Why would game developers develop games for Nintendo if there was no Nintendo hardware? No-one is going to develop a 'Nintendo game' if it's running on an x86 server and displayed over the Internet.
However, if I can use a netbook (rather than a $2000 15 pound gaming notebook) paired with in-flight wi-fi and play my 360 games on the airplane, it might be worth it.
For the cost of playing a 360 game streamed over satellite wi-fi, you could buy the best laptop on the planet.
And that's assuming that several people playing games on the same aircraft could even get enough bandwidth in the first place. Isn't the total bandwidth to one aircraft around 512kps?
If you want data integrity, use NTFS. Using Fat32 is like saying you want a reliable car, so you're buying a Edsel because they've been around a long time-- it doesn't make sense
I've lost far more data on NTFS than FAT.
In fact, I don't think I've ever lost data on FAT without a hardware failure (e.g. bad floppy disk), whereas I've seen Windows delete multi-gigabyte files from NTFS disks after a power-failure. And any blue screen with Firefox open on an NTFS partition would normally delete all my bookmarks.
As I understand it, NTFS only tries to guarantee data consistency, not that your data is actually there; and reformatting the hard drive every time you reboot would achieve that.
Instead of saying that it isn't bad, that it isn't real, shouldn't we be asking ourselves how is it that we are unable to recognize it as real in the moment we are doing it.
Because... duh... it's not real.
I don't think it's any coincidence that the people who most believe that others can't distinguish between fantasy and reality seem unable to do so themselves.
Personally, I've been killing things in computer games for thirty years, yet I won't even kill a spider in the house if I can catch it and toss it out the door instead. But then I can tell what's real and what's not.
It was a "few pixels" back in the days of Space Invaders, but now the push is to make it more and more pixels, to get more realistic.
And? The more realistic it becomes, the less people will enjoy doing it unless they're psychopaths already: Grossman's own book points out that the vast majority of people have a natural aversion to killing, and that's not going to be any less applicable to realistic killing in computer games than to killing in real life.
As a poster up above pointed out, you can't quit boot camp the way you can quit playing a computer game, so the comparison is just silly.
Not if they keep doing it until that emotional backlash subsides and they see "things that look and act exactly like humans" as empty cybernetic shells rather than as people.
Except anyone who keeps killing innocent photorealistic VR humans until 'the emotional backlash subsides' was probably a psychopath to begin with.
You must have a pretty low opinion of your fellow humans if you think that the average person will enjoy realistic in-game killings as opposed to current cartoon-style death.
You might also want to explain how the average frontline wartime soldier -- you know, someone who's been professionally indoctrinated to kill people and has actually, really, physically killed them for real in real life -- manages not to go on a killing spree after being discharged from the service, yet a kid who's killed a few pixels on a video screen is going to do so?
I have read it, and I'm sorry, but I'm far from convinced: he makes some good points in his book, but this one is just silly. It's one thing to take a soldier who's going through the brutalising process of basic training, teach them to shoot a gun at a target, then throw them into a war-zone with a gun and people shooting back at them and expect them to shoot back; it's a huge jump to go from there to claiming that shooting a few pixels on a screen using a mouse button in the comfort of your own home will make the average person more likely to go on a killing spree.
The way I read it, his major concern is that as the person who commits realistic murder, YOU will be affected by the emotional backlash of seeing "someone" suffer as a consequence of your actions.
Which must be a good thing, because it will make non-psychopaths far less likely to murder someone in real life.
I could be wrong here, but I'm pretty sure that there is violence in video-games is because in reality we are increasingly less able to do it.
Absolutely: humans are by far the most bad-ass predators on the planet, yet for the last few decades governments have been trying harder and harder to wrap us in cotton wool. It's no surprise that if we're denied an outlet for our natural violence then we'll find one in play.
What the cotton-wool fanatics seem to miss is that is that violence is not a bad thing so long as it's used in defensively rather than destructively, and that if humans can't play at being violent, they're far more likely to bring violence into the real world in destructive manners.
Basically, instead of being polite and letting the OS keep the disk spun down until data needs to be written, Firefox spins up the HD for writing every single time it does anything.
But this isn't a bug, it's a feature: the ext4 developers keep telling us that Posix requires that you fsync() any file that you actually want to find on the disk after a reboot.
More seriously, this may be a response to the earlier problems on Windows where you would reboot after a system crash or power outage and find all your bookmarks had been eaten by scandisk because they weren't properly written to disk before the crash.
Either change the views of the people who hold the power, or replace them with others, and the situation changes. I'm not going to suggest this is easy, but I am going to suggest that if the constituents of a given Labour MP started flooding his or her office with letters pushing for change, it'd be a step in the right direction.
Again, over 50% of laws in the UK are rubber-stamping EU regulations: many of those pushed through the EU by current or failed British socialist politcos who could never have got the same laws through in the UK. How will writing to a Labour MP change that?
This does get us to the larger problems, which are apathy and support for the current state of affairs.
22% of voters voted for the Labour party, but they won anyway. Where do you get the idea that people support the current state of affairs?
If the current crop of politicians didn't have popular support for what they were doing, they'd be out of a job.
HOW?!?!?!?! Who's going to throw them out?
Where I used to live in the UK I could vote Tory and the Tories would win. I could vote Labour and the Tories would win. I could probably vote BNP -- no idea whether they had a candidate there -- and the Tories would win. There was absolutely nothing I could do as a voter to make any difference whatsoever.
Unless he lives in a tiny marginal constituency, how is the OP supposed to 'throw them out' short of marching on Parliament with a rope?
So part of what needs to happen is getting through to enough of the people who either want the current government or don't care either way.
I didn't know anyone in the UK who wanted the current government: even the few who admitted to voting Labour had to hold their noses as they did so, and some of them ended up marching through London protesting against the same government's actions. Which, of course, made fsck all difference to anything the government did.
Britain is simply broken: the only way to change it is civil war or catastrophic collapse. The smart people are getting out before they require exit visas.
yeah, we socialists were definitely the ones who decided to deregulate the banks and thus cause the collapse of the entire fucking world economy!
Hint: aside from outright takeover, what could be more socialist regulation of finance than a _central bank_ setting interest rates? There's a reason why imposing central banking was one of the goals of the Communist Manifesto for converting free countries to communism.
Also, UK has one of the highest standards of living in the world.
LOL. I now earn less than I did in the UK, but my standard of living is dramatically higher... I suspect that's true of most of Europe and North America.
I don't know how anyone can suggest that Britain has a high standard of living, unless you're comparing it to some third-world crap-hole. The cost of living is among the highest in the developed world and you get crap for it.
That being said, my suggestion to the person who posted this article is the improve the local situation instead of fleeing from it.
Labour were elected by 22% of the voters, the Tories aren't much different, though at least they'd get rid of ID cards, and they can't change much anyway because both parties have worked together over the last forty years to hand Britain's sovereignty over to the EU (I believe more than half of all new laws in the UK are now just rubber-stamping edicts from Brussels).
Given those facts, maybe you could suggest how the OP could 'improve the local situation' short of rioting in the streets and stringing up the politicos from lamp-posts on Westminster Bridge? At an absolute minimum, he'd have to get Britain out of the EU, and the entire politico-media establishment would oppose that.
The really scary part is that if things continue the way they're going, I could easily see people getting desperate enough to elect whackos like the BNP... now imagine a neo-Nazi government handed the keys to Brown's surveillance state and terrorist powers and it will make Iran look like a fun place to live.
But to be quite honest with you, with what is going in Iran at this moment, your request seems frivolous.
Yes, that's always the excuse the statists use: 'sure, Britain is a bloated, high-tax surveillance state where the police are more concerned with screwing fines out of the middle class than protecting them from real criminals and at any moment you can be dragged from your house and locked up for six weeks without being charged, but what about Zimbabwe, eh? You can't complain about Britain when you could be living in Zimbabwe' (though presumably now it's Iran that's the scapegoat).
I fled the UK a couple of years ago, and would never even think of going back unless the Tories throw out everything Labour have done to destroy the place over the last sixty years.
"Were you trying to say there is some kind of problem?"
Money wasted on stupid wind turbines is money not spent doing something useful that people actually want.
Or do you really believe that the country would be better off if the government paid half the unemployed to smash windows and the other half to fix them?
The only people who think wind turbines are a good idea are naive Greenists and wind turbine companies.
"Are you sure that old media isn't legally required to disclose when they have been paid to put up certain content?"
I don't remember ever seeing a game magazine admit that they gave 'This Game Sucks 2' a 95% rating just because of all the advertising the publisher bought that month even though everyone who's seen it knows that it stinks.
In a rational world this whole idea would be thrown out as blatantly unconstitutional.
Why would you hire the leftovers? Really, you think that you can just get better quality by spending less? Really?
Here's the deal: Manager X tells their boss that they can save the company millions of dollars by sacking US IT staff and sending the work to India.
When the software comes back from the Indian sweat-shop it's a steaming pile of sacred cow shit, but by that time Manager X has got big brownie points, a big bonus and a promotion and doesn't have to deal with it. Now the problem is dumped in the hands of Manager Y and the few US IT staff who are still left at the company.
This is just another example of the perverse incentives in Western business which gave us delights such as the credit crash, where bankers could make multi-million dollar bonuses by lending billions to people who never had any chance of paying the money back... of course they wouldn't have to repay their bonuses when the loans went bad, and the government would bail out the banks anyway.
I honestly don't think you know many 'average users'. In my experience ordinary non-technical people rip DVDs far more than I do; e.g. to make copies on DVD-R because they don't want their kids to destroy the originals.
If they don't know there's DRM on DVDs it's because the DRM has been completely broken so they don't even see it (e.g. their $30 DVD player is already multi-region out of the box).
Though they get seriously pissed when (name of EVIL movie company deleted) forces them to sit through several minutes of trailers and crap every single bloody time they put the DVD in the player because their kids want to watch it again, because said player actually enforces the 'do not allow the player to skip' bit on the disk.
"I, for one, find it puzzling why both Fedora and Ubuntu continue to put GNOME first with KDE as the also-ran."
Probably because Gnome works, and Redhat customers are paying for something that... works.
I tried the latest KDE on Ubuntu recently (not sure which version they're shipping) and while it looked somewhat pretty it crashed fairly often, I found some of the features bizarre and annoying (e.g. the side-scrolling program menu menus) and never found out how to get it to not display the windows on my 1920x1080 LCD with fonts about thirty pixels tall (I have a big monitor so I can display lots of windows, not so I can display windows which appear the same size as if it was a 1024x768 display but use bigger fonts).
I'd certainly be willing to switch, but only if they spend more time making KDE usable than making it look pretty.
DRM _IS_ bad because there's no way to allow me to use media I purchase in any way I choose (e.g ripping DVDs to my MythTV server) while preventing me from giving those files to someone else.
DRM simply cannot be 'implemented properly', because it's broken by design; either I control my use of purchased media or the IP Robber Barons do... there's no middle ground.
Any effective DRM will cripple my use of media so much that I simply won't buy it. For example, I would have bought a few hundred Blu-Ray disks by now if it weren't for the DRM... if it's cracked to the point where I can use those disks as easily as DVDs, then I'll start buying them, but not until then.
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Why would game developers develop games for Nintendo if there was no Nintendo hardware? No-one is going to develop a 'Nintendo game' if it's running on an x86 server and displayed over the Internet.
However, if I can use a netbook (rather than a $2000 15 pound gaming notebook) paired with in-flight wi-fi and play my 360 games on the airplane, it might be worth it.
For the cost of playing a 360 game streamed over satellite wi-fi, you could buy the best laptop on the planet.
And that's assuming that several people playing games on the same aircraft could even get enough bandwidth in the first place. Isn't the total bandwidth to one aircraft around 512kps?
If you want data integrity, use NTFS. Using Fat32 is like saying you want a reliable car, so you're buying a Edsel because they've been around a long time-- it doesn't make sense
I've lost far more data on NTFS than FAT.
In fact, I don't think I've ever lost data on FAT without a hardware failure (e.g. bad floppy disk), whereas I've seen Windows delete multi-gigabyte files from NTFS disks after a power-failure. And any blue screen with Firefox open on an NTFS partition would normally delete all my bookmarks.
As I understand it, NTFS only tries to guarantee data consistency, not that your data is actually there; and reformatting the hard drive every time you reboot would achieve that.
Fortunately the .Net runtime installer crashes every time it tries to update my Windows machine, so I don't have this problem :).
Instead of saying that it isn't bad, that it isn't real, shouldn't we be asking ourselves how is it that we are unable to recognize it as real in the moment we are doing it.
Because... duh... it's not real.
I don't think it's any coincidence that the people who most believe that others can't distinguish between fantasy and reality seem unable to do so themselves.
Personally, I've been killing things in computer games for thirty years, yet I won't even kill a spider in the house if I can catch it and toss it out the door instead. But then I can tell what's real and what's not.
It was a "few pixels" back in the days of Space Invaders, but now the push is to make it more and more pixels, to get more realistic.
And? The more realistic it becomes, the less people will enjoy doing it unless they're psychopaths already: Grossman's own book points out that the vast majority of people have a natural aversion to killing, and that's not going to be any less applicable to realistic killing in computer games than to killing in real life.
As a poster up above pointed out, you can't quit boot camp the way you can quit playing a computer game, so the comparison is just silly.
Not if they keep doing it until that emotional backlash subsides and they see "things that look and act exactly like humans" as empty cybernetic shells rather than as people.
Except anyone who keeps killing innocent photorealistic VR humans until 'the emotional backlash subsides' was probably a psychopath to begin with.
You must have a pretty low opinion of your fellow humans if you think that the average person will enjoy realistic in-game killings as opposed to current cartoon-style death.
You might also want to explain how the average frontline wartime soldier -- you know, someone who's been professionally indoctrinated to kill people and has actually, really, physically killed them for real in real life -- manages not to go on a killing spree after being discharged from the service, yet a kid who's killed a few pixels on a video screen is going to do so?
Read this by Dave Grossman http://www.killology.com/print/print_teachkid.htm
I have read it, and I'm sorry, but I'm far from convinced: he makes some good points in his book, but this one is just silly. It's one thing to take a soldier who's going through the brutalising process of basic training, teach them to shoot a gun at a target, then throw them into a war-zone with a gun and people shooting back at them and expect them to shoot back; it's a huge jump to go from there to claiming that shooting a few pixels on a screen using a mouse button in the comfort of your own home will make the average person more likely to go on a killing spree.
The way I read it, his major concern is that as the person who commits realistic murder, YOU will be affected by the emotional backlash of seeing "someone" suffer as a consequence of your actions.
Which must be a good thing, because it will make non-psychopaths far less likely to murder someone in real life.
I could be wrong here, but I'm pretty sure that there is violence in video-games is because in reality we are increasingly less able to do it.
Absolutely: humans are by far the most bad-ass predators on the planet, yet for the last few decades governments have been trying harder and harder to wrap us in cotton wool. It's no surprise that if we're denied an outlet for our natural violence then we'll find one in play.
What the cotton-wool fanatics seem to miss is that is that violence is not a bad thing so long as it's used in defensively rather than destructively, and that if humans can't play at being violent, they're far more likely to bring violence into the real world in destructive manners.
Basically, instead of being polite and letting the OS keep the disk spun down until data needs to be written, Firefox spins up the HD for writing every single time it does anything.
But this isn't a bug, it's a feature: the ext4 developers keep telling us that Posix requires that you fsync() any file that you actually want to find on the disk after a reboot.
More seriously, this may be a response to the earlier problems on Windows where you would reboot after a system crash or power outage and find all your bookmarks had been eaten by scandisk because they weren't properly written to disk before the crash.
Either change the views of the people who hold the power, or replace them with others, and the situation changes. I'm not going to suggest this is easy, but I am going to suggest that if the constituents of a given Labour MP started flooding his or her office with letters pushing for change, it'd be a step in the right direction.
Again, over 50% of laws in the UK are rubber-stamping EU regulations: many of those pushed through the EU by current or failed British socialist politcos who could never have got the same laws through in the UK. How will writing to a Labour MP change that?
This does get us to the larger problems, which are apathy and support for the current state of affairs.
22% of voters voted for the Labour party, but they won anyway. Where do you get the idea that people support the current state of affairs?
If the current crop of politicians didn't have popular support for what they were doing, they'd be out of a job.
HOW?!?!?!?! Who's going to throw them out?
Where I used to live in the UK I could vote Tory and the Tories would win. I could vote Labour and the Tories would win. I could probably vote BNP -- no idea whether they had a candidate there -- and the Tories would win. There was absolutely nothing I could do as a voter to make any difference whatsoever.
Unless he lives in a tiny marginal constituency, how is the OP supposed to 'throw them out' short of marching on Parliament with a rope?
So part of what needs to happen is getting through to enough of the people who either want the current government or don't care either way.
I didn't know anyone in the UK who wanted the current government: even the few who admitted to voting Labour had to hold their noses as they did so, and some of them ended up marching through London protesting against the same government's actions. Which, of course, made fsck all difference to anything the government did.
Britain is simply broken: the only way to change it is civil war or catastrophic collapse. The smart people are getting out before they require exit visas.
yeah, we socialists were definitely the ones who decided to deregulate the banks and thus cause the collapse of the entire fucking world economy!
Hint: aside from outright takeover, what could be more socialist regulation of finance than a _central bank_ setting interest rates? There's a reason why imposing central banking was one of the goals of the Communist Manifesto for converting free countries to communism.
Also, UK has one of the highest standards of living in the world.
LOL. I now earn less than I did in the UK, but my standard of living is dramatically higher... I suspect that's true of most of Europe and North America.
I don't know how anyone can suggest that Britain has a high standard of living, unless you're comparing it to some third-world crap-hole. The cost of living is among the highest in the developed world and you get crap for it.
That being said, my suggestion to the person who posted this article is the improve the local situation instead of fleeing from it.
Labour were elected by 22% of the voters, the Tories aren't much different, though at least they'd get rid of ID cards, and they can't change much anyway because both parties have worked together over the last forty years to hand Britain's sovereignty over to the EU (I believe more than half of all new laws in the UK are now just rubber-stamping edicts from Brussels).
Given those facts, maybe you could suggest how the OP could 'improve the local situation' short of rioting in the streets and stringing up the politicos from lamp-posts on Westminster Bridge? At an absolute minimum, he'd have to get Britain out of the EU, and the entire politico-media establishment would oppose that.
The really scary part is that if things continue the way they're going, I could easily see people getting desperate enough to elect whackos like the BNP... now imagine a neo-Nazi government handed the keys to Brown's surveillance state and terrorist powers and it will make Iran look like a fun place to live.
But to be quite honest with you, with what is going in Iran at this moment, your request seems frivolous.
Yes, that's always the excuse the statists use: 'sure, Britain is a bloated, high-tax surveillance state where the police are more concerned with screwing fines out of the middle class than protecting them from real criminals and at any moment you can be dragged from your house and locked up for six weeks without being charged, but what about Zimbabwe, eh? You can't complain about Britain when you could be living in Zimbabwe' (though presumably now it's Iran that's the scapegoat).
I fled the UK a couple of years ago, and would never even think of going back unless the Tories throw out everything Labour have done to destroy the place over the last sixty years.
"Building a wind turbine is proven, and cost effective."
If it was cost-effective, then it wouldn't require massive government subsidies.
Coal, on the other hand, _is_ proven and cost-effective, which is why there are so many coal-fired power stations.
"Were you trying to say there is some kind of problem?"
Money wasted on stupid wind turbines is money not spent doing something useful that people actually want.
Or do you really believe that the country would be better off if the government paid half the unemployed to smash windows and the other half to fix them?
The only people who think wind turbines are a good idea are naive Greenists and wind turbine companies.
"Are you sure that old media isn't legally required to disclose when they have been paid to put up certain content?"
I don't remember ever seeing a game magazine admit that they gave 'This Game Sucks 2' a 95% rating just because of all the advertising the publisher bought that month even though everyone who's seen it knows that it stinks.
In a rational world this whole idea would be thrown out as blatantly unconstitutional.
Why would you hire the leftovers? Really, you think that you can just get better quality by spending less? Really?
Here's the deal: Manager X tells their boss that they can save the company millions of dollars by sacking US IT staff and sending the work to India.
When the software comes back from the Indian sweat-shop it's a steaming pile of sacred cow shit, but by that time Manager X has got big brownie points, a big bonus and a promotion and doesn't have to deal with it. Now the problem is dumped in the hands of Manager Y and the few US IT staff who are still left at the company.
This is just another example of the perverse incentives in Western business which gave us delights such as the credit crash, where bankers could make multi-million dollar bonuses by lending billions to people who never had any chance of paying the money back... of course they wouldn't have to repay their bonuses when the loans went bad, and the government would bail out the banks anyway.
I honestly don't think you know many 'average users'. In my experience ordinary non-technical people rip DVDs far more than I do; e.g. to make copies on DVD-R because they don't want their kids to destroy the originals.
If they don't know there's DRM on DVDs it's because the DRM has been completely broken so they don't even see it (e.g. their $30 DVD player is already multi-region out of the box).
Though they get seriously pissed when (name of EVIL movie company deleted) forces them to sit through several minutes of trailers and crap every single bloody time they put the DVD in the player because their kids want to watch it again, because said player actually enforces the 'do not allow the player to skip' bit on the disk.
"I, for one, find it puzzling why both Fedora and Ubuntu continue to put GNOME first with KDE as the also-ran."
Probably because Gnome works, and Redhat customers are paying for something that... works.
I tried the latest KDE on Ubuntu recently (not sure which version they're shipping) and while it looked somewhat pretty it crashed fairly often, I found some of the features bizarre and annoying (e.g. the side-scrolling program menu menus) and never found out how to get it to not display the windows on my 1920x1080 LCD with fonts about thirty pixels tall (I have a big monitor so I can display lots of windows, not so I can display windows which appear the same size as if it was a 1024x768 display but use bigger fonts).
I'd certainly be willing to switch, but only if they spend more time making KDE usable than making it look pretty.
"In fact, the "average" person has no problem with DRM schemes such as those that "lock" down DVDs or VHS (macrovision),"
The average user has no problem with them because they're trivially crackable.
"Your post makes it sound like DRM is bad."
DRM _IS_ bad because there's no way to allow me to use media I purchase in any way I choose (e.g ripping DVDs to my MythTV server) while preventing me from giving those files to someone else.
DRM simply cannot be 'implemented properly', because it's broken by design; either I control my use of purchased media or the IP Robber Barons do... there's no middle ground.
Any effective DRM will cripple my use of media so much that I simply won't buy it. For example, I would have bought a few hundred Blu-Ray disks by now if it weren't for the DRM... if it's cracked to the point where I can use those disks as easily as DVDs, then I'll start buying them, but not until then.
Read TFA. This is not a 'police state' in the forming.
Indeed not. When the police can decide what you are and aren't allowed to access on the Internet, the police state is already here.