So why are macs getting more games than Linux? Are there really more Mac users than Linux users?
Anyway, if you develop a game for a PC, you're already most of the way towards developing for any console. Renderware is a great example -- just pick some middleware, even something as simple as SDL, and you've got most of your porting done for you. It amazes me that people still choose DirectX for PC games.
I would love to start my own company and work on this problem, but I'm eating enough Ramen as it is. Instead, I'll develop it in my spare time and figure it out later.
The thing is, the two can effectively become the same. For instance, blocking the Skype protocol would be just as effective, if not more effective, than blocking Skype.com
I disagree, and I'll tell you why: If an ISP wants to block traffic to its customers on a specific port, it's lousy, and deceptive, and their customers shouldn't stand for it, but it isn't anti-competitive so long as it's applied globally.
Not true when a particular port is often for one company. I don't know if this is true with my Skype example, but let's say they've made a deal with, say, Linksys, to prioritize Linksys VPN traffic. I can pretty much guarantee that doesn't go over UDP port 1194, which is what I use for OpenVPN traffic. Or perhaps a deal with someone who stands to lose from OpenVPN makes a deal...
Same is true of many games. Most game engines, at least, operate on unique ports from one another.
It doesn't have to be the port, either. BitTorrent is most often QoS'd now by the header, not the port, which is why many BT clients now encrypt the headers and use random ports.
Back to your example: Skype does not use open standard VoIP protocols, though it does support them. Skype mainly uses a proprietary protocol, which may or may not be identifiable by headers.
When you get down to it, targeting a single competitor does not necessarily mean host versus protocol/port/whatever.
Good to see you understand the rest of the issue, though. The issue of "Google doesn't pay for their bandwidth" is a wholly separate issue than QoS/prioritizing, and telecoms are using this argument to convince people that Net Neutrality is bad, while few actually get the QoS part, which is really what net neutrality is about. That's ignoring, of course, the fact that "Google doesn't pay for their bandwidth" is a complete and total fabrication.
And I do agree with you about government regulation. Even more than this, I'd like to see the government actually require more of this stuff to be taught in schools. Hell, I even had to take an economics class -- why should John Q. Public know what capitalism is and not know what an OS is?
The thing is, the two can effectively become the same. For instance, blocking the Skype protocol would be just as effective, if not more effective, than blocking Skype.com.
Anyway, nothing about Net Neutrality (either definition you mention) prevents me from doing my own QoS. All it does is make it so my ISP cannot do it for me, without my knowledge or consent -- which is fair.
Or are you assuming that it's a legitimate business practice to sell 20x the bandwidth you actually have, by calling it "burst bandwidth" and counting on people not to use it for real throughput? QoS, at the ISP level, becomes completely irrelevant when you can actually deliver 100% of the bandwidth that I paid for -- at that point, the burden is entirely on me to QoS my BitTorrent if I want my web surfing to be faster. Or not, as I see fit.
And it's not just about anti-competitiveness, it's about freedom of speech. Once we've gotten the bandwidth issue out of the way, why is it in any way my ISP's business what I'm doing on the Internet? They should be commont carriers.
The difference here is, one vacuum cleaner bag is as good as another -- all I care about is whether it works with my vacuum cleaner. Not so with a game.
The reason I hate consoles (well, love them and hate them) is that every single popular game system now has a game I want to play. I want Final Fantasies, Halos, and Zeldas. I want Katamari Damacy. I want Half-Life 2.
During the golden age of PC gaming, none of this would matter -- console games would be nowhere near the level of PC games, and for every good console game, there was a better PC game. That meant I only had to buy one system, and I could play anything I wanted on it. Maybe this never existed, but this is how I want things to be.
Yes, on consoles I don't know the decisions that were made for me during development, but at least you get the same game experience on my PS2 versus someone else's PS2.
Why is this important to you? Other than keeping up with the Joneses?
In my experience, on a console, you're always having that first experience -- that of your PC. Your friend's PC can't really exist, beyond a better TV or speakers. And hell, I like to be that friend sometimes -- not to compare with you, but because Half-Life 2 does rock with a big, bright monitor, nice speakers, and a decent video card.
New games look better. The same games do not, which was the point I was making. Perhaps they could, if they could be patched, but until recently, they cannot.
You say this as you post to Slashdot, proving my point. I don't know anyone who has access to a console but not a computer of some sort. I know very few people who have a console and a Mac, but no PC.
I keep hearing hardware horror stories, which I never see myself. Maybe I just don't play enough games.
Every genre you list exists for the PC. They aren't executed as well, though. I blame that on there being no decent, popular controllers for the PC other than keyboard/mouse.
Quality over quantity. There is nothing like Half-Life 2 for a console. And then there's the mods:
Illegal copies and software piracy is one of the big reason why the PC gaming market has gone WAY down....just a thought.
Free != illegal. I'm talking about mods and actual free games -- as in, games that were developend and released for free, sometimes with full source code. Half-Life 2 comes with about 10 games that you can see from the same menu you play Half-Life 2 from, and double-click to download and install, for free.
By the way, I'd argue that it's mostly not the software piracy, but the anti-piracy mechanisms used. You said it yourself:
I had a similar problem with the game MechCommander 2 some years ago. The copy protection used had a bug with some CD drives. It kept asking me to insert my original CD in the drive. The game was an original (not a copy) i purchased in a legal fashion at the computer store, yet i had to crack it to play the game i bought.
This is why I still buy id games, even though the games themselves aren't necessarily the most fun. I want to support them for having a native Linux version, which has virtually no copy protection -- which means no BS for me as a user.
This is why I buy Steam games, even though they arguably have more onerous copy protection than most -- their copy protection has actually resulted in less hassle for me. I don't need the game CD in the drive, I just need an Internet connection -- hell, if I completely lose the game, I can just put in my password and re-download. Or I can back it up to DVD...
I know about demoscene. What's your point? Packing it into tiny files has nothing to do with the graphics -- more than a few of these use DirectX or OpenGL for rendering.
nobody really bothers to optimize anything on the PC nowadays, because the video cards we have right now are so ridiculously overpowered, we don't have to.
Sad but true, in some respects. But it's not the video cards that I wish we'd optimize for -- those, you usually optimize anyway to squeeze every last ounce even out of the N+1000-series card coming out, to make your game really exceptional. It's the RAM and disk usage. Jak 3 looks as good as most PC games, yet most PC games make you wait for an entire level to load, some taking WAY more time than they should. Stronghold 2 takes several minutes to get to the menu on a new computer, and more to load a map. Yet Jak 3, for the PS2, does fully dynamic level loading, off a much slower DVD (Stronghold is loading off the hard disk), and the PS2 has a grand total of 32 megs of RAM -- we were attempting Stronghold 2 on a machine with 1 gig of RAM, and later on another with 2 gigs.
I think that because the hardware stays the same, it's a good thing - mostly. This is because people will have time and have the possibility to optimize their code for one platform...
Why is that better than optimizing your code for a moving target?
Jak & Daxter. Looks better than most late PS2 games. From what I remember, it was a launch title.
Console gamers get that improvement in visual quality essentially for free, no need to buy new expensive hardware or anything.
Depends -- console gamers have to buy the new games. PC gamers can get visual improvements by either buying new hardware or buying new games.
Anyway, I still do a lot of gaming on both consoles and PCs. There are definately pros and cons to each, and I don't think they're mutually exclusive. So no need to bash one totally in favor of the other.
I agree, pros and cons. The reason I am bashing consoles in favor of PCs is that I wish PCs really lived up to their potential as a game platform. I wish I could run any game on Linux, I wish there were standard console-like controllers to buy, I wish people actually put a decent piece of hardware behind their multi-thousand-dollar home theater projectors and surround sound, and I wish copy protection schemes weren't killing it all.
I wish consoles were just PCs with some standard format for the games, so that I could buy a console game and play it on a PC.
But I don't think we're there yet, because at the moment, the above would mean either bootable Linux games (which would suck if you actually had a PC) or autorun Windows games (which would suck if you had a console).
How recently? I've heard of plenty of PS2 bugs that can make a game unplayable.
But a patch isn't always fixing a bug, and is a necessity for any MMO -- hell, anything that goes online. When was the last time you heard of a router that didn't have a firmware update or two?
And four PCs require four times the electricity, four times the monitors, four times the furniture, four times the Windows tax, and four times the game software licenses.
Yes, that's a problem for your family of six. However, four friends (even non-gamers) will typically each have a PC that is capable of playing Quake 3 -- remember, sub-GameCube graphics.
And what multiplayer PC games do you recommend that are not rated 17+?
Unfortunately, not many, but some. You might try Gish (by Chronic Logic -- Google it, I'm a bit too lazy now) -- while it is a bit cramped, you can play a single view game with four people. I've done it with two, and it was some of the most fun I've had lately -- my only regret was we couldn't do it networked, to make it less cramped, but that's because I didn't have a spare USB keyboard.
The Rumor is the PS3 will do the same, increasing the resolution and adding nice effects the FSAA to the older PS1 and PS2 games.
I call BS on the PS1. PS2 I could believe, but I've seen what happens when this is attempted with PS1 emulators.
spending sometimes hours installing
Never takes me more than 10-15 mins, but I don't just sit there waiting for it. I read something, watch a movie, whatever I feel like. Hell, if the game is a Steam game, I just buy it, schedule it to download, come back the next day and it's installed and ready to play, usually already tweaked for my system -- don't even have to go to the store, as I would for a console game. (A real one -- the Arcade feature still seems to lack good games.)
finding the patches you need
Never takes me more than 2-5 mins. Less on a system that automates the process, like Steam or World of Warcraft. Where does this "hours" figure of yours come from?
WAITING for the patches you need if they aren't out for your hardware yet
Never had this problem for hardware, but it was always annoying with the native Linux ports of some games. Besides, the trick I've discovered is to pick up games that are at least a few months, if not a year old. This pretty much guarantees they will rock on my hardware, without tweaking anything, and they still look better than most console games I've seen.
then spending sometimes hours tweaking the controls the way you like them
Huh. Default controls always worked for me -- it usually only takes me a few minutes to change them if it doesn't notice my Dvorak keymap. Or I set it back to US for single-player games that don't require typing.
leaning the good servers for each of your games
Assuming multiplayer. And this is something I missed in Halo 2 -- I can run through Matchmaking, or I can form groups of friends, but there are no permanent servers, and the only server mods are illegal. Counter-Strike, as the obvious example, just about every single server has some sort of mods, many of them fun. Admins can do things you'd never dream of on a console. You complain about setting up your controls -- ok, but as an admin, I can map admin_slay to a key.
Or, say, a UT server where the rocket launcher behaves exactly as it should, and fires rockets, but those rockets explode as if they were Redeemers.
Yes, console games could do this, but they don't, never have. And even if they did, the point is that consoles have never been particularly flexible in terms of user-created mods. This could change sometime in the future, but I don't see it now.
Sure I could get a wireless controller for my PC and put my PC down there in the home theater room, but I don't just use my PC for gaming, I do web development, email, internet browsing.
Something you couldn't do downstairs in the basement? Presumably you do have Internet down there? I don't know about you, but I'd love to work with some music on those home theater speakers. Just set up a desk and a monitor, nothing says you have to use the projector for that.
I'd pretty much have to either buy a 2nd PC
A 2nd PC for web development, email, and internet browsing can be had for less than the cost of a next-gen console. Just move the gaming rig you've got downstais and buy that 2nd one, if you really feel the need to have your entertainment physically separate from your work.
not to mention it still doesn't remedy all the time I've wasted in setup and configuration before I can even fully enjoy my game.
I suspect you either don't maintain your PC very well, or you tried too hard to stay on the cutting edge -- or maybe you impulse buy every new game, as soon as it comes out?
Q: What if I scratch it or lose it? A: You will have to buy a new one.
This is a bad thing.
Question: Is Splinter Cell cracked? Answer: Most likely. Thus, I can still run it entirely from hard disk, and keep the disc somewhere safe, which is already much better/more convenient than console games.
You missed the point. A reasonably recent computer, running a reasonably recent Windows, makes checking the specs more often a matter of curiosity than anything else. You'll find very few games you can't buy.
My complaint wasn't about the process of checking whether it says "Playstation 2", my problem is the market is divided such that not every game I want would be for a console I have, unless I just buy all the consoles. Which I might do, if I had the money -- my real complaint is that every console has its killer game franchise. Nintendo has Zelda, Microsoft has Halo, and the PS2 had Final Fantasy. The PC has Half-Life 2. If I want to play all of them, I must own all three major consoles.
In a PC world, there is some of that -- if I had a Mac as my gaming rig, my choices would be severely limited. But with a Windows PC, just about anything will run -- the only question is whether my computer is recent enough. I'm deliberately not counting the Vista-only stuff, by the way -- Vista isn't shipped yet, and I'm treating it as vaporware until it does.
For my info to be compromised, that means you have to capture enough of my packets for it to matter, and then there has to be a significant breakthrough in crypto tech. Which means that the storage space starts to get prohibative unless you're specifically targeting me. If you are, that almost certainly means there has to be some financial gain to you -- that is, you must be looking for, say, access to company servers, or credit card info, or something of that nature -- all of which will be pointlessly out of date by the time you crack it. I can't imagine anyone wasting this amount of time and money on, say, personal blackmail, especially when you never know if it will pay off.
I just can't see this happening on a large enough scale. How are you going to tell my BitTorrent traffic from my VPN traffic, unless you're only listening to port 1194? And that's just OpenVPN... What if I tunnel an encrypted channel over plain HTTP? How many paranoid people are already doing this? I know I will soon enough -- I need to be able to get around anal firewalls.
I agree, your assessment of other people is accurate, but you did not say "Most people". You said:
Anyone using a public terminal and transmitting/receiving any type of personal information in one way or another, is playing russian roulette with their information.
Emphasis mine.
I strongly suspect that I'm not seriously risking anything that's of enough value to me or anyone to justify anyone throwing the kind of resources you're talking about at me. After all, as Bruce Schneier puts it, most of security is economics anyway.
What, exactly, are you suggesting I'll do differently?
For instance, the car. I don't have one right now, because in the town I live in, everything is within walking distance, and I'm trying to lose weight, so I just Urban Ranger everywhere.
What about a computer? I don't think I'd buy a new laptop, at least not yet. I'd wait till Apple stablizes their Intel stuff, then get myself a new one, and sell my old Powerbook. Gaming rig? I'd wait 2 years between upgrades -- minimum. Games? I'd buy more, sure, but I'd probably still be just as much a stubborn bastard -- mostly Linux games, and no StarForce, ever. House? I already miss my dorm room, and the room I'm in is much bigger.
Just what is it that money can buy that would be more valuable to me than time?
You're probably accurate about many people, and it's probably arrogant to say this, but I think I'm pretty unique, especially here.
I don't believe you can do this without a rootkit, however, and there are tools for detecting most rootkits. On Windows, I believe you can attach to running processes and... mess with them. I don't think this can be done on Unix unless the process feels like letting you do it.
Don't underestimate the power of the chroot jail. Correct me if I'm wrong, but only Unix seems to have the concept of most services dropping permissions and throwing themselves into a chroot jail immediately after initialization. I don't think a chroot jail is even possible under Windows, as there's no such thing as a root filesystem under Windows.
What you're talking about sounds good, but a large advantage here comes from the fact that generally, any compromise of a Windows system leads pretty directly to Admin. Compromise a chrooted Apache, and you'll have a much harder time -- maybe you can deface the website -- maybe -- and you absolutely will not be able to connect out. You'll be lucky to even get a shell, and if you do, you'll have to somehow upload it yourself, through your exploit.
The hell it would. They'd just have to be willing to distribute source code to the actual OS, while keeping their own window manager and Wine-like software proprietary.
There's nothing about the GPL that requires all software running under a GPL system to be licensed to the GPL, unless you're linking against GPL code. If we can have a proprietary Doom 3 and Quake 4 run on Linux, we can have a proprietary Windows compatibility layer and UI run on Linux.
You're going to college, right? What will the PDA be used for?
I've found that in just about every class in college, I was allowed to use a laptop. Sure, it could be a distraction (IM, etc), but so can the cute girl two rows down in the lecture hall. And if you can handle distractions, the laptop really can't be beat.
Wireless in every building, good reception (if not an actual access point) in every classroom and lecture hall. A full keyboard (it's a Powerbook) on which to type notes -- much faster than I could with a PDA. The disadvantage is it's harder to manage a schedule that way, but as a student, my class schedule was pretty constant, and I didn't need reminders for the few other activities that had dates and times -- most of the good events just happened. So since you can open it at least once per class, you can check when your next lecture is.
Only real annoyance was when I was trying to find a classroom, couldn't remember the room number, had to keep whipping out the laptop and checking, password-protected so I was typing it every time -- you could tell I was a geek.
But that was maybe the first couple days in a given semester, and as I learned my way around campus, it became less and less of a problem. And it's just awesome to be able to correct your professors in realtime, with Wikipedia citations!
Slashdot Mirror
So why are macs getting more games than Linux? Are there really more Mac users than Linux users?
Anyway, if you develop a game for a PC, you're already most of the way towards developing for any console. Renderware is a great example -- just pick some middleware, even something as simple as SDL, and you've got most of your porting done for you. It amazes me that people still choose DirectX for PC games.
I would love to start my own company and work on this problem, but I'm eating enough Ramen as it is. Instead, I'll develop it in my spare time and figure it out later.
Not true when a particular port is often for one company. I don't know if this is true with my Skype example, but let's say they've made a deal with, say, Linksys, to prioritize Linksys VPN traffic. I can pretty much guarantee that doesn't go over UDP port 1194, which is what I use for OpenVPN traffic. Or perhaps a deal with someone who stands to lose from OpenVPN makes a deal...
Same is true of many games. Most game engines, at least, operate on unique ports from one another.
It doesn't have to be the port, either. BitTorrent is most often QoS'd now by the header, not the port, which is why many BT clients now encrypt the headers and use random ports.
Back to your example: Skype does not use open standard VoIP protocols, though it does support them. Skype mainly uses a proprietary protocol, which may or may not be identifiable by headers.
When you get down to it, targeting a single competitor does not necessarily mean host versus protocol/port/whatever.
Good to see you understand the rest of the issue, though. The issue of "Google doesn't pay for their bandwidth" is a wholly separate issue than QoS/prioritizing, and telecoms are using this argument to convince people that Net Neutrality is bad, while few actually get the QoS part, which is really what net neutrality is about. That's ignoring, of course, the fact that "Google doesn't pay for their bandwidth" is a complete and total fabrication.
And I do agree with you about government regulation. Even more than this, I'd like to see the government actually require more of this stuff to be taught in schools. Hell, I even had to take an economics class -- why should John Q. Public know what capitalism is and not know what an OS is?
You win by finding an emulator, compiler, or other mechanism for running the language you want, implemented in one of these languages.
That was one of the most impressive typos I've ever seen. Hanoi -> Honia? Looks like it's not just cards that are getting shuffled...
I've heard Java is to be open sourced, but what is the JDK license at the moment? To what extent can I modify and redistribute?
The thing is, the two can effectively become the same. For instance, blocking the Skype protocol would be just as effective, if not more effective, than blocking Skype.com.
Anyway, nothing about Net Neutrality (either definition you mention) prevents me from doing my own QoS. All it does is make it so my ISP cannot do it for me, without my knowledge or consent -- which is fair.
Or are you assuming that it's a legitimate business practice to sell 20x the bandwidth you actually have, by calling it "burst bandwidth" and counting on people not to use it for real throughput? QoS, at the ISP level, becomes completely irrelevant when you can actually deliver 100% of the bandwidth that I paid for -- at that point, the burden is entirely on me to QoS my BitTorrent if I want my web surfing to be faster. Or not, as I see fit.
And it's not just about anti-competitiveness, it's about freedom of speech. Once we've gotten the bandwidth issue out of the way, why is it in any way my ISP's business what I'm doing on the Internet? They should be commont carriers.
Xbox. End of discussion. The Phantom didn't suck because it was a PC, it sucked because it never materialized.
Except I wish the Xbox was a decent PC out of the box, also.
The difference here is, one vacuum cleaner bag is as good as another -- all I care about is whether it works with my vacuum cleaner. Not so with a game.
The reason I hate consoles (well, love them and hate them) is that every single popular game system now has a game I want to play. I want Final Fantasies, Halos, and Zeldas. I want Katamari Damacy. I want Half-Life 2.
During the golden age of PC gaming, none of this would matter -- console games would be nowhere near the level of PC games, and for every good console game, there was a better PC game. That meant I only had to buy one system, and I could play anything I wanted on it. Maybe this never existed, but this is how I want things to be.
Why is this important to you? Other than keeping up with the Joneses?
In my experience, on a console, you're always having that first experience -- that of your PC. Your friend's PC can't really exist, beyond a better TV or speakers. And hell, I like to be that friend sometimes -- not to compare with you, but because Half-Life 2 does rock with a big, bright monitor, nice speakers, and a decent video card.
New games look better. The same games do not, which was the point I was making. Perhaps they could, if they could be patched, but until recently, they cannot.
You say this as you post to Slashdot, proving my point. I don't know anyone who has access to a console but not a computer of some sort. I know very few people who have a console and a Mac, but no PC.
I keep hearing hardware horror stories, which I never see myself. Maybe I just don't play enough games.
Every genre you list exists for the PC. They aren't executed as well, though. I blame that on there being no decent, popular controllers for the PC other than keyboard/mouse.
Quality over quantity. There is nothing like Half-Life 2 for a console. And then there's the mods:
Free != illegal. I'm talking about mods and actual free games -- as in, games that were developend and released for free, sometimes with full source code. Half-Life 2 comes with about 10 games that you can see from the same menu you play Half-Life 2 from, and double-click to download and install, for free.
By the way, I'd argue that it's mostly not the software piracy, but the anti-piracy mechanisms used. You said it yourself:
This is why I still buy id games, even though the games themselves aren't necessarily the most fun. I want to support them for having a native Linux version, which has virtually no copy protection -- which means no BS for me as a user.
This is why I buy Steam games, even though they arguably have more onerous copy protection than most -- their copy protection has actually resulted in less hassle for me. I don't need the game CD in the drive, I just need an Internet connection -- hell, if I completely lose the game, I can just put in my password and re-download. Or I can back it up to DVD...
I know about demoscene. What's your point? Packing it into tiny files has nothing to do with the graphics -- more than a few of these use DirectX or OpenGL for rendering.
Sad but true, in some respects. But it's not the video cards that I wish we'd optimize for -- those, you usually optimize anyway to squeeze every last ounce even out of the N+1000-series card coming out, to make your game really exceptional. It's the RAM and disk usage. Jak 3 looks as good as most PC games, yet most PC games make you wait for an entire level to load, some taking WAY more time than they should. Stronghold 2 takes several minutes to get to the menu on a new computer, and more to load a map. Yet Jak 3, for the PS2, does fully dynamic level loading, off a much slower DVD (Stronghold is loading off the hard disk), and the PS2 has a grand total of 32 megs of RAM -- we were attempting Stronghold 2 on a machine with 1 gig of RAM, and later on another with 2 gigs.
Why is that better than optimizing your code for a moving target?
Jak & Daxter. Looks better than most late PS2 games. From what I remember, it was a launch title.
Depends -- console gamers have to buy the new games. PC gamers can get visual improvements by either buying new hardware or buying new games.
I agree, pros and cons. The reason I am bashing consoles in favor of PCs is that I wish PCs really lived up to their potential as a game platform. I wish I could run any game on Linux, I wish there were standard console-like controllers to buy, I wish people actually put a decent piece of hardware behind their multi-thousand-dollar home theater projectors and surround sound, and I wish copy protection schemes weren't killing it all.
I wish consoles were just PCs with some standard format for the games, so that I could buy a console game and play it on a PC.
But I don't think we're there yet, because at the moment, the above would mean either bootable Linux games (which would suck if you actually had a PC) or autorun Windows games (which would suck if you had a console).
How recently? I've heard of plenty of PS2 bugs that can make a game unplayable.
But a patch isn't always fixing a bug, and is a necessity for any MMO -- hell, anything that goes online. When was the last time you heard of a router that didn't have a firmware update or two?
Yes, that's a problem for your family of six. However, four friends (even non-gamers) will typically each have a PC that is capable of playing Quake 3 -- remember, sub-GameCube graphics.
Unfortunately, not many, but some. You might try Gish (by Chronic Logic -- Google it, I'm a bit too lazy now) -- while it is a bit cramped, you can play a single view game with four people. I've done it with two, and it was some of the most fun I've had lately -- my only regret was we couldn't do it networked, to make it less cramped, but that's because I didn't have a spare USB keyboard.
I call BS on the PS1. PS2 I could believe, but I've seen what happens when this is attempted with PS1 emulators.
Never takes me more than 10-15 mins, but I don't just sit there waiting for it. I read something, watch a movie, whatever I feel like. Hell, if the game is a Steam game, I just buy it, schedule it to download, come back the next day and it's installed and ready to play, usually already tweaked for my system -- don't even have to go to the store, as I would for a console game. (A real one -- the Arcade feature still seems to lack good games.)
Never takes me more than 2-5 mins. Less on a system that automates the process, like Steam or World of Warcraft. Where does this "hours" figure of yours come from?
Never had this problem for hardware, but it was always annoying with the native Linux ports of some games. Besides, the trick I've discovered is to pick up games that are at least a few months, if not a year old. This pretty much guarantees they will rock on my hardware, without tweaking anything, and they still look better than most console games I've seen.
Huh. Default controls always worked for me -- it usually only takes me a few minutes to change them if it doesn't notice my Dvorak keymap. Or I set it back to US for single-player games that don't require typing.
Assuming multiplayer. And this is something I missed in Halo 2 -- I can run through Matchmaking, or I can form groups of friends, but there are no permanent servers, and the only server mods are illegal. Counter-Strike, as the obvious example, just about every single server has some sort of mods, many of them fun. Admins can do things you'd never dream of on a console. You complain about setting up your controls -- ok, but as an admin, I can map admin_slay to a key.
Or, say, a UT server where the rocket launcher behaves exactly as it should, and fires rockets, but those rockets explode as if they were Redeemers.
Yes, console games could do this, but they don't, never have. And even if they did, the point is that consoles have never been particularly flexible in terms of user-created mods. This could change sometime in the future, but I don't see it now.
Something you couldn't do downstairs in the basement? Presumably you do have Internet down there? I don't know about you, but I'd love to work with some music on those home theater speakers. Just set up a desk and a monitor, nothing says you have to use the projector for that.
A 2nd PC for web development, email, and internet browsing can be had for less than the cost of a next-gen console. Just move the gaming rig you've got downstais and buy that 2nd one, if you really feel the need to have your entertainment physically separate from your work.
I suspect you either don't maintain your PC very well, or you tried too hard to stay on the cutting edge -- or maybe you impulse buy every new game, as soon as it comes out?
I have never, ever spent more
This is a bad thing.
Question: Is Splinter Cell cracked? Answer: Most likely. Thus, I can still run it entirely from hard disk, and keep the disc somewhere safe, which is already much better/more convenient than console games.
You missed the point. A reasonably recent computer, running a reasonably recent Windows, makes checking the specs more often a matter of curiosity than anything else. You'll find very few games you can't buy.
My complaint wasn't about the process of checking whether it says "Playstation 2", my problem is the market is divided such that not every game I want would be for a console I have, unless I just buy all the consoles. Which I might do, if I had the money -- my real complaint is that every console has its killer game franchise. Nintendo has Zelda, Microsoft has Halo, and the PS2 had Final Fantasy. The PC has Half-Life 2. If I want to play all of them, I must own all three major consoles.
In a PC world, there is some of that -- if I had a Mac as my gaming rig, my choices would be severely limited. But with a Windows PC, just about anything will run -- the only question is whether my computer is recent enough. I'm deliberately not counting the Vista-only stuff, by the way -- Vista isn't shipped yet, and I'm treating it as vaporware until it does.
A lot.
For my info to be compromised, that means you have to capture enough of my packets for it to matter, and then there has to be a significant breakthrough in crypto tech. Which means that the storage space starts to get prohibative unless you're specifically targeting me. If you are, that almost certainly means there has to be some financial gain to you -- that is, you must be looking for, say, access to company servers, or credit card info, or something of that nature -- all of which will be pointlessly out of date by the time you crack it. I can't imagine anyone wasting this amount of time and money on, say, personal blackmail, especially when you never know if it will pay off.
I just can't see this happening on a large enough scale. How are you going to tell my BitTorrent traffic from my VPN traffic, unless you're only listening to port 1194? And that's just OpenVPN... What if I tunnel an encrypted channel over plain HTTP? How many paranoid people are already doing this? I know I will soon enough -- I need to be able to get around anal firewalls.
I agree, your assessment of other people is accurate, but you did not say "Most people". You said:
Emphasis mine.
I strongly suspect that I'm not seriously risking anything that's of enough value to me or anyone to justify anyone throwing the kind of resources you're talking about at me. After all, as Bruce Schneier puts it, most of security is economics anyway.
What, exactly, are you suggesting I'll do differently?
For instance, the car. I don't have one right now, because in the town I live in, everything is within walking distance, and I'm trying to lose weight, so I just Urban Ranger everywhere.
What about a computer? I don't think I'd buy a new laptop, at least not yet. I'd wait till Apple stablizes their Intel stuff, then get myself a new one, and sell my old Powerbook. Gaming rig? I'd wait 2 years between upgrades -- minimum. Games? I'd buy more, sure, but I'd probably still be just as much a stubborn bastard -- mostly Linux games, and no StarForce, ever. House? I already miss my dorm room, and the room I'm in is much bigger.
Just what is it that money can buy that would be more valuable to me than time?
You're probably accurate about many people, and it's probably arrogant to say this, but I think I'm pretty unique, especially here.
I don't believe you can do this without a rootkit, however, and there are tools for detecting most rootkits. On Windows, I believe you can attach to running processes and... mess with them. I don't think this can be done on Unix unless the process feels like letting you do it.
Don't underestimate the power of the chroot jail. Correct me if I'm wrong, but only Unix seems to have the concept of most services dropping permissions and throwing themselves into a chroot jail immediately after initialization. I don't think a chroot jail is even possible under Windows, as there's no such thing as a root filesystem under Windows.
What you're talking about sounds good, but a large advantage here comes from the fact that generally, any compromise of a Windows system leads pretty directly to Admin. Compromise a chrooted Apache, and you'll have a much harder time -- maybe you can deface the website -- maybe -- and you absolutely will not be able to connect out. You'll be lucky to even get a shell, and if you do, you'll have to somehow upload it yourself, through your exploit.
The hell it would. They'd just have to be willing to distribute source code to the actual OS, while keeping their own window manager and Wine-like software proprietary.
There's nothing about the GPL that requires all software running under a GPL system to be licensed to the GPL, unless you're linking against GPL code. If we can have a proprietary Doom 3 and Quake 4 run on Linux, we can have a proprietary Windows compatibility layer and UI run on Linux.
You're going to college, right? What will the PDA be used for?
I've found that in just about every class in college, I was allowed to use a laptop. Sure, it could be a distraction (IM, etc), but so can the cute girl two rows down in the lecture hall. And if you can handle distractions, the laptop really can't be beat.
Wireless in every building, good reception (if not an actual access point) in every classroom and lecture hall. A full keyboard (it's a Powerbook) on which to type notes -- much faster than I could with a PDA. The disadvantage is it's harder to manage a schedule that way, but as a student, my class schedule was pretty constant, and I didn't need reminders for the few other activities that had dates and times -- most of the good events just happened. So since you can open it at least once per class, you can check when your next lecture is.
Only real annoyance was when I was trying to find a classroom, couldn't remember the room number, had to keep whipping out the laptop and checking, password-protected so I was typing it every time -- you could tell I was a geek.
But that was maybe the first couple days in a given semester, and as I learned my way around campus, it became less and less of a problem. And it's just awesome to be able to correct your professors in realtime, with Wikipedia citations!