Laptops are certainly a possible candidate, but do you really believe the average gaming laptop consumes 320W?
If I remember correctly, the power brick on my gaming laptop is only rated for 80W. I've no idea how the graphics performance compares to Ivy Bridge, but I've only recently had to stop running with high-quality graphics settings on most new games.
(I.e., 64bit is pushing more data around in every single machine instruction because the addresses specified are longer.)
No, it's not. In fact, you're less likely to require an address in an instruction on an x64 CPU because you have twice as many registers so you're not having to perpetually push values out to RAM and read them back in order to free up registers for other uses.
Sure, but low resolution and medium quality is of no interest to most gamers. Being able to play a game badly isn't really a big selling point when you can play it well for another $100.
But putting the 'best and brightest' in charge has usually been far worse. They actually believe they can make everything better with central planning.
In the same way the government disincentivzed space travel.
Uh, they did.
Being first to the Moon was the biggest single incentive for private manned spaceflight; someone would have done it sooner or later for the prestige. But the government threw vast amounts of money at NASA to do it without leaving any usable infrastructure behind that would allow such flights to continue.
So if any company says today 'we want to raise billions of dollars to go to the moon', people just shrug and say 'so what? we already did that years ago'.
The largest advantage of a Windows Tablet is that everything just works. You can run Starcraft if you feel like it. You can run not some butchered Google Docs or HTML5 version of office but the real application. You can run the real version of flash, silverlight and everything else if you really really need to.
But, um, that's rather the point. The tablet claims to be 'Windows', but you can't do any of those things.
All you'll be able to run are ARM apps, Metro apps and the limited subset of.Net apps that can run on ARM. If you try to run some random Windows program on your tablet, you'll probably find it won't run.
The fact that the Win RT based devices can't join a domain doesn't matter. In fact, the iPad has never been able to join one and it doesn't seem to be a problem with them.
I think you miss the point. Why buy a Windows tablet if it doesn't have the Windows features that you're used to?
If a Windows tablet is no easier to integrate into your business than an iPad, why not just buy an iPad?
The space shuttle has a mass of around 100 tons and is very fragile. A 500 ton asteroid would have a much better chance of surviving re-entry, but then you'd just have a 500 ton rock. We've got plenty of those already.
The games industry is MUCH more fragile than the car, music or movies industry, before some smartass comes in with his "used cars never killed the industry", perhaps you should also look again at the MASSIVE bailout of a car company that happened in the not too distant past.
Used cars didn't kill GM, poor management did.
How many people do you think would put up $20-30,000 to buy a car if there was no used market?
He produced the Frontier games, didn't he? My experience of those was:
Frontier: copy protection so bad that you had about a 25% chance of being able to start the game until you removed it. First Encouters: required a patch to run at all, then crashed. I think I played about an hour before I gave up.
So I doubt he has to worry about anyone wanting to buy a used copy of either.
I think a large part of the blame must go to publishers, who have apparently only been interested in 'literary' SF about dark characters (preferably written by raving socialists) over the last few years. This is probably why 60% of the best-selling SF e-books on Amazon were self-published, last I checked.
You know, we took an outage in our dev lab yesterday when a PDU blew, and took out some fiber that was running next to it. Shit happens...maybe not often, but it does.
Dual PSUs fed from two independent PDUs fed by two independent power sources. We would just shrug and replace the PDU if that happened.
Its a question of how fast you can recover WHEN it happens.
Much faster from a blown PDU than from having your server confiscated by the Feds because some other user may have broken the law.
We did have to reboot one of ours last year, but that was only because the internal hardware monitoring system was claiming the air temperature was 255 degrees.
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Laptops are certainly a possible candidate, but do you really believe the average gaming laptop consumes 320W?
If I remember correctly, the power brick on my gaming laptop is only rated for 80W. I've no idea how the graphics performance compares to Ivy Bridge, but I've only recently had to stop running with high-quality graphics settings on most new games.
(I.e., 64bit is pushing more data around in every single machine instruction because the addresses specified are longer.)
No, it's not. In fact, you're less likely to require an address in an instruction on an x64 CPU because you have twice as many registers so you're not having to perpetually push values out to RAM and read them back in order to free up registers for other uses.
Sure, but low resolution and medium quality is of no interest to most gamers. Being able to play a game badly isn't really a big selling point when you can play it well for another $100.
A 50% GPU improvement over Sandy Bridge is VERY significant.
Not particularly. A 50% faster GPU will still suck for gamers and will be irrelevant to non-gamers.
And commercial games had things like the LENSLOK protection.
Ah, LENSLOK, the Starforce of its day.
Though arguably the 'match the right colored squares' system could be worse when playing on a monochrome TV.
No, uneducated democracies are bad.
But putting the 'best and brightest' in charge has usually been far worse. They actually believe they can make everything better with central planning.
The fastest way to destroy a sense of community is to have government meddle in everything and take over roles that local charities used to fulfill.
Individuals create communities, not government.
In the same way the government disincentivzed space travel.
Uh, they did.
Being first to the Moon was the biggest single incentive for private manned spaceflight; someone would have done it sooner or later for the prestige. But the government threw vast amounts of money at NASA to do it without leaving any usable infrastructure behind that would allow such flights to continue.
So if any company says today 'we want to raise billions of dollars to go to the moon', people just shrug and say 'so what? we already did that years ago'.
The largest advantage of a Windows Tablet is that everything just works. You can run Starcraft if you feel like it. You can run not some butchered Google Docs or HTML5 version of office but the real application. You can run the real version of flash, silverlight and everything else if you really really need to.
But, um, that's rather the point. The tablet claims to be 'Windows', but you can't do any of those things.
All you'll be able to run are ARM apps, Metro apps and the limited subset of .Net apps that can run on ARM. If you try to run some random Windows program on your tablet, you'll probably find it won't run.
The fact that the Win RT based devices can't join a domain doesn't matter. In fact, the iPad has never been able to join one and it doesn't seem to be a problem with them.
I think you miss the point. Why buy a Windows tablet if it doesn't have the Windows features that you're used to?
If a Windows tablet is no easier to integrate into your business than an iPad, why not just buy an iPad?
I saw someone using an iPad only three weeks ago. I saw another one last year.
I presume you hand your entire disposable income to 'hungry people starving under a bridge', right?
The space shuttle has a mass of around 100 tons and is very fragile. A 500 ton asteroid would have a much better chance of surviving re-entry, but then you'd just have a 500 ton rock. We've got plenty of those already.
What are they going to find on a rock in space that is not already available on THIS rock in space?
I heard they're looking for something called 'Unobtanium'.
+Not really. Most of what got crushed was shitty old gassers nobody can afford to fuel.
Because it totally makes sense to buy a $20,000 car to save $1,000 a year in fuel costs.
The games industry is MUCH more fragile than the car, music or movies industry, before some smartass comes in with his "used cars never killed the industry", perhaps you should also look again at the MASSIVE bailout of a car company that happened in the not too distant past.
Used cars didn't kill GM, poor management did.
How many people do you think would put up $20-30,000 to buy a car if there was no used market?
That's called Steam, isn't it? I don't remember the last time I paid more than $5 for a game there.
He produced the Frontier games, didn't he? My experience of those was:
Frontier: copy protection so bad that you had about a 25% chance of being able to start the game until you removed it.
First Encouters: required a patch to run at all, then crashed. I think I played about an hour before I gave up.
So I doubt he has to worry about anyone wanting to buy a used copy of either.
"Startups these days are focused, driven, and efficient, creating products that people actually use."
Creating products that people use is easy. Creating products that people will pay to use is the hard part.
Meanwhile the British government are pushing laws to record everything everyone does on the Internet at the behest of the EU.
Who cares what the EU SAY, when they DO the opposite?
I think a large part of the blame must go to publishers, who have apparently only been interested in 'literary' SF about dark characters (preferably written by raving socialists) over the last few years. This is probably why 60% of the best-selling SF e-books on Amazon were self-published, last I checked.
Yeah, I'm sure some hardware register was stuck with all bits set; power cycling fixed it.
You know, we took an outage in our dev lab yesterday when a PDU blew, and took out some fiber that was running next to it. Shit happens...maybe not often, but it does.
Dual PSUs fed from two independent PDUs fed by two independent power sources. We would just shrug and replace the PDU if that happened.
Its a question of how fast you can recover WHEN it happens.
Much faster from a blown PDU than from having your server confiscated by the Feds because some other user may have broken the law.
You must buy crappy servers.
We did have to reboot one of ours last year, but that was only because the internal hardware monitoring system was claiming the air temperature was 255 degrees.
Considering the guy is an air traffic controller, I'm pretty sure they trust him.
Considering that the TSA have reportedly confiscated scissors and bottles of water from airline pilots, I wouldn't be so sure about that.