This is the reason Apple has had so much success lately, and why they won't ever be loved by Slashdot. Personally, I'm happy to roll my own OpenBSD kernels for my media server and firewall at home, but when it comes to my phone I'll take Steve Jobs' walled garden. I don't have the time for anything else, and I really need my phone to "just work".
The folly of this is that you can have as much convenience and as much flexibility as you want with non-apple products. Apple's success story has more to do with marketing than anything else. Sure, their devices work ok, but I wouldn't say they're stellar or that there aren't better choices on the market, usability wise. walled gardens only guarantee stability and security for the vendor's market. They are not consumer friendly. It is needless complexity that is the enemy of security and stability in the context you're referring to. If you're that concerned, you shouldn't be using a 'smart' phone period.
True general-purpose computing exists on the desktop and will continue to do so - but the consequences of that model will be continued security issues far in excess of the walled garden's, compatibility issues due to a functionally infinite number of hardware configurations to support, and abandonment by any developers unwilling to tolerate piracy/off-label usage of their applications [some might say 'good riddance' to the latter, but there's an awful lot of money and talent in that pool that will be spent making the walled gardens more attractive].
yes, more complexity leads to greater potential failure. As far as developer attitudes go, I'm not sure it's in everyones' best interest to coddle petty narcissism and paranoid control freakery. Paranoid attempts to control consumer behavior with distributed binaries only affects paid customers. Pirates aren't subject to it. In the end, it just makes the pirate copy more attractive.
As far as the open source and freedom-to-code communities go, they can either approach this with ineffectual wailing and gnashing of teeth, or they can resolve to make this work for them. How? By building compelling services that are free-as-in-speech on general-purpose computers, and charging nominal fees for viewers targeting closed platforms, the proceeds from which are used to fund further development.
No, it's a computer coupled to a radio transmitter that happens to make phonecalls. I'm tired of reminding people that their 'phones' are computerized radios first, phones second, when they bitch about signal loss.
1. Total and utter freedom to install anything on your phone. But miss a very important phone call due to a badly programmed application running down the battery or locking up the phone. Just think, that call could be a job offer, an ex-girlfriend wanting some fun or the news that someone is in trouble.
Problems like this manifest as complexity increases. If reliability is that important to you, you shouldn't be using a smartphone at all..
2. Less freedoms but a better experience, higher quality software, less chance of battery rundown or lock ups?
You make a rather blatant suggestion here. Back it up. Shitty software is shitty software and plenty of it is open and closed.
If restrictions and licence fees weed out all the bad coders then it's a good thing.
That's just it, they don't. There's more to the 'experience' than good code. The intentions of the business said coders work for make all the difference in the world. The quality of the code only determines how effective those intentions are implemented.
Like most programmers, you're not looking at the nightmare of dependencies and execution overhead multilanguage applications require, esp ones that are interpreted. seriously, for the end user, running an app written in such languages that can use C/C++ 'plugins' is a royal pain in the ass, and is usually quite a bit slower than simply using a native C/C++ variant. There is a reason C/C++ is used 'for everything' even when purists say there are better tools available. In theory, yes, other languages provide better constructs for designing in specific areas, but as far as execution on real hardware goes, no.
Yes, this is my opinion based on observations working in the industry. I do not intend to pass it off as fact. I am sure there are exceptions, but reality is rarely as neat and clean andorderly as theory expects of it.
MySpace was infantile. It encouraged aliases, whereas Facebook encouraged valid names. MySpace also had GeoCities personalization. There's nothing wrong with infantile if that's what you want your market to be. Facebook appeals to people of all ages, and that is one of the main reasons it won.
Just because a site demands real names doesn't mean it's more or less 'infantile.'
I'm not claiming this wiki article is complete, but the amateur HF bands are far far away from 900Mhz. I could understand a complaint if the switching supply in the meters (that drives the embedded logic) spewed harmonic RFI and/or dumped noise on the line due to a bad (cheap) design. I think electronic dimmers, radio driven electric fences, and existing broadband-over-power solutions are much bigger threats to HF bands than the circuits in these things.
This is true of most cross-functional interactions within groups, the people on the lines don't fully understand the functions of people on different tasks, nor should they. But the point is that being bluntly and abusively frank without any filter isn't the same thing as being honest. It's not a PC cop-out to say something in nicer terms, but not everyone is wired to think before they speak.
sorry, I missed this one..
I don't see a difference between honesty and bluntness so long as the discussion stays away from ad hominems and other fallacies. I admit that dealing with messy feelings of others is a part of reality, but it seems these days that propping up feelings (especially of those high in the hierarchy) is taking priority. This is not good. Tech types appear brusque because they don't (nor shouldn't they) care about how a result is going to affect someone emotionally, esp their boss. It's their JOB to accurately report their results based upon what the boss defines as the problem and the limits of available resource to solve it. If said boss can't handle this reality emotionally, then he needs to find another line of work.
And conversely, the marketing guy might be sitting there thinking it doesn't matter that it costs us thousands of dollars in support calls if we lose millions because there's a whole in the product line during the Christmas period. (A case where the engineer is an idiot.)
management is responsible for providing adequate time/resource for development processes, right? if the product misses key marketing deadlines, whose fault is that (assuming competent techs)? if the tech is not competent, get rid of him.
I understand that being able to see from multiple perspectives is valuable, but that doesn't mean the perspectives themselves are equal. Unfortunately, I've seen several good people get canned because the upper echelon's ego couldn't handled being questioned.
Now, when things aren't equal, when you're dealing with exceptionals and incompetents, it's hard to judge. The trick is being able to determine if the exceptional are truly that, and where is the incompetence. You have to fix the problems.
agreed.
I guess my point is that, assuming competent techs/engineers, it is management that has to work within their constraints, because, in the end, the engineers are themselves constrained by reality. They are the ones that feel it every day. They have to to do their jobs.
I've seen a lot of incompetent engineers masking themselves as savants by throwing big technical terms at a customer who is too intimidated by their own ignorance to question the person they are paying to guide them.
Right. some people are assholes. They're in every department and can occupy any position. This is why the guy who "takes the specifications and brings them to the engineers so the engineers don't have to" is so important. However, if these engineers are truly incompetent and are not simply trying to escape the conversation because they know that the customer will never understand the details or scope of what he's asking, they should be canned.
And it's no longer your opinion that this or that person is incompetent. It doesn't matter what anyone's feelings are about something if you can produce numbers and say option A x dollars, option B y dollars.
Sure, but always be wary of cherry picked stats. Unfortunately, management doesn't always have its company's best interests in mind when it's dealing with perceived (or possibly real) insubordination brought on by a lack of earned respect or at least a willingness to listen to its underlings.
Sounds like you're a bit sensitive.. You should work on that. If these super-smart executives could, they would hire their college buddies to do the work. They don't. Why not? Because their buddies are just as ignorant in technical areas as they are. I'm not assuming anything about myself. I was stating observations.
I suppose everyone's deficient in some areas. The problem is that the culture at most companies is set up to compensate solely on the deficiencies of your so-called super-smart executives, even at the expense of the profits and play time they so much desire.
Generally, the malcontent, venom or other abrasive behavior is just a gap in understanding between the savant's perspective and the demands/motivations of the people he's dealing with.
In the most extreme cases, perhaps, but generally what I've run across is the opposite: management doesn't know what they want, they only know that they dont' want what their employees generated. this is often due to poor leadership. I hesitate to call them savants because, in the end, it's the management that needs to decide what's more important: results or their feelings/political-'correctness.' Technical people perceive political-correctness as a form of cowardice, because that's what it really is. People should not have to resort to 'politically correct' answers because such 'answers' usually aren't answers at all.. they're just shims to get around the critical problem of a boss/coworker who lacks the testicular fortitude to accept reality, whatever that may be. Our culture today rewards such behavior. It shouldn't.
The rest of your post is fairly on target though. It depicts an unfortunate reality.
I seem to remember a time when tech culture was better tolerated, if misunderstood. Post dot-com era, the old conformist culture has reasserted itself with it's fucked up, ultimately self-defeating expectations, where feelings matter more than fact, process matters more than results, and blind loyalty matters more than earned respect. This is the primary reason technical people run into trouble at work.
Sure, there are assholes in every field, but the best technical people are rarely if ever socially well-adapted. Their minds are world-focused, not people-focused. This is what allows them to do their jobs well in the first place. Their caustic (to non techs) attitudes manifest because they are often focal points within their organizations that end up interfacing expectation (often hollywood trained) with technical realities. PHBs don't give a shit about the details, they "hired you to make it work, so make it work" even while they refuse to grant you required resources/time/training because they lack proper understanding in the first place (and often lack the desire to learn the basics so they can manage properly). Being less people-oriented already, that pressure often blows off in lots of dark, satirical sarcasm, one-liners, and other nuggets of wisdom that, more often than not, hit too close to home for insecure management and coworkers. Instead of encouraging hyper-sensitivity, culture in general needs to toughen up if it wants to be effective in solving problems. In short, many techs would have better attitudes if they were listened to a bit more (no I do not mean despotic deference). They will never be warm, people-pleasers, but, trust me, you don't want them that way.
I suggest all the would-be well-this-is-how-real-'professionals'-like-me-work posters stop and think about how stressful their situations are and/or how good they really are before they preach to those they'd dismiss as anti-social malcontents who need to get with it. Neuro-typicals make mediocre techs at best, that's why they hire us in the first place.
1. I wasn't sure, and I said as much. even so my other positions stand.
2. streaming is the future, unfortunately. plastic disks will eventually die out, taking with them the ability to control the media you purchase.
3. Nothing I can do about it, so it's not my fault either. In the case of gaming, what worked rather efficiently before (clientside executable at the very least) is replaced by a gluttonous bw sapping kludge.
4. if you're posting here, you must have some kind of idea how latency works on networks. I have tried the service before, and it DOES lag significantly.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by 'only people who win.'
last I checked, blockbuster is moving away from disc rentals because netflix is pummeling them in streaming services. Brick/mortar places like gamestop are done. online streaming is the future, whether I like it or not. I just think it's unfortunate that most people decided to trade ownership for convenience. by ownership I mean control over when/where I watch/play/listen to my movies/games/music.
oh and netflix streaming does suck. its quality is worse than comcast's constrained 'HD'. Like onlive, it's convenient though. Like I said, today, other options exist, but I think the majority has decided that plastic discs are passe and it's unfortunate because it will kill these options for those of us who do prefer them.
sure.. or maybe onlive or the publisher has decided that one of your favorite titles isn't making enough money anymore, so they can it. What happened to xbox-classic's multiplayer?
this post doesn't exactly sound like a standing ovation for the service. sure, in the future, average bw will increase, maybe even to the point where the net-cost is no higher than it is today. This still leaves the larger issue at hand: how much control should the vendor have over its products once they're sold? if gaming-as-service is the future, will it truly be superior to what we already have? I'm sure it'll be more convenient, but I'll trade a bit of that for the flexibility to extract a bit more value out of the products I buy (in this context, I'm talking about mods/maps/3rd party servers etc). Being able to even have the potential to play my titles years after the publisher/dev house has gone out of business (or simply dropped support thereby removing it from my thin client's menu) is also important to me. The thriving emulation scene is proof (to me at least) that there are many out there like me.
..at some point, there needs to be a barrier of entry, otherwise said activity loses its value. I"m not saying you should go out and buy a console or game pc to try one game, but at some point the watering down of the experience just to get it into more hands ruins it for those who really do enjoy it. sure, today there's plenty of choice, but I suspect this method of 'delivery' will become dominant within the next 10 years, turning gaming into just another passive corporate-sanctioned experience instead of a thriving interactive 3rd party community that operates on its own terms. It's already being done with today's consoles, but stuff like onlive removes the control from the consumer altogether while potentially driving up his costs because of the extreme amounts of bandwidth involved. The only people who win here are the publishers and isps.
I've loved this service, and they haven't done me any wrong.
As they taught in health class, the dealer always says 'the first hit's on me.' come back to me when they're the only game in town.
yup. I fail to see the benefit for me. I do see the benefit for the publishers. even without a sub fee, I'm still eating massive bw and I lose control over the media.
lets pay full retail price for the game + monthly onlive subscription so we can: 1. get on a treadmill that gets harder and harder to get off each time a new game is purchased, because if a subscription is ever canceled all purchased games are gone forever. 2. get heavily bandwidth constrained lossy 720p video streams. 3. repeatedly peg bandwidth caps on our internet connections just by playing comparatively few hours of gaming a month. 4. get laggy input 5. lose control over yet another thing we're supposedly purchasing. (spare me the legal crap, games are presented as sales, not leases or rentals)
perhaps the terms have changed since the last time I looked at this, but I doubt it.
You might not if they trigger cancer with repeated exposure. I guess I"m more a fan of profiling than xraying.. if the guy has a turban and a long beard, and is carrying a koran, there's no reason to rape that 6yo kid with prosthetic legs. better yet, stipulate that all luggage must be flown in a cargo transport plane.. the maximum death that could occur would be two pilots which is hardly worth the expense. I'm sure the logistics could be worked out...
Not sure I agree on this.. An average of pad players stats vs an average of kb/mouse players will tell you the same story. The individual mastery of each player doesn't matter so much.
The parent's post has nothing to do with which is more popular, but a (rather dubious) measurement of skill stated in the article. To use a car analogy (I know), most people drive hondas and toyotas, but that doesn't mean there aren't (or shouldn't be) better cars/drivers out there.
I have an experiment. Tape a laser pointer to a toy rifle and a toy pistol. Acquire some targets at various ranges. Tie a five pound weight to the toy rifle and try again. Hell, try the laser pointer by itself. Is any of this easier than point & shoot on a mouse?
No, actually it isn't. Different muscles have differing amounts of fine motor control in the brain.. Your wrist and fingers are MUCH more capable of fine movement than arms/shoulders. since the average motion is shorter with a mouse, reaction time is also a lot better.
I roll my eyes at "mice are superior for FPS". They are when the virtual weapons involved are stupidly accurate, and players have big gliding balls for feet that can rapidly do 180's.
in nearly ANY FPS gameplay config, a mouse will be easier to aim with than an analog stick or pad. Set up an fps with any amount of gimping you want, and assuming all else is equal, the mouse/kb players come out on top.
THAT is not by any means "better" than what an FPS could be. Weapon accuracy should be dialed down a lot, and a little aim assist once in a while isn;t going to hurt anyone.
Some of this is subjective, but many gamers can tell when they were hit by shoddy 'aim assist' and bitch vehemently about it...rightly so. It's just another example of using rand() as a crutch for 'realism' that gets around an inherently inferior input design.
Actually with analog controls you can be quite precise as well. The problem is that people that grew up on consoles (the 16 year olds these days) have gotten used to consoles dumbing down the controls to the point that many don't know they can be more precise. There's many times I play with my younger brother-in-law and beat him in FPS I haven't played before and when I look at his screen he doesn't even bother aiming before shooting. I have seen the same from a number of gamers even those that are ranked pretty high.
This conflicts.. They dumb the controls down precisely because they know the analog stick is a poor substitute for a mouse. It's not just the controls either, but the whole gameplay mechanic: hitbox size, movement speeds, weapon damage etc.. There's a reason consoles had that 'kiddie' rep in the first place, it's just that the current crop of gamers never played any of the oldschool pc shooters, so they say that pc gamers are whiners who can't adapt. They can adapt just fine, it's that they don't want to use something that's inferior to what they've been playing on for the last 15 years.
Slashdot Mirror
This is the reason Apple has had so much success lately, and why they won't ever be loved by Slashdot. Personally, I'm happy to roll my own OpenBSD kernels for my media server and firewall at home, but when it comes to my phone I'll take Steve Jobs' walled garden. I don't have the time for anything else, and I really need my phone to "just work".
The folly of this is that you can have as much convenience and as much flexibility as you want with non-apple products. Apple's success story has more to do with marketing than anything else. Sure, their devices work ok, but I wouldn't say they're stellar or that there aren't better choices on the market, usability wise. walled gardens only guarantee stability and security for the vendor's market. They are not consumer friendly. It is needless complexity that is the enemy of security and stability in the context you're referring to. If you're that concerned, you shouldn't be using a 'smart' phone period.
True general-purpose computing exists on the desktop and will continue to do so - but the consequences of that model will be continued security issues far in excess of the walled garden's, compatibility issues due to a functionally infinite number of hardware configurations to support, and abandonment by any developers unwilling to tolerate piracy/off-label usage of their applications [some might say 'good riddance' to the latter, but there's an awful lot of money and talent in that pool that will be spent making the walled gardens more attractive].
yes, more complexity leads to greater potential failure. As far as developer attitudes go, I'm not sure it's in everyones' best interest to coddle petty narcissism and paranoid control freakery. Paranoid attempts to control consumer behavior with distributed binaries only affects paid customers. Pirates aren't subject to it. In the end, it just makes the pirate copy more attractive.
As far as the open source and freedom-to-code communities go, they can either approach this with ineffectual wailing and gnashing of teeth, or they can resolve to make this work for them. How? By building compelling services that are free-as-in-speech on general-purpose computers, and charging nominal fees for viewers targeting closed platforms, the proceeds from which are used to fund further development.
Isn't this what google does with android?
It's a phone not a computer.
No, it's a computer coupled to a radio transmitter that happens to make phonecalls. I'm tired of reminding people that their 'phones' are computerized radios first, phones second, when they bitch about signal loss.
1. Total and utter freedom to install anything on your phone. But miss a very important phone call due to a badly programmed application running down the battery or locking up the phone. Just think, that call could be a job offer, an ex-girlfriend wanting some fun or the news that someone is in trouble.
Problems like this manifest as complexity increases. If reliability is that important to you, you shouldn't be using a smartphone at all..
2. Less freedoms but a better experience, higher quality software, less chance of battery rundown or lock ups?
You make a rather blatant suggestion here. Back it up. Shitty software is shitty software and plenty of it is open and closed.
If restrictions and licence fees weed out all the bad coders then it's a good thing.
That's just it, they don't. There's more to the 'experience' than good code. The intentions of the business said coders work for make all the difference in the world. The quality of the code only determines how effective those intentions are implemented.
Like most programmers, you're not looking at the nightmare of dependencies and execution overhead multilanguage applications require, esp ones that are interpreted. seriously, for the end user, running an app written in such languages that can use C/C++ 'plugins' is a royal pain in the ass, and is usually quite a bit slower than simply using a native C/C++ variant. There is a reason C/C++ is used 'for everything' even when purists say there are better tools available. In theory, yes, other languages provide better constructs for designing in specific areas, but as far as execution on real hardware goes, no.
Yes, this is my opinion based on observations working in the industry. I do not intend to pass it off as fact. I am sure there are exceptions, but reality is rarely as neat and clean andorderly as theory expects of it.
MySpace was infantile. It encouraged aliases, whereas Facebook encouraged valid names. MySpace also had GeoCities personalization. There's nothing wrong with infantile if that's what you want your market to be. Facebook appeals to people of all ages, and that is one of the main reasons it won.
Just because a site demands real names doesn't mean it's more or less 'infantile.'
Yeah, I realized that after I posted and replied as such. I apologize. I'm not sure where I got HF from.
Oops, I forgot that there's a 900Mhz AR band now. My apologies..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_meter
I'm not claiming this wiki article is complete, but the amateur HF bands are far far away from 900Mhz. I could understand a complaint if the switching supply in the meters (that drives the embedded logic) spewed harmonic RFI and/or dumped noise on the line due to a bad (cheap) design. I think electronic dimmers, radio driven electric fences, and existing broadband-over-power solutions are much bigger threats to HF bands than the circuits in these things.
This is true of most cross-functional interactions within groups, the people on the lines don't fully understand the functions of people on different tasks, nor should they. But the point is that being bluntly and abusively frank without any filter isn't the same thing as being honest. It's not a PC cop-out to say something in nicer terms, but not everyone is wired to think before they speak.
sorry, I missed this one..
I don't see a difference between honesty and bluntness so long as the discussion stays away from ad hominems and other fallacies. I admit that dealing with messy feelings of others is a part of reality, but it seems these days that propping up feelings (especially of those high in the hierarchy) is taking priority. This is not good. Tech types appear brusque because they don't (nor shouldn't they) care about how a result is going to affect someone emotionally, esp their boss. It's their JOB to accurately report their results based upon what the boss defines as the problem and the limits of available resource to solve it. If said boss can't handle this reality emotionally, then he needs to find another line of work.
And conversely, the marketing guy might be sitting there thinking it doesn't matter that it costs us thousands of dollars in support calls if we lose millions because there's a whole in the product line during the Christmas period. (A case where the engineer is an idiot.)
management is responsible for providing adequate time/resource for development processes, right? if the product misses key marketing deadlines, whose fault is that (assuming competent techs)? if the tech is not competent, get rid of him.
I understand that being able to see from multiple perspectives is valuable, but that doesn't mean the perspectives themselves are equal. Unfortunately, I've seen several good people get canned because the upper echelon's ego couldn't handled being questioned.
Now, when things aren't equal, when you're dealing with exceptionals and incompetents, it's hard to judge. The trick is being able to determine if the exceptional are truly that, and where is the incompetence. You have to fix the problems.
agreed.
I guess my point is that, assuming competent techs/engineers, it is management that has to work within their constraints, because, in the end, the engineers are themselves constrained by reality. They are the ones that feel it every day. They have to to do their jobs.
I've seen a lot of incompetent engineers masking themselves as savants by throwing big technical terms at a customer who is too intimidated by their own ignorance to question the person they are paying to guide them.
Right. some people are assholes. They're in every department and can occupy any position. This is why the guy who
"takes the specifications and brings them to the engineers so the engineers don't have to" is so important. However, if these engineers are truly incompetent and are not simply trying to escape the conversation because they know that the customer will never understand the details or scope of what he's asking, they should be canned.
And it's no longer your opinion that this or that person is incompetent. It doesn't matter what anyone's feelings are about something if you can produce numbers and say option A x dollars, option B y dollars.
Sure, but always be wary of cherry picked stats. Unfortunately, management doesn't always have its company's best interests in mind when it's dealing with perceived (or possibly real) insubordination brought on by a lack of earned respect or at least a willingness to listen to its underlings.
Sounds like you're a bit sensitive.. You should work on that. If these super-smart executives could, they would hire their college buddies to do the work. They don't. Why not? Because their buddies are just as ignorant in technical areas as they are. I'm not assuming anything about myself. I was stating observations.
I suppose everyone's deficient in some areas. The problem is that the culture at most companies is set up to compensate solely on the deficiencies of your so-called super-smart executives, even at the expense of the profits and play time they so much desire.
Generally, the malcontent, venom or other abrasive behavior is just a gap in understanding between the savant's perspective and the demands/motivations of the people he's dealing with.
In the most extreme cases, perhaps, but generally what I've run across is the opposite: management doesn't know what they want, they only know that they dont' want what their employees generated. this is often due to poor leadership. I hesitate to call them savants because, in the end, it's the management that needs to decide what's more important: results or their feelings/political-'correctness.' Technical people perceive political-correctness as a form of cowardice, because that's what it really is. People should not have to resort to 'politically correct' answers because such 'answers' usually aren't answers at all.. they're just shims to get around the critical problem of a boss/coworker who lacks the testicular fortitude to accept reality, whatever that may be. Our culture today rewards such behavior. It shouldn't.
The rest of your post is fairly on target though. It depicts an unfortunate reality.
I seem to remember a time when tech culture was better tolerated, if misunderstood. Post dot-com era, the old conformist culture has reasserted itself with it's fucked up, ultimately self-defeating expectations, where feelings matter more than fact, process matters more than results, and blind loyalty matters more than earned respect. This is the primary reason technical people run into trouble at work.
Sure, there are assholes in every field, but the best technical people are rarely if ever socially well-adapted. Their minds are world-focused, not people-focused. This is what allows them to do their jobs well in the first place. Their caustic (to non techs) attitudes manifest because they are often focal points within their organizations that end up interfacing expectation (often hollywood trained) with technical realities. PHBs don't give a shit about the details, they "hired you to make it work, so make it work" even while they refuse to grant you required resources/time/training because they lack proper understanding in the first place (and often lack the desire to learn the basics so they can manage properly). Being less people-oriented already, that pressure often blows off in lots of dark, satirical sarcasm, one-liners, and other nuggets of wisdom that, more often than not, hit too close to home for insecure management and coworkers. Instead of encouraging hyper-sensitivity, culture in general needs to toughen up if it wants to be effective in solving problems. In short, many techs would have better attitudes if they were listened to a bit more (no I do not mean despotic deference). They will never be warm, people-pleasers, but, trust me, you don't want them that way.
I suggest all the would-be well-this-is-how-real-'professionals'-like-me-work posters stop and think about how stressful their situations are and/or how good they really are before they preach to those they'd dismiss as anti-social malcontents who need to get with it. Neuro-typicals make mediocre techs at best, that's why they hire us in the first place.
1. I wasn't sure, and I said as much. even so my other positions stand.
2. streaming is the future, unfortunately. plastic disks will eventually die out, taking with them the ability to control the media you purchase.
3. Nothing I can do about it, so it's not my fault either. In the case of gaming, what worked rather efficiently before (clientside executable at the very least) is replaced by a gluttonous bw sapping kludge.
4. if you're posting here, you must have some kind of idea how latency works on networks. I have tried the service before, and it DOES lag significantly.
5. this dodges my point entirely.
haha true.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by 'only people who win.'
last I checked, blockbuster is moving away from disc rentals because netflix is pummeling them in streaming services. Brick/mortar places like gamestop are done. online streaming is the future, whether I like it or not. I just think it's unfortunate that most people decided to trade ownership for convenience. by ownership I mean control over when/where I watch/play/listen to my movies/games/music.
oh and netflix streaming does suck. its quality is worse than comcast's constrained 'HD'. Like onlive, it's convenient though. Like I said, today, other options exist, but I think the majority has decided that plastic discs are passe and it's unfortunate because it will kill these options for those of us who do prefer them.
sure.. or maybe onlive or the publisher has decided that one of your favorite titles isn't making enough money anymore, so they can it. What happened to xbox-classic's multiplayer?
this post doesn't exactly sound like a standing ovation for the service. sure, in the future, average bw will increase, maybe even to the point where the net-cost is no higher than it is today. This still leaves the larger issue at hand: how much control should the vendor have over its products once they're sold? if gaming-as-service is the future, will it truly be superior to what we already have? I'm sure it'll be more convenient, but I'll trade a bit of that for the flexibility to extract a bit more value out of the products I buy (in this context, I'm talking about mods/maps/3rd party servers etc). Being able to even have the potential to play my titles years after the publisher/dev house has gone out of business (or simply dropped support thereby removing it from my thin client's menu) is also important to me. The thriving emulation scene is proof (to me at least) that there are many out there like me.
..at some point, there needs to be a barrier of entry, otherwise said activity loses its value. I"m not saying you should go out and buy a console or game pc to try one game, but at some point the watering down of the experience just to get it into more hands ruins it for those who really do enjoy it. sure, today there's plenty of choice, but I suspect this method of 'delivery' will become dominant within the next 10 years, turning gaming into just another passive corporate-sanctioned experience instead of a thriving interactive 3rd party community that operates on its own terms. It's already being done with today's consoles, but stuff like onlive removes the control from the consumer altogether while potentially driving up his costs because of the extreme amounts of bandwidth involved. The only people who win here are the publishers and isps.
I've loved this service, and they haven't done me any wrong.
As they taught in health class, the dealer always says 'the first hit's on me.' come back to me when they're the only game in town.
yup. I fail to see the benefit for me. I do see the benefit for the publishers. even without a sub fee, I'm still eating massive bw and I lose control over the media.
lets pay full retail price for the game + monthly onlive subscription so we can:
1. get on a treadmill that gets harder and harder to get off each time a new game is purchased, because if a subscription is ever canceled all purchased games are gone forever.
2. get heavily bandwidth constrained lossy 720p video streams.
3. repeatedly peg bandwidth caps on our internet connections just by playing comparatively few hours of gaming a month.
4. get laggy input
5. lose control over yet another thing we're supposedly purchasing. (spare me the legal crap, games are presented as sales, not leases or rentals)
perhaps the terms have changed since the last time I looked at this, but I doubt it.
You might not if they trigger cancer with repeated exposure. I guess I"m more a fan of profiling than xraying.. if the guy has a turban and a long beard, and is carrying a koran, there's no reason to rape that 6yo kid with prosthetic legs. better yet, stipulate that all luggage must be flown in a cargo transport plane.. the maximum death that could occur would be two pilots which is hardly worth the expense. I'm sure the logistics could be worked out...
Not sure I agree on this.. An average of pad players stats vs an average of kb/mouse players will tell you the same story. The individual mastery of each player doesn't matter so much.
The parent's post has nothing to do with which is more popular, but a (rather dubious) measurement of skill stated in the article. To use a car analogy (I know), most people drive hondas and toyotas, but that doesn't mean there aren't (or shouldn't be) better cars/drivers out there.
I have an experiment. Tape a laser pointer to a toy rifle and a toy pistol. Acquire some targets at various ranges. Tie a five pound weight to the toy rifle and try again. Hell, try the laser pointer by itself. Is any of this easier than point & shoot on a mouse?
No, actually it isn't. Different muscles have differing amounts of fine motor control in the brain.. Your wrist and fingers are MUCH more capable of fine movement than arms/shoulders. since the average motion is shorter with a mouse, reaction time is also a lot better.
I roll my eyes at "mice are superior for FPS". They are when the virtual weapons involved are stupidly accurate, and players have big gliding balls for feet that can rapidly do 180's.
in nearly ANY FPS gameplay config, a mouse will be easier to aim with than an analog stick or pad. Set up an fps with any amount of gimping you want, and assuming all else is equal, the mouse/kb players come out on top.
THAT is not by any means "better" than what an FPS could be. Weapon accuracy should be dialed down a lot, and a little aim assist once in a while isn;t going to hurt anyone.
Some of this is subjective, but many gamers can tell when they were hit by shoddy 'aim assist' and bitch vehemently about it...rightly so. It's just another example of using rand() as a crutch for 'realism' that gets around an inherently inferior input design.
Actually with analog controls you can be quite precise as well. The problem is that people that grew up on consoles (the 16 year olds these days) have gotten used to consoles dumbing down the controls to the point that many don't know they can be more precise. There's many times I play with my younger brother-in-law and beat him in FPS I haven't played before and when I look at his screen he doesn't even bother aiming before shooting. I have seen the same from a number of gamers even those that are ranked pretty high.
This conflicts.. They dumb the controls down precisely because they know the analog stick is a poor substitute for a mouse. It's not just the controls either, but the whole gameplay mechanic: hitbox size, movement speeds, weapon damage etc.. There's a reason consoles had that 'kiddie' rep in the first place, it's just that the current crop of gamers never played any of the oldschool pc shooters, so they say that pc gamers are whiners who can't adapt. They can adapt just fine, it's that they don't want to use something that's inferior to what they've been playing on for the last 15 years.