Sixty thousand people have bought the game since May 2009, not in the last two weeks.
I bought the game a couple of months ago and every other game in my collection had been neglected.
The basic gist of it is that the entire world is generated from cubes on the fly. You explore, chop down trees, make tools, mine for minerals and stone, build houses/castles/towers/ridiculous pixel art sculptures and watch out for monsters which inhabit the world at night and dark corners of your mines and naturally-occuring caves. The world is generated on the fly as you explore, with mountains, rivers, forests, caves and the occasional treasure room. Multiplayer is in the early stages right now, but fun. Single player is an amazing time waster, it's so easy to get completely sucked into a world made up of giant pixels.
It's one of the best indie games I've ever tried and it's made by just one guy.
Absolutely, whiteboards are essential for communicating complex relations.
I don't even do NOC stuff anymore, be the office I share with 4 other people has every available wall covered in whiteboards. We use them to map out system architectures, networks, just about anything you can interconnect with lines, shared to-do lists are also very nice to have.
I worked for a couple of months in doing NOC work, you pick up some basic must-haves really quickly in regards to comfort, I'd like to add them. Temperature and air quality is among the very top priorities for sure, here are a few other points.
Get the best and most comfortable chairs you can find and then get the ones that are even better. People will be sitting in these 24/7, you need the best you can get or they'll get worn down in mere months, both chairs and people. Full range of adjustability is essential, as is full back and lumbar support. Look at the seats in taxis, cop cars, any sort of car where people do long shifts, look at long-haul trucks if you can. Taxis where I live are almost uniformly Mercedes-Benz or Volvo, partly because of their excellent seat ergonomics.
Get people out of the chairs. I know this sounds silly considering you've just bought amazing chairs, but give people options. Exercise balls, kneeling chairs etc., let people mix it up so they aren't stuck in an ordinary sitting position for hours on end. Some basic exercise equipment is good too, doesn't have to be anything more fancy than some wall-mounted bars etc., just to let people stretch a bit.
Quick access to toilets and kitchen(ette). This type of work demands as little downtime as possible. Make sure the kitchen has at least two microwave ovens, depending on the number of people who'll be working there, a good meal is essential to getting through a night shift and even the slight inconvenience of having to wait a bit longer can be amplified by being sleepy and in a job where you deal with very stressful situations on a daily basis. Night shifts have been shown to have a correlation with heart disease and possibly cancer. Don't make people wait too for their food as well:-) The place where I worked had lots of people doing 9-5 jobs as well and the cafeteria always kept well-stocked vending machines with sandwiches and the hot dish of the day for the night shifters. It was highly appreciated.
Speaking of the kitchen, get really good coffee. No scratch that, get great coffee and reliable high-capacity coffee makers. These people will suck down black coffee like you wouldn't believe. Keep the fridge(s) well-stocked with ice-cold Coke (or whatever caffeinated soft drink they like) for the non-coffee drinkers.
I cannot stress this enough: Have fresh fruit available at all times. This was an absolutely life saver for me. You haven't had a tasty apple until you've bitten into a fresh, ripe Golden Delicious at 4:30 in the morning after a long nights stressful work. Keeps people from gorging on chips and other unhealthy snack foods as well.
Lastly, let people have their distractions. We used fancy multi-monitor setups where we could put just about any system we monitored on whichever monitor we wanted, very slick. I can't remember what they called it, but it seemed to work pretty well. My point is that the universal setup seemed to be one monitor for desktop stuff, one for TV (most people had 24/7 news on) and the rest for monitoring etc.. The TV feed was brilliant, during the downtime you could catch up on the news and so on, it helped you get through the boring parts of a night shift.
I'm sure I've forgotten a lot of stuff, but these things stood out in my mind as the most important.
"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." is a good mantra, people need to eat real food instead of pre-made crap. My rule of thumb is that if a great-grandma wouldn't be able to recognize a meal or an ingredient, you should think very hard about whether you really want to eat it. Note that I said a great-grandma, not my great-grandma. There are loads of great foods that us westerners have only been exposed to in the last couple of decades that have been known elsewhere for centuries.
I decided long ago to cut out snacks, soft drinks, fast food, pre-cooked packaged foods (they're way too salty, anyway. And bearnaise sauce power, just add milk? WTF does that have to do with real bearnaise?) and the like, with slight allowances on special occasions, such as birthdays.
I cook every meal myself and I use real ingredients. Crunchy fresh vegetables, real butter, real whole grains, good quality meat (my local supermarket employs a great butcher), fragrant olive oil, all the good stuff that people seem to have forgotten in their quest to make meals easy and forgettable. Yesterday I made chicken paprikash from an old Hungarian recipe and I was in heaven for every single mouthful. Sure, it took longer than popping a frozen meat pie in the microwave, but it's worth it every single taste, every single time.
I tried losing weight by exercising, but it didn't do a thing until I started cooking everything myself and cut the crap out of my diet. I don't cook completely old-school with full-fat cream, whole milk and the like, there are some good lower-fat products available that are every bit as tasty. But I do use butter in my cooking and deep fry stuff from time and probably a lot of things that people have told us never to do unless we want to gain 40 pounds. Yet, I'm losing weight. Old-school real food is much more filling, I eat much less these days than when ate crap foods.
Cooking is fun and it's an activity you can share with your loved ones. Why are people so afraid of it?
The preference for fat is not new. Since the very first humans, calorie-rich foods were essential for survival and no food has higher energy density than fat. I know I prefer my pork chops and steaks with good marbling and a nice ½cm of fat on the edge. Why? Because it tastes better, it's that simple. It's not brainwashing or sinister corporate influence, it's basic human preferences that we're all born with.
I'm not sure I agree with your assertion that modern meat is more fatty than the meats of yesteryear. Have you seen meat from an old-fashioned hog? We're talking upwards of 3cm of pure fat and thorough marbling and don't even get me started on the lard hogs. Today, hogs have been bred to have the leanest meat possible to compete with chicken and it's getting harder and harder to find a steak with proper marbling without ordering it specifically.
Excessive calories are making people fat. Sure, fat has the highest energy content, but have you tried eating more than one big pork chop with the fat intact? You can't or at least it's extremely hard, because your body's reaction to too much fat is making you feel stuffed and making you sweat. With carbs you can basically pile on the calories and you'll have more quick-release energy to use. I think we both can agree that if you don't burn this energy it goes straight to your fat deposits.
The US is fucked up when it comes to corn, the lobbyists have had too much power for too long.
Unfortunately, I don't live in rural France right next to an obscure, but quietly magnificent vineyard. I wish I did, though.
Of course the big-brand stuff is expensive, but I'm sure you have an amazing selection of less well-known wines that either just aren't exported or are ridiculously priced if we do happen to get them. I don't blame the French at all, but I do blame the market for putting French wines on a pedestal as some sort of pantheon of wine.
I'm told by a French friend who is a wine buff that the Aussie wines he can buy are superior to French wines (seriously)
I'm not a wine buff, but I've found that Australian, Chilean, South African and Californian wines are generally both better and cheaper than French wines. There are some really great French wines, but 99% of them are overrated.
When it comes to European wine, I prefer Italian anyway.
I've begun using Windows 7 since upgrading my PC. Arch Linux didn't mind the new hardware, but Windows XP certainly doesn't like having the motherboard+cpu+ram switched out from underneath it:-)
Anyway, I must say the new taskbar in 7 works pretty damn well. I've set it to only combine multiple instances of the same app into an icon once the bar is full, I think it works really well this way with my 5 or 6 most-used applications pinned. I love how for instance the current download progress in Chrome is displayed by the taskbar entry gaining a progress bar, I think it's a very slick idea.
I'd love to have something similar in KDE, either by making icons in the panels act like pinned apps in Windows 7 or by adding application launcher functionality to the taskbar so it acts like the Windows counterpart.
For me, MS definitely got the taskbar spot-on in Windows 7.
I just went and made a donation to MSF. You are among the most courageous people in the world, braving wars, plagues and hostile environments for the sole purpose of helping other people.
So far it looks like a solid digital notebook, it'd be great for drawing and annotating flowcharts etc. at work and. E-reader functionality with a good reflective (transflective?) LCD could be just as good as the e-ink stuff at a slightly lower DPI.
The Eee Tablet has 2450dpi input sensitivity, which sounds about right for a Wacom-based device, not a 2450dpi screen, which would rival even the best laser printers available. Expect the resolution to be a relatively pedestrian 1024x768 or similar.
I like the way Arcanum handled the world map. Cities and fixed locations were hand-designed, but outside of these areas terrain was randomly generated according to the whichever part of the map you were on, desert, forest, mountains etc.
What really impressed me was that you could travel everywhere without ever using the world map. Sure, it would take you ages to travel anywhere by foot in real time (go realism!), but you could if you wanted to. Everything was connected by proper distances instead of some insta-travel world map and it lent a suprising sense of scale to a 2D game.
A sector is 64 x 64 tiles in size and each tile is approximately 6 feet square. Arcanum's map is 2000 x 2000 sectors.
This equates to a world map roughly 235 x 235 km in size. As far as I can remember, Tim Cain said that this would take ~35 real life hours (or 20 game days) to run across in real time, but the engine can handle maps large enough that it would take 14 real life years to traverse them in real time.
Laptops are available with 145+dpi displays...Why can't I buy a desktop monitor with the same pixel density display as a 15.4" 1920x1200 Thinkpad?
You can. And they are expensive. Just like laptop displays are expensive.
Where are these mythical 150+dpi displays sold? I have yet to see any for sale outside of the bizarro-pricing world of medical displays etc., which goes far beyond what I'm guessing you meant by "expensive".
But it seems you'd rather insult me than offer any geniune insight. It's funny how people seem to kneejerk about this particular issue and revert to outright luddism if anyone dares to suggest moving beyond 100dpi. I want print-quality text on my monitor and I'm willing to compromise on a lot of other parameters to get it, but god forbid people lose their precious visibly blocky pixels. Moving to a significantly higher DPI would render antialiasing, sub-pixel hinting and a whole lot of other ugly hacks in one fell swoop.
But oh no, let's insult the people who desire improvement in the most significant output device by a far margin.
Unless you're watching video, the drawbacks you mentioned aren't particularly serious. For working with large amounts of text, pictures, graphs etc. or photo editing, you'd probably never even notice. Besides, the T22x monitors were first introduced in 2001. 9 years of semiconductor development should be able to get us markedly better response time (the 41hz refresh rate is perfectly fine for anything but gaming or 60fps video).
As you wrote, it's perfect for photo and graphic design work, why hasn't high-resolution monitor tech trickled down into the mainstream in the last 9 years?
My point is that the average monitor is still stuck somewhere below 100dpi for no good reason.
Laptops are available with 145+dpi displays, some smartphones have displays in excess of 200dpi and yet the average desktop monitor has only moved from about ~75dpi to less than 100dpi in the last 20 years. Why can't I buy a desktop monitor with the same pixel density display as a 15.4" 1920x1200 Thinkpad?
- Difficult to manufacture - Unsupported by most software - Pointless for 99% of applications - Require high-end hardware to even make use of it
- Somehow the panel manufacturers make it work for laptops etc. - It's just higher resolution, nothing fancy about it until you reach the limits of DVI etc. Can't see stuff because it's too small? Too bad, some of us can and glasses and contact lenses have been available for a long time. Ideally, we'd have completely resolution-independent windowing systems, but it's a chicken and egg problem. - Says who? I want to tile my windows for efficient usage without having them resized to unusuably small window sizes. - Just about any graphics adapter today can do at least 2560x1600 via dual link DVI, regardless of price. Many cards can do even more with linked DVI and the proper flag set in the driver (every Nvidia Quadro card made in the last 5-6 years or more can do this)
Like all car analogies yours falls flat, you're comparing apples to oranges, fuel efficiency != electronics, plus the internal combustion engine has had a lot more time to be perfected, we're banging into the ceiling of what's possible with current fuels.
Why, when there have there been such massive leaps forwards in electronics as relates to personal computers in almost every aspect are we left with one glaring exception?
Unfortunately, finding one of these magnificent monitors is damn hard and they still command rather high prices (although nowhere near the original ~$7500 price tag).
Dear monitor manufacturers, I just want a 200+dpi monitor, is that really so hard to understand? 100dpi is stone age technology compared to the massive leaps forward every single other piece of hardware has experienced.
Even the lowly computer mouse has gone from low-res two-button models hindered by the low update speed of the serial port to modern USB/wireless/bluetooth models with resolutions in the thousands of dpi, multiple hundreds of updates per second, plenty of buttons and scroll wheels and superb ergonomics to boot.
Not to mention the proliferation of multicore processors, ridiculously powerful graphics adapters (they're almost complete computers by themselves, now!), perpendicular recording on hard drives, solid state drives, the list goes on and on.
Shady as hell. In related news, Michigan's legislature passed a "texting while driving" ban which sounds good to the uninitiated on the surface, but will no doubt become a "holding a cell phone while in the driver's seat" ban, be it taking a call or looking at a map on a smart phone.
You really shouldn't be doing any of those things while driving. Unless of course your issue is that you could be ticketed for holding a cell phone while parked, which would be rather draconian.
I have far more problems finding good games on my X-Box 360. I plan to get Red Dead Redemption but I see no other game in the piopline thats a must buy for me.
Other than Red Dead Redemption, you really should get Alan Wake, which looks to be all kinds of awesome.
(Yes, I've preordered. We get it may 14th in Europe)
But there's also Crackdown 2, Fallout: New Vegas (although I prefer my PC for FPS), Alpha Protocol, Split/Second, Prince Of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, Lost Planet 2, Fable 3 and others. There are even a few exclusives in there as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Sixty thousand people have bought the game since May 2009, not in the last two weeks.
I bought the game a couple of months ago and every other game in my collection had been neglected.
The basic gist of it is that the entire world is generated from cubes on the fly. You explore, chop down trees, make tools, mine for minerals and stone, build houses/castles/towers/ridiculous pixel art sculptures and watch out for monsters which inhabit the world at night and dark corners of your mines and naturally-occuring caves. The world is generated on the fly as you explore, with mountains, rivers, forests, caves and the occasional treasure room. Multiplayer is in the early stages right now, but fun. Single player is an amazing time waster, it's so easy to get completely sucked into a world made up of giant pixels.
It's one of the best indie games I've ever tried and it's made by just one guy.
Absolutely, whiteboards are essential for communicating complex relations.
I don't even do NOC stuff anymore, be the office I share with 4 other people has every available wall covered in whiteboards. We use them to map out system architectures, networks, just about anything you can interconnect with lines, shared to-do lists are also very nice to have.
So THAT explains the PowerPoint hellholes that are corporate meetings. They're going for the high score!
Do sound effects and animations award additional points?
Sounds like you're on the right path, be sure to post a follow-up article once you get everything up and running, I'd love to see how it turns out :-)
I worked for a couple of months in doing NOC work, you pick up some basic must-haves really quickly in regards to comfort, I'd like to add them. Temperature and air quality is among the very top priorities for sure, here are a few other points.
Get the best and most comfortable chairs you can find and then get the ones that are even better. People will be sitting in these 24/7, you need the best you can get or they'll get worn down in mere months, both chairs and people. Full range of adjustability is essential, as is full back and lumbar support. Look at the seats in taxis, cop cars, any sort of car where people do long shifts, look at long-haul trucks if you can. Taxis where I live are almost uniformly Mercedes-Benz or Volvo, partly because of their excellent seat ergonomics.
Get people out of the chairs. I know this sounds silly considering you've just bought amazing chairs, but give people options. Exercise balls, kneeling chairs etc., let people mix it up so they aren't stuck in an ordinary sitting position for hours on end. Some basic exercise equipment is good too, doesn't have to be anything more fancy than some wall-mounted bars etc., just to let people stretch a bit.
Quick access to toilets and kitchen(ette). This type of work demands as little downtime as possible. Make sure the kitchen has at least two microwave ovens, depending on the number of people who'll be working there, a good meal is essential to getting through a night shift and even the slight inconvenience of having to wait a bit longer can be amplified by being sleepy and in a job where you deal with very stressful situations on a daily basis. Night shifts have been shown to have a correlation with heart disease and possibly cancer. Don't make people wait too for their food as well :-) The place where I worked had lots of people doing 9-5 jobs as well and the cafeteria always kept well-stocked vending machines with sandwiches and the hot dish of the day for the night shifters. It was highly appreciated.
Speaking of the kitchen, get really good coffee. No scratch that, get great coffee and reliable high-capacity coffee makers. These people will suck down black coffee like you wouldn't believe. Keep the fridge(s) well-stocked with ice-cold Coke (or whatever caffeinated soft drink they like) for the non-coffee drinkers.
I cannot stress this enough: Have fresh fruit available at all times. This was an absolutely life saver for me. You haven't had a tasty apple until you've bitten into a fresh, ripe Golden Delicious at 4:30 in the morning after a long nights stressful work. Keeps people from gorging on chips and other unhealthy snack foods as well.
Lastly, let people have their distractions. We used fancy multi-monitor setups where we could put just about any system we monitored on whichever monitor we wanted, very slick. I can't remember what they called it, but it seemed to work pretty well. My point is that the universal setup seemed to be one monitor for desktop stuff, one for TV (most people had 24/7 news on) and the rest for monitoring etc.. The TV feed was brilliant, during the downtime you could catch up on the news and so on, it helped you get through the boring parts of a night shift.
I'm sure I've forgotten a lot of stuff, but these things stood out in my mind as the most important.
"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." is a good mantra, people need to eat real food instead of pre-made crap. My rule of thumb is that if a great-grandma wouldn't be able to recognize a meal or an ingredient, you should think very hard about whether you really want to eat it. Note that I said a great-grandma, not my great-grandma. There are loads of great foods that us westerners have only been exposed to in the last couple of decades that have been known elsewhere for centuries.
I decided long ago to cut out snacks, soft drinks, fast food, pre-cooked packaged foods (they're way too salty, anyway. And bearnaise sauce power, just add milk? WTF does that have to do with real bearnaise?) and the like, with slight allowances on special occasions, such as birthdays.
I cook every meal myself and I use real ingredients. Crunchy fresh vegetables, real butter, real whole grains, good quality meat (my local supermarket employs a great butcher), fragrant olive oil, all the good stuff that people seem to have forgotten in their quest to make meals easy and forgettable. Yesterday I made chicken paprikash from an old Hungarian recipe and I was in heaven for every single mouthful. Sure, it took longer than popping a frozen meat pie in the microwave, but it's worth it every single taste, every single time.
I tried losing weight by exercising, but it didn't do a thing until I started cooking everything myself and cut the crap out of my diet. I don't cook completely old-school with full-fat cream, whole milk and the like, there are some good lower-fat products available that are every bit as tasty. But I do use butter in my cooking and deep fry stuff from time and probably a lot of things that people have told us never to do unless we want to gain 40 pounds. Yet, I'm losing weight. Old-school real food is much more filling, I eat much less these days than when ate crap foods.
Cooking is fun and it's an activity you can share with your loved ones. Why are people so afraid of it?
The preference for fat is not new. Since the very first humans, calorie-rich foods were essential for survival and no food has higher energy density than fat. I know I prefer my pork chops and steaks with good marbling and a nice ½cm of fat on the edge. Why? Because it tastes better, it's that simple. It's not brainwashing or sinister corporate influence, it's basic human preferences that we're all born with.
I'm not sure I agree with your assertion that modern meat is more fatty than the meats of yesteryear. Have you seen meat from an old-fashioned hog? We're talking upwards of 3cm of pure fat and thorough marbling and don't even get me started on the lard hogs. Today, hogs have been bred to have the leanest meat possible to compete with chicken and it's getting harder and harder to find a steak with proper marbling without ordering it specifically.
Excessive calories are making people fat. Sure, fat has the highest energy content, but have you tried eating more than one big pork chop with the fat intact? You can't or at least it's extremely hard, because your body's reaction to too much fat is making you feel stuffed and making you sweat. With carbs you can basically pile on the calories and you'll have more quick-release energy to use. I think we both can agree that if you don't burn this energy it goes straight to your fat deposits.
The US is fucked up when it comes to corn, the lobbyists have had too much power for too long.
Unfortunately, I don't live in rural France right next to an obscure, but quietly magnificent vineyard. I wish I did, though.
Of course the big-brand stuff is expensive, but I'm sure you have an amazing selection of less well-known wines that either just aren't exported or are ridiculously priced if we do happen to get them. I don't blame the French at all, but I do blame the market for putting French wines on a pedestal as some sort of pantheon of wine.
I'm not a wine buff, but I've found that Australian, Chilean, South African and Californian wines are generally both better and cheaper than French wines. There are some really great French wines, but 99% of them are overrated.
When it comes to European wine, I prefer Italian anyway.
It was Duke Nukem originally, but they changed it in version 2.0 because of a possible trademark issue with a comic book character.
It turned out to be a non-issue, so Duke got his original name back with Duke Nukem II.
I've begun using Windows 7 since upgrading my PC. Arch Linux didn't mind the new hardware, but Windows XP certainly doesn't like having the motherboard+cpu+ram switched out from underneath it :-)
Anyway, I must say the new taskbar in 7 works pretty damn well. I've set it to only combine multiple instances of the same app into an icon once the bar is full, I think it works really well this way with my 5 or 6 most-used applications pinned. I love how for instance the current download progress in Chrome is displayed by the taskbar entry gaining a progress bar, I think it's a very slick idea.
I'd love to have something similar in KDE, either by making icons in the panels act like pinned apps in Windows 7 or by adding application launcher functionality to the taskbar so it acts like the Windows counterpart.
For me, MS definitely got the taskbar spot-on in Windows 7.
We'll just start (or keep) riding supermotos.
Speed bumps? I only see wheelie indicators :-)
I just went and made a donation to MSF. You are among the most courageous people in the world, braving wars, plagues and hostile environments for the sole purpose of helping other people.
I salute you.
"He pulled a Duke" rolls better off the tongue.
Dude, you're getting ripped off. A pint is either 568ml or 473ml, imperial and US respectively ;-)
We'll just have to wait and see, I guess.
So far it looks like a solid digital notebook, it'd be great for drawing and annotating flowcharts etc. at work and. E-reader functionality with a good reflective (transflective?) LCD could be just as good as the e-ink stuff at a slightly lower DPI.
I want one :-)
The Eee Tablet has 2450dpi input sensitivity, which sounds about right for a Wacom-based device, not a 2450dpi screen, which would rival even the best laser printers available. Expect the resolution to be a relatively pedestrian 1024x768 or similar.
I like the way Arcanum handled the world map. Cities and fixed locations were hand-designed, but outside of these areas terrain was randomly generated according to the whichever part of the map you were on, desert, forest, mountains etc.
What really impressed me was that you could travel everywhere without ever using the world map. Sure, it would take you ages to travel anywhere by foot in real time (go realism!), but you could if you wanted to. Everything was connected by proper distances instead of some insta-travel world map and it lent a suprising sense of scale to a 2D game.
This equates to a world map roughly 235 x 235 km in size. As far as I can remember, Tim Cain said that this would take ~35 real life hours (or 20 game days) to run across in real time, but the engine can handle maps large enough that it would take 14 real life years to traverse them in real time.
I am willing to compromise on price, but paying 10 or 20 times what I'd pay for a 100dpi display? That's just ridiculous.
Where are these mythical 150+dpi displays sold? I have yet to see any for sale outside of the bizarro-pricing world of medical displays etc., which goes far beyond what I'm guessing you meant by "expensive".
But it seems you'd rather insult me than offer any geniune insight. It's funny how people seem to kneejerk about this particular issue and revert to outright luddism if anyone dares to suggest moving beyond 100dpi. I want print-quality text on my monitor and I'm willing to compromise on a lot of other parameters to get it, but god forbid people lose their precious visibly blocky pixels. Moving to a significantly higher DPI would render antialiasing, sub-pixel hinting and a whole lot of other ugly hacks in one fell swoop.
But oh no, let's insult the people who desire improvement in the most significant output device by a far margin.
Unless you're watching video, the drawbacks you mentioned aren't particularly serious. For working with large amounts of text, pictures, graphs etc. or photo editing, you'd probably never even notice. Besides, the T22x monitors were first introduced in 2001. 9 years of semiconductor development should be able to get us markedly better response time (the 41hz refresh rate is perfectly fine for anything but gaming or 60fps video).
As you wrote, it's perfect for photo and graphic design work, why hasn't high-resolution monitor tech trickled down into the mainstream in the last 9 years?
My point is that the average monitor is still stuck somewhere below 100dpi for no good reason.
Laptops are available with 145+dpi displays, some smartphones have displays in excess of 200dpi and yet the average desktop monitor has only moved from about ~75dpi to less than 100dpi in the last 20 years. Why can't I buy a desktop monitor with the same pixel density display as a 15.4" 1920x1200 Thinkpad?
- Difficult to manufacture
- Unsupported by most software
- Pointless for 99% of applications
- Require high-end hardware to even make use of it
- Somehow the panel manufacturers make it work for laptops etc.
- It's just higher resolution, nothing fancy about it until you reach the limits of DVI etc. Can't see stuff because it's too small? Too bad, some of us can and glasses and contact lenses have been available for a long time. Ideally, we'd have completely resolution-independent windowing systems, but it's a chicken and egg problem.
- Says who? I want to tile my windows for efficient usage without having them resized to unusuably small window sizes.
- Just about any graphics adapter today can do at least 2560x1600 via dual link DVI, regardless of price. Many cards can do even more with linked DVI and the proper flag set in the driver (every Nvidia Quadro card made in the last 5-6 years or more can do this)
Like all car analogies yours falls flat, you're comparing apples to oranges, fuel efficiency != electronics, plus the internal combustion engine has had a lot more time to be perfected, we're banging into the ceiling of what's possible with current fuels.
Why, when there have there been such massive leaps forwards in electronics as relates to personal computers in almost every aspect are we left with one glaring exception?
Unfortunately, finding one of these magnificent monitors is damn hard and they still command rather high prices (although nowhere near the original ~$7500 price tag).
Dear monitor manufacturers, I just want a 200+dpi monitor, is that really so hard to understand? 100dpi is stone age technology compared to the massive leaps forward every single other piece of hardware has experienced.
Even the lowly computer mouse has gone from low-res two-button models hindered by the low update speed of the serial port to modern USB/wireless/bluetooth models with resolutions in the thousands of dpi, multiple hundreds of updates per second, plenty of buttons and scroll wheels and superb ergonomics to boot.
Not to mention the proliferation of multicore processors, ridiculously powerful graphics adapters (they're almost complete computers by themselves, now!), perpendicular recording on hard drives, solid state drives, the list goes on and on.
Why are we still stuck at 100dpi?
Shady as hell. In related news, Michigan's legislature passed a "texting while driving" ban which sounds good to the uninitiated on the surface, but will no doubt become a "holding a cell phone while in the driver's seat" ban, be it taking a call or looking at a map on a smart phone.
You really shouldn't be doing any of those things while driving. Unless of course your issue is that you could be ticketed for holding a cell phone while parked, which would be rather draconian.
Other than Red Dead Redemption, you really should get Alan Wake, which looks to be all kinds of awesome.
(Yes, I've preordered. We get it may 14th in Europe)
But there's also Crackdown 2, Fallout: New Vegas (although I prefer my PC for FPS), Alpha Protocol, Split/Second, Prince Of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, Lost Planet 2, Fable 3 and others. There are even a few exclusives in there as well.