What's this "we" business? DX10 is only available with Vista, and Vista sales are abysmal. And with this being a *nix-oriented site, it's falling on deaf ears.
Stories posted to the Game section of Slashdot rarely see more than fifty responses.
The Slashdot Geek isn't really a driving force in PC gaming and anything said here about Microsoft and Vista tends to be tainted by wishful thinking. It isn't retail-boxed Vista that sells to the home market, it is the OEM system bundle.
You'll find the neon-lit Gamer's PC with Vista and NVIDIA 8800 DX10 Video at Walmart.com. What you won't find is OEM Linux at any price or in any configuration.
I can't see game developers getting that excited about something supported only on a version of the operating system that people are specifically NOT migrating to in droves.
In the home market, migration is to the next generation of Windows hardware and software.
The OEM system bundle.
The DX10 system with mid-line performance and pricing is still quite new, probably shipping in significant numbers no earlier June. Not the prime shopping season for a PC.
That said, in the W3Schools stats, Vista went from 0 to 4% of the market in about six months.
In a statistical dead heat with Linux and OSX. OS Platform Stats - both of which, in PC terms, have been around since the last Ice Age.
Don't they tend to claim that violent games turn children into sociopaths, isn't the inability to experience the emotions of others one of the defining features of a sociopath?
That is - precisely - the danger critics see in role-playing a psychopath. In rewarding the player for the sadism of his kills.
The stealth shooter can explore the moral ambiguity of the sniper's role, but the issues in a game like S.W.A.T are framed in a moment of great tension. The right decision may not be to attempt the shot.
The problem is, that history is rarely painted in black and white.
Pinball in the thirties often came with payouts - thinly disguised gambling machines at a time when a nickel was serious money.
In the fifties, comic books were losing older readers to the paperback novels of Mickey Spillane.
Graphic crime and horror seemed the way to go.
The problem was these often very crude and exploitive comics were being sold off the same drugstore racks as Archie, Casper and Scrooge McDuck.
There was no adult channel for the distribution of comics except through the same news stands and cigar stores that had a well-earned reputation for selling hard core porn out of the back room.
In the fifties artists like Al Capp, Milton Caniff, Walt Kelly, Charles Schulz and a dozen others were publishing newspaper strips that were fun, sophisticated, and appealing to a very broad readership.
They were in a much stronger position than EC and they could - and did - fight back.
The point is playing a shoot-em-up is hardly physically dangerous
But the question is whether a game like Manhunt 2 is psychologically dangerous.
Ray Bradbury was posing this question as early as 1951 in his short story The Veldt. Gene Wolfe had his own take on role-playing games in When I Was Ming the Merciless, ca. 1976.
I don't think you dispose of these questions quite as easily as the Gamer-Geek would like to believe. I can see a problem in wielding the Wii remote in imitation of a real-life weapon.
Particularly in a game that - in any sense - rewards the player for the grotesqueness and sadism of his kills.
"It's a different level of engagement in video games," says Rockstar's Rodney Walker. "You can literally experience the emotional responses of the character."
This quote is God's gift to the anti-violent video game crusader. It will never be forgotten or forgiven.
So let me see here. Fencing, musketry, paintball, boxing, combat training, karate, kendo, sparring, stuntwork, etc, should all be out of the question for anyone younger than adults.
In unsupervised settings, all of these activities would be considered out-of-bounds for minors.
That is what put CBS on a tightrope with "Kid Nation." The adult simply can't dump kids in the desert - and expect to escape liability when something goes wrong.
The Nazis used children's games to shape and perpetuate a culture of hate and violence.
The HJ were viewed as future "Aryan supermen" and were indoctrinated in anti-Semitism. [Many] HJ activities closely resembled military training, with weapons training, assault course circuits and basic strategy. Some cruelty by the older boys toward the younger ones was tolerated and even encouraged, since it was believed this would weed out the unfit and harden the rest. The HJ wore uniforms very like those of the SA, with similar ranks and insignia.
It's my understanding that we have thousands of miles of "dark fibre", or unused fibre optic cables running under our grounds.
dark fiber buried beside the interstate highway, the railroad track, or the high-tension line doesn't translate into bandwidth that you can sell to your retail customers.
If you had hidden volumes on an encrypted disk they would have no way to know there was potential evidence there and therefore could not demand you hand over the password.
Not true.
The warrant will be for a search of your hard drive.
The consequences won't be pleasant when a judge asks why you withheld the key to a hidden volume that was known to others or was exposed in forensic analysis.
I suspect that the iPhone plaintiffs will lose their case and Apple will lose a chunk of market-share opportunity.
While I suspect that Apple can sell the iPhone as fast as it can stamp them out. That sales lost to modders will have less visibility than a rounding error in Apple's corporate accounts.
Before Gates, software was not a "product." It was something that helped to make hardware useful. People created it, shared it, ported it and everything that OSS is attempting to recapture. the idea of selling the software to the USER as a product I blame on Bill Gates
Is the Geek's long-term memory selective - or simply non-existent?
WordStar released in 1978 became the defacto standard for word processing on CP/M.
VisiCalc for the Apple II hit the market a year later and would be ported to CP/M, the Atari, the Commodore PET, and the MSDOS PC. Selling 700,000 in six years.
The October 1982 Creative Computing [in its 300 pages!] featured four-color adds for Frogger and Wizardry.
PC gaming on the 8-bit micro has taken on a very familiar shape. King's Quest for the IBM PC is two years down the road. In this single issue there are about 100 pages of adds for software in all categories.
Users will gladly pay for a decent operating system that works and doesn't limit them the way Windows or OSX do.
Users who buy the OSX or Windows PC don't think of "limitations" in the same way the Geek does.
The OS is not their obsession. The less it demands of them the more they like it. The OS that does the heavy lifting backstage is what sells. That is freedom and power as they understand it.
They are shopping for an office machine or a household appliance.
But for everyone that doesn't want Windows, it is indeed a tax.
The Linux Geek is the only one who gives a damn about the Microsoft Tax.
Everyone else is buying a PC - Mac or Windows - built with the commodity hardware originally designed for the Windows PC market. Hardware that has become dirt cheap because the Windows platform has damn near a billion users worldwide.
OEM Linux disappeared from Walmart.com in late January.
Walmart.com's cheapest Compaq Presario has an Athlon Dual Core CPU, 1 GB RAM, 160 GB HDD, DVD burner, GeForce 6150 SE graphics and runs Vista Basic. $348.
Top of the line at $1900:
The HP Elite with Intel Core 2 Quad CPU, 3 GB RAM, 2 500 GB HDDs, ATSC tuner, etc., running Vista Ultimate
And where are Wal-Mart's national advertisements for this product line?
Where they have always been: In Limbo. Non-existent.
i'm still baffled as to how a dell computer with linux costs more than one with windows
Dell markets to customers that have been using MSDOS and Windows since 1981. They are comfortable with Microsoft and relatively undemanding of service and support.
In the retail segment Dell has kiosks in the Galleria Mall, shelf space at WalMart, a niche on the Home Shopping Channel. To reach these customers Dell can afford direct mail, four color Sunday supplements, the thirty-second commercial during the Super Bowl.
Some can be persuaded to upgrade to the desktop replacement or high-end gamer's PC. [The Geek thinks cheap] They will bundle in purchases of monitors and printers. HDTV. MS Office. Bioshock, etc.
as hardware prices fall below $250 for laptops and desktops, Linux should gain as the Microsoft tax stands out in sharper relief
Walmart.com tried every flavor of OEM Linux and at price points as low as $200. The poor weren't buying PCs at any price and the middle class wouldn't touch the bottom feeders.
Mid-line you would have been lucky to have saved $50 on an OEM Linux box - the price of a single Windows PC game, two ink jet cartridges or a month of broadband cable.
No struggling with WINE or Caldega.
No retiring the Windows software library you have been building since 1992. Is there an iTunes for Windows? Will I need a new printer?
No one but a Geek wants to even think about this stuff.
In fall of 2007, Walmart.com is all Windows and mostly Vista. The Vista Basic laptop starts at $420. The Dual-Core Vista Premium laptop at $800.
If entry level is $250 think of what you buy at $500 - at $1000!
The PC is middle-class.
The middle class is most comfortable with the service life and pricing of "major home appliances."
They buy the Windows PC - the PC system bundle - the best they can afford - use it for five to ten years - and never give a second's thought to the so-called "Microsoft Tax."
It seems to me that that before you charge someone of committing libel, you must first prove that his/her accusations against you are untrue.
The libel is in the words that is reasonable to believe will damage your reputation.
Truth is a modern defense to an action for libel. There was in the past the belief that "truth" did not always contribute to civil and productive political debate.
That defaming your neighbors was a disturbance of the peace.
Imagine the zealot who makes it his life's mission to expose homosexuals to public humiliation and you will get the general idea.
Imagine a traditional print media, with someone sending letters to a newspaper about something they think is true. How would they find out who the person was? Especially if the person took measures not to be found (i.e. cut paste words from the newspaper and avoid putting their fingerprints on it blah blah).
The anonymous threat, the poison pen letter, doesn't get printed.
But certainly I don't think the blogger should be arrested for libel unless he gives his name and accuses the hospital. See, he's anonymous and his credibility is null. Big deal.
You are not "arrested" for libel. Libel is not a crime, libel is a cause for action in a civil court.
"Freedom of speech" has to mean something more - demand something more - than the anonymity of the poison pen.
If the blogger's accusations turn out to be false, the blogger's credibility will fall down like those wacky conspiracy theorists.
Conspiracy theories have an extraordinary longevity and can do lasting damage. How many postings to Slashdot base their arguments on the urban legends that have become the geek's gospel truth?
I am not old enough to remember when phones themselves were first introduced. However, I am sure the exclusivity was limited to simply I have a phone and you do not sort of thing.
The first telephone exchange was set up in New Haven, Connecticut in January 1878.
In 1900 there 6,000 independent phone companies - mostly rural and small town - with no connection to the Bell system or to each other.
Companies at the tin can-and-string level of tech and service while Bell was pioneering long distance - before the invention of the vacuum tube.
It's 1981. The floppy disk drive is an option. RAM is measured in kilobytes. You make the choice.
Consider the piece of crap that were Windows ME and Windows 2000. They did just fine, despite the long list of quality problems reported in the tech media (but never noticed by 90% of the buying public). There's no real reason to believe that Vista will do any worse.
The real lesson here may be that the issues that obsess the geek do not obsess the non-technical user.
The user that buys his HP Pavilion laptop from WalMart.
NVIDIA 8600 GS graphics. HDTV tuner card. 2 GB RAM, 240 GB HDD, and a dual core processor. $1300 The OS Vista Premium. The drivers will be there, the performance will be there, for most anything he wants to do.
Guess what - 97% of the population that buys wine on the Internet by the case at 20+ quid a pop does not run Windows. More likely - windows is under 40% and even that runs firefox or opera. Rest are MacOS and Linux users.
I have been trying to find - anything - on Google that backs this up.
Personally, I'd chance a modest wager that anyone buying wine "by the case at 20 quid a pop" is running Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
Stories posted to the Game section of Slashdot rarely see more than fifty responses.
The Slashdot Geek isn't really a driving force in PC gaming and anything said here about Microsoft and Vista tends to be tainted by wishful thinking. It isn't retail-boxed Vista that sells to the home market, it is the OEM system bundle.
You'll find the neon-lit Gamer's PC with Vista and NVIDIA 8800 DX10 Video at Walmart.com. What you won't find is OEM Linux at any price or in any configuration.
In the home market, migration is to the next generation of Windows hardware and software.
The OEM system bundle.
The DX10 system with mid-line performance and pricing is still quite new, probably shipping in significant numbers no earlier June. Not the prime shopping season for a PC.
That said, in the W3Schools stats, Vista went from 0 to 4% of the market in about six months.
In a statistical dead heat with Linux and OSX. OS Platform Stats - both of which, in PC terms, have been around since the last Ice Age.
because pissing off Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo does not bode well for your future in console gaming.
and because retailers like WalMart may be unwilling to provide shelf space for publishers pushing AO content on the side.
That is - precisely - the danger critics see in role-playing a psychopath. In rewarding the player for the sadism of his kills.
The stealth shooter can explore the moral ambiguity of the sniper's role, but the issues in a game like S.W.A.T are framed in a moment of great tension. The right decision may not be to attempt the shot.
The problem is, that history is rarely painted in black and white.
Pinball in the thirties often came with payouts - thinly disguised gambling machines at a time when a nickel was serious money.
In the fifties, comic books were losing older readers to the paperback novels of Mickey Spillane.
Graphic crime and horror seemed the way to go.
The problem was these often very crude and exploitive comics were being sold off the same drugstore racks as Archie, Casper and Scrooge McDuck.
There was no adult channel for the distribution of comics except through the same news stands and cigar stores that had a well-earned reputation for selling hard core porn out of the back room.
In the fifties artists like Al Capp, Milton Caniff, Walt Kelly, Charles Schulz and a dozen others were publishing newspaper strips that were fun, sophisticated, and appealing to a very broad readership.
They were in a much stronger position than EC and they could - and did - fight back.
But the question is whether a game like Manhunt 2 is psychologically dangerous.
Ray Bradbury was posing this question as early as 1951 in his short story The Veldt. Gene Wolfe had his own take on role-playing games in When I Was Ming the Merciless, ca. 1976.
I don't think you dispose of these questions quite as easily as the Gamer-Geek would like to believe. I can see a problem in wielding the Wii remote in imitation of a real-life weapon.
Particularly in a game that - in any sense - rewards the player for the grotesqueness and sadism of his kills.
This quote is God's gift to the anti-violent video game crusader. It will never be forgotten or forgiven.
In unsupervised settings, all of these activities would be considered out-of-bounds for minors.
That is what put CBS on a tightrope with "Kid Nation." The adult simply can't dump kids in the desert - and expect to escape liability when something goes wrong.
Germany hasn't forgotten the Hitler Youth.
The Nazis used children's games to shape and perpetuate a culture of hate and violence.
The HJ were viewed as future "Aryan supermen" and were indoctrinated in anti-Semitism. [Many] HJ activities closely resembled military training, with weapons training, assault course circuits and basic strategy. Some cruelty by the older boys toward the younger ones was tolerated and even encouraged, since it was believed this would weed out the unfit and harden the rest. The HJ wore uniforms very like those of the SA, with similar ranks and insignia.
dark fiber buried beside the interstate highway, the railroad track, or the high-tension line doesn't translate into bandwidth that you can sell to your retail customers.
Six months in the county lock-up will do wonders for your memory - which is what thi smart-ass response to the judge will get you.
Not true.
The warrant will be for a search of your hard drive.
The consequences won't be pleasant when a judge asks why you withheld the key to a hidden volume that was known to others or was exposed in forensic analysis.
While I suspect that Apple can sell the iPhone as fast as it can stamp them out. That sales lost to modders will have less visibility than a rounding error in Apple's corporate accounts.
Is the Geek's long-term memory selective - or simply non-existent?
WordStar released in 1978 became the defacto standard for word processing on CP/M.
VisiCalc for the Apple II hit the market a year later and would be ported to CP/M, the Atari, the Commodore PET, and the MSDOS PC. Selling 700,000 in six years.
The October 1982 Creative Computing [in its 300 pages!] featured four-color adds for Frogger and Wizardry.
PC gaming on the 8-bit micro has taken on a very familiar shape. King's Quest for the IBM PC is two years down the road. In this single issue there are about 100 pages of adds for software in all categories.
Users who buy the OSX or Windows PC don't think of "limitations" in the same way the Geek does.
The OS is not their obsession. The less it demands of them the more they like it. The OS that does the heavy lifting backstage is what sells. That is freedom and power as they understand it.
They are shopping for an office machine or a household appliance.
The Linux Geek is the only one who gives a damn about the Microsoft Tax.
Everyone else is buying a PC - Mac or Windows - built with the commodity hardware originally designed for the Windows PC market. Hardware that has become dirt cheap because the Windows platform has damn near a billion users worldwide.
Neither.
OEM Linux disappeared from Walmart.com in late January.
Walmart.com's cheapest Compaq Presario has an Athlon Dual Core CPU, 1 GB RAM, 160 GB HDD, DVD burner, GeForce 6150 SE graphics and runs Vista Basic. $348.
Top of the line at $1900:
The HP Elite with Intel Core 2 Quad CPU, 3 GB RAM, 2 500 GB HDDs, ATSC tuner, etc., running Vista Ultimate
And where are Wal-Mart's national advertisements for this product line?
Where they have always been: In Limbo. Non-existent.
Dell markets to customers that have been using MSDOS and Windows since 1981. They are comfortable with Microsoft and relatively undemanding of service and support.
In the retail segment Dell has kiosks in the Galleria Mall, shelf space at WalMart, a niche on the Home Shopping Channel. To reach these customers Dell can afford direct mail, four color Sunday supplements, the thirty-second commercial during the Super Bowl.
Some can be persuaded to upgrade to the desktop replacement or high-end gamer's PC. [The Geek thinks cheap] They will bundle in purchases of monitors and printers. HDTV. MS Office. Bioshock, etc.
Walmart.com tried every flavor of OEM Linux and at price points as low as $200. The poor weren't buying PCs at any price and the middle class wouldn't touch the bottom feeders.
Mid-line you would have been lucky to have saved $50 on an OEM Linux box - the price of a single Windows PC game, two ink jet cartridges or a month of broadband cable.
No struggling with WINE or Caldega.
No retiring the Windows software library you have been building since 1992. Is there an iTunes for Windows? Will I need a new printer?
No one but a Geek wants to even think about this stuff.
In fall of 2007, Walmart.com is all Windows and mostly Vista. The Vista Basic laptop starts at $420. The Dual-Core Vista Premium laptop at $800.
If entry level is $250 think of what you buy at $500 - at $1000!
The PC is middle-class.
The middle class is most comfortable with the service life and pricing of "major home appliances."
They buy the Windows PC - the PC system bundle - the best they can afford - use it for five to ten years - and never give a second's thought to the so-called "Microsoft Tax."
The libel is in the words that is reasonable to believe will damage your reputation.
Truth is a modern defense to an action for libel. There was in the past the belief that "truth" did not always contribute to civil and productive political debate.
That defaming your neighbors was a disturbance of the peace.
Imagine the zealot who makes it his life's mission to expose homosexuals to public humiliation and you will get the general idea.
The anonymous threat, the poison pen letter, doesn't get printed.
You are not "arrested" for libel. Libel is not a crime, libel is a cause for action in a civil court.
"Freedom of speech" has to mean something more - demand something more - than the anonymity of the poison pen.
If the blogger's accusations turn out to be false, the blogger's credibility will fall down like those wacky conspiracy theorists.
Conspiracy theories have an extraordinary longevity and can do lasting damage. How many postings to Slashdot base their arguments on the urban legends that have become the geek's gospel truth?
The first telephone exchange was set up in New Haven, Connecticut in January 1878.
In 1900 there 6,000 independent phone companies - mostly rural and small town - with no connection to the Bell system or to each other.
Companies at the tin can-and-string level of tech and service while Bell was pioneering long distance - before the invention of the vacuum tube.
A $40 price tag for PC-DOS vs $240 for CP/M 86 .
It's 1981. The floppy disk drive is an option. RAM is measured in kilobytes. You make the choice.
Consider the piece of crap that were Windows ME and Windows 2000.
They did just fine, despite the long list of quality problems reported in the tech media (but never noticed by 90% of the buying public). There's no real reason to believe that Vista will do any worse.
The real lesson here may be that the issues that obsess the geek do not obsess the non-technical user.
The user that buys his HP Pavilion laptop from WalMart.
NVIDIA 8600 GS graphics. HDTV tuner card. 2 GB RAM, 240 GB HDD, and a dual core processor. $1300 The OS Vista Premium. The drivers will be there, the performance will be there, for most anything he wants to do.
I have been trying to find - anything - on Google that backs this up.
Personally, I'd chance a modest wager that anyone buying wine "by the case at 20 quid a pop" is running Windows.