. You are correct in most modern aircraft if you were to suddenly take away all of the electronic flight systems the plane would fall out of the sky, but to get all those systems to shut down at once (most primary systems are at least triple redundant)usually means something so drastic had happened that the plane would have come down whether or not those systems were functioning.
Once movies start costing a few hundred thousand to make, you'll see some crazy bastard sell the idea to make/remake a 30-40 sequel pack of movies covering the entire Skywalker timeline from Anakin through Anakin the second (Solo's kid) and all the side stories. Of course it will still be rereleased 1 week later with the special edition in the brand new nano format pack, (a small storage dot on a Special Edition Pepsi can) and of course be edited and narated by a Clone of the late great Lucas.
100gb is alot for a game. Even the biggest ones out now are less than 5gb. What it would be nice for 100gb would be being able to buy a game library that has ever single title to come out for the last 10 years, or a music library with every song from a particular 10 year period or genre, or 10-20 movies on one disc. What they really need to add is a couple small raided hard drives in the consels along with a nice big stack of RAM to make the big games humm. Then you could have your 100gb disks for "loading" the game to the consel and your expansive worlds would come to life.
EQ2 is a perfect example of that, but what's interesting about that is the "basic game" underneath hasn't really changed all that much since the mid 90's. Most of the "gild" as you described it is the advancement in the game.
If you crank everything down to minimum settings on EQ2 is looks suspiciously alot like EQ1. Muddled textures, flat lighting, low polygon counts, unsmooth animation, limited number of characters on the screen at once, no flora, no shadowing, etc etc.
Turn it all up and now you realize why you ungraded your computer every couple of years. To run near the highest settings you don't need the latest and the greatest something 2 years old will run it just fine. In others words most of your parts will be out of the bargin bin.
As far as high-spec PC's are concerned, do you remember when the last Xbox came out. MS was bragging how they had the latest GPU and it was better than anything available for the PC, aka the GF3, and PC's got it a whole 6 months later. The same thing is happening with the 360.
People forget most gaming PC's are already multi-core or multi-PU machines. The 360 has 6 non-dedicated, your typical gaming PC has 3. 2 dedicated (video and sound) and one CPU. By this time next year that'll jump to something between 4-7.
As I said before, the 360/PC agrument will be all the rage on the boards just like with the Xbox. And it'll rage on for about 2 years or so, right up until a low end PC cheap price surpasses it, just like the original Xbox. To say the 360 is going to superior to all comers for some time, is silly. High end PC's are already walking away from it as we speak.
360 - multicore CPU
PC - got it
360 - game and VOIP
PC - have it
360 - advanced physics
PC - old news
360- accelerated physics?
PC - I'll have it about the same time you will.
A physics accelerator card is due for fall release from a company called Ageia (http://www.ageia.com/). Epic has already jumped on board with support with it in it's Unreal engine. Should be pretty interesting to see what it can do.
360 - dedicated video with high speed RAM
PC - very old news
360 - media center functions with TV/HDTV support and external harddrives
PC - yawn
360 - USB mouse and key board support
PC - you're joking right?
PC- my turn
PC - Multi monitor diplays?
360 - I can't do that.
PC - dual dedicated GPU's?
360 - errrrr no.
PC - greater than TV rezs
360 - nope
PC - future dedicated PPU?
360 - nope
PC - large amounts of RAM?
360 - no
PC - RAID hardrive configurations?
360 - no
PC - any expansion slots or upgradeable?
360 - does USB count?
PC - no
PC - components that are upgraded in the market at least anually?
360- no
PC - custom cases?
360 - no
PC - custom software?
360 - not without modding me or violating my user agreement
PC - digital recording/encoding/editing? 360 - sorry no PC - can you do anything but play games/media?
360 - nope I'm a one trick Pony
PC - Smiles, pats 360 on it's head and goes to the fridge for another beer...shakes his head
Kids these days they think they are so hot
Don't get me wrong, I just love bashing on the "PC gaming is dead crowd" I think the 360 is going to be pretty slick, but it'll never knock the PC off it's spot. The PC is just to flexable and usefull to die out even in the gaming world. I will though be picking up a 360 for the living room, and move my noisier media server PC to the garage
Damn means I'm actually going to have to dig up the tv guide and record the shows instead of just downloading them. :(
The whole gaming experience for me peaked around Unreal Tournament and it's been cooling off ever since. Sure voice chat is cool, and the graphics, and online gaming, and the new vehicles, and the new weapons, and the new physics. My younger coworkers get me started into something new and talk trash until a few rounds go by and I dial in the old skills and show them not to mess with the "old man" Sorry guys I've been playing this "new game" for the better part of a decade. You are not going to catch up any time soon, so run along and play.
I'm finally to the point where I'm not finding anything inspiring enough to want to keep upgrading my computer, except for bittorrent. Just bought yet another hard drive.
The videogame market is not going to die out, but they are rapidly loosing the interest of their demography that can afford to pay for the expensive toys.
I think that will change once the mod community matures and once the media companies create better and more affordable tools. That will hopefully bring back the days when a couple of people with a great idea can in a relatively short amount of time create the next great game with their weekend efforts, much like what is happening with the movie industry.
Until then I've gone off into several new/old hobbies scuba diving, digital photography, and light aircraft pilot. The challenges are stimulating and the graphics are smooth and photorealistic. Now if I could just get used to that big yellow thing in the sky.
Now making a new Batmovie that doesn't suck big rooster, now that's Real Ultimate Power.
Even the train robbery episode, if i do recall had a maglev train, which was a nice tip of the hat to sci-fi and western themes.
On the PC side of the house the only place this will take hold are those that think Dell's are computers, and personally those people need all the help they can get.
I don't know about you but I'm moving to Hong Kong
You can get fairly accurate (compared to the commercial ones) local forcasts now in english, and with a minimal amount of training make heads and tails of the better naval and aviation sites.
Besides if it has a burn rate of less than 1gps one would grow old and be denied social security long before one of these discs was complete.
I don't have much faith in yet another optical format, after being jerked around by the last 23 or (in just the last two years). I'll stick with flash memory and harddrives for my portable needs.
They seem to act up after about a year of use, probably dust and part wear. Typically 1 in 10 of movie DVD's will just flat out not work reguardless of what player is being used. Though in those cases I've always been able to rip the DVD to my computer to watch it from the harddrive even though I couldn't play it straight from the DVD in the same drive.
There has also been the joy of burning a DVD only to find out that the format is not readable by their drive or DVD player. Not usually a problem with my fellow computer nuts, but frustrating when you want to send video to family and friends. I've come to absolutely loath any form of optical media and treat it as an unreliable form of storage. I've never had a disc go bad on me yet, but I've had to play the game of musical drives many times to find one that would read it.
I say "Nuts" (just got done watching Band of Brothers) to optical media. Let them drown in the sess pool of formats and incompatible hardware.
My solution has been CF chips and a portable harddrive for file transfers and file backup. Less headaches all the way around.