Well, since Google says "versions don't matter anymore" and they're planning on releasing every six weeks, they'll be on version 18 by the end of the year.
In town? A messenger service (taxi companies also provide this, too). To another city, state, or country? UPS/FedEx. If I had twenty blueprints to send somewhere, I'd say it's safe to assume I'm doing it for some form of business and that it was needed in a timely fashion and with both guaranteed delivery and confirmed delivery. It wouldn't even be a question, for me, as a business organization.
It seems that the USPS is having a real hard time finding special niches where it can still fit in and provide a service that isn't already provided by private industry without government subsidies or oversight.
By the way, why don't I find the USPS reliable? Well, they use a measuring system for reliability that scores them at 90%, but they won't actually publically release any information on what is delivered, lost, or stolen. I do recall some watchdog (CATO, maybe?) accused them of losing over a billion items per year. I've also never heard of stories about UPS or FedEx as I have the USPS. You know, stealing Netflix CDs. Finding tens of thousands of letters and packages in a postal carrier's home. Finding mail thrown away rather than delivered, etc.
I have no faith in the USPS and would never use them to send an important document. Especially one that I needed signed, guaranteed to be delivered by a certain date, or even proven that it was delivered. I know that USPS does offer some or all of these services (for a price), but I simply don't find them reliable enough. With UPS or FEDEX, I never have any concern about whether my delivery will be made when I want it and with a signature. Also, it's not all that expensive (unless you're sending it over night). It's maybe 20% more to ship by UPS than USPS, but in my experience, it's definitely worth it.
The USPS is still an incredible deal if you are sending a letter, for certain. You can't really beat 40 or 50 cents to get a letter across the entire country within only a few days. On the other hand, you can't beat email, so that's becoming an outdated service. Even at 50 cents. I'm not in Sweden, so I can only speak for this from the perspective of the USPS and it may be an entirely different situation over there (though, apparently, a more advanced one, if only a bit).
By the way, the best way to make sure I won't buy an item from your store or your auction? Tell me I can only get it by USPS. One of the most aggravating things is when I buy something, say, from Amazon. Only to find that the item was actually fulfilled from an Amazon *partner*... and that they sent it by USPS, instead of a courier service. Seriously pisses me off.
Also, who sends letters? I communicate with colleagues, friends, and family by phone, IM, email, and video phone. I send and receive packages via UPS and FEDEX. I pay bills via my bank's bill pay. I write checks via my bank's automatic check writing/sending service. The only thing I get in the mail are tax documents and junk mail.
The problem is not just what they're capable of. It's what they cost. For the price of my last video card, you could own *both* a PS3 and a 360 and have top of the line (for that market) graphics, until the end of the console's life (since a 360 from 2011 is obviously serving the same experience as a 360 from 2005, sans certain RROD experiences). So someone could have a machine for $300 that gives them the same experience 30-million other people are having or they can buy a top of the line PC that will be bottom of the line by the end of that console cycle. Or they could buy a midrange PC several times over during that cycle. Either way, it's hard to beat the $300 of the console.
If all anyone cared about was graphics, it'd be the PC non-stop until the end of time, for obvious reasons.
In fact, if you read a lot of gaming forums today when the topic comes up about "Are you ready for a new generation of consoles, yet?", most of the responses (I'd estimate 80%) say "fuck no, I don't want a new generation of consoles yet! there's no reason for it as the current generation does everything I could possibly want". Of course, there are people like myself who say "hell yes, I love technology and video games and want to have my mind blown". I mean, more toys means more awesome. And graphics aren't the only increase that comes with these things. A certain complexity and depth is possible with the advancement and you want that more than once a decade.
The sad fact is that the gaming industry seems to be stagnant and most people are just fine with it remaining stagnant.
The only hope -- and I've been saying this for a year or two, now -- is that the next generation of consoles takes SO long to come out, that even the die-hard anti-new-stuff people can't take playing on the old systems any more. At this rate, it's obvious we wouldn't see a new console until the end of 2013 at the earliest. By that point, the current consoles will have been about 8 years old. They'll be running on 2005 console hardware (that wasn't exactly top of the line, even back then) while 2013 PCs will be largely running on 2013 hardware.
So, if it takes any longer than that for consoles to come out, the different between current consoles and current PCs as a gaming experience may be so vast that nobody can stick their heads in the sand and even the die-hard console-only gamers will say "holy shit, I have got to get me a new gaming PC". Gaming on the PC will see a resurgence. Developers will flood back into the PC market and do some amazing stuff. It'll flourish again. For a little while.
Then the next console will come out and everyone will go back to their $300-$400 consoles for another decade while the PC dies again.
That's a really oversimplified way of looking at it. As a life-long hard core PC gamer who didn't cozy up to consoles *at all* until just a few years ago, I'm completely fine acknowledging that many games are a much better experience on the console. Not MMOs or strategy games, of course. And not some FPSes (especially multiplayer).
I'm not even talking about the fact that even the highest end computer isn't running with a 65" screen and a high end audio system like your home theater is. Or that your computer is on a desk in front of an office chair, like you probably spend most of your life in already, instead of on a nice comfy beanbag or sofa or lounger, like your television. I'm just talking about the presentation itself, the controls, and the pretty decent online experience (as far as match-making and number of people to play with).
Saying one is definitely an ideal while the other has no redeeming value is kind of silly. I have all the consoles and a sweet rig and I enjoy them all equally.
Well, not the Wii, because I haven't touched that since it came out (I don't even know where the hell it is, right now) . . . but everything *else* . . .:P
Yeah, see, I don't get this. That sounds an awful lot like my friend who only has a CRT television and says he can't understand how HD or 16:9 or anything could possibly be any better. I mean, watching Perry Mason on your black and white 13" 4:3 CRT in the kitchen sitting next to your rotary land line phone is fine if it satisfies all your needs, but it's kind of naive to suggest that's the experience everyone else has or wants.
On the other hand, I remember when CCP introduced the new Trinity graphics engine for EVE-Online and people fucking lost their shit over it. There was a whopping 1.4 percent (or something like that) of players who had systems that did not support Shader Model 3 in the new engine and because of the amount of effort required to continue testing and developing the older graphics that supported Shader Model 2, they found that it wasn't worth it for the few people it addressed.
Of course, any card in any system that was less than five or seven (I forget which) years old at the time already supported SM3, so it shouldn't have been a big deal. But there are always a handful of people that don't see why they can't run the newest software on their 18lb Superlap 386 from 1987.
That's a slightly different then, granted, than merely lowering the graphics of your game so you can enjoy it on a low-end computer. And as you point out, that's much more possible to do in 2011 than it was in 2005 or 2000. We've reached a point where you can maintain lower fidelity and performance as needed without reaching a break-point.
I'd love to see a list of these games you're having perfect experiences with right out of the box, because that is the opposite of what I seem most people exieriencing, these days. Take Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, for example. Buggy, glitchy, and for a lot of people, completely unplayable. Go check out the Steam forums for examples of people having nightmares just getting the game not to crash when running for a few minutes. People are still having major problems with Fallout 3 and it was released a couple years ago.
Also, these "golly, I don't even know what my computer is, but stuff just by gone works in it, I tell you what!" people are a lot like people who say "the Wii is all I need for videogame playing and I'm perfectly happy with standard def and 4:3 content!". Well, that's great for you. And that's why iPhone games like Angry Birds are such huge sellers. But that's not entirely representative.
PC gaming continues to be plagued with problems. In fact, I tend to feel they're even worse than they used to be, because developers (except for Dice with BF3, for example) are treating the PC as a secondary platform that they deploy on as an afterthought, meaning it's less QAd and less refined.
Also, I wouldn't really say that Starcraft2 is a good benchmark for claiming that an old machine is just dandy for the biggest and bestest new titles. Starcraft2 was designed with extreme care and great attention afforded to low end systems (consider where the biggest amount of SC2 gaming occurs . . . ). Tell me if you get the same satisfying experience with New Vegas, Bulletstorm, a new MMO, Civ V, or Dragon Age II (which seems to have some fairly big optimization problems).
Of course, this is all assuming you're running at a modern-ish resolution, too. If you're running at 1280x1024 or 1600x or something, then of course you're still getting pretty good performance.
As attention continues to be paid primarily only to the console side of the equation, I fully expect this to get worse. Especially since people seem to have less desire for a desktop system. A few of us will continue to buy desktops for video games, but most people don't do that. Most people have computers and they figure they might as well play some games on them while they have a chance. When it comes down to it, their computer will handle their browsing and email for years to come. Long after they can run modern games on them anywhere near as they're meant to be experienced. And when that happens, those people don't think "time for a new computer!". They either don't game beyond some facebook or free to play game or they drop $300 on a console and play console games, instead.
That point is irrelevant, since console players and PC players don't play together on the same servers. It's not some kid with a controller versus me with a mouse and WASD.
Also, if you read any gaming forums where this topic comes up, it seems to be consistently around 80% of players who have the opinion that they see no need for a new generation of consoles in the next couple of years. They are entirely happy playing on consoles that have hardware from 2005 that was already a little dated back then and could just barely keep up with 2005's PC hardware at the time, and is significantly farther behind PC hardware six years later. They just don't see a need for anything more than they have now.
Personally, I don't see how any geek can say "more new awesome stuff with more power and more whiz-bang? naw, don't give me that. I just want the same old thing". More power is always better.
It's already 2011. I'm ready for some systems that have more than 256mb of RAM. A fucking calculator watch has more RAM than that, these days. And something that can hold more than a mere 9gb of data (DVD). And something that is capable of more multiplayer numbers than most games currently run at (12-24), which isn't even half of the numbers Battlefield 2 did on the PC about six years ago.
Hell, the developers of MAG (Zipper studios) has been fighting console limitations since before the game came out. Every time they add or change something, they're forced to remove something else, due to very tight memory constraints.
The game still has those atrociously poorly done and poorly animated faces. I also took issue with the tons of cut-scenes. In the first twenty minutes (before I turned it off), it was about three seconds of doing something followed by thirty seconds of cut-scene. Then doing three seconds of something again and then more cut-scenes. Not to mention, a fair amount of jerkiness (and I wasn't even using the HD textures). This is on an i7 930 with 12gb ram and an ATI 5970 that doesn't have any sort of hitching on anything else.
On top of that, the degree of bullshit you have to go through to get the game going is absurd.
Having bought it on Steam, I had to:
Pre-load.
Decrypt.
Launch.
Configure.
Click "register on bioware's website to get full access to content".
Once I was on the bioware site, I had to hunt down what my login credentials for their site were.
Once I had the login credentials and logged in, I had to enter a code to register the game and unlock the content.
The key didn't work.
I went to the Steam forums and looked for a thread that discussed the same thing, which explained which of the several keys/codes were actually needed.
Went back to the bioware site and entered a key. Waited for it to activate it.
Did the same thing with the second key.
Launched the game again.
Didn't want it running in the default "windowed full screen" mode and set it to "full screen".
When it asked me to confirm to keep settings (with a countdown timer), it didn't show a cursor, so I had to wait out the timer and do it all over again. This time it showed the cursor and let me commit the changes.
The game notified me that it had lost connection with the bioware servers and that I would not have access to certain content, until it was connected again.
I opened up the "DLC" section in the game and none of the content I just entered the serials to receive appeared.
Launched the game and began to play it, before I decided I wasn't in the mood for having cut-scenes every 45 seconds and quit for the time being.
Found out about the PC texture pack and clicked the link.
Took me to the bioware site, where I had to login again.
Downloaded the 1gb installer.
Ran the texture installer.
Launched the game again.
Went to Options/Settings=>Video=>Selected "high-resolution textures".
Went back to the DLC section. DLC still isn't there.
Clicked on the button to view DLC on my account, which took me back to Bioware's site again, but just showed me two items I already received with the purchase that said "buy now".
Clicked on Profile=>My Registered Content on the website.
Took me to a huge list of my registered content, which shows it for every platform (each console, too).
Only thing you could do here is click on a "more info" button next to each item. More Info for six of the DA2 items says to launch the game and view the "Unlockables" screen under "Extras".
ALT+TABbed back to the game. Said the connection to bioware was lost, so I had to sign in again through the game.
Followed the info from the site to find that the items did appear under Extras=>Unlockables, instead of DLC.
Went back to the bioware site.
Clicked on the seventh item in my list, which had "More Info PC / More Info MAC".
Said I had to download and install the DLC, separately.
Downloaded the DLC from the website.
ALT+TAbbed back to the game and quit it.
Ran the DLC installer.
Launched the game again.
Verified that the DLC now appears in-game.
Now they want us to go download a separate pack of textures to get the full PC experience on a game that is the full $60 console game price? I am ON a PC and downloaded and purchased the game from a PC game service (Steam) and installed it. Shouldn't the high res textures ha
If you have a neighbor who is a plumber, electrician, contractor, or handyman, you'll find that they demand to be paid for their time and their work.
However, those same people will come to you for help with their computers and expect it for free. I'll help out my immediate family and a few friends, but I just only have so much time and patience and energy. It's not even the money. I just don't want to deal with it.
I agree that text messaging is priced ridiculously, but if people are using it that much, they should probably be communicating by a more efficient method. I probably send and receive about four text messages a month. If that. Why do I need text messaging when I already have email, IM, and . . . uh . . . A TELEPHONE. But yeah, Google Voice does SMS, so you don't really need anything else. At least, as long as their service remains free (for the rest of this year, I guess).
'For those who must have it for free anyway, you probably know where to look.'"
Piracy doesn't get you something for free. Piracy is when someone makes unauthorized duplicates of something which they don't own the copyright for with the intention of selling it for a profit. Piracy is the guy on the street in New York who is trying to sell you a movie that is still in the theaters for $20 on DVD or is trying to sell you a copy of some software for $5.
Stop perpetuating the misuse of these words. Piracy, copyright infringement, plagiarism, and forgery are all different things. Playing a scene-ripped copy of a game or movie is not piracy. That doesn't justify it if you do it, but it's not piracy.
If I want to talk to my friends, I'm going to just call them. I'm certainly not going to login to a website and send messages through a proprietary system to them. And I'm *certainly* not going to login to the website, find their page or find them in some contact list, then call them via skype. Instead, I'm going to . . . you know, pick up the fucking phone.
Besides, Skype isn't in keeping with the spirit of Facebook. Facebook (like all social networking) is NOT about one on one communication. Social networking sites are all about "I AM SO IMPORTANT... I AM **SO** IMPORTANT . . . . that I can't be bothered to let the people important to me in y life know about things or talk with them. Instead, I'm going to broadcast it to the entire world so I can put in the least amount of effort and personal interaction to accomplish telling EVERYONE on earth about X, Y, and Z. .."
The only way this would keep in spirit with facebook is if it only broadcast everything you said via Skype into some massive 1,200 person distribution list that they can then *listen* to.
More interestingly, does anybody know of a blogger blog on blogger that is actually useful? Seems to me like banning every blogger "site" nation-wide is kind of like Google re-jiggering the algorithm they use to reduce exposure for link farms and content farms. Win-win.
But we pay a nontrivial cost for those filters. Even if you only use gmail for email, and you trust the "free" google filters, you are still paying for them. The cost is passed down to the consumer to pay for bandwidth, CPU time, storage space, and of course updates to filter rules.
We pay for inoculations as well. They aren't free and often are not paid for by the individual being inoculated. If you starve it out, the problem will go away and that is MUCH more feasible than targeting thousands of amorphous spammers around the globe (often in places where they are not reachable by any punitive means).
If everyone is inoculated against something, so nobody is thereby being infected with said virus, is it really still an "epidemic"?
That is not a fair comparison and I'll tell you why.
When we began inoculation against polio, we eventually wiped out the virus from the main population. The virus could not spread and could not infect (of course now it may be coming back but that is a different situation). The cost of polio dropped to almost nothing because in the developed world people no longer were infected by the virus.
On the other hand, people all over the world are constantly paying the cost of spam. Just because they don't see (much of) it doesn't mean it no longer exists. Spam still consumes bandwidth, storage, and CPU time. And of course we need to also consider the false positive rate of spam filtering; the lost productivity and economic progress that we pay for as a result of legitimate email that is errantly thrown out as spam by filtering techniques. Those who believe in filters have to update their filters because the spammers are constantly finding new ways to get around them. Even if the average person sees very few spam emails in a year, it doesn't mean they don't have to pay for them.
And the fact that so many people are oblivious to what spam costs them may in some ways be even worse.
So in other words, yes. Spam is still very much an epidemic. It will cease to be an epidemic when spam is no longer sent; regardless of whether or not it is viewed.
I don't see a significant difference from the inoculation metaphor. Like a virus, spam only continues to "spread" if it continues to find purchase within a host. Or, rather, to be viewed and responded to. The only reason spammers continue to do what they do is because of the handful of people who don't take precautions against spam, like people who don't protect their children from mumps, rubella, or smallpox.
When it comes down to it, spam is a thing like many others in the tech world. A thing which can best be addressed by preventative technology rather than trying to stick some kid in pound-me-in-the-ass hard-core prison, for writing a script that spams a bunch of crap to a million accounts.
Of course, there's another similarity to viruses and inoculations. The sickness fuels an entire industry (medical and pharmaceutical or technological and consultative) on which a large economy is fueled. A sort of "prison industry / criminal legislation" symbiosis.
Is spam really an epidemic? We have simple means to block almost all spam, so that the average person probably sees maybe a dozen spam messages per year. If everyone is inoculated against something, so nobody is thereby being infected with said virus, is it really still an "epidemic"?
Yeah, the headline on Slashdot would tend to elicit rightful cries of "Is spamming a 'crime' worthy of taking several percent of someone's entire life span?", while the real article would elicit rightful responses of "Okay, so the guy was found guilty of running a prescription drug sales scam online".
Someone really needs to vet the sanity of articles before they make Slashdot, but after almost fifteen years, why start now?
So you and your wife live in the united states, but don't support the most fundamental tenet of our law, which is that you're innocent until you're proven guilty. Nice.
I've read enough comments here that seem to completely miss what is going on here and are completely ignorant on the abuse by our government in violating the Fourth Amendment. The assumption by everyone seems to be one of two things. Either the police are seizing property as evidence of a crime committed (in which case, you would presume it will be returned if he's found innocent) or that he has been found guilty and they're taking his ill-gotten gains.
That is not the case.
What they're doing is taking possession of someone's property. Someone who has not been convicted of a crime through a fair trial, yet. Then they're going to sell it and keep the profit. Does that sound right to you? Shouldn't you receive a trial and be found guilty of a crime, before paying for that crime?
In fact, not only do you not have to be found guilty through trial of an actual crime in this country for the government to steal your property and sell it for themselves, but you don't have to even be charged with a crime, in many cases. I went looking for something to explain it to those who care to be enlightened (by what I thought was common knowledge, but by the reactions on Slashdot to this article, seems to be foreign to 80% of us). I actually found a well composed video that from the Institute for Justice
Essentially, what has been happening for about thirty years, is that instead of charging YOU with a crime, the government charges your PROPERTY with a crime. Your property can't defend itself, so it is assumed "guilty". They take the property, sell it at auction, and then split it up among various government departments. All without YOU being convicted. Or even tried in a court of law. Or even being charged with a crime. It is currently a billion-dollar scam in this country.
So save your "durr durr meth dealer bad!" bullshit. You aren't a hard-ass for saying "throw away the key!" or "execute this guy!" or "he deserves it!". You just look ignorant for not considering the due process we have in this country that protects people like you and me from being railroaded without evidence. Maybe the guy IS guilty. That's fine. If he's guilty, throw the book at him. The mere fact that someone has charged him with a crime doesn't mean he deserves punishment nor that he deserves to have his property stolen from him, auctioned off, and then split amongst his local government agencies.
Really? You don't think he should be proven guilty, first? We're just taking property of innocent people now and throwing them in prison without a trial? What country do you live in? In the states, you're innocent until proven beyond any reasonable doubt to be guilty by a jury. By your logic, all those people who are accused of rape and later confess to false accusations (say, because they didn't want to go to a party, so they pretended to be raped to get out of going - seriously, google this shit) . . . then the mere fact that you were accused means they should be rushed to prison and the key thrown away. Fair trial and truth be fucked, eh?
I'm all for dealing with true criminals who absolutely damage other unwilling individuals in society. But let's be sure they're guilty, before we do it.
Yeah, who cares that studies show that approximately 10% to 15% of the prison population is actually innocent. Hey, maybe we should torture them before killing them, too! I mean, if the whole point is to feel like we've really gotten our vengeance, why just kill them straight out before really getting your rocks off, huh?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, since Google says "versions don't matter anymore" and they're planning on releasing every six weeks, they'll be on version 18 by the end of the year.
In town? A messenger service (taxi companies also provide this, too). To another city, state, or country? UPS/FedEx. If I had twenty blueprints to send somewhere, I'd say it's safe to assume I'm doing it for some form of business and that it was needed in a timely fashion and with both guaranteed delivery and confirmed delivery. It wouldn't even be a question, for me, as a business organization.
It seems that the USPS is having a real hard time finding special niches where it can still fit in and provide a service that isn't already provided by private industry without government subsidies or oversight.
By the way, why don't I find the USPS reliable? Well, they use a measuring system for reliability that scores them at 90%, but they won't actually publically release any information on what is delivered, lost, or stolen. I do recall some watchdog (CATO, maybe?) accused them of losing over a billion items per year. I've also never heard of stories about UPS or FedEx as I have the USPS. You know, stealing Netflix CDs. Finding tens of thousands of letters and packages in a postal carrier's home. Finding mail thrown away rather than delivered, etc.
I have no faith in the USPS and would never use them to send an important document. Especially one that I needed signed, guaranteed to be delivered by a certain date, or even proven that it was delivered. I know that USPS does offer some or all of these services (for a price), but I simply don't find them reliable enough. With UPS or FEDEX, I never have any concern about whether my delivery will be made when I want it and with a signature. Also, it's not all that expensive (unless you're sending it over night). It's maybe 20% more to ship by UPS than USPS, but in my experience, it's definitely worth it.
The USPS is still an incredible deal if you are sending a letter, for certain. You can't really beat 40 or 50 cents to get a letter across the entire country within only a few days. On the other hand, you can't beat email, so that's becoming an outdated service. Even at 50 cents. I'm not in Sweden, so I can only speak for this from the perspective of the USPS and it may be an entirely different situation over there (though, apparently, a more advanced one, if only a bit).
By the way, the best way to make sure I won't buy an item from your store or your auction? Tell me I can only get it by USPS. One of the most aggravating things is when I buy something, say, from Amazon. Only to find that the item was actually fulfilled from an Amazon *partner*... and that they sent it by USPS, instead of a courier service. Seriously pisses me off.
Also, who sends letters? I communicate with colleagues, friends, and family by phone, IM, email, and video phone. I send and receive packages via UPS and FEDEX. I pay bills via my bank's bill pay. I write checks via my bank's automatic check writing/sending service. The only thing I get in the mail are tax documents and junk mail.
The problem is not just what they're capable of. It's what they cost. For the price of my last video card, you could own *both* a PS3 and a 360 and have top of the line (for that market) graphics, until the end of the console's life (since a 360 from 2011 is obviously serving the same experience as a 360 from 2005, sans certain RROD experiences). So someone could have a machine for $300 that gives them the same experience 30-million other people are having or they can buy a top of the line PC that will be bottom of the line by the end of that console cycle. Or they could buy a midrange PC several times over during that cycle. Either way, it's hard to beat the $300 of the console.
If all anyone cared about was graphics, it'd be the PC non-stop until the end of time, for obvious reasons.
In fact, if you read a lot of gaming forums today when the topic comes up about "Are you ready for a new generation of consoles, yet?", most of the responses (I'd estimate 80%) say "fuck no, I don't want a new generation of consoles yet! there's no reason for it as the current generation does everything I could possibly want". Of course, there are people like myself who say "hell yes, I love technology and video games and want to have my mind blown". I mean, more toys means more awesome. And graphics aren't the only increase that comes with these things. A certain complexity and depth is possible with the advancement and you want that more than once a decade.
The sad fact is that the gaming industry seems to be stagnant and most people are just fine with it remaining stagnant.
The only hope -- and I've been saying this for a year or two, now -- is that the next generation of consoles takes SO long to come out, that even the die-hard anti-new-stuff people can't take playing on the old systems any more. At this rate, it's obvious we wouldn't see a new console until the end of 2013 at the earliest. By that point, the current consoles will have been about 8 years old. They'll be running on 2005 console hardware (that wasn't exactly top of the line, even back then) while 2013 PCs will be largely running on 2013 hardware.
So, if it takes any longer than that for consoles to come out, the different between current consoles and current PCs as a gaming experience may be so vast that nobody can stick their heads in the sand and even the die-hard console-only gamers will say "holy shit, I have got to get me a new gaming PC". Gaming on the PC will see a resurgence. Developers will flood back into the PC market and do some amazing stuff. It'll flourish again. For a little while.
Then the next console will come out and everyone will go back to their $300-$400 consoles for another decade while the PC dies again.
That's a really oversimplified way of looking at it. As a life-long hard core PC gamer who didn't cozy up to consoles *at all* until just a few years ago, I'm completely fine acknowledging that many games are a much better experience on the console. Not MMOs or strategy games, of course. And not some FPSes (especially multiplayer).
I'm not even talking about the fact that even the highest end computer isn't running with a 65" screen and a high end audio system like your home theater is. Or that your computer is on a desk in front of an office chair, like you probably spend most of your life in already, instead of on a nice comfy beanbag or sofa or lounger, like your television. I'm just talking about the presentation itself, the controls, and the pretty decent online experience (as far as match-making and number of people to play with).
Saying one is definitely an ideal while the other has no redeeming value is kind of silly. I have all the consoles and a sweet rig and I enjoy them all equally.
Well, not the Wii, because I haven't touched that since it came out (I don't even know where the hell it is, right now) . . . but everything *else* . . . :P
Yeah, see, I don't get this. That sounds an awful lot like my friend who only has a CRT television and says he can't understand how HD or 16:9 or anything could possibly be any better. I mean, watching Perry Mason on your black and white 13" 4:3 CRT in the kitchen sitting next to your rotary land line phone is fine if it satisfies all your needs, but it's kind of naive to suggest that's the experience everyone else has or wants.
On the other hand, I remember when CCP introduced the new Trinity graphics engine for EVE-Online and people fucking lost their shit over it. There was a whopping 1.4 percent (or something like that) of players who had systems that did not support Shader Model 3 in the new engine and because of the amount of effort required to continue testing and developing the older graphics that supported Shader Model 2, they found that it wasn't worth it for the few people it addressed.
Of course, any card in any system that was less than five or seven (I forget which) years old at the time already supported SM3, so it shouldn't have been a big deal. But there are always a handful of people that don't see why they can't run the newest software on their 18lb Superlap 386 from 1987.
That's a slightly different then, granted, than merely lowering the graphics of your game so you can enjoy it on a low-end computer. And as you point out, that's much more possible to do in 2011 than it was in 2005 or 2000. We've reached a point where you can maintain lower fidelity and performance as needed without reaching a break-point.
I'd love to see a list of these games you're having perfect experiences with right out of the box, because that is the opposite of what I seem most people exieriencing, these days. Take Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, for example. Buggy, glitchy, and for a lot of people, completely unplayable. Go check out the Steam forums for examples of people having nightmares just getting the game not to crash when running for a few minutes. People are still having major problems with Fallout 3 and it was released a couple years ago.
Also, these "golly, I don't even know what my computer is, but stuff just by gone works in it, I tell you what!" people are a lot like people who say "the Wii is all I need for videogame playing and I'm perfectly happy with standard def and 4:3 content!". Well, that's great for you. And that's why iPhone games like Angry Birds are such huge sellers. But that's not entirely representative.
PC gaming continues to be plagued with problems. In fact, I tend to feel they're even worse than they used to be, because developers (except for Dice with BF3, for example) are treating the PC as a secondary platform that they deploy on as an afterthought, meaning it's less QAd and less refined.
Also, I wouldn't really say that Starcraft2 is a good benchmark for claiming that an old machine is just dandy for the biggest and bestest new titles. Starcraft2 was designed with extreme care and great attention afforded to low end systems (consider where the biggest amount of SC2 gaming occurs . . . ). Tell me if you get the same satisfying experience with New Vegas, Bulletstorm, a new MMO, Civ V, or Dragon Age II (which seems to have some fairly big optimization problems).
Of course, this is all assuming you're running at a modern-ish resolution, too. If you're running at 1280x1024 or 1600x or something, then of course you're still getting pretty good performance.
As attention continues to be paid primarily only to the console side of the equation, I fully expect this to get worse. Especially since people seem to have less desire for a desktop system. A few of us will continue to buy desktops for video games, but most people don't do that. Most people have computers and they figure they might as well play some games on them while they have a chance. When it comes down to it, their computer will handle their browsing and email for years to come. Long after they can run modern games on them anywhere near as they're meant to be experienced. And when that happens, those people don't think "time for a new computer!". They either don't game beyond some facebook or free to play game or they drop $300 on a console and play console games, instead.
That point is irrelevant, since console players and PC players don't play together on the same servers. It's not some kid with a controller versus me with a mouse and WASD.
Also, if you read any gaming forums where this topic comes up, it seems to be consistently around 80% of players who have the opinion that they see no need for a new generation of consoles in the next couple of years. They are entirely happy playing on consoles that have hardware from 2005 that was already a little dated back then and could just barely keep up with 2005's PC hardware at the time, and is significantly farther behind PC hardware six years later. They just don't see a need for anything more than they have now.
Personally, I don't see how any geek can say "more new awesome stuff with more power and more whiz-bang? naw, don't give me that. I just want the same old thing". More power is always better.
It's already 2011. I'm ready for some systems that have more than 256mb of RAM. A fucking calculator watch has more RAM than that, these days. And something that can hold more than a mere 9gb of data (DVD). And something that is capable of more multiplayer numbers than most games currently run at (12-24), which isn't even half of the numbers Battlefield 2 did on the PC about six years ago.
Hell, the developers of MAG (Zipper studios) has been fighting console limitations since before the game came out. Every time they add or change something, they're forced to remove something else, due to very tight memory constraints.
2000: Andreas Junghanns writes: "Check out the Second International RoShamBo Programming Competition for a completely different experience! If you think you know everything about Rock-Paper-Scissors -- here is your chance to prove it against some stiff international competition. At the Web site you can find rules, sample programs and a report of the first contest, complete with results and program descriptions." This looks pretty cool, and it might make a neat first project for someone, too.
The game still has those atrociously poorly done and poorly animated faces. I also took issue with the tons of cut-scenes. In the first twenty minutes (before I turned it off), it was about three seconds of doing something followed by thirty seconds of cut-scene. Then doing three seconds of something again and then more cut-scenes. Not to mention, a fair amount of jerkiness (and I wasn't even using the HD textures). This is on an i7 930 with 12gb ram and an ATI 5970 that doesn't have any sort of hitching on anything else.
On top of that, the degree of bullshit you have to go through to get the game going is absurd.
Having bought it on Steam, I had to:
Now they want us to go download a separate pack of textures to get the full PC experience on a game that is the full $60 console game price? I am ON a PC and downloaded and purchased the game from a PC game service (Steam) and installed it. Shouldn't the high res textures ha
If you have a neighbor who is a plumber, electrician, contractor, or handyman, you'll find that they demand to be paid for their time and their work.
However, those same people will come to you for help with their computers and expect it for free. I'll help out my immediate family and a few friends, but I just only have so much time and patience and energy. It's not even the money. I just don't want to deal with it.
On the other hand, they could just ban cell phones like they did when I was in school in the 90s.
I agree that text messaging is priced ridiculously, but if people are using it that much, they should probably be communicating by a more efficient method. I probably send and receive about four text messages a month. If that. Why do I need text messaging when I already have email, IM, and . . . uh . . . A TELEPHONE. But yeah, Google Voice does SMS, so you don't really need anything else. At least, as long as their service remains free (for the rest of this year, I guess).
'For those who must have it for free anyway, you probably know where to look.'"
Piracy doesn't get you something for free. Piracy is when someone makes unauthorized duplicates of something which they don't own the copyright for with the intention of selling it for a profit. Piracy is the guy on the street in New York who is trying to sell you a movie that is still in the theaters for $20 on DVD or is trying to sell you a copy of some software for $5.
Stop perpetuating the misuse of these words. Piracy, copyright infringement, plagiarism, and forgery are all different things. Playing a scene-ripped copy of a game or movie is not piracy. That doesn't justify it if you do it, but it's not piracy.
If I want to talk to my friends, I'm going to just call them. I'm certainly not going to login to a website and send messages through a proprietary system to them. And I'm *certainly* not going to login to the website, find their page or find them in some contact list, then call them via skype. Instead, I'm going to . . . you know, pick up the fucking phone.
Besides, Skype isn't in keeping with the spirit of Facebook. Facebook (like all social networking) is NOT about one on one communication. Social networking sites are all about "I AM SO IMPORTANT... I AM **SO** IMPORTANT . . . . that I can't be bothered to let the people important to me in y life know about things or talk with them. Instead, I'm going to broadcast it to the entire world so I can put in the least amount of effort and personal interaction to accomplish telling EVERYONE on earth about X, Y, and Z. . ."
The only way this would keep in spirit with facebook is if it only broadcast everything you said via Skype into some massive 1,200 person distribution list that they can then *listen* to.
Exactly. Why the fuck am I going to waste my time coddling some waste of flesh . . . and bits?
More interestingly, does anybody know of a blogger blog on blogger that is actually useful? Seems to me like banning every blogger "site" nation-wide is kind of like Google re-jiggering the algorithm they use to reduce exposure for link farms and content farms. Win-win.
We have simple means to block almost all spam
But we pay a nontrivial cost for those filters. Even if you only use gmail for email, and you trust the "free" google filters, you are still paying for them. The cost is passed down to the consumer to pay for bandwidth, CPU time, storage space, and of course updates to filter rules.
We pay for inoculations as well. They aren't free and often are not paid for by the individual being inoculated. If you starve it out, the problem will go away and that is MUCH more feasible than targeting thousands of amorphous spammers around the globe (often in places where they are not reachable by any punitive means).
If everyone is inoculated against something, so nobody is thereby being infected with said virus, is it really still an "epidemic"?
That is not a fair comparison and I'll tell you why.
When we began inoculation against polio, we eventually wiped out the virus from the main population. The virus could not spread and could not infect (of course now it may be coming back but that is a different situation). The cost of polio dropped to almost nothing because in the developed world people no longer were infected by the virus.
On the other hand, people all over the world are constantly paying the cost of spam. Just because they don't see (much of) it doesn't mean it no longer exists. Spam still consumes bandwidth, storage, and CPU time. And of course we need to also consider the false positive rate of spam filtering; the lost productivity and economic progress that we pay for as a result of legitimate email that is errantly thrown out as spam by filtering techniques. Those who believe in filters have to update their filters because the spammers are constantly finding new ways to get around them. Even if the average person sees very few spam emails in a year, it doesn't mean they don't have to pay for them.
And the fact that so many people are oblivious to what spam costs them may in some ways be even worse.
So in other words, yes. Spam is still very much an epidemic. It will cease to be an epidemic when spam is no longer sent; regardless of whether or not it is viewed.
I don't see a significant difference from the inoculation metaphor. Like a virus, spam only continues to "spread" if it continues to find purchase within a host. Or, rather, to be viewed and responded to. The only reason spammers continue to do what they do is because of the handful of people who don't take precautions against spam, like people who don't protect their children from mumps, rubella, or smallpox.
When it comes down to it, spam is a thing like many others in the tech world. A thing which can best be addressed by preventative technology rather than trying to stick some kid in pound-me-in-the-ass hard-core prison, for writing a script that spams a bunch of crap to a million accounts.
Of course, there's another similarity to viruses and inoculations. The sickness fuels an entire industry (medical and pharmaceutical or technological and consultative) on which a large economy is fueled. A sort of "prison industry / criminal legislation" symbiosis.
Is spam really an epidemic? We have simple means to block almost all spam, so that the average person probably sees maybe a dozen spam messages per year. If everyone is inoculated against something, so nobody is thereby being infected with said virus, is it really still an "epidemic"?
Yeah, the headline on Slashdot would tend to elicit rightful cries of "Is spamming a 'crime' worthy of taking several percent of someone's entire life span?", while the real article would elicit rightful responses of "Okay, so the guy was found guilty of running a prescription drug sales scam online".
Someone really needs to vet the sanity of articles before they make Slashdot, but after almost fifteen years, why start now?
So you and your wife live in the united states, but don't support the most fundamental tenet of our law, which is that you're innocent until you're proven guilty. Nice.
I've read enough comments here that seem to completely miss what is going on here and are completely ignorant on the abuse by our government in violating the Fourth Amendment. The assumption by everyone seems to be one of two things. Either the police are seizing property as evidence of a crime committed (in which case, you would presume it will be returned if he's found innocent) or that he has been found guilty and they're taking his ill-gotten gains.
That is not the case.
What they're doing is taking possession of someone's property. Someone who has not been convicted of a crime through a fair trial, yet. Then they're going to sell it and keep the profit. Does that sound right to you? Shouldn't you receive a trial and be found guilty of a crime, before paying for that crime?
In fact, not only do you not have to be found guilty through trial of an actual crime in this country for the government to steal your property and sell it for themselves, but you don't have to even be charged with a crime, in many cases. I went looking for something to explain it to those who care to be enlightened (by what I thought was common knowledge, but by the reactions on Slashdot to this article, seems to be foreign to 80% of us). I actually found a well composed video that from the Institute for Justice
(video 2m30s) - Policing for Profit - The Abuse of Civil Asset Forfeiture
Essentially, what has been happening for about thirty years, is that instead of charging YOU with a crime, the government charges your PROPERTY with a crime. Your property can't defend itself, so it is assumed "guilty". They take the property, sell it at auction, and then split it up among various government departments. All without YOU being convicted. Or even tried in a court of law. Or even being charged with a crime. It is currently a billion-dollar scam in this country.
So save your "durr durr meth dealer bad!" bullshit. You aren't a hard-ass for saying "throw away the key!" or "execute this guy!" or "he deserves it!". You just look ignorant for not considering the due process we have in this country that protects people like you and me from being railroaded without evidence. Maybe the guy IS guilty. That's fine. If he's guilty, throw the book at him. The mere fact that someone has charged him with a crime doesn't mean he deserves punishment nor that he deserves to have his property stolen from him, auctioned off, and then split amongst his local government agencies.
Really? You don't think he should be proven guilty, first? We're just taking property of innocent people now and throwing them in prison without a trial? What country do you live in? In the states, you're innocent until proven beyond any reasonable doubt to be guilty by a jury. By your logic, all those people who are accused of rape and later confess to false accusations (say, because they didn't want to go to a party, so they pretended to be raped to get out of going - seriously, google this shit) . . . then the mere fact that you were accused means they should be rushed to prison and the key thrown away. Fair trial and truth be fucked, eh?
I'm all for dealing with true criminals who absolutely damage other unwilling individuals in society. But let's be sure they're guilty, before we do it.
Yeah, who cares that studies show that approximately 10% to 15% of the prison population is actually innocent. Hey, maybe we should torture them before killing them, too! I mean, if the whole point is to feel like we've really gotten our vengeance, why just kill them straight out before really getting your rocks off, huh?