This is how I usually end this kind of conversation -- I go over their head. If I know more than they do about the subject, I speak jargon until their eyes glaze over, and then say something to the effect of "Do you really want to know why you're wrong, or will you take my word for it?" I'm a good enough teacher to back that up if they really do want to know. Or sometimes I start from the other end -- if I have a good enough analogy ready, I can start with that -- the money one is a good analogy for the crypto (Would you rather give me two $10 bills or one $100 bill? Would you let me settle a $100 debt with you by giving you two $10 bills?)
The other method of going over their head is to cite someone -- not always even a specific person -- who is smarter than both of us. So for crypto algorithms, I can ask them, "If it was really that easy, don't you think someone else would've thought of it by now? Why do you think we invent wholly new algorithms for 128 bits?"
And if both of those fail, the final method of going over their head is to cite specific sources and papers, and invite them to actually disprove what's said there (without really having to understand it yourself) if they really think they're right.
All of these, of course, are when I knwo I'm right. Quite often, I really don't know, and I stay humble there. But when I know I'm right, it's usually much more important to hit them over the head with one of the above than to try to explain why I'm right. After all, you don't have to know why a car is safer than open air for a lightning storm, you just have to do it. It's not important that someone understand why not to just double-encrypt with 64-bits, it's just important that they not do it.
As an individual, there are still reasons I like services like this: Backup, and things like email and IM. I can set up my own SMTP and Jabber servers, but if they're actually on my laptop, they're worthless -- it's not always on, and it changes IP addresses quite frequently. So I VPN home for those. It's also nice to be able to share things between machines -- laptop and desktop, for instance. My calendar is stored on a WebDav server, also accessed over a VPN to home.
Backup is still the big one. I keep trying to think how a person as paranoid as me could have the kind of efficient backup I'd want.
You also can't do anything about it if you put it in your pocket and plug it into an untrusted computer, at which point you have to decide who you trust more -- botnet authors or Google?
No, are you? I was talking about software. I want Linux games!
PCs have a huge variety of video cards, processors, OS and driver versions, and it's a pain in the ass to develop a game that works with all of them, let alone works well.
It's a pain in the ass to develop a game, period. Making it portable is easy, if you stick to portable libraries. Most people have done that work for you.
John Carmack once said that the XBox ran Doom 3 as well as a PC with double the power, just because the game could be specifically optimized for the XBox.
BS. Find me the quote. This smells like that old troll about "The PC will never be as powerful as the Xbox" when we had 1.5 ghz CPUs and the Xbox was 700 mhz.
And yes, that does contribute something. But Doom 3 still sucked royally on the XBox, in case you didn't notice. Framerate issues, looked like crap anyway... It looks and plays much better on the PC.
Much of the reason people prefer consoles over PCs is that they want a simple, reliable experience. Just pop the disc in and start playing, no worries about installation or whether your machine will run it.
And there's nothing wrong with that, if you're happy with those limitations. I prefer a better experience overall. For instance, as long as I remember my Steam password, I can play Half-Life 2 from any decent PC, provided I'm willing to wait for it to download. I can't even burn a console game. Scratch it or lose it and I have to buy a new one.
Anyway, how hard is it? Flip the package over and compare specs with your system. Pop the disk in and hit next. When it's done, play the game. The only problems I ever have with PC games all stem from me trying to run them on Linux.
However, your argument of "if I buy a console game, I have a one in four shot of it playing on a popular console" is rubbish. You purchase games for your specific console.
You're right. My point was that on the PC, you're much more likely to be able to just buy a "computer game" and have it work. Most games built for OS X will also run on Windows -- not many game developers are willing to risk losing that market -- few enough are willing to make an OS X port in the first place.
And you're right, I can't play Civ4 on a 386, but the lack of specific revisions is nice, too -- especially because I often can reasonably expect to play a game intended for a 386 (like Doom, say) on an amd64. Said amd64 can even play NES, SNES, and N64 games, with varying degrees of success.
My single biggest complaint about consoles, as a user, is that they discourage homebrew. My brother wisely decided not to update his PSP firmware, and he can still play NES games on it, thanks to the wonders of homebrew.
But if you want to construct a set-top gaming PC, you also need to buy a case, motherboard, CPU, RAM, and drives. Can you get all those PC parts for $100?
Irrelevant, since I already bought these things. It will likely be four years or so before any games require more RAM than I have now, as that requires 64-bit on Windows, and it will likely be at least a couple of years before I'm even thinking about upgrading anything. I can pick and choose, and the video card and RAM are the top two bottlenecks -- not CPU, not mobo, and I'm not looking to replace my case.
It's kind of like a house. You need a house to play a game on a console, but you need a house for other things anyway, so why not? Same with a PC -- you need one anyway, which means we're already talking about a case, drives, and the basic stuff. And you wouldn't believe how much RAM business people are throwing at their computers to deal with the bloatware that passes for financial software these days, so RAM and CPU are already covered. It's really only the video card.
Assume that I have a set-top gaming PC and four USB gamepads. What free four-player party games do you recommend that match the fun of Super Smash Bros. Melee or the Bomberman series?
Sadly, not enough. I did have a lot of fun with two players on a single keyboard for Gish, though -- and if you trust people not to cheat, you can always plug in another keyboard.
However, I've personally had at least as much fun giving four people cheap computers and playing Quake 3. Pretty much any computer anyone's coming to college with can play Quake 3. The only reason we didn't play it more was everyone else was off playing Halo. Cretins.
Good points about local multiplayer. That's why we have LAN parties, but that is a LOT more expensive.
But that's about it. Your points about controllers are well taken -- indeed, a keyboard would really suck for DDR. So I bought a PS2->USB adapter, and now I play StepMania with my PS2 DDR pad. There are numerous controllers for the PC -- it is not a technological or price issue here, it is an issue of perception. You could take a PC, plug in a controller, a TV out, and a headphone->RCA adapter, put it in the living room, and... Guess what? That's what the Xbox was.
The problem is, of course, that you can't play Xbox games on a PC -- so the PC is not likely to have the same games, or if it does, they aren't likely to play the same way. Still, I've often been surprised at how playable console ports are on a keyboard/mouse.
As for console games do not improve over their lifetime, I would disagree with this but (regardless) Resident Evil 4 still looks impressive
Are you saying Resident Evil 4 looks better than earlier games for the same platform? (GameCube, right?) Or are you saying that it looks better now than it did before?
Console games do improve over the lifetime of said console, to a point. But an individual console game will not improve, in visual appearence, over the lifetime of the console. Zelda: WindWaker still looks exactly the same as it always did. So does Zelda 64 -- the pixellation is really quite annoying, I really wish I could put it on a PC and turn up the resolution, but even the best emulators don't really do that reliably. I've seen it sort of tried with a PS1 emulator, and I eventually gave up (too many glitches) and just played the game on a PS2.
PC games, on the other hand, do improve, which is why games often have settings that are targeted a couple of notches past the $500 video cards of today. Even if they have to patch them later to make them work properly -- oh! And PC games can be patched. Console games being patched is a relatively recent thing.
I like a console as much as everyone else, and there are games worth buying a console for -- Halo, Final Fantasy, Zelda -- but I do miss the flexibility and hackability of my PC, especially Linux. The good news for me, at least, is that if I do eventually buy a console, my desktop monitor can do TV in, although I'll have to rethink this for the next gen if I get them.
PCs are there for people such as yourself that (based on your above post) base their purchases on graphics. Consoles are available for those who dont feel the same way.
Not true. How do you explain the Xbox 360?
I am not arguing that the PC is The Answer, only that it is an answer to the console wars.
cracking certain types of wireless encryption may be impossible from a practicle standpoint, but that doesn't mean it's safe. Capture the packets, and crack them at your leisure.
4096-bit RSA for key exchange. Blowfish for stream encryption. lzo compression before encryption.
How long will that take to break? I think we're approaching theoretical impossibility. And how many packets can you really capture? I send DVD images over my VPN, over the wireless. Unless Google or Microsoft desperately wants something I have, I don't think anyone else can hold onto enough of my traffic to matter by the time they find a crack.
If it was still 10 years ago and we were still actually using single DSA for secure stuff, I'd tend to agree with you, but now?
Long answer: If you can't trust the software, you're SOL. If you can't trust the browser, how can you trust a java applet that the browser delivers? If you suspect a keylogger, your java applet will only be secure so long as it's uncommon enough that no one cares to counter it with common keylogging software. Unless you propose to implement the crypto in Java, and distribute all required components inside your Java app, there's a good chance you have to call a local crypto library, so one could easily imagine keylogging software grabbing everything you're doing from the crypto API, after you type it but before it's actually encrypted and sent out.
And of course, as you say, they could monitor the screen and mouse movements, they could discover that you're using an applet and do a MITM (sending you to another applet that looks similar to yours but logs what you do), they could...
Hell, they could just visit that applet themselves, steal your bandwidth.
There's a very, very good chance that if you bring a boot CD, boot DVD, bootable flash, or any combination of the above, that you will be as secure as you would with a laptop. There could easily be hardware keyloggers, but that's probably significantly rarer.
But really, bring a laptop and use a VPN. Laptops can be had ridiculously cheap, and VPNs can be ridiculously easy to set up, and Tempest attacks are ridiculously hard to execute. Then your biggest problem would be shoulder surfing. But that's easy -- type too fast for them to catch your passwords, and make sure you're not being watched when you hit anything particularly sensitive. I also use Dvorak, for an added layer of confusion.
Any security can be beat, but mine is very, very difficult to break, while at the same time being insanely easy for me.
Oh, man, I wish I'd thought of half of the things you (and other replies) are putting out here. Recently, I was at a completely unsecured Windows desktop in a hotel lobby. Apparently, someone at the hotel thought Wireless was a magic bullet and put some Linksys or Dlink crap up, with a click-through agreement.
Now, for whatever reason, my Powerbook with OpenVPN will, with seemingly random frequency, crash all but the most industrial-strength access points. Iowa State University wireless was about the only place I didn't have that problem, and they don't do any kind of NAT -- you get a real Internet IP address. Just a little firewalling -- common things like Windows file sharing and outbound SMTP (spam) -- other than that, every box you have is naked on the Internet. But I digress...
So, this hotel, the desktop in the lobby (next to the front desk, probably 10 feet from their access point) was hooked up via wireless. So I come in, turn on my wireless, click through the agreement, and 10 minutes later -- boom! No more Internet, for the whole fucking hotel.
So I go sit down at the Windows box to check it out. Sure enough, the Internet outages -- which only seem to happen when I'm doing something with my laptop -- occur at exactly the same time, judging by pings to Google on the Windows box and my laptop.
But while at the Windows box, I noticed something. Despite a few warnings on the sign next to the computer, the thing was completely open. Judging by a few of the programs I was seeing here, it had been 0wned several times by several different people, but all with the motive of intercepting credit card numbers (or something), none with the motive of defacing the box. It was blatantly obvious they didn't image it much.
All that power, and the only thing I could think to do (or dared try) was changing the "Internet Explorer" link on the desktop to "Internet Exploder". Too subtle, too -- I should've changed the icon to a bomb. I hope someone gets a chuckle out of it someday, but unfortunately, I doubt it will cause hours of fun for anyone, the way the desktop/screenshot thing might.
That much, at least, makes sense: Most people generally believe they deserve wealth, as a rationalization for wanting it. If they don't have it, the rationalization goes "The rich assholes have all the money, and Bush is an idiot, or the economy sucks for Reason X, and so I don't have the money I should." The wealthy rationalize it like this: "Well, that wasn't so hard. Any idiot can be wealthy if they really try, after all, I did it -- which must mean any cretin who isn't wealthy is a lazy bum who doesn't deserve wealth."
And me? Technology is the only expensive hobby I have. If I suddenly had a fortune, I'd probably still eat ramen, and I'd probably wear the same clothes, live in about the same amount of space, ride a bicycle in a small town or own a sensible car, and so on. I'm told all of this is rare.
Basically, if I was paid more per hour, then past a certain point, I'd simply work fewer hours.
I don't understand the point of working long hours at a high-paying job to support a family you rarely see living in an awesome house you're barely in except to sleep and a cool car you drive to and from work in.
That could make sense, even -- if the artist of modest ambition can barely afford ramen, and the greedy artist has the cook deliver something healthy every day, then guess which one is going to have more time to focus on art? Which one will actually be more healthy and alert when creating art?
Actually, I only said that so I don't get modded offtopic. What I really want to say is, in your sig, what would the "night" represent? Linux?
Chances are good that it will suck hard on your PC, unless of course you're one of those guys who shelled out for the videocard that, by itself, cost as much as the xbox360.
Most games rock hard on my PC, and my video card cost about $200. How much does a 360 cost now? At least $100 more, right?
And I bought it a year ago.
And then the next generation of games comes out, and you're once again stuck with the question "Do I want to pay $500 for the top of the line video card, or am I ok with turning down the quality sliders, shutting off the dynamic shadows and the reflective surfaces, and..."
Yeah, I have that option. Console gamers don't. Your games stay at around the same quality over the years, and the developers get to make that choice for you -- "Are we OK with dropping the framerate to 10fps here to get the effects we want?" By the end of a console's life cycle, your games don't look that much better than they did at the beginning.
Which means that by the time you're deciding whether or not to buy an Xbox 360 -- which will do absolutely nothing for your current Xbox games except maybe not be able to play them -- basically, do you want Halo 2 to continue to work well, or do you want to play Halo 3? And what about all the other games -- are you buying a $300 system just to play Halo 3, or are there actually any other good 360 titles? And are you going to buy a PS3? A Wii?
Whereas I can buy a game, play it on my current system, and if I find I really am cutting down too much on the quality, I can buy a new video card. That new video card will make all my games improve, unless they are so ridiculously old (Quake 3) that I can already play them at 1600x1200 with every scrap of quality turned all the way up.
In other words, I can try before I buy, and I still have the option of playing new games on older hardware. You don't even get that option -- if Halo 3 is a 360 game, does anyone really think it will exist for the old Xbox? From the point of view of a programmer, it looks like it would be much harder to port a game between consoles, especially generations of consoles, than to make it scalable on PCs. And even if they did, would you be able to buy it for the Xbox and also get the 360 version, or would you have to buy it again when you bought a 360?
The trick is to not quite buy top of the line, since that $500 card isn't really $300 better than my $200 one, and in another 2 or 3 years, $200 will buy me more than that $500 could buy me now.
You know what else I can do? I can play free games. Everything about consoles is driven by money -- even the Xbox Live Arcade (or whatever) is going to cost you at least $5 for a game. You spend $60 on a game that I pay $50 for, at most, and you get just the one game. I get another 20 or 30 free mods to go with it, and I can still go with the Xbox Live Arcade model (via Steam), but with 100 gigs of space (just my Windows partition) instead of 15 or 20 to put downloaded games on -- which means that downloaded games, free or not, can meet or exceed the quality of games I buy on a disc.
But I think the amount of free games I can get more than justifies the cost of hardware.
There is a real question here: Why do console gamers still tolerate competition between incompatible systems? Unless the Cell rocks our world, there won't be a significant difference between x86 and any other platform, so why not just sell low-end PCs as consoles? I hate to say it, but the Windows monoculture has its advantages -- if I buy a computer game these days, chances are very good that it will play on a Windows PC. If I buy a console game, I have a one in four shot of it playing on a popular console.
When you're presenting a game (specifically the graphics of a game) a video is definitely going to be the best medium to use. When you're presenting last year's earnings data a graph is the best medium.
Exactly.
And you should not present a game as a graph, unless you have a really good reason to.
It's a matter of taste. I unlocked PoP 1 as a secret area of SoT. I also unlocked the first level of PoP 1, redid with the SoT engine. And, disregarding all fancy graphics, do you know what I discovered?
PoP had an absolutely horrible control scheme.
Maybe it's just that I'm bitter because I was unskilled, but it was entirely too easy to be killed by even the lowliest swordsman, it was too easy to fall to your death doing simple things like climbing back up, timing jumps was near-impossible, and it felt sluggish -- and I'm not talking about the abysmal framerate.
Compare that to, say, Donkey Kong, which was unlockable on DK 64. That wasn't necessarily easy or fun, but it mostly did what you wanted it to do -- the controls were nice and responsive, and made sense. That one was actually hard, not artificially hard because I tell the Prince to drop down gently and he decides to run forward, full speed, and fall into a pit of spikes.
Don't just dismiss what you have been asked to as impossible or unreasonable because you are the 'expert'.
I actually do this all the time -- but I tell them so.
The point is to keep lines of communication open. Tell the customer what we can or cannot do, how hard it is to do a particular thing. Don't just send them betas, send them alpha mockups and user stories.
As someone else put it: Users don't know what they want, but they know what they don't want when they see it. So make sure that they are disillusioned as to what's impossible, and that you're entirely sure what they do want out of what's possible, before you go and start implementing.
Wait, you're putting Numa-numa and Flying Spaghetti Monster in the same sentence?
I still don't know what numa-numa is, but a quick look on Wikipedia suggests it's a meme-of-the-day, like, say, All Your Base. The FSM actually has a point -- that we must, as scientists, either reject Intelligent Design (as it is currently taught) as retarded, or we must accept an intelligent design that covers the equally possible Flying Spaghetti Monster. It's not only hilarious, it should be required reading for the morons on the Kansas School Board -- which was its original intent, but unfortunately, most of the morons on the Kansas School Board either didn't read it or missed the point.
Anyway, I think a much more fun internet meme than Snakes on a Plane is a Slashdot comment I saw once about the revenge sequel: A Plane on Snakes.
Here's what I've seen in Halo, but rarely anywhere else:
Vehicles that can be more fun than moving on foot. No othen FPS (GTA doesn't count) did vehicles as well. The Ghost is just fun. Yet it's still balanced enough that a person on foot can reasonably expect to beat a person in a vehicle, without making vehicles feel gimped.
Insane amount of polish for its time. From what I remember, we were just inching along on Half-Life improvements, and PC gamers were scoffing at console gamers, even as they mostly played Counter-Strike. Then there was Halo. Counter-Strike... then Halo. It would have been a shocking leap forward in graphics, gameplay, and AI, even if it was a PC game -- and it was a console game.
The game made the console. You could argue that Zelda made the Gamecube, but most people who had an N64 bought a PS2 instead, so that was a failure. The PS2 simply had more games, but I'd imagine almost no one bought a PS2 because of any one game -- or if they did, I know there aren't a significant number of people who bought a PS2 for the same game. People bought the Xbox because of Halo, and developers made other games for the Xbox because it was popular -- because of Halo.
Amazing soundtrack. Other games have had good soundtracks, but the Halo and Halo 2 soundtracks are worth buying even if you don't like the game. Very rarely does the soundtrack alone sound like a symphony. Very rarely does a game soundtrack evoke emotions other than headbanging adrenaline.
Compelling, epic story. Especially Halo 2. Naysayers will break down the story to the point where it sounds stupid, but you can do that with anything. As an aspiring author, I've discovered that it's all about the execution, even in a book. It's an epic story, with characters you actually care about.
Master Chief. It's all about characters, and this one in particular is just a fun character to play. It means the game can be as realistic as possible, but there's good reason that when you win, your character has done such impossible things -- he really is unique, he really would be able to do that. Compare that to, say, Quake 4, which is the closest anything else comes -- your character has a reputation, but it's not really explained why he's so unique. And in creating this character and the game around him, they've done what every Superman game and every Hulk game has failed utterly at -- creating a character that really is too much of a badass, too powerful, and creating a realistic challenge to match. This is how you can have an epic first-person game, where you play as only one character -- make the character that good.
Beautiful artwork. Goes with the territory. Beautiful music, beautiful artwork, beautifully put together.
They did it again. People debate about whether Halo 2 is better or worse than the original Halo. But the fact is, they can actually have that debate. With most sequels, you can't -- either the original was so bad no one cares (Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time faced no competition from its predecessors), or the new version sucks so blatantly compared to the original (Doom 3), or not enough has really changed for anyone to care (your point about Madden). The fact is, Halo 2 did significantly change compared to Halo -- and I'm not talking about carjacking, swording, or dual-wielding. Subtle tweaks all around -- the pistol is no longer the hand of God, needlers finally have a purpose, Flood heads actually hurt. Halo 2 was every bit as good as Halo, but it was different enough, in gameplay and storyline, that anyone who played Halo will want to play Halo 2.
All of the above. Think of it this way -- I don't like Linux because it's unique. I like it because it has everything that every other OS has, and more. If I wanted something truly unique and innovative, I'd be using Plan 9, HURD, or Minix. Halo doesn't improve much on the first-person shooter, i
This has its place, certainly, but I think you're absolutely right to say this, even if you didn't mean it:
you're really not utilizing a tiny fraction of the benefit of having a large group of interested people assembled on the topic.
That is to say, you are utilizing all but a tiny fraction of the benefit, and thus your software only adds a tiny fraction of benefit.
It's true that involving your audience can be a good thing, but depending on what you're presenting, it's usually much better to completely drop the bullets.
For instance, suppose I'm doing a presentation on some software. I should be showing you not bullets, not screenshots, but the actual software, live. For parts that aren't ready, do a video mockup.
Or suppose I'm doing a presentation on marine wildlife -- if there's a video screen at all, it should have video clips of what I'm talking about.
If I'm doing a presentation about a movie, I should have movie clips -- that's a movie trailer. If I'm doing a presentation about a game, I should have a tech demo ready.
And if I'm doing a presentation about something that there really is no appropriate video for, such as why I hate PowerPoint, I should turn off the display and just talk. And yet, there probably will be at least a couple of times I'll want to show something -- Here's a PowerPoint presentation sucking, and here's my tech demo that completely pwns it. Now fade to black, and let's talk about what we've learned, without visual distractions.
The real trick is to find the right balance between distracting and supporting. For instance, doing flipping, popping, and sounds may be distracting. But, say, lose the sound and have a very quick, simple animation of the text expanding from some point, and you have a very good visual cue that there is something new here -- and it doesn't last long enough to distract from the main point.
Kind of like how we all scoffed at drop shadows, but they really do serve a useful purpose -- they make it absolutly, 100% clear where one window ends and another begins, without really obstructing much. Or animating windows, dialogs, and so on -- as long as the animation is quick enough not to get in the way of what you're doing, it provides a strong visual cue of what changed on the screen.
The trick is to remember that you're not presenting animation, you're presenting information. If you were presenting animation, you shouldn't have used PowerPoint, you should've used a video.
And this, really, is where I think all PowerPoint-like software -- PowerPoint, Impress, Keynote, KPresenter, all of it -- falls flat on its face. Anyone remember that long Half-Life 2 video from E3, from before the game was released? That was a lot more compelling to me than any equivalent powerpoint, or bullets, or anything. Ditto for the new Portal video -- it absolutely blows away any presentation anyone could've done about portal tech.
Slashdot Mirror
This is how I usually end this kind of conversation -- I go over their head. If I know more than they do about the subject, I speak jargon until their eyes glaze over, and then say something to the effect of "Do you really want to know why you're wrong, or will you take my word for it?" I'm a good enough teacher to back that up if they really do want to know. Or sometimes I start from the other end -- if I have a good enough analogy ready, I can start with that -- the money one is a good analogy for the crypto (Would you rather give me two $10 bills or one $100 bill? Would you let me settle a $100 debt with you by giving you two $10 bills?)
The other method of going over their head is to cite someone -- not always even a specific person -- who is smarter than both of us. So for crypto algorithms, I can ask them, "If it was really that easy, don't you think someone else would've thought of it by now? Why do you think we invent wholly new algorithms for 128 bits?"
And if both of those fail, the final method of going over their head is to cite specific sources and papers, and invite them to actually disprove what's said there (without really having to understand it yourself) if they really think they're right.
All of these, of course, are when I knwo I'm right. Quite often, I really don't know, and I stay humble there. But when I know I'm right, it's usually much more important to hit them over the head with one of the above than to try to explain why I'm right. After all, you don't have to know why a car is safer than open air for a lightning storm, you just have to do it. It's not important that someone understand why not to just double-encrypt with 64-bits, it's just important that they not do it.
That's why we have other crypto algorithms ready. I use Blowfish for my VPN connections.
I do -- old tech. Please, let FTP die a well-deserved death!
As an individual, there are still reasons I like services like this: Backup, and things like email and IM. I can set up my own SMTP and Jabber servers, but if they're actually on my laptop, they're worthless -- it's not always on, and it changes IP addresses quite frequently. So I VPN home for those. It's also nice to be able to share things between machines -- laptop and desktop, for instance. My calendar is stored on a WebDav server, also accessed over a VPN to home.
Backup is still the big one. I keep trying to think how a person as paranoid as me could have the kind of efficient backup I'd want.
You also can't do anything about it if you put it in your pocket and plug it into an untrusted computer, at which point you have to decide who you trust more -- botnet authors or Google?
No, are you? I was talking about software. I want Linux games!
It's a pain in the ass to develop a game, period. Making it portable is easy, if you stick to portable libraries. Most people have done that work for you.
BS. Find me the quote. This smells like that old troll about "The PC will never be as powerful as the Xbox" when we had 1.5 ghz CPUs and the Xbox was 700 mhz.
And yes, that does contribute something. But Doom 3 still sucked royally on the XBox, in case you didn't notice. Framerate issues, looked like crap anyway... It looks and plays much better on the PC.
And there's nothing wrong with that, if you're happy with those limitations. I prefer a better experience overall. For instance, as long as I remember my Steam password, I can play Half-Life 2 from any decent PC, provided I'm willing to wait for it to download. I can't even burn a console game. Scratch it or lose it and I have to buy a new one.
Anyway, how hard is it? Flip the package over and compare specs with your system. Pop the disk in and hit next. When it's done, play the game. The only problems I ever have with PC games all stem from me trying to run them on Linux.
You're right. My point was that on the PC, you're much more likely to be able to just buy a "computer game" and have it work. Most games built for OS X will also run on Windows -- not many game developers are willing to risk losing that market -- few enough are willing to make an OS X port in the first place.
And you're right, I can't play Civ4 on a 386, but the lack of specific revisions is nice, too -- especially because I often can reasonably expect to play a game intended for a 386 (like Doom, say) on an amd64. Said amd64 can even play NES, SNES, and N64 games, with varying degrees of success.
My single biggest complaint about consoles, as a user, is that they discourage homebrew. My brother wisely decided not to update his PSP firmware, and he can still play NES games on it, thanks to the wonders of homebrew.
Irrelevant, since I already bought these things. It will likely be four years or so before any games require more RAM than I have now, as that requires 64-bit on Windows, and it will likely be at least a couple of years before I'm even thinking about upgrading anything. I can pick and choose, and the video card and RAM are the top two bottlenecks -- not CPU, not mobo, and I'm not looking to replace my case.
It's kind of like a house. You need a house to play a game on a console, but you need a house for other things anyway, so why not? Same with a PC -- you need one anyway, which means we're already talking about a case, drives, and the basic stuff. And you wouldn't believe how much RAM business people are throwing at their computers to deal with the bloatware that passes for financial software these days, so RAM and CPU are already covered. It's really only the video card.
Sadly, not enough. I did have a lot of fun with two players on a single keyboard for Gish, though -- and if you trust people not to cheat, you can always plug in another keyboard.
However, I've personally had at least as much fun giving four people cheap computers and playing Quake 3. Pretty much any computer anyone's coming to college with can play Quake 3. The only reason we didn't play it more was everyone else was off playing Halo. Cretins.
Good points about local multiplayer. That's why we have LAN parties, but that is a LOT more expensive.
But that's about it. Your points about controllers are well taken -- indeed, a keyboard would really suck for DDR. So I bought a PS2->USB adapter, and now I play StepMania with my PS2 DDR pad. There are numerous controllers for the PC -- it is not a technological or price issue here, it is an issue of perception. You could take a PC, plug in a controller, a TV out, and a headphone->RCA adapter, put it in the living room, and... Guess what? That's what the Xbox was.
The problem is, of course, that you can't play Xbox games on a PC -- so the PC is not likely to have the same games, or if it does, they aren't likely to play the same way. Still, I've often been surprised at how playable console ports are on a keyboard/mouse.
Are you saying Resident Evil 4 looks better than earlier games for the same platform? (GameCube, right?) Or are you saying that it looks better now than it did before?
Console games do improve over the lifetime of said console, to a point. But an individual console game will not improve, in visual appearence, over the lifetime of the console. Zelda: WindWaker still looks exactly the same as it always did. So does Zelda 64 -- the pixellation is really quite annoying, I really wish I could put it on a PC and turn up the resolution, but even the best emulators don't really do that reliably. I've seen it sort of tried with a PS1 emulator, and I eventually gave up (too many glitches) and just played the game on a PS2.
PC games, on the other hand, do improve, which is why games often have settings that are targeted a couple of notches past the $500 video cards of today. Even if they have to patch them later to make them work properly -- oh! And PC games can be patched. Console games being patched is a relatively recent thing.
I like a console as much as everyone else, and there are games worth buying a console for -- Halo, Final Fantasy, Zelda -- but I do miss the flexibility and hackability of my PC, especially Linux. The good news for me, at least, is that if I do eventually buy a console, my desktop monitor can do TV in, although I'll have to rethink this for the next gen if I get them.
Not true. How do you explain the Xbox 360?
I am not arguing that the PC is The Answer, only that it is an answer to the console wars.
4096-bit RSA for key exchange. Blowfish for stream encryption. lzo compression before encryption.
How long will that take to break? I think we're approaching theoretical impossibility. And how many packets can you really capture? I send DVD images over my VPN, over the wireless. Unless Google or Microsoft desperately wants something I have, I don't think anyone else can hold onto enough of my traffic to matter by the time they find a crack.
If it was still 10 years ago and we were still actually using single DSA for secure stuff, I'd tend to agree with you, but now?
Long answer: If you can't trust the software, you're SOL. If you can't trust the browser, how can you trust a java applet that the browser delivers? If you suspect a keylogger, your java applet will only be secure so long as it's uncommon enough that no one cares to counter it with common keylogging software. Unless you propose to implement the crypto in Java, and distribute all required components inside your Java app, there's a good chance you have to call a local crypto library, so one could easily imagine keylogging software grabbing everything you're doing from the crypto API, after you type it but before it's actually encrypted and sent out.
And of course, as you say, they could monitor the screen and mouse movements, they could discover that you're using an applet and do a MITM (sending you to another applet that looks similar to yours but logs what you do), they could...
Hell, they could just visit that applet themselves, steal your bandwidth.
There's a very, very good chance that if you bring a boot CD, boot DVD, bootable flash, or any combination of the above, that you will be as secure as you would with a laptop. There could easily be hardware keyloggers, but that's probably significantly rarer.
But really, bring a laptop and use a VPN. Laptops can be had ridiculously cheap, and VPNs can be ridiculously easy to set up, and Tempest attacks are ridiculously hard to execute. Then your biggest problem would be shoulder surfing. But that's easy -- type too fast for them to catch your passwords, and make sure you're not being watched when you hit anything particularly sensitive. I also use Dvorak, for an added layer of confusion.
Any security can be beat, but mine is very, very difficult to break, while at the same time being insanely easy for me.
Oh, man, I wish I'd thought of half of the things you (and other replies) are putting out here. Recently, I was at a completely unsecured Windows desktop in a hotel lobby. Apparently, someone at the hotel thought Wireless was a magic bullet and put some Linksys or Dlink crap up, with a click-through agreement.
Now, for whatever reason, my Powerbook with OpenVPN will, with seemingly random frequency, crash all but the most industrial-strength access points. Iowa State University wireless was about the only place I didn't have that problem, and they don't do any kind of NAT -- you get a real Internet IP address. Just a little firewalling -- common things like Windows file sharing and outbound SMTP (spam) -- other than that, every box you have is naked on the Internet. But I digress...
So, this hotel, the desktop in the lobby (next to the front desk, probably 10 feet from their access point) was hooked up via wireless. So I come in, turn on my wireless, click through the agreement, and 10 minutes later -- boom! No more Internet, for the whole fucking hotel.
So I go sit down at the Windows box to check it out. Sure enough, the Internet outages -- which only seem to happen when I'm doing something with my laptop -- occur at exactly the same time, judging by pings to Google on the Windows box and my laptop.
But while at the Windows box, I noticed something. Despite a few warnings on the sign next to the computer, the thing was completely open. Judging by a few of the programs I was seeing here, it had been 0wned several times by several different people, but all with the motive of intercepting credit card numbers (or something), none with the motive of defacing the box. It was blatantly obvious they didn't image it much.
All that power, and the only thing I could think to do (or dared try) was changing the "Internet Explorer" link on the desktop to "Internet Exploder". Too subtle, too -- I should've changed the icon to a bomb. I hope someone gets a chuckle out of it someday, but unfortunately, I doubt it will cause hours of fun for anyone, the way the desktop/screenshot thing might.
That much, at least, makes sense: Most people generally believe they deserve wealth, as a rationalization for wanting it. If they don't have it, the rationalization goes "The rich assholes have all the money, and Bush is an idiot, or the economy sucks for Reason X, and so I don't have the money I should." The wealthy rationalize it like this: "Well, that wasn't so hard. Any idiot can be wealthy if they really try, after all, I did it -- which must mean any cretin who isn't wealthy is a lazy bum who doesn't deserve wealth."
And me? Technology is the only expensive hobby I have. If I suddenly had a fortune, I'd probably still eat ramen, and I'd probably wear the same clothes, live in about the same amount of space, ride a bicycle in a small town or own a sensible car, and so on. I'm told all of this is rare.
Basically, if I was paid more per hour, then past a certain point, I'd simply work fewer hours.
I don't understand the point of working long hours at a high-paying job to support a family you rarely see living in an awesome house you're barely in except to sleep and a cool car you drive to and from work in.
That could make sense, even -- if the artist of modest ambition can barely afford ramen, and the greedy artist has the cook deliver something healthy every day, then guess which one is going to have more time to focus on art? Which one will actually be more healthy and alert when creating art?
Actually, I only said that so I don't get modded offtopic. What I really want to say is, in your sig, what would the "night" represent? Linux?
Most games rock hard on my PC, and my video card cost about $200. How much does a 360 cost now? At least $100 more, right?
And I bought it a year ago.
Yeah, I have that option. Console gamers don't. Your games stay at around the same quality over the years, and the developers get to make that choice for you -- "Are we OK with dropping the framerate to 10fps here to get the effects we want?" By the end of a console's life cycle, your games don't look that much better than they did at the beginning.
Which means that by the time you're deciding whether or not to buy an Xbox 360 -- which will do absolutely nothing for your current Xbox games except maybe not be able to play them -- basically, do you want Halo 2 to continue to work well, or do you want to play Halo 3? And what about all the other games -- are you buying a $300 system just to play Halo 3, or are there actually any other good 360 titles? And are you going to buy a PS3? A Wii?
Whereas I can buy a game, play it on my current system, and if I find I really am cutting down too much on the quality, I can buy a new video card. That new video card will make all my games improve, unless they are so ridiculously old (Quake 3) that I can already play them at 1600x1200 with every scrap of quality turned all the way up.
In other words, I can try before I buy, and I still have the option of playing new games on older hardware. You don't even get that option -- if Halo 3 is a 360 game, does anyone really think it will exist for the old Xbox? From the point of view of a programmer, it looks like it would be much harder to port a game between consoles, especially generations of consoles, than to make it scalable on PCs. And even if they did, would you be able to buy it for the Xbox and also get the 360 version, or would you have to buy it again when you bought a 360?
The trick is to not quite buy top of the line, since that $500 card isn't really $300 better than my $200 one, and in another 2 or 3 years, $200 will buy me more than that $500 could buy me now.
You know what else I can do? I can play free games. Everything about consoles is driven by money -- even the Xbox Live Arcade (or whatever) is going to cost you at least $5 for a game. You spend $60 on a game that I pay $50 for, at most, and you get just the one game. I get another 20 or 30 free mods to go with it, and I can still go with the Xbox Live Arcade model (via Steam), but with 100 gigs of space (just my Windows partition) instead of 15 or 20 to put downloaded games on -- which means that downloaded games, free or not, can meet or exceed the quality of games I buy on a disc.
But I think the amount of free games I can get more than justifies the cost of hardware.
Yeah, it's so cool it's been done twice before, at least.
Just how is this any different than Natural Selection or Tremulous?
Oh, right. 10 hour matches.
There is a real question here: Why do console gamers still tolerate competition between incompatible systems? Unless the Cell rocks our world, there won't be a significant difference between x86 and any other platform, so why not just sell low-end PCs as consoles? I hate to say it, but the Windows monoculture has its advantages -- if I buy a computer game these days, chances are very good that it will play on a Windows PC. If I buy a console game, I have a one in four shot of it playing on a popular console.
Exactly.
And you should not present a game as a graph, unless you have a really good reason to.
It's a matter of taste. I unlocked PoP 1 as a secret area of SoT. I also unlocked the first level of PoP 1, redid with the SoT engine. And, disregarding all fancy graphics, do you know what I discovered?
PoP had an absolutely horrible control scheme.
Maybe it's just that I'm bitter because I was unskilled, but it was entirely too easy to be killed by even the lowliest swordsman, it was too easy to fall to your death doing simple things like climbing back up, timing jumps was near-impossible, and it felt sluggish -- and I'm not talking about the abysmal framerate.
Compare that to, say, Donkey Kong, which was unlockable on DK 64. That wasn't necessarily easy or fun, but it mostly did what you wanted it to do -- the controls were nice and responsive, and made sense. That one was actually hard, not artificially hard because I tell the Prince to drop down gently and he decides to run forward, full speed, and fall into a pit of spikes.
I actually do this all the time -- but I tell them so.
The point is to keep lines of communication open. Tell the customer what we can or cannot do, how hard it is to do a particular thing. Don't just send them betas, send them alpha mockups and user stories.
As someone else put it: Users don't know what they want, but they know what they don't want when they see it. So make sure that they are disillusioned as to what's impossible, and that you're entirely sure what they do want out of what's possible, before you go and start implementing.
It is, indeed, all about communication.
Wait, you're putting Numa-numa and Flying Spaghetti Monster in the same sentence?
I still don't know what numa-numa is, but a quick look on Wikipedia suggests it's a meme-of-the-day, like, say, All Your Base. The FSM actually has a point -- that we must, as scientists, either reject Intelligent Design (as it is currently taught) as retarded, or we must accept an intelligent design that covers the equally possible Flying Spaghetti Monster. It's not only hilarious, it should be required reading for the morons on the Kansas School Board -- which was its original intent, but unfortunately, most of the morons on the Kansas School Board either didn't read it or missed the point.
Anyway, I think a much more fun internet meme than Snakes on a Plane is a Slashdot comment I saw once about the revenge sequel: A Plane on Snakes.
Here's what I've seen in Halo, but rarely anywhere else:
This has its place, certainly, but I think you're absolutely right to say this, even if you didn't mean it:
That is to say, you are utilizing all but a tiny fraction of the benefit, and thus your software only adds a tiny fraction of benefit.
It's true that involving your audience can be a good thing, but depending on what you're presenting, it's usually much better to completely drop the bullets.
For instance, suppose I'm doing a presentation on some software. I should be showing you not bullets, not screenshots, but the actual software, live. For parts that aren't ready, do a video mockup.
Or suppose I'm doing a presentation on marine wildlife -- if there's a video screen at all, it should have video clips of what I'm talking about.
If I'm doing a presentation about a movie, I should have movie clips -- that's a movie trailer. If I'm doing a presentation about a game, I should have a tech demo ready.
And if I'm doing a presentation about something that there really is no appropriate video for, such as why I hate PowerPoint, I should turn off the display and just talk. And yet, there probably will be at least a couple of times I'll want to show something -- Here's a PowerPoint presentation sucking, and here's my tech demo that completely pwns it. Now fade to black, and let's talk about what we've learned, without visual distractions.
The real trick is to find the right balance between distracting and supporting. For instance, doing flipping, popping, and sounds may be distracting. But, say, lose the sound and have a very quick, simple animation of the text expanding from some point, and you have a very good visual cue that there is something new here -- and it doesn't last long enough to distract from the main point.
Kind of like how we all scoffed at drop shadows, but they really do serve a useful purpose -- they make it absolutly, 100% clear where one window ends and another begins, without really obstructing much. Or animating windows, dialogs, and so on -- as long as the animation is quick enough not to get in the way of what you're doing, it provides a strong visual cue of what changed on the screen.
The trick is to remember that you're not presenting animation, you're presenting information. If you were presenting animation, you shouldn't have used PowerPoint, you should've used a video.
And this, really, is where I think all PowerPoint-like software -- PowerPoint, Impress, Keynote, KPresenter, all of it -- falls flat on its face. Anyone remember that long Half-Life 2 video from E3, from before the game was released? That was a lot more compelling to me than any equivalent powerpoint, or bullets, or anything. Ditto for the new Portal video -- it absolutely blows away any presentation anyone could've done about portal tech.