You can have multiple individuals using the same PC.
I'm aware that multihead is possible with multiple graphics cards on an X11/Linux box.. But I thought home versions of Windows, the most popular operating system for desktop and laptop computers in the industrialized English-speaking world and therefore probably the most interesting to the marketing industry, were locked down to support only one desktop session at once.
Or perhaps you meant one at a time. Previous comments such as this one seem to indicate that multi-PC households are more common than family members taking turns on separate user accounts on the same PC. Furthermore, multi-PC households are more attractive to the marketing industry because they are more likely to be affluent enough to buy what the marketers are pushing.
Given the "all maximized all the time" window management policy of popular web browsing environments, the viewport size is a very good predictor of screen size. In fact, exact viewport size might even help with fingerprinting because different system fonts may cause the the notification bar to be larger or smaller.
Then the browser could lie to sites that want to use WebGL, telling them "My device's GPU is no more powerful than that of the original PlayStation from 1995" until the user has opted into full-featured WebGL for that domain.
Does it have TV output and an attached physical controller? Trying to press on-screen buttons at the corners of a flat sheet of glass while looking at the action in the middle is an exercise in frustration. Nintendo Switch has both.
And Neo Geo AES graphics were better than Sega Genesis and Super NES, but at the time, Neo Geo was also even farther out of the typical console gamer's price range than the PS3's mocked "599 US dollars" launch price.
In any case, that's debatable. The Master System had more color depth than the NES and ability to write to video memory during draw time, but the NES had more versatile scrolling with the vertical position splits used to make status bars in numerous games, hills in Rad Racer, and trippy effects in Recca, as well as expandable video memory to increase background animation detail. The Genesis had slightly more pixels across than most Super NES graphics modes, but it was even more color-limited than the TG16 that preceded it, and it didn't have anything like the Super NES's floor texture mapping mode (mode 7) until the expensive Sega CD.
Because if you try to use a mobile chipset for a home console, you get OUYA. But did it fizzle because of its mobile chipset, or did it fizzle because of no first party games?
Making a game that targets the XB1, PS4 and PC is a no brainer. That's because these platforms are close enough (i.e. parity) [...] If the Switch is NOT at parity then the obvious outcome is that it will cost more money to develop for that platform
How close is the Nintendo Switch to performance parity with integrated graphics on laptop PCs? Because that's how I see the analogy between the console world and the user-programmable computer world: PlayStation 4 is like a desktop PC, Nintendo Switch is like a laptop, and PlayStation Vita or New Nintendo 3DS is like an Android phone.
Who releases a console just after Christmas, when everyone just spent their money on a shiny new XBox One S or Playstation 4 Slim?
Probably a company that learned from the supply crunches and scalping that plagued the Wii in 2006 and NES Classic Edition in 2016. The idea as I see it is that by fourth quarter 2017, there will be enough Nintendo Switch consoles in the channel that console scalpers don't interfere with selling games to users.
Hardware costs of PC gaming greatly exceed the hardware costs of console gaming.
How so? If you already have a desktop PC with a competent CPU and 8 GB of RAM or more, adding a $200 GPU will let you play essentially all games on settings equivalent to those on the consoles. And if you want a large enough selection of worthwhile exclusive games to rival PC exclusives, you need both the current generation PlayStation console and the current generation Nintendo console. Or are you referring to games that support split-screen only on console, whose PC versions require a separate gaming PC per player?
In these days of virtual machines, I don't necessarily see that a hosting server ever needs to be shutdown - they should be able to scale up or down with demand.
How well does the ability to fix security vulnerabilities and perform other server maintenance tasks "scale up or down with demand"?
Being able to run apps remotely on a machine totally breaks Apple's lock. Same as being able to run apps remotely under, say, X.
This is true if a device is online, not so much if a device is offline. For example, an iPod touch or a Wi-Fi-only iPad is likely to be offline much of the time, and an offline device can run only native apps and apps written in JavaScript that use Service Workers. That's why I've been reminding people for years that "Just get an iPad and a keyboard and use SSH to run applications in categories that Apple excludes" isn't an adequate substitute for a laptop in cities whose public transit doesn't offer Wi-Fi.
And programs are released for a single platform all the time.
Is it common for someone to carry four devices, one to run an exclusive app for each device? For example, is it common for someone to carry an iOS device to run an iOS-exclusive app, an Android device to run an Android-exclusive app, a PlayStation Vita to run a Vita-exclusive game, and a Nintendo 3DS to run a 3DS-exclusive game?
FidoNet could take days to forward mail due to providers' reliance on "nights and weekends" long distance rates, and international snail mail is also slow and expensive.
Besides, considering all comments between 53620127 and this one, it appears you're suggesting that people go to all this cost and latency just to avoid things like:),:(, and:P. I find that ludicrous.
Statistically, you're better off collecting bottles for the recycling fee than developing an app.
Developing a brand new mobile operating system, as you had recommended in post #53642865, would be an even worse value proposition. So would releasing an app for one platform and expecting end users of other platforms to port it to their own devices.
And no, I was referring to WeChat (TenCent) - among others - ability to run apps without installing them on the phone. It was covered by Reuters a few days ago.
Thank you for mentioning WeChat. I was able to find a Slashdot discussion about that story. As far as anybody in that story's comment section can tell, that's one of three things: either A. all the apps are shipped as part of WeChat and updated when WeChat updates, B. the apps run in a WebView of some sort (equivalent to a web app), or C. the apps run in Remote Desktop of some sort (equivalent to a web app running in Opera Mini).
HexChat and other popular IRC clients keep client-side history by default, and some IRC servers support "bouncers" that provide server-side history. I guess the reason they're not used more often is that there's a culture against keeping a permanent record of things said in a channel (IRC's term for a group chat).
being able to paste text and images and such into chat rather than resorting to pastebins
Unless the IRC client automatically authenticates to a pastebin service on the user's behalf and sends any pasted image or pasted text longer than 4 lines there.
Sure some things like emoji support may be a bit silly
Silly, yet supported in any IRC client that processes UTF-8 encoded Unicode text.
Perhaps you were supposed to continue to hammer the broken form on the bug console with repeated requests until either A. it stopped being broken or B. an administrator noticed the anomaly in the bug console's access log.
It's not only whether Wikimedia Foundation has the resources to make works in those formats available. It's also whether mirrors that aren't as well capitalized as Wikimedia have the resources to make works in those formats available. This is why, for example, works under a license specific to Wikimedia are outside the scope of Commons.
Wikimedia Commons already skips the crappy (NC and ND) licenses. It allows CC0 (public domain equivalent), CC BY (attribution required), and CC BY-SA (attribution required, derivatives must be under same license).
Unless the HDD spins down, and it probably won't as the browser continuously saves your position in case of a crash or power loss, it's a matter of marginal power during access compared to idle. Does a 2.5" HDD use more power moving the head or just keeping the platters spinning?
If I visit the first page for a site to retrieve all of the graphics-intensive formatting stuff, then as I browse thirty more pages on that same site I do not have to re-download that stuff because it's cached then that could make for a difference.
That depends on a particular user's browsing habits. You might "browse thirty more pages on" Slashdot while reading stories and writing comments but hit only one document on a site when reading each story's featured article. Or you might "browse thirty more pages on" a web search engine while performing queries but hit only one document on a site when reading each result.
Slashdot Mirror
You can have multiple individuals using the same PC.
I'm aware that multihead is possible with multiple graphics cards on an X11/Linux box.. But I thought home versions of Windows, the most popular operating system for desktop and laptop computers in the industrialized English-speaking world and therefore probably the most interesting to the marketing industry, were locked down to support only one desktop session at once.
Or perhaps you meant one at a time. Previous comments such as this one seem to indicate that multi-PC households are more common than family members taking turns on separate user accounts on the same PC. Furthermore, multi-PC households are more attractive to the marketing industry because they are more likely to be affluent enough to buy what the marketers are pushing.
Given the "all maximized all the time" window management policy of popular web browsing environments, the viewport size is a very good predictor of screen size. In fact, exact viewport size might even help with fingerprinting because different system fonts may cause the the notification bar to be larger or smaller.
Then the browser could lie to sites that want to use WebGL, telling them "My device's GPU is no more powerful than that of the original PlayStation from 1995" until the user has opted into full-featured WebGL for that domain.
$299 gets a top end android tablet
Does it have TV output and an attached physical controller? Trying to press on-screen buttons at the corners of a flat sheet of glass while looking at the action in the middle is an exercise in frustration. Nintendo Switch has both.
That's what Virtual Console is for.
Sega always had better graphics than Nintendo.
And Neo Geo AES graphics were better than Sega Genesis and Super NES, but at the time, Neo Geo was also even farther out of the typical console gamer's price range than the PS3's mocked "599 US dollars" launch price.
In any case, that's debatable. The Master System had more color depth than the NES and ability to write to video memory during draw time, but the NES had more versatile scrolling with the vertical position splits used to make status bars in numerous games, hills in Rad Racer, and trippy effects in Recca, as well as expandable video memory to increase background animation detail. The Genesis had slightly more pixels across than most Super NES graphics modes, but it was even more color-limited than the TG16 that preceded it, and it didn't have anything like the Super NES's floor texture mapping mode (mode 7) until the expensive Sega CD.
Because if you try to use a mobile chipset for a home console, you get OUYA. But did it fizzle because of its mobile chipset, or did it fizzle because of no first party games?
Making a game that targets the XB1, PS4 and PC is a no brainer. That's because these platforms are close enough (i.e. parity) [...] If the Switch is NOT at parity then the obvious outcome is that it will cost more money to develop for that platform
How close is the Nintendo Switch to performance parity with integrated graphics on laptop PCs? Because that's how I see the analogy between the console world and the user-programmable computer world: PlayStation 4 is like a desktop PC, Nintendo Switch is like a laptop, and PlayStation Vita or New Nintendo 3DS is like an Android phone.
Who releases a console just after Christmas, when everyone just spent their money on a shiny new XBox One S or Playstation 4 Slim?
Probably a company that learned from the supply crunches and scalping that plagued the Wii in 2006 and NES Classic Edition in 2016. The idea as I see it is that by fourth quarter 2017, there will be enough Nintendo Switch consoles in the channel that console scalpers don't interfere with selling games to users.
Hardware costs of PC gaming greatly exceed the hardware costs of console gaming.
How so? If you already have a desktop PC with a competent CPU and 8 GB of RAM or more, adding a $200 GPU will let you play essentially all games on settings equivalent to those on the consoles. And if you want a large enough selection of worthwhile exclusive games to rival PC exclusives, you need both the current generation PlayStation console and the current generation Nintendo console. Or are you referring to games that support split-screen only on console, whose PC versions require a separate gaming PC per player?
In these days of virtual machines, I don't necessarily see that a hosting server ever needs to be shutdown - they should be able to scale up or down with demand.
How well does the ability to fix security vulnerabilities and perform other server maintenance tasks "scale up or down with demand"?
It's just too bad that game publishers successfully sue to shut down said open source server replacements.
Plug two Xbox 360 controllers into an Xbox 360 console and you can play co-op Zombies in Call of Duty: Black Ops.
You realize that most people have access to no-extra-charge long distance plans nowadays, right?
Is this "no-extra-charge long distance" international, or is it only domestic?
Being able to run apps remotely on a machine totally breaks Apple's lock. Same as being able to run apps remotely under, say, X.
This is true if a device is online, not so much if a device is offline. For example, an iPod touch or a Wi-Fi-only iPad is likely to be offline much of the time, and an offline device can run only native apps and apps written in JavaScript that use Service Workers. That's why I've been reminding people for years that "Just get an iPad and a keyboard and use SSH to run applications in categories that Apple excludes" isn't an adequate substitute for a laptop in cities whose public transit doesn't offer Wi-Fi.
And programs are released for a single platform all the time.
Is it common for someone to carry four devices, one to run an exclusive app for each device? For example, is it common for someone to carry an iOS device to run an iOS-exclusive app, an Android device to run an Android-exclusive app, a PlayStation Vita to run a Vita-exclusive game, and a Nintendo 3DS to run a 3DS-exclusive game?
FidoNet could take days to forward mail due to providers' reliance on "nights and weekends" long distance rates, and international snail mail is also slow and expensive.
Besides, considering all comments between 53620127 and this one, it appears you're suggesting that people go to all this cost and latency just to avoid things like :), :(, and :P. I find that ludicrous.
Statistically, you're better off collecting bottles for the recycling fee than developing an app.
Developing a brand new mobile operating system, as you had recommended in post #53642865, would be an even worse value proposition. So would releasing an app for one platform and expecting end users of other platforms to port it to their own devices.
And no, I was referring to WeChat (TenCent) - among others - ability to run apps without installing them on the phone. It was covered by Reuters a few days ago.
Thank you for mentioning WeChat. I was able to find a Slashdot discussion about that story. As far as anybody in that story's comment section can tell, that's one of three things: either A. all the apps are shipped as part of WeChat and updated when WeChat updates, B. the apps run in a WebView of some sort (equivalent to a web app), or C. the apps run in Remote Desktop of some sort (equivalent to a web app running in Opera Mini).
wow, a whole flight simulator within html5
JavaScript NES emulators exist. The only thing keeping you from running Top Gun for NES in such an emulator is Konami's legal department.
having the history available on reconnect
HexChat and other popular IRC clients keep client-side history by default, and some IRC servers support "bouncers" that provide server-side history. I guess the reason they're not used more often is that there's a culture against keeping a permanent record of things said in a channel (IRC's term for a group chat).
being able to paste text and images and such into chat rather than resorting to pastebins
Unless the IRC client automatically authenticates to a pastebin service on the user's behalf and sends any pasted image or pasted text longer than 4 lines there.
Sure some things like emoji support may be a bit silly
Silly, yet supported in any IRC client that processes UTF-8 encoded Unicode text.
Perhaps you were supposed to continue to hammer the broken form on the bug console with repeated requests until either A. it stopped being broken or B. an administrator noticed the anomaly in the bug console's access log.
It's not only whether Wikimedia Foundation has the resources to make works in those formats available. It's also whether mirrors that aren't as well capitalized as Wikimedia have the resources to make works in those formats available. This is why, for example, works under a license specific to Wikimedia are outside the scope of Commons.
Wikimedia Commons already skips the crappy (NC and ND) licenses. It allows CC0 (public domain equivalent), CC BY (attribution required), and CC BY-SA (attribution required, derivatives must be under same license).
16:9 split down the middle is dual 8:9, like two 960x1080 portrait monitors. This gives plenty of vertical space for text.
Unless the HDD spins down, and it probably won't as the browser continuously saves your position in case of a crash or power loss, it's a matter of marginal power during access compared to idle. Does a 2.5" HDD use more power moving the head or just keeping the platters spinning?
If I visit the first page for a site to retrieve all of the graphics-intensive formatting stuff, then as I browse thirty more pages on that same site I do not have to re-download that stuff because it's cached then that could make for a difference.
That depends on a particular user's browsing habits. You might "browse thirty more pages on" Slashdot while reading stories and writing comments but hit only one document on a site when reading each story's featured article. Or you might "browse thirty more pages on" a web search engine while performing queries but hit only one document on a site when reading each result.