What sucks is $5 a month or even $1 a month, this assumes everyone can afford such death of thousand cuts and/or that things will stay the same for many years (income, bank account or debit card, who pays the bill..) If a one-time payment of $29.99 could work that'd be better.
Expensive is relative, but games are pigs that need an i5 CPU and a good GPU (if only a recent $100 one) that are otherwise not needed at all. In older times any PC good enough to run Windows 95 was good enough to run real games sold in boxes in stores. It's cheaper now but if you go for console-priced laptop or desktop + monitor you'll have a great shitbox for web games and minecraft not so much console-quality games.
Gladiators were paid athletes that could earn considerable fame and were pampered, at the least well fed enough to be strong and fat. They were carefully matched and fought between the news and drama or musicals. In contrast I guess the trolls were beaten and lashed at for a couple days before being fed to angry lions. Morals aside or if adjusting the morals it would likely be great to live in that era. They had wine and tablets, so not much to be missed.
There a site out there that puts the so-called social trackers behind a toggle button for each. The audience is geeky, but it's by large (french speaking) Windows users and gamers that care about the news about the latest graphics driver or piece of hardware. Still, the web site has been around for as long as slashdot and like slashdot there's basic respect for the users. You still need blocking for the billions other web sites.
Duh. Father and son are facebook friends and known as father and son. They went on fishing weekends and either talked about it (in fb IM!) or were geolocated at the lake in the same 20 hours or took a few pictures or..., maybe all of that.
The joe Six Pack uses what he has! I know one who has Windows XP and no Internet, so he uses that. Music and crap in the file manager, stuff mostly opens in VLC or whatever is associated. Others are with Windows 7, some stream everything, one streams a lot but has a sneakernet collection from just before. Kids these days have a mobile device without a DPAD and never use a file manager, because that's what given to them. They don't know that real keyboards have a couple keys always in the same place that brings them instantly to the top of bottom of a web page.
So if Joe Sixpack is given cloud-only wifi-only hdmi-only shit he will use that. And cheap laptops with no hard drive slots are very close to that. You can run winamp, 1997 software, add a 256GB SD card and access samba shares on that but Joe will not. Users need be educated by the "old guard":)
And they thought it was a good idea to not release the Metro userland for Windows 7! I think that's the original sin, Metro software could have run in floating windows back in 2012 on the OS people actually use. Breaking forward compatibility, and so early to boot was a dickish move.
In former times,.NET 1.1 and 2.0 were available for win 9x, even DX9 and other things. Windows 3.1 had win32s though it mostly served to run Freecell. No Metro apps on Windows 7 means no user base, so nothing to draw the developers in. Users could have installed the stuff voluntarily : "I'm hearing of iPad and Android all the time, what if tried these appy apps things on my PC first?"
Uh? Rightists/Exponentialists don't want to control the wealth, they control it. Their idea of healthcare is endless bureaucracy, price gouging and denial of care, and bankruptcy of insured people by medical bills. They determined that you deserve to eat pink slime and steroid beef. Rightists/Exponentialists want you to pledge allegiance to "free trade", Wall Street, the European Union and so on. If your country lacks "compliance" the US of A and its numerous allies will target it for "regime change" (also now called a "political transition") through various means including firing over a hundred cruise missiles, snipers that fire both at the crowds and the police or sending weapons and money to Al Qaeda so that they fight for "freedom" and "democracy".
This reduces population but not by very much, about a million per decade these days. Rightists/Exponentialists are content with that since they can sell weapons, provide "security guards" and "reconstruction" services. And I forgot, to find crackpots listen at presidents, prime ministers, secretaries of State, foreign ministers, the mainstream media.
Jevon's paradox : increase the efficiency of a process that uses some resource and more of that resource will be used. Well, I'll make a quick and dirty point : if at the end of a decade your economy went 10% more carbon efficient but it grew by 11%, that's exponential growth. Silly numbers but to make the point.
Look Wireless Displayport up : that's really something that seemingly competes with a VGA cable and such. At the same time it falls short for very high res at 90Hz and you would likely not get 100% bitrate all the time. There is ultrafast compression built into DP 1.3 that will certainly be useful. Might not cut it still. Then, GPUs can render some of the scene at partial resolution (recent nvidia PR), wireless VR would have to integrate that saving in the display chain. If that's not enough you'll need some higher frame by frame compression which will introduce latency, which is the VR devil.
I think it's close but using a cable would be safer. At least USB type C is there for that (run fast DP on the high bandwith portion not USB 3.1, use USB 2.0 for everything else)
The spectrum used by it is unlicensed because it is absorbed by the air's oxygen, if you look it up it's one of the spikes oxygen has on a graph. Long distance might not work at all (there might be some slack at the upper or lower range). If the link can survive rain or mist for something line of sight and across the street(s) we'll be lucky enough. I don't know. Good thing is fallback to 2.4 or 5.5 is pretty much built-in if that's of use.
No idea about the power use (mobile battery life). The immediate usefulness is shit tons of very local spectrum i.e. the conference room and the living room ; beaming 1080p60 and such (interactive desktop or display, not a video)
I don't know what are your regulations but in my european country people seem to tow stuff with compact cars just fine. There's a cut off limit to not need a special license at 750kg, just a fair bit under 2000 lbs. Over that the turbodiesel sedan is a traditional towing vehicle e.g. gypsies who live in what they tow. Often a modern Mercedes, sometimes an old high end French one if they're not doing well.
I never understood much why there weren't bluetooth consumer PCI cards, even with a tiny protruding antenna if need be. Even though there were those noisy java featurephones all over the place that I hated in part because they were sold with absoletuly no way (out of the box) to get data out of them - carriers wanted you to send paid for MMS and buy ringtones, wallpapers and crap. This was when a low end laptop was $1000.
What if we made the best reciprocating steam engine we can do, computer-controlled, best design, 21st century materials and machining, high power to weight ratio.. then burn the hydrogen to run it?
Which makes no sense : some actually propose to turn hydrogen into CH4 so that it can be distributed and stored. It can be done, after electrolysis of water, with yet more energy and an industrial source of CO2 waste. If you've got nat gas to begin with you already have a fuel better than hydrogen.
Biomass uses water and soil nutrients, so I believe it's not fit for our relatively huge demands. As an analogy we could chop all accessible wood and burn it in furnaces, or try to support a population of one billion horses and lose everything in a few years.
Looking only at carbon, we could also build a few thousand nuclear reactors and call it done (assuming we would just find untapped uranium and not care if it gets 10x more expensive). I've liked it in principle but bad shit may happen eventually - and I don't know about designs meant to be torn down cheaply.
Maybe there are ways to rape the oceans for biomass, energy and other things but it may be dangerous (even exploiting temperature differentials on a mass scale : what is the impact of vacuuming and mixing stuff from ocean layers?)
I'm pretty sure the long start up time is about the cooling indeed but storing energy in a superconducting loop is a thing (not specifically storing energy in magnets although I don't know if a circle with current circulating in it is an electromagnet or not). From what I had read on wikipedia the use case is very limited, very low energy but very high power and quick turnaround time, used to do some electrical grid smoothing on what I presume are very short timescales.
Generally speaking what new potential tech would be awesome is a cheap superconductor that runs on LN2 and is workable into cables and coils and such. It would be useful for myriads of things like laser diodes allowed more applications that I can think about. What if MRI were dirt cheap?
Not if your stuff is massively parallel. For example on a 100 watt GPU, doubled performance per watt translates to doubled performance - if there's no significant bandwith bottleneck etc. If you're the bad ass dude who wants a 250 watt GPU and nothing else it's the exact same deal. There are a few cards that eat even more but nobody will make a kilowatt GPU (single) just for you.
Game loss sucks but tying games to the hardware has its advantages. It's how game or media ownership worked before Steam DRM and Apple/Google store etc. : games were in a shoe box or on a shelf, and thus not tied to a physical person with debit card, account, email, password and so on. With a family game collection, why should it belong to only one person? Why your brother should be able to steal the whole collection and leave you with an empty console, what if there's a divorce and one of the parents asserts control of the account.. Perhaps there should be a physical item that holds the credential, which you can make one backup of.
If the account owner is lost or destroyed the games may be lost forever too. Offending analogy, but what if grandma dies and someone from the government comes in and burns all her books, tears the photos down, takes all cassettes away.. That sucks donkey (kong) dick.
Eh, Star Fox 64 sucked because it was all too easy. Beating the game in one sitting on the first try, without really dying even once and it took way less than an hour.. WTF ??? The Game Cube game was better, though combats were unchallenging. It was also not a Star Fox game at all, since you played a guy on the ground armed with a staff. Different game with Star Fox characters stuck in it after it was developed. I miss it : the Game Cube was killed quite early, most successful consoles have a lifespan a bit below or above a decade.
How about Windows 10? That's a pretty damn good and topical complaint. Also I highly doubt you've only spent $1200 on a gaming PC in 15 years, unless you're completely happy with 10fps. I'm in the position right now where games like Witcher 3 simply don't run on my GTX 570 (5 years old), and my i5 proc is getting a little long in the tooth with paying 1080 video while gaming. To upgrade both to mid-range specs would cost at least $600. So I bought a ps4 instead. In no small part due to a new program at ebgames that lets you try a game for 7 days and bring it back no questions asked. This only applies to console games.
So with the ever increasing cost of computer hardware, and the frequency with which AAA games suck, there's a lot of reason to buy a console.
Agreed. PC hardware isn't even that expensive for what you get, but you have to get something midrange - years ago, low end was faster than 5-year-old stuff and thus was an upgrade, even for games. Not so anymore. Then there is no non-gaming incentive whatsoever, your outdated PC is good enough for video editing.
My PC is crappier, but even then it's like we have what used to be unobtainable hardware such as a high end Silicon Graphics station (or a big multi-user Sun machine). You need enough RAM then you can do what you want to do. Even the I/O capacity is many gigabytes per second if you can afford to fill the PC with adequate drives and interface cards (up from a shared 133MB/s just over a decade ago)
Yet the games are addicted to very fast CPU (we're still waiting for AMD to come back as a second source supplier in that context) and really, $600 for games? Most of us would be better served by upgrades such as adding a 4TB RAID1, a backup drive, bluetooth on the desktop, 5GHz wifi, a new keyboard, a 10x faster (on writes) USB flash drive or SD etc. and of course more RAM. Most monitors are crap and need to be replaced with not-crap (even e.g. a Sony HDTV a buddy has, by 1990s standards it would be crap. Most LCD technology isn't really fit for screens bigger than 15" or 17", if that) All that does nothing for game performance.
Slashdot Mirror
What sucks is $5 a month or even $1 a month, this assumes everyone can afford such death of thousand cuts and/or that things will stay the same for many years (income, bank account or debit card, who pays the bill..)
If a one-time payment of $29.99 could work that'd be better.
Expensive is relative, but games are pigs that need an i5 CPU and a good GPU (if only a recent $100 one) that are otherwise not needed at all. In older times any PC good enough to run Windows 95 was good enough to run real games sold in boxes in stores. It's cheaper now but if you go for console-priced laptop or desktop + monitor you'll have a great shitbox for web games and minecraft not so much console-quality games.
Gladiators were paid athletes that could earn considerable fame and were pampered, at the least well fed enough to be strong and fat. They were carefully matched and fought between the news and drama or musicals.
In contrast I guess the trolls were beaten and lashed at for a couple days before being fed to angry lions. Morals aside or if adjusting the morals it would likely be great to live in that era. They had wine and tablets, so not much to be missed.
There a site out there that puts the so-called social trackers behind a toggle button for each. The audience is geeky, but it's by large (french speaking) Windows users and gamers that care about the news about the latest graphics driver or piece of hardware. Still, the web site has been around for as long as slashdot and like slashdot there's basic respect for the users.
You still need blocking for the billions other web sites.
It's a good thing, but precisely because it goes back to exposing the internal computer's bus like PCMCIA, PCCard did on 90s PC laptops :)
I don't have the same requirements as you, therefore you are an idiot and a liar.
Duh. Father and son are facebook friends and known as father and son. They went on fishing weekends and either talked about it (in fb IM!) or were geolocated at the lake in the same 20 hours or took a few pictures or..., maybe all of that.
The joe Six Pack uses what he has!
I know one who has Windows XP and no Internet, so he uses that. Music and crap in the file manager, stuff mostly opens in VLC or whatever is associated.
Others are with Windows 7, some stream everything, one streams a lot but has a sneakernet collection from just before.
Kids these days have a mobile device without a DPAD and never use a file manager, because that's what given to them. They don't know that real keyboards have a couple keys always in the same place that brings them instantly to the top of bottom of a web page.
So if Joe Sixpack is given cloud-only wifi-only hdmi-only shit he will use that. And cheap laptops with no hard drive slots are very close to that. You can run winamp, 1997 software, add a 256GB SD card and access samba shares on that but Joe will not. :)
Users need be educated by the "old guard"
And they thought it was a good idea to not release the Metro userland for Windows 7! I think that's the original sin, Metro software could have run in floating windows back in 2012 on the OS people actually use. Breaking forward compatibility, and so early to boot was a dickish move.
In former times, .NET 1.1 and 2.0 were available for win 9x, even DX9 and other things. Windows 3.1 had win32s though it mostly served to run Freecell.
No Metro apps on Windows 7 means no user base, so nothing to draw the developers in. Users could have installed the stuff voluntarily : "I'm hearing of iPad and Android all the time, what if tried these appy apps things on my PC first?"
Uh?
Rightists/Exponentialists don't want to control the wealth, they control it.
Their idea of healthcare is endless bureaucracy, price gouging and denial of care, and bankruptcy of insured people by medical bills.
They determined that you deserve to eat pink slime and steroid beef.
Rightists/Exponentialists want you to pledge allegiance to "free trade", Wall Street, the European Union and so on. If your country lacks "compliance" the US of A and its numerous allies will target it for "regime change" (also now called a "political transition") through various means including firing over a hundred cruise missiles, snipers that fire both at the crowds and the police or sending weapons and money to Al Qaeda so that they fight for "freedom" and "democracy".
This reduces population but not by very much, about a million per decade these days. Rightists/Exponentialists are content with that since they can sell weapons, provide "security guards" and "reconstruction" services.
And I forgot, to find crackpots listen at presidents, prime ministers, secretaries of State, foreign ministers, the mainstream media.
Jevon's paradox : increase the efficiency of a process that uses some resource and more of that resource will be used.
Well, I'll make a quick and dirty point : if at the end of a decade your economy went 10% more carbon efficient but it grew by 11%, that's exponential growth. Silly numbers but to make the point.
Look Wireless Displayport up : that's really something that seemingly competes with a VGA cable and such. At the same time it falls short for very high res at 90Hz and you would likely not get 100% bitrate all the time. There is ultrafast compression built into DP 1.3 that will certainly be useful. Might not cut it still. Then, GPUs can render some of the scene at partial resolution (recent nvidia PR), wireless VR would have to integrate that saving in the display chain. If that's not enough you'll need some higher frame by frame compression which will introduce latency, which is the VR devil.
I think it's close but using a cable would be safer. At least USB type C is there for that (run fast DP on the high bandwith portion not USB 3.1, use USB 2.0 for everything else)
The spectrum used by it is unlicensed because it is absorbed by the air's oxygen, if you look it up it's one of the spikes oxygen has on a graph. Long distance might not work at all (there might be some slack at the upper or lower range).
If the link can survive rain or mist for something line of sight and across the street(s) we'll be lucky enough. I don't know. Good thing is fallback to 2.4 or 5.5 is pretty much built-in if that's of use.
No idea about the power use (mobile battery life). The immediate usefulness is shit tons of very local spectrum i.e. the conference room and the living room ; beaming 1080p60 and such (interactive desktop or display, not a video)
I don't know what are your regulations but in my european country people seem to tow stuff with compact cars just fine. There's a cut off limit to not need a special license at 750kg, just a fair bit under 2000 lbs. Over that the turbodiesel sedan is a traditional towing vehicle e.g. gypsies who live in what they tow. Often a modern Mercedes, sometimes an old high end French one if they're not doing well.
I never understood much why there weren't bluetooth consumer PCI cards, even with a tiny protruding antenna if need be. Even though there were those noisy java featurephones all over the place that I hated in part because they were sold with absoletuly no way (out of the box) to get data out of them - carriers wanted you to send paid for MMS and buy ringtones, wallpapers and crap. This was when a low end laptop was $1000.
What if we made the best reciprocating steam engine we can do, computer-controlled, best design, 21st century materials and machining, high power to weight ratio.. then burn the hydrogen to run it?
Which makes no sense : some actually propose to turn hydrogen into CH4 so that it can be distributed and stored. It can be done, after electrolysis of water, with yet more energy and an industrial source of CO2 waste.
If you've got nat gas to begin with you already have a fuel better than hydrogen.
Biomass uses water and soil nutrients, so I believe it's not fit for our relatively huge demands. As an analogy we could chop all accessible wood and burn it in furnaces, or try to support a population of one billion horses and lose everything in a few years.
Looking only at carbon, we could also build a few thousand nuclear reactors and call it done (assuming we would just find untapped uranium and not care if it gets 10x more expensive). I've liked it in principle but bad shit may happen eventually - and I don't know about designs meant to be torn down cheaply.
Maybe there are ways to rape the oceans for biomass, energy and other things but it may be dangerous (even exploiting temperature differentials on a mass scale : what is the impact of vacuuming and mixing stuff from ocean layers?)
Of course, it might be possible to shine light at the Sun and get it back later.
I'm pretty sure the long start up time is about the cooling indeed but storing energy in a superconducting loop is a thing (not specifically storing energy in magnets although I don't know if a circle with current circulating in it is an electromagnet or not). From what I had read on wikipedia the use case is very limited, very low energy but very high power and quick turnaround time, used to do some electrical grid smoothing on what I presume are very short timescales.
Generally speaking what new potential tech would be awesome is a cheap superconductor that runs on LN2 and is workable into cables and coils and such. It would be useful for myriads of things like laser diodes allowed more applications that I can think about. What if MRI were dirt cheap?
I liked that read, even though in real life you don't start with a lemonade stand and end up as a billionaire or whatever the story is :)
Not if your stuff is massively parallel. For example on a 100 watt GPU, doubled performance per watt translates to doubled performance - if there's no significant bandwith bottleneck etc.
If you're the bad ass dude who wants a 250 watt GPU and nothing else it's the exact same deal. There are a few cards that eat even more but nobody will make a kilowatt GPU (single) just for you.
Game loss sucks but tying games to the hardware has its advantages. It's how game or media ownership worked before Steam DRM and Apple/Google store etc. : games were in a shoe box or on a shelf, and thus not tied to a physical person with debit card, account, email, password and so on.
With a family game collection, why should it belong to only one person? Why your brother should be able to steal the whole collection and leave you with an empty console, what if there's a divorce and one of the parents asserts control of the account..
Perhaps there should be a physical item that holds the credential, which you can make one backup of.
If the account owner is lost or destroyed the games may be lost forever too. Offending analogy, but what if grandma dies and someone from the government comes in and burns all her books, tears the photos down, takes all cassettes away.. That sucks donkey (kong) dick.
Eh, Star Fox 64 sucked because it was all too easy. Beating the game in one sitting on the first try, without really dying even once and it took way less than an hour.. WTF ???
The Game Cube game was better, though combats were unchallenging. It was also not a Star Fox game at all, since you played a guy on the ground armed with a staff. Different game with Star Fox characters stuck in it after it was developed. I miss it : the Game Cube was killed quite early, most successful consoles have a lifespan a bit below or above a decade.
How about Windows 10? That's a pretty damn good and topical complaint. Also I highly doubt you've only spent $1200 on a gaming PC in 15 years, unless you're completely happy with 10fps. I'm in the position right now where games like Witcher 3 simply don't run on my GTX 570 (5 years old), and my i5 proc is getting a little long in the tooth with paying 1080 video while gaming. To upgrade both to mid-range specs would cost at least $600. So I bought a ps4 instead. In no small part due to a new program at ebgames that lets you try a game for 7 days and bring it back no questions asked. This only applies to console games.
So with the ever increasing cost of computer hardware, and the frequency with which AAA games suck, there's a lot of reason to buy a console.
Agreed. PC hardware isn't even that expensive for what you get, but you have to get something midrange - years ago, low end was faster than 5-year-old stuff and thus was an upgrade, even for games. Not so anymore. Then there is no non-gaming incentive whatsoever, your outdated PC is good enough for video editing.
My PC is crappier, but even then it's like we have what used to be unobtainable hardware such as a high end Silicon Graphics station (or a big multi-user Sun machine). You need enough RAM then you can do what you want to do.
Even the I/O capacity is many gigabytes per second if you can afford to fill the PC with adequate drives and interface cards (up from a shared 133MB/s just over a decade ago)
Yet the games are addicted to very fast CPU (we're still waiting for AMD to come back as a second source supplier in that context) and really, $600 for games? Most of us would be better served by upgrades such as adding a 4TB RAID1, a backup drive, bluetooth on the desktop, 5GHz wifi, a new keyboard, a 10x faster (on writes) USB flash drive or SD etc. and of course more RAM.
Most monitors are crap and need to be replaced with not-crap (even e.g. a Sony HDTV a buddy has, by 1990s standards it would be crap. Most LCD technology isn't really fit for screens bigger than 15" or 17", if that)
All that does nothing for game performance.