You assume that all employers have this policy of their employees. You further assume that all clients of independent contractors have this policy of their contractors. On what do you base this?
They don't *require* you to give your phone number. Just give them a different email address.
That depends on where you are and on which service you're trying to create an account. Yahoo always requires a phone number. On Google it varies; some IP address blocks are more likely than others to cause Google's automated system to also require a phone number.
A phone produces voicemail, and I thought nehumanuscrede and Karl Cocknozzle were specifically discussing avoiding voicemail.
or those handy gaming cafes or a number of other community computers.
Karl Cocknozzle mentioned "employees". Using a gaming cafe would require leaving the office and hoping that the IT department's trouble ticket system is even reachable from a non-company network.
those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head
Super Smash Land would probably meet the same fate as Princess Rescue or AM2R: a takedown on a claim of copyright infringement. But thanks for the other six.
And since we're cherry-picking
You appear to disagree with my choice of genre. But if your friends play a particular game genre, and that genre is better represented on one platform than another, sometimes you have to pick a platform based on that.
How many strategy games are there for consoles?
Turn-based? Koei made a bunch for the NES and Genesis. RTS? The genre began on consoles with Herzog Zwei. I'm aware that PC has pushed it further in part because of the more capable pointing device. But Command & Conquer and StarCraft got console ports, and Halo Wars was console original. And if modern-era homebrew for retro consoles counts, there's RHDE: Furniture Fight.
How many CMS games are there for consoles?
This genre also started on console with Utopia for Intellivision. Rampart was on the Lynx, NES, Game Boy, and Super NES. Wikipedia's article about the genre includes the aforementioned Koei games. The first two SimCity games and Aerobiz made it to the Super NES, and Theme Park was on it and the fifth gens. Does Harvest Moon count?
How many programming games are there for consoles?
I mentioned some in another post, to which I'll add Petit Computer for Nintendo DSi.
You can get a domain name for $10/yr, and a VPS to set up your own mail server for less than $5/mo.
For a total of $70 per year to avoid giving a cell phone number to a freemail provider. That might be a good tradeoff if you currently don't subscribe to any form of mobile phone service. Otherwise, a burner phone might run $100 per year.
It's fast to read a message but slow to write one.
It depends on how it's written. On a phone, you might be right. But on a computer with a full-size (or nearly so) keyboard, 80 wpm is more than possible. Anyone who routinely gets the "Slow Down Cowboy!" error message on Slashdot can attest to this.
You don't actually GIVE your phone number to them, do you?
Are you recommending instead not creating an account with Outlook, Gmail, or Yahoo at all? If so, then which email provider should one use in order to continue receiving important mail after changing ISPs?
Most people who call when I'm not there to answer are on a cell themselves, they can text or email and I'll call back.
Are they just "on a cell" or particularly on a smartphone? Because flip phones like my Audiovox 8610 don't do email, and a text is laborious to compose with T9 and switching to multitap for unknown words. Or is a cell phone that doesn't cost $400 a year to run also "ancient hipster technology"?
Users of Family BASIC for Famicom, Dezaemon series for Famicom and later Japanese consoles, RPG Maker for PlayStation and PlayStation 2, LittleBigPlanet for PlayStation 3, and WarioWare: DIY for Nintendo DS would disagree with "can't".
so it can never be better than PC.
"Never" is a strong word. At various times, consoles have had key features that contemporary features lacked. When the Famicom came out in 1983, for instance, the IBM PC and many other home computers (except those made by Commodore) didn't have a scrollable tile plane, a scrollable frame buffer, or hardware sprites. This meant frame rates in those few games that did attempt scrolling were unplayable. It took until the release of Commander Keen in Invasion of the Vorticons in 1990 for practical scrolling to be figured out on the EGA, and by then, the Mega Drive and Super Famicom were already pumping out parallax scrolling.
If you build a PC, you get a computer, something that can be upgraded, a TOOOL, and of course a great-gaming-platform, not just a TV-toy
It sounds like you're comparing building a single machine (a gaming PC) to buying two machines (an "office" PC and a game console). You'd end up having to keep carrying your gaming PC back and forth between the TV room and your computer desk. Or does the Steam Link extender adequately solve that?
There are tons of fighting games for PC and we get all of the Street Fighter games as soon as they come out
There are flat fighting games like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat, and there are platform fighting games like Super Smash Bros. or PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale, where players can use terrain in a stage for an advantage. Which PC games in the latter category would you recommend for people who aren't "all Final Destination all the time"?
There exist small-form-factor desktop PCs, but they tend not to have a lot of options for graphics expansion.
Oh noes, my laptop, mini tower or shuttle PC case looks absolutely horrible next to my huge stereo system components and huge TV.
You recommend three form factors. I'll address each:
Laptop
How many laptops are designed to have a user-replaceable graphics card, especially those actually intended for use away from a desk? (To me, that means a screen smaller than a 17" desktop-replacement monster.) Otherwise, you're stuck with the integrated graphics that shipped with it.
Mini tower
Still far larger than any Xbox, unless you're referring to the ones that don't take full-height graphics cards.
Shuttle PC
I'd be interested to see your Shuttle PC build that keeps pace with an Xbox One S without dramatically exceeding its price.
Monitors have always had way better resolution than TV, but consoles have only been supporting TV-style resolutions.
That's because monitors have tended to be far smaller (physically) than living room TVs. One of the big draws of a console compared to a PC is a historic culture around offline multiplayer. Screen sharing is sort of hard with the 13" VGA monitors that were common when "monitor" resolutions started to diverge from "TV" resolutions. But now that TVs can act as PC monitors, you're starting to see more indie PC games that take multiple USB game controllers. And because indie games tend to be less graphically complex, they're more likely to work on the integrated graphics of a laptop or NUC.
Slashdot Mirror
no accredited degree=no job
You assume that all employers have this policy of their employees. You further assume that all clients of independent contractors have this policy of their contractors. On what do you base this?
2. Clean Energy: Someone Else's Wealth.
How so? Buy a solar panel, mount it on your roof (or on a pole if local safety regulations make it easier), and harvest your own clean energy.
6. Pocket Supercomputers for Everyone: Someone Else's data collection.
How so? If you want, you can install a Gapps-free ROM on a Nexus phone.
8. High-Quality Online Education: Someone Else's knowledge
You assume that nobody puts the course material under a license for free cultural works.
...that no employer will ever esteem as highly as a degree.
What employer? In the gig economy, a high-quality education will include a course on how to be an independent contractor.
11. A New Space Age: Someone Else's patent.
Unlike copyrights, patents expire.
I think Medium tries to disguise itself as not "just a blog host" through not using a subdomain per user and not offering as much customization.
Why it hasn't bought small.com and large.com is beyond me.
In other words, you'd like a sadist who tries to lock you into using Microsoft products.
FreeDOS is free software. As for Windows, can the license from an old PC that has since been retired be migrated to that PC?
Smartphones are also far more expensive per month to operate than dumbphones.
They don't *require* you to give your phone number. Just give them a different email address.
That depends on where you are and on which service you're trying to create an account. Yahoo always requires a phone number. On Google it varies; some IP address blocks are more likely than others to cause Google's automated system to also require a phone number.
You still need a regular phone number in the U.S. to get a Google Voice number.
How does an emulator like DOSBox or a third-party VM such as Oracle's open-source VirtualBox fail on Windows 10 Home?
Then you use a phone (yours or someone else)
A phone produces voicemail, and I thought nehumanuscrede and Karl Cocknozzle were specifically discussing avoiding voicemail.
or those handy gaming cafes or a number of other community computers.
Karl Cocknozzle mentioned "employees". Using a gaming cafe would require leaving the office and hoping that the IT department's trouble ticket system is even reachable from a non-company network.
those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head
Super Smash Land would probably meet the same fate as Princess Rescue or AM2R: a takedown on a claim of copyright infringement. But thanks for the other six.
And since we're cherry-picking
You appear to disagree with my choice of genre. But if your friends play a particular game genre, and that genre is better represented on one platform than another, sometimes you have to pick a platform based on that.
How many strategy games are there for consoles?
Turn-based? Koei made a bunch for the NES and Genesis. RTS? The genre began on consoles with Herzog Zwei. I'm aware that PC has pushed it further in part because of the more capable pointing device. But Command & Conquer and StarCraft got console ports, and Halo Wars was console original. And if modern-era homebrew for retro consoles counts, there's RHDE: Furniture Fight.
How many CMS games are there for consoles?
This genre also started on console with Utopia for Intellivision. Rampart was on the Lynx, NES, Game Boy, and Super NES. Wikipedia's article about the genre includes the aforementioned Koei games. The first two SimCity games and Aerobiz made it to the Super NES, and Theme Park was on it and the fifth gens. Does Harvest Moon count?
How many programming games are there for consoles?
I mentioned some in another post, to which I'll add Petit Computer for Nintendo DSi.
You can get a domain name for $10/yr, and a VPS to set up your own mail server for less than $5/mo.
For a total of $70 per year to avoid giving a cell phone number to a freemail provider. That might be a good tradeoff if you currently don't subscribe to any form of mobile phone service. Otherwise, a burner phone might run $100 per year.
I don't want to waste my vote on either of them, which is why I donated to Gov. Gary Johnson's campaign.
You think al Qaeda isn't a corporation? Someone read its expense reports.
I use a voicemail service that transcribes the voicemail for me automatically.
How does it handle "international" accents?
It's fast to read a message but slow to write one.
It depends on how it's written. On a phone, you might be right. But on a computer with a full-size (or nearly so) keyboard, 80 wpm is more than possible. Anyone who routinely gets the "Slow Down Cowboy!" error message on Slashdot can attest to this.
mycomputerisdead
now almost every company allows employees to submit tickets online
Good luck with that when yourcomputerisdead.
I suspect the reason she likes the voicemail so much is that she types like 3 words a minute using one finger.
But if you switch to voicemail, you're shutting out the deaf coworker. So how can both mobility disabilities and hearing disabilities be accommodated?
You don't actually GIVE your phone number to them, do you?
Are you recommending instead not creating an account with Outlook, Gmail, or Yahoo at all? If so, then which email provider should one use in order to continue receiving important mail after changing ISPs?
Most people who call when I'm not there to answer are on a cell themselves, they can text or email and I'll call back.
Are they just "on a cell" or particularly on a smartphone? Because flip phones like my Audiovox 8610 don't do email, and a text is laborious to compose with T9 and switching to multitap for unknown words. Or is a cell phone that doesn't cost $400 a year to run also "ancient hipster technology"?
You can't develop a game on a console
Users of Family BASIC for Famicom, Dezaemon series for Famicom and later Japanese consoles, RPG Maker for PlayStation and PlayStation 2, LittleBigPlanet for PlayStation 3, and WarioWare: DIY for Nintendo DS would disagree with "can't".
so it can never be better than PC.
"Never" is a strong word. At various times, consoles have had key features that contemporary features lacked. When the Famicom came out in 1983, for instance, the IBM PC and many other home computers (except those made by Commodore) didn't have a scrollable tile plane, a scrollable frame buffer, or hardware sprites. This meant frame rates in those few games that did attempt scrolling were unplayable. It took until the release of Commander Keen in Invasion of the Vorticons in 1990 for practical scrolling to be figured out on the EGA, and by then, the Mega Drive and Super Famicom were already pumping out parallax scrolling.
If you build a PC, you get a computer, something that can be upgraded, a TOOOL, and of course a great-gaming-platform, not just a TV-toy
It sounds like you're comparing building a single machine (a gaming PC) to buying two machines (an "office" PC and a game console). You'd end up having to keep carrying your gaming PC back and forth between the TV room and your computer desk. Or does the Steam Link extender adequately solve that?
There are tons of fighting games for PC and we get all of the Street Fighter games as soon as they come out
There are flat fighting games like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat, and there are platform fighting games like Super Smash Bros. or PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale, where players can use terrain in a stage for an advantage. Which PC games in the latter category would you recommend for people who aren't "all Final Destination all the time"?
There exist small-form-factor desktop PCs, but they tend not to have a lot of options for graphics expansion.
Oh noes, my laptop, mini tower or shuttle PC case looks absolutely horrible next to my huge stereo system components and huge TV.
You recommend three form factors. I'll address each:
Laptop How many laptops are designed to have a user-replaceable graphics card, especially those actually intended for use away from a desk? (To me, that means a screen smaller than a 17" desktop-replacement monster.) Otherwise, you're stuck with the integrated graphics that shipped with it. Mini tower Still far larger than any Xbox, unless you're referring to the ones that don't take full-height graphics cards. Shuttle PC I'd be interested to see your Shuttle PC build that keeps pace with an Xbox One S without dramatically exceeding its price.Monitors have always had way better resolution than TV, but consoles have only been supporting TV-style resolutions.
That's because monitors have tended to be far smaller (physically) than living room TVs. One of the big draws of a console compared to a PC is a historic culture around offline multiplayer. Screen sharing is sort of hard with the 13" VGA monitors that were common when "monitor" resolutions started to diverge from "TV" resolutions. But now that TVs can act as PC monitors, you're starting to see more indie PC games that take multiple USB game controllers. And because indie games tend to be less graphically complex, they're more likely to work on the integrated graphics of a laptop or NUC.
Too bad current TVs have dropped the inclusion of non-DRMed high definition video inputs
What do you mean? HDMI without HDCP lacks digital restrictions management, and TVs support HDMI without HDCP just as easily as with.
If you're referring to dropping VGA in, component in, and DVI/HDMI with separate analog audio in, to which makes and models do you refer?