You've got to stop saying things like that. You'll give them ideas.
But seriously, that's a very good business practice and it's worked very well for Microsoft in the past. Apple tries very hard, by making an O/S that will only work on their lock-in hardware. Many businesses use this kind of lockin wherever they can. Even my phone is locked down to 3 as a provider (Good phone, godawful company to be locked into).
The only thing that stops this kind of lock in is market forces that trend towards consumer choice. Those forces have almost always proved beneficial to consumers in the long run - Windows for instance is more popular than OS/X because there isn't as much lock-in for hardware (I can choose which platform to run Windows from, I can't choose to run OS/X anywhere but where Apple tells me to). In turn, Linux is now gaining serious footholds into Microsofts market for being even more pro-choice than Windows. Sony's memory stick and Minidisc formats aren't universal standards because they only tend to work with Sony or Sony licensed gear.
Unless the media is protected by encryption or similar copy protection of any kind. The american DMCA prevents circumvention of copy protection, even if you have a legitimate right to make copies, you have no right to bypass copy protection.
This is exactly my point! Console games don't "just work". Not anymore. Let me explain.
They need to make at least a shallow attempt at competing with the PC in terms of attractive graphics, because the eyecandy factor of a console will help sales. This is obvious because next generation consoles are more popular than previous generation consoles, despite being more expensive.
Early PC games, just like early console games, just like most early software, was generally more free of bugs than more complex modern software. The less you have to test, the less code you have to debug, the better the quality will be (in theory). As PC games got more complicated, they became more and more bug ridden. This is starting to happen with console games as well.
Patching with *any* software is always a good thing. Or are we suggesting that applying service packs to Windows, or kernel patches to Linux is unforgivable? I'll take my patches thanks. The same applies to games. If they can improve the quality of a game, even after I've already given them my money, then I'm all for that.
As for your question:
"Well, if PC games are so amazingly better, why aren't more people buying them?"
You've answered it for me:
"For most casual users, it's not worth the effort to get PC games to work."
So, lack of motivation to go through a few simple steps to install a PC game instead of plugging in a cartridge/DVD/whatever has robbed console players the opportunity to enjoy richer, higher quality games.
But you say console games "just work"? Given that the consoles are more and more commonly using the same code base, I'm not sure how you can qualify this anymore. There are some advantages because of the static platform for the game, testing is simplified, and quality will be higher, but this patch episode demonstrates that the times are changing.
Now, in Australia, I don't know about there, but when the PS/2 was first released it cost $899 AUD in stores. For that price you can get a low end PC capable of playing games of even higher quality than the commercials for the PS/2 games, and that *includes* a monitor. What's more, you can inexpensively continue to upgrade the PC. Of course, the console becomes much cheaper as it gets older. But then, a two year old PC will cost you much less than that $899. The cheap cost of a console is becoming more and more of a myth, as consoles try harder and harder to gain the same capabilities of a PC.
Console games don't just work. They're becoming more expensive and more complex. Now you have to jump on the internet and download the patches, it's not just a case of dropping in the disk.
One last suggestion: You'll find it much more enjoyable downloading the patches for your console games if you use a real PC for it. You even get a choice of browser!
Yep, that and the smaller gravitational pull of the planet. The bigger problem is that there's no van-allen belt surrounding Mars either, because the core is dead. Who'd have thunk all those volcanoes were so good for us.
We've already got plentiful O2 factories here on earth. They're called "plants". The problem is, to build them from thier pre-fab state (seeds), you need warmth, sunlight, C02 and water. Mars is badly lacking in both the warmth and water components, the sunlight isn't that great, and the C02 is a bit thinner than what they're used to.
The moon would be orders of magnitude more difficult than mars for some basic reasons.
You need to have something to work with before you can start terraforming. The moon has a lot of rock. So does Mars, but Mars has different kinds of rock, and it also has ice and CO2.
A planetoid needs a reasonable amount of gravity to retain a gaseous atmosphere before it bleeds off into space. Mars has a very thin atmosphere, the moon has none.
I'm not suggesting these are the right names, but they're all terms that are commonly used to describe USB flash memory drives. The flash drives and the HDD caddy's are both sold as USB hard drives in some places here, but the name is different from shop to shop. Just because it's technically not the right term has never stopped erroneous nomenclature in the past!
Here's the problem, as games become increasingly more complex on consoles (as the article said, nothing new for PC games), the bugs have become more apparent. It seems consoles must chase after the PCs again by including patchability in games.
Unfortunately the industry will just use this new technology as an excuse to make poor quality games for poor quality consoles and completely ignore the technology in the PC gaming platform.
Another Wolverine console game conversion from Activision perhaps?
I've still got some at home. They weren't totally as reliable as fully tested HD floppies, but they did great and they cost less. My dad had a bench drill that made really short work of punching holes in the disks, too. You just had to get it at exactly the right spot and you were good to go. Can't see that working with CD-R's somehow.
We also used some software, forget the name now, that allowed formatting of 360K floppies to 420K, and 720K to 800K. Those were the days! I ran MS-DOS3.3! And QUEMM386.
USB key fob huh? Or USB hard drive? Memory stick? What the heck are we supposed to call these things? They're great but we don't know what to call it. Kinda like fizzy soft drinks. Great but nobody has ever standardised on a name for them.
That's an amazing argument you got there. Allow me to paraphrase.
"Macs are great, because nobody uses them, so nobody bothers to write viruses for them. Ergo, Mac PCs are more secure than Windows PCs."
And your supporting argument is:
"Windows has spyware."
The only reason Windows has a lot of spyware is, firstly, as you rightly pointed out, people (plural of the small handful of persons that are Mac users) actually use Windows, making it a target. The spyware isn't bundled with the O/S, it's installed there by incapable users (the ones who are still on Windows and haven't Switched so they can be incompetent but don't need to worry about rightclicking anymore)
Couple this with the lack of an SOE or the rampant use of IE instead of a decent multiplatform browser like Mozilla or Opera, and of course you're going to have problems, problems that are very easily fixed by revoking admin access and using virus checkers and spyware scanners.
Microsoft is actively removing the very last of the serious issues with Windows. Windows XPSP2 is including a firewall, and they're obscuring the elements of MSIE that allow one-click spyware installs, and enabling CPU buffer overflow checking for AMD64 processors. They're replacing most of the old VB code with bufferchecked.NET code.
But if you really, really want security, why would you even contemplate a closed source OS? Linux is open source. Linux is secure because the OS community continually works to make it so. Microsoft, even Microsoft is admitting that security through obscurity does not work, so they're bundling firewalls and A/V software in Windows now. But Apple seems to believe that security through obscurity is the way to go.
Ghost Recon and Rainbow 6 have numerous expansions Operation Flashpoint + the two expansions BF1942 can be played co-op if everyone joins the same team Vietnam: LOS Vietcong Hidden & Dangerous The earlier Delta Force games
The vast majority of co-op games are military sims, and generally the more complex style of FPS. There's obviously some perception out there that people don't want co-op, but it's the one thing I hear people complaining about more than any other multiplayer aspect. It's also one of the heaviest areas of modding for games. Just look at Sven-coop!
The guys come over to my house just about every week with their PC's, we hook them up, we play Ghost Recon, Raven Shield, Op Flashpoint, Freespace 2, Serious Sam, C&C Generals, Warcraft 3, Vietcong - any game that can be played co-op against the AI. Given that the average distance between players is about 5 meters, I don't quite understand why you need to be even closer than that on a console.
Co-op is important on a console because... you can reach out and touch the person you are playing with? That's kinda perverse. I'll be happy keeping the guys outside of my personal space.
PS don't go play co-op games with MBraynard, he might try and touch you.
I agree wholeheartedly. Without US intervention in the UN, we could have had George Bush up on war crimes in Brussels, not to mention Israel being a completely different kettle of fish without all those US vetoes in Israels favour.
This is not actually a bad thing. This is how the whole internet thing is supposed to work. Changes have occured due to the new technology available to us today. Old, inferior business methods are falling quietly by the wayside. Some collectors will keep old encyclopaedia to show to the grandchildren. People have access to more knowledge more easily thanks to the wikipedia. Society and human culture take a small step forward.
Imagine if the same principles applied to the RIAA or SCO - you don't see these guys lying down quietly. What would things be like if Britannica cited their encyclopaedia as prior art for the internet, slapped down a patent on "method for storing and retrieving information by categorical reference in text and illustrated formats" and charged everyone $699 for using the internet? The RIAA should pay a little attention to World Book, Funk & Wagnells and Britannica. The RIAA is going down next, right?
It's true that Mac hardware is of a good quality level.
It's true that equivalent level hardware can be purchased for an AMD/Intel platform at lower cost, so long as you do a basic amount of research and are aware of the technologies available to you. Why, Macs are even using very similar graphics accelerators from the same manufacturers as the AMD/Intel ones.
It's true that AMD/Intel systems perform better. Before the arguments come flooding in, I'd like to point out that I'm not seeing a lot of Macs taking over from the old Mainframe and Midrange market segments in the data centre here, and there aren't a lot of favourable framerate comparisons up on Toms Hardware or Anandtech for the gamers. I certainly wouldn't trust benchmarks from Apple, I haven't seen more deceptive benchmarking practices in my life.
So the hardware argument is a pretty open/shut case. The only reason anyone would buy more expensive Mac hardware than equivalent/better quality cheaper standard parts is because you want to run OS/X instead of Windows/Linux/BSD.
I can run Windows on lots of different hardware, and we all know Linux can run anywhere. OS/X is the most proprietary OS you can buy nowadays (apart from maybe Unixware). For this reason there's not a whole lot of application support for OS/X, I heard even MS was starting to cut back on the Office releases for OS/X. Is there any software that runs on OS/X that I can't get for Linux/Windows? What's so special about OS/X? I already know how to use the left *and* right mouse buttons on my mouse, so OS/X won't save me any headaches there. My Windows and Linux installs run very stably on my hardware at home already (uptimes in the months, only thanks to some blackouts a while ago). Someone enlighten me?
I was amazed that the score wasn't more heavily in intel's favour! All those OEM boxes and cheap nasty Celerons have to sell in droves. What I really want to know, if this is what the proportion of gamer PC's looks like, is why aren't developers optimising for 3Dnow! or at the very least the Athlon architectures instead of/as well as the intel architecture. So they can sell games to office workers? I don't know.
This is why I only trust the aggregates from gametab.com - If you take a look through them they're pretty representative of the overall quality and production value of a game. For instance, top of the list is Vice City for the PC platform, and nowhere on the top ten can I see Enter the Matrix or DX2. Although Gametab does take ratings from the big reviewers, they also grab ratings from as many smaller indy review sites as they can. This gives a much better sample of real reviewers and journalists.
Very true. The problem has always been, and this is why the F117 looks like a weetbix with wings, is that radar defeating curved surfaces are a real mathematical nightmare to work out. But they work and they let the plane fly really well. So as you look at the more modern stealth planes, there are more curves, as computational power is leaping and bounding. As far as I know, the F117 was worked out on paper, with calculators and Apple II's and C64's and slide rules and a rusty abacus.
Slashdot Mirror
You've got to stop saying things like that. You'll give them ideas.
But seriously, that's a very good business practice and it's worked very well for Microsoft in the past. Apple tries very hard, by making an O/S that will only work on their lock-in hardware. Many businesses use this kind of lockin wherever they can. Even my phone is locked down to 3 as a provider (Good phone, godawful company to be locked into).
The only thing that stops this kind of lock in is market forces that trend towards consumer choice. Those forces have almost always proved beneficial to consumers in the long run - Windows for instance is more popular than OS/X because there isn't as much lock-in for hardware (I can choose which platform to run Windows from, I can't choose to run OS/X anywhere but where Apple tells me to). In turn, Linux is now gaining serious footholds into Microsofts market for being even more pro-choice than Windows. Sony's memory stick and Minidisc formats aren't universal standards because they only tend to work with Sony or Sony licensed gear.
Unless the media is protected by encryption or similar copy protection of any kind. The american DMCA prevents circumvention of copy protection, even if you have a legitimate right to make copies, you have no right to bypass copy protection.
This is exactly my point! Console games don't "just work". Not anymore. Let me explain.
They need to make at least a shallow attempt at competing with the PC in terms of attractive graphics, because the eyecandy factor of a console will help sales. This is obvious because next generation consoles are more popular than previous generation consoles, despite being more expensive.
Early PC games, just like early console games, just like most early software, was generally more free of bugs than more complex modern software. The less you have to test, the less code you have to debug, the better the quality will be (in theory). As PC games got more complicated, they became more and more bug ridden. This is starting to happen with console games as well.
Patching with *any* software is always a good thing. Or are we suggesting that applying service packs to Windows, or kernel patches to Linux is unforgivable? I'll take my patches thanks. The same applies to games. If they can improve the quality of a game, even after I've already given them my money, then I'm all for that.
As for your question:
"Well, if PC games are so amazingly better, why aren't more people buying them?"
You've answered it for me:
"For most casual users, it's not worth the effort to get PC games to work."
So, lack of motivation to go through a few simple steps to install a PC game instead of plugging in a cartridge/DVD/whatever has robbed console players the opportunity to enjoy richer, higher quality games.
But you say console games "just work"? Given that the consoles are more and more commonly using the same code base, I'm not sure how you can qualify this anymore. There are some advantages because of the static platform for the game, testing is simplified, and quality will be higher, but this patch episode demonstrates that the times are changing.
Now, in Australia, I don't know about there, but when the PS/2 was first released it cost $899 AUD in stores. For that price you can get a low end PC capable of playing games of even higher quality than the commercials for the PS/2 games, and that *includes* a monitor. What's more, you can inexpensively continue to upgrade the PC. Of course, the console becomes much cheaper as it gets older. But then, a two year old PC will cost you much less than that $899. The cheap cost of a console is becoming more and more of a myth, as consoles try harder and harder to gain the same capabilities of a PC.
Console games don't just work. They're becoming more expensive and more complex. Now you have to jump on the internet and download the patches, it's not just a case of dropping in the disk.
One last suggestion: You'll find it much more enjoyable downloading the patches for your console games if you use a real PC for it. You even get a choice of browser!
Yep, that and the smaller gravitational pull of the planet. The bigger problem is that there's no van-allen belt surrounding Mars either, because the core is dead. Who'd have thunk all those volcanoes were so good for us.
We've already got plentiful O2 factories here on earth. They're called "plants". The problem is, to build them from thier pre-fab state (seeds), you need warmth, sunlight, C02 and water. Mars is badly lacking in both the warmth and water components, the sunlight isn't that great, and the C02 is a bit thinner than what they're used to.
I can see you don't work anywhere near end-users. You'd think they were joking, too. But they still break their cupholders.
The moon would be orders of magnitude more difficult than mars for some basic reasons.
You need to have something to work with before you can start terraforming. The moon has a lot of rock. So does Mars, but Mars has different kinds of rock, and it also has ice and CO2.
A planetoid needs a reasonable amount of gravity to retain a gaseous atmosphere before it bleeds off into space. Mars has a very thin atmosphere, the moon has none.
I'm not suggesting these are the right names, but they're all terms that are commonly used to describe USB flash memory drives. The flash drives and the HDD caddy's are both sold as USB hard drives in some places here, but the name is different from shop to shop. Just because it's technically not the right term has never stopped erroneous nomenclature in the past!
Ouch man, that must have stung!
Parent has a point though, although Microsoft is an ISP, I bet they're so lousy most people don't even think about it.
Here's the problem, as games become increasingly more complex on consoles (as the article said, nothing new for PC games), the bugs have become more apparent. It seems consoles must chase after the PCs again by including patchability in games.
Unfortunately the industry will just use this new technology as an excuse to make poor quality games for poor quality consoles and completely ignore the technology in the PC gaming platform.
Another Wolverine console game conversion from Activision perhaps?
It looks like you're writing a slashdot post! Office assistance can help you write your post.
What kind of karma would you like?
1) Insightful
2) Overrated
3) Troll
Ehh you get the idea.
I've still got some at home. They weren't totally as reliable as fully tested HD floppies, but they did great and they cost less. My dad had a bench drill that made really short work of punching holes in the disks, too. You just had to get it at exactly the right spot and you were good to go. Can't see that working with CD-R's somehow.
We also used some software, forget the name now, that allowed formatting of 360K floppies to 420K, and 720K to 800K. Those were the days! I ran MS-DOS3.3! And QUEMM386.
USB key fob huh?
Or USB hard drive?
Memory stick?
What the heck are we supposed to call these things? They're great but we don't know what to call it. Kinda like fizzy soft drinks. Great but nobody has ever standardised on a name for them.
That's an amazing argument you got there.
.NET code.
Allow me to paraphrase.
"Macs are great, because nobody uses them, so nobody bothers to write viruses for them. Ergo, Mac PCs are more secure than Windows PCs."
And your supporting argument is:
"Windows has spyware."
The only reason Windows has a lot of spyware is, firstly, as you rightly pointed out, people (plural of the small handful of persons that are Mac users) actually use Windows, making it a target. The spyware isn't bundled with the O/S, it's installed there by incapable users (the ones who are still on Windows and haven't Switched so they can be incompetent but don't need to worry about rightclicking anymore)
Couple this with the lack of an SOE or the rampant use of IE instead of a decent multiplatform browser like Mozilla or Opera, and of course you're going to have problems, problems that are very easily fixed by revoking admin access and using virus checkers and spyware scanners.
Microsoft is actively removing the very last of the serious issues with Windows. Windows XPSP2 is including a firewall, and they're obscuring the elements of MSIE that allow one-click spyware installs, and enabling CPU buffer overflow checking for AMD64 processors. They're replacing most of the old VB code with bufferchecked
But if you really, really want security, why would you even contemplate a closed source OS? Linux is open source. Linux is secure because the OS community continually works to make it so. Microsoft, even Microsoft is admitting that security through obscurity does not work, so they're bundling firewalls and A/V software in Windows now. But Apple seems to believe that security through obscurity is the way to go.
Who would you trust?
But wait, there's more!
Ghost Recon and Rainbow 6 have numerous expansions
Operation Flashpoint + the two expansions
BF1942 can be played co-op if everyone joins the same team
Vietnam: LOS
Vietcong
Hidden & Dangerous
The earlier Delta Force games
The vast majority of co-op games are military sims, and generally the more complex style of FPS. There's obviously some perception out there that people don't want co-op, but it's the one thing I hear people complaining about more than any other multiplayer aspect. It's also one of the heaviest areas of modding for games. Just look at Sven-coop!
The guys come over to my house just about every week with their PC's, we hook them up, we play Ghost Recon, Raven Shield, Op Flashpoint, Freespace 2, Serious Sam, C&C Generals, Warcraft 3, Vietcong - any game that can be played co-op against the AI. Given that the average distance between players is about 5 meters, I don't quite understand why you need to be even closer than that on a console.
Co-op is important on a console because... you can reach out and touch the person you are playing with? That's kinda perverse. I'll be happy keeping the guys outside of my personal space.
PS don't go play co-op games with MBraynard, he might try and touch you.
I agree wholeheartedly. Without US intervention in the UN, we could have had George Bush up on war crimes in Brussels, not to mention Israel being a completely different kettle of fish without all those US vetoes in Israels favour.
Meet the Feebles 2?
Brain Dead 2?
Worse Taste?
This is not actually a bad thing. This is how the whole internet thing is supposed to work. Changes have occured due to the new technology available to us today. Old, inferior business methods are falling quietly by the wayside. Some collectors will keep old encyclopaedia to show to the grandchildren. People have access to more knowledge more easily thanks to the wikipedia. Society and human culture take a small step forward.
Imagine if the same principles applied to the RIAA or SCO - you don't see these guys lying down quietly. What would things be like if Britannica cited their encyclopaedia as prior art for the internet, slapped down a patent on "method for storing and retrieving information by categorical reference in text and illustrated formats" and charged everyone $699 for using the internet? The RIAA should pay a little attention to World Book, Funk & Wagnells and Britannica. The RIAA is going down next, right?
It's true that Mac hardware is of a good quality level. It's true that equivalent level hardware can be purchased for an AMD/Intel platform at lower cost, so long as you do a basic amount of research and are aware of the technologies available to you. Why, Macs are even using very similar graphics accelerators from the same manufacturers as the AMD/Intel ones. It's true that AMD/Intel systems perform better. Before the arguments come flooding in, I'd like to point out that I'm not seeing a lot of Macs taking over from the old Mainframe and Midrange market segments in the data centre here, and there aren't a lot of favourable framerate comparisons up on Toms Hardware or Anandtech for the gamers. I certainly wouldn't trust benchmarks from Apple, I haven't seen more deceptive benchmarking practices in my life. So the hardware argument is a pretty open/shut case. The only reason anyone would buy more expensive Mac hardware than equivalent/better quality cheaper standard parts is because you want to run OS/X instead of Windows/Linux/BSD. I can run Windows on lots of different hardware, and we all know Linux can run anywhere. OS/X is the most proprietary OS you can buy nowadays (apart from maybe Unixware). For this reason there's not a whole lot of application support for OS/X, I heard even MS was starting to cut back on the Office releases for OS/X. Is there any software that runs on OS/X that I can't get for Linux/Windows? What's so special about OS/X? I already know how to use the left *and* right mouse buttons on my mouse, so OS/X won't save me any headaches there. My Windows and Linux installs run very stably on my hardware at home already (uptimes in the months, only thanks to some blackouts a while ago). Someone enlighten me?
I was amazed that the score wasn't more heavily in intel's favour! All those OEM boxes and cheap nasty Celerons have to sell in droves. What I really want to know, if this is what the proportion of gamer PC's looks like, is why aren't developers optimising for 3Dnow! or at the very least the Athlon architectures instead of/as well as the intel architecture. So they can sell games to office workers? I don't know.
But without TV how will they advertise? Oh wait, spam.
This is why I only trust the aggregates from gametab.com - If you take a look through them they're pretty representative of the overall quality and production value of a game. For instance, top of the list is Vice City for the PC platform, and nowhere on the top ten can I see Enter the Matrix or DX2. Although Gametab does take ratings from the big reviewers, they also grab ratings from as many smaller indy review sites as they can. This gives a much better sample of real reviewers and journalists.
Very true. The problem has always been, and this is why the F117 looks like a weetbix with wings, is that radar defeating curved surfaces are a real mathematical nightmare to work out. But they work and they let the plane fly really well. So as you look at the more modern stealth planes, there are more curves, as computational power is leaping and bounding. As far as I know, the F117 was worked out on paper, with calculators and Apple II's and C64's and slide rules and a rusty abacus.