Sorry, I overlooked this part the first time I read your reply:
If you want to rent games on PC you can sign up with Gamefly, but it would cost more.
From the front page of GameFly:
To enjoy GameFly, you'll need to enable JavaScript in your web browser. Please click here to learn how.
Once I got past that barrier, all games listed on the All Games page appear to be either for consoles or for handhelds made by console makers, not for PC. This is because PC game rental infringes U.S. copyright, unlike console game rental.
Steam allows users to trial games and gives full refunds within a certain time, which is a good substitute for "renting."
Until Valve decides that you've abused the refund policy and takes away access to all games that use Steam authentication.
I recently upgraded my PC from a 7-8 year old Core 2 Duo, and even before that upgrade I was still playing AAA games, like Dying Light, just not at the highest settings.
Thanks for the data point. I'll mark ability to scale down to a C2D as "works for some".
most people have a PC around for other uses anyway
Except for people like one of my former co-workers, who owned only a smartphone. Mobile-only users adapt with Bluetooth keyboards and occasionally blocking out time for errands during library hours. Likewise, people who have only a laptop with Intel graphics and no standard MXM slot can't cheaply upgrade to a gaming GPU.
If you own a console with a $60/year subscription for 6 years you'd have an extra $360 to off-set the additional PC sticker price, subsequent PC upgrades (if needed), or pocket it.
Or theoretically spend it on some corresponding PC game rental service, if only one existed. Though "you can't play online on a console without also buying game rental" appears to be an argument in the PC's favor, console fans could reply "you can't buy game rental at all on PC". What do PC gamers typically use as a substitute for PlayStation Plus Free Games or Games with Gold? Or do they just rely on reviews? Or buying into a Humble Bundle every few months?
If you want to go used or older generations then the costs for consoles go down.
Likewise, I ought to try to remember to recommend a more recent used desktop PC with a new GPU to others making price comparisons.
Remember "Cairo"? [...] WinFS probably takes the cake
I agree that Microsoft has talked a good vapor game. But each component of the Cairo project appears to have seen eventual release in some form.
Windows NT 3.1 included DCE/RPC.
Windows 95 and Windows NT 4 included Windows Explorer.
Windows 2000 included Windows Search as part of MSN Toolbar. It became a core operating system component in Windows Vista.
Windows XP included Windows NT Home. At this point, the majority of Cairo technologies had been released, and incidentally the Greek letters Chi-Rho look like the Latin letters X-P.
Object File System, later called Windows Future Storage (WinFS), eventually became features of Microsoft SQL Server.
I tend toward PC in principle, but sometimes I argue the other side to help keep both sides honest and help bring out both sides' strongest arguments.
Most families still need or want a computer at home for reasons besides gaming (e.g. internet, word processing, tracking finances, online banking, digital storage, remote connections to workplaces).
First, these non-gaming applications can be done with a cheap eight-year-old PC with a Core 2 Duo and Intel integrated graphics. I'm told just dropping a video card into a PC with a CPU that old isn't enough to run AAA games from the present generation (2014 and later), which would quickly become CPU-bound. Second, these can be done with a laptop, and I've seen no evidence that people routinely upgrade a laptop with a separately purchased MXM video card. Third, a console can be used while someone else is using the family PC.
The price of games should be factored into the cost of a game system and games are cheaper on PC through digital distributors like Steam, Origin, etc., which over time off-sets the initial cost of the PC.
First, though Steam has sales. PlayStation Store also has sales. Second, console games have historically been more likely than PC games to support same-screen multiplayer with two to four gamepads, and if you have more than one gamer in the house, one copy of a $60 game that supports multiple gamepads is cheaper than three copies of a $30 game that requires a separate copy per player. Third, if everybody were to wait for the sale instead of buying in release month at full price, publishers would have no money to continue to fund development of high-production-value games.
If you want to play games online (which many people do) you have to add the life-time cost of an online subscription to a console.
PlayStation Plus and Xbox Live Gold cost $60 per year. But in addition to online matchmaking, this includes rental of a rotating selection of games (PlayStation Plus Free Games and Games with Gold respectively). What's the analogous way to try PC games?
You don't need an expensive PC to play games. A $500 PC (which is comparable to a new PS4+accessories) will play ~98% of the PC games.
Or you could go for a pre-owned PlayStation 4 console with a 500 GB HDD, which costs $280 (source). Which accessories were you including in the price?
I'm a developer. I bought an Xbox One because I can write software for it without a $uper $pecial Dev Kit.
True, Microsoft has been generous with ID@Xbox. But if you can make more money by selling copies to PlayStation 4 owners than by selling copies to the smaller Xbox One audience, that might make up for the cost of such a devkit.
I'm developing a UWP app for a specialty niche that would allow a "cheap" Xbox One to run it instead of requiring a PC.
What keeps you from also releasing ports of the app to X11/Linux, Win32 desktop, and possibly macOS? Then you can make it available to people who already have a PC.
A PC with the same multimedia and processing capabilities that my app needs would be quite a bit more expensive than the Xbox One.
In before Hairyfeet mentions that many owners of what's now considered an entry-level desktop PC can drop in a $150 video card and get performance more than on par with Xbox One.
If the patch is to the game publisher's bespoke server application rather than to the platform it runs on, then creating and testing the patch costs programmer wages. How does that "scale up or down with demand"?
the "productivity" that is measured these days is seeing how many jobs you can make a single employee do before they reach the breaking point and quit.
I think that might have been GLMDesigns' point. By dismissing these measurable benefits, your boss is constructively dismissing you. Take this as an opportunity to stop complaining about your boss and instead be your own boss, working as a contractor instead of an employee.
I think it means biological age as opposed to strict chronological age. If you're biologically eight years older, your cells show damage comparable to the median person chronologically eight years older than you.
You got me. But the top two consoles of that generation both have limited-geometry, partial-screen, texture-mapped, software-rendered first-person shooters. For every Zero Tolerance, there's a Jurassic Park and a Wolfenstein 3D.
Apple products include H.264 functionality despite the risk of submarine patents covering H.264. Thus Apple can't use the risk of submarine patents as an excuse against VP8 and VP9.
For another, exactly how are you sure that there's not some submarine patent waiting to surprise everyone on H.265? I'm aware of already more than one patent pool for that codec: MPEG LA administers some patents and HEVC Advance administers others.
Windows 10 "Anniversary Update" includes Edge 14, which supports VP9. That leaves Apple as the holdout supporting only codecs that require payment of a royalty to a patent pool.
Reportedly a majority of Northern Ireland voted "remain in the European Union". Once Britain exercises Article 50, I anticipate a referendum to rejoin Ireland gaining support.
And then, I'm assuming, the hypervisor would put the guest operating systems into hibernation while the hypervisor restarts for security updates. Is that how it typically works?
The Super NES was good, but crippled by the fact that MODE 7 could only scale and rotate backgrounds, not sprites.
In the same generation, Genesis needed the Sega CD peripheral to rotate anything, and though Neo Geo could scale, it couldn't rotate and was too expensive for most players.
Slashdot Mirror
But now that What is gone, it appears to have become nearly impossible to get into PTP.
(If I pay for BBC America, aren't I already paying to watch it, I need to pay twice with the commercials?)
Commercials are why cable costs $50 per month and not $200 per month.
Sorry, I overlooked this part the first time I read your reply:
If you want to rent games on PC you can sign up with Gamefly, but it would cost more.
From the front page of GameFly:
Once I got past that barrier, all games listed on the All Games page appear to be either for consoles or for handhelds made by console makers, not for PC. This is because PC game rental infringes U.S. copyright, unlike console game rental.
Steam allows users to trial games and gives full refunds within a certain time, which is a good substitute for "renting."
Until Valve decides that you've abused the refund policy and takes away access to all games that use Steam authentication.
I recently upgraded my PC from a 7-8 year old Core 2 Duo, and even before that upgrade I was still playing AAA games, like Dying Light, just not at the highest settings.
Thanks for the data point. I'll mark ability to scale down to a C2D as "works for some".
most people have a PC around for other uses anyway
Except for people like one of my former co-workers, who owned only a smartphone. Mobile-only users adapt with Bluetooth keyboards and occasionally blocking out time for errands during library hours. Likewise, people who have only a laptop with Intel graphics and no standard MXM slot can't cheaply upgrade to a gaming GPU.
If you own a console with a $60/year subscription for 6 years you'd have an extra $360 to off-set the additional PC sticker price, subsequent PC upgrades (if needed), or pocket it.
Or theoretically spend it on some corresponding PC game rental service, if only one existed. Though "you can't play online on a console without also buying game rental" appears to be an argument in the PC's favor, console fans could reply "you can't buy game rental at all on PC". What do PC gamers typically use as a substitute for PlayStation Plus Free Games or Games with Gold? Or do they just rely on reviews? Or buying into a Humble Bundle every few months?
If you want to go used or older generations then the costs for consoles go down.
Likewise, I ought to try to remember to recommend a more recent used desktop PC with a new GPU to others making price comparisons.
Also, there are about 3.5 MILLION Americans who are legally blind.
I thought blind people got subsidized audio books that play in specialized DAISY players, under the U.S. Books for the Blind program and foreign counterparts.
I don't think using an ARM CPU makes porting games too difficult.
Unless one of the binary-only middleware libraries you're using is available only for x86 and x86-64 architectures.
Remember "Cairo"? [...] WinFS probably takes the cake
I agree that Microsoft has talked a good vapor game. But each component of the Cairo project appears to have seen eventual release in some form.
Was Apple any worse with its "Pink" and "Copland" projects?
I tend toward PC in principle, but sometimes I argue the other side to help keep both sides honest and help bring out both sides' strongest arguments.
Most families still need or want a computer at home for reasons besides gaming (e.g. internet, word processing, tracking finances, online banking, digital storage, remote connections to workplaces).
First, these non-gaming applications can be done with a cheap eight-year-old PC with a Core 2 Duo and Intel integrated graphics. I'm told just dropping a video card into a PC with a CPU that old isn't enough to run AAA games from the present generation (2014 and later), which would quickly become CPU-bound. Second, these can be done with a laptop, and I've seen no evidence that people routinely upgrade a laptop with a separately purchased MXM video card. Third, a console can be used while someone else is using the family PC.
The price of games should be factored into the cost of a game system and games are cheaper on PC through digital distributors like Steam, Origin, etc., which over time off-sets the initial cost of the PC.
First, though Steam has sales. PlayStation Store also has sales. Second, console games have historically been more likely than PC games to support same-screen multiplayer with two to four gamepads, and if you have more than one gamer in the house, one copy of a $60 game that supports multiple gamepads is cheaper than three copies of a $30 game that requires a separate copy per player. Third, if everybody were to wait for the sale instead of buying in release month at full price, publishers would have no money to continue to fund development of high-production-value games.
If you want to play games online (which many people do) you have to add the life-time cost of an online subscription to a console.
PlayStation Plus and Xbox Live Gold cost $60 per year. But in addition to online matchmaking, this includes rental of a rotating selection of games (PlayStation Plus Free Games and Games with Gold respectively). What's the analogous way to try PC games?
You don't need an expensive PC to play games. A $500 PC (which is comparable to a new PS4+accessories) will play ~98% of the PC games.
Or you could go for a pre-owned PlayStation 4 console with a 500 GB HDD, which costs $280 (source). Which accessories were you including in the price?
I'm a developer. I bought an Xbox One because I can write software for it without a $uper $pecial Dev Kit.
True, Microsoft has been generous with ID@Xbox. But if you can make more money by selling copies to PlayStation 4 owners than by selling copies to the smaller Xbox One audience, that might make up for the cost of such a devkit.
I'm developing a UWP app for a specialty niche that would allow a "cheap" Xbox One to run it instead of requiring a PC.
What keeps you from also releasing ports of the app to X11/Linux, Win32 desktop, and possibly macOS? Then you can make it available to people who already have a PC.
A PC with the same multimedia and processing capabilities that my app needs would be quite a bit more expensive than the Xbox One.
In before Hairyfeet mentions that many owners of what's now considered an entry-level desktop PC can drop in a $150 video card and get performance more than on par with Xbox One.
If the patch is to the game publisher's bespoke server application rather than to the platform it runs on, then creating and testing the patch costs programmer wages. How does that "scale up or down with demand"?
Glad I prefer lying in bed all day
"Of course I didn't sleep with anyone else."
Stop bitching and create something.
the "productivity" that is measured these days is seeing how many jobs you can make a single employee do before they reach the breaking point and quit.
I think that might have been GLMDesigns' point. By dismissing these measurable benefits, your boss is constructively dismissing you. Take this as an opportunity to stop complaining about your boss and instead be your own boss, working as a contractor instead of an employee.
I think it means biological age as opposed to strict chronological age. If you're biologically eight years older, your cells show damage comparable to the median person chronologically eight years older than you.
You got me. But the top two consoles of that generation both have limited-geometry, partial-screen, texture-mapped, software-rendered first-person shooters. For every Zero Tolerance, there's a Jurassic Park and a Wolfenstein 3D.
Apple products include H.264 functionality despite the risk of submarine patents covering H.264. Thus Apple can't use the risk of submarine patents as an excuse against VP8 and VP9.
If the throughput were unlimited, the iPad would be sending an uncompressed stream. The H.264 is used because the throughput is limited.
For one thing, back in 2013, Google bought a one-time license from MPEG LA to sublicense MPEG LA-administered patents essential to VP8 and VP9.
For another, exactly how are you sure that there's not some submarine patent waiting to surprise everyone on H.265? I'm aware of already more than one patent pool for that codec: MPEG LA administers some patents and HEVC Advance administers others.
Windows 10 "Anniversary Update" includes Edge 14, which supports VP9. That leaves Apple as the holdout supporting only codecs that require payment of a royalty to a patent pool.
And the iPad Pro has a display 2732x2048 pixels in size. It's not quite 3840x2160 (home 4K-class res), but it's still bigger than 1920x1080.
Because a Lightning adapter is cheaper than an Apple TV.
But then because of limited throughput over Lightning, the Lightning adapter uses AirPlay protocol anyway, and it isn't even full 1080p.
I watch most of my videos in 240 or 480p. Upscaling makes mos of them look good enough
I watch screencasts of tech support scam baiting. The 480p stream is just barely enough to be able to make on-screen text legible.
We getting rid of Northern Ireland then?
Reportedly a majority of Northern Ireland voted "remain in the European Union". Once Britain exercises Article 50, I anticipate a referendum to rejoin Ireland gaining support.
And then, I'm assuming, the hypervisor would put the guest operating systems into hibernation while the hypervisor restarts for security updates. Is that how it typically works?
the expense of having to own 4 copies of a game if you and your kids want to play through a game together
That's what Steam sales are for: four copies at $10 each are cheaper than one full-priced copy at $60.
The Super NES was good, but crippled by the fact that MODE 7 could only scale and rotate backgrounds, not sprites.
In the same generation, Genesis needed the Sega CD peripheral to rotate anything, and though Neo Geo could scale, it couldn't rotate and was too expensive for most players.