Uhh, you can buy a computer for like $200 nowadays and I have seen stuff like Crysis being run on Atom powered netbooks by toning down the graphics.
And you can get an Xbox 360 if you want to run Xbox 360-era games.
What exactly is a "living room friendly" case? I think you just made that up right now.
Something not as physically large as a tower. There exist small-form-factor desktop PCs, but they tend not to have a lot of options for graphics expansion. This means a console can run a game at higher settings than a same-size, same-price PC.
PC gets exclusive games too.
I'm well aware of that. But some genres tend to be far better represented on one of the consoles than on PC, such as JRPGs or fighting games. For example, the PC version of Mortal Kombat [9] was delayed for years, and the PC version of the Mortal Kombat XL expansion to Mortal Kombat X was canceled.
Cheating in multiplayer PC games is equally as difficult as cheating in console games.
How so? Cheating in multiplayer PC games is often a matter of hacking up the client app. This is especially true of cheats that are hard to enforce server-side, such as wall translucency or aim assistance.
Also being able to be played easilly on a large screen TV is also a plus as it gives me more to do with my 40 inch TV and nicer then a 19 inch monitor
Essentially all recent PCs support HDMI output to your 40-inch TV, be it through an HDMI port or through HDMI signals on a DVI port. Older PCs instead support VGA + analog audio output to your 40-inch TV.
The whole POINT of a console over a PC is a known quantity for software makers. You don't have to guess at CPU or GPU or RAM or what-have-you
Not always.
Game Boy
The Game Boy Pocket had a faster LCD, reducing the need to intentionally slow gameplay just to reduce motion blur. The Game Boy Color had a double speed processor, more RAM (48K instead of 16K), hardware-assisted copying of data to video memory, and a color LCD.
Nintendo 64
The stock console had 4 MB of RAM. The optional Expansion Pak increased this to 8 MB.
PlayStation Portable
Later models had a faster CPU (333 MHz vs. 222 MHz) and more RAM (64 MB vs. 32 MB). Some games were delivered only as a download to Memory Stick, not as a disc, and I'm guessing that was to speed up loading times.
Nintendo DS
The DSi had a faster CPU, more RAM, a camera, and a Wi-Fi chip capable of WPA.
Nintendo 3DS
Again with more CPU+RAM in the New Nintendo 3DS. It also includes a C-stick and an NFC reader for the cash grab known as "amiibo", but as I understand it, these are available as add-ons for the original 3DS.
Of these systems, only the Game Boy Color had the majority of its library exclusive to the updated platform by the end of its life. Most later N64 games would still run on an unexpanded system, few DSi-only games were ever released, and I'm not aware of any PSP games that absolutely need a PSP-2000, PSP-3000, or PSP Go.
Take that away and what exactly would differentiate Scorpio from a gaming PC?
The same things that distinguish any console: exclusives, an uncluttered download store, better offline use including installation and multiplayer, less online cheating, and lower price (for equivalent CPU and RAM). Also a reasonably sized, uncluttered case, as even the original Xbox from 2001 was less XBOX HUEG than a PC tower.
But why would anyone do that when you could buy a PC and adjust game settings?
For one thing, a PC that can run the game on the same settings is likely to cost more, even if only for the living-room-friendly case and the Windows license. For another, consoles tend to get games that are either exclusive to one console or made for everything-but-PC. Finally, cheating in competitive online pickup multiplayer games is a lot harder on a console.
Then the question becomes one of which CDMA phones support Verizon's and Sprint's frequency bands. Back in the day, many GSM/UMTS phones were stuck on 2G when used on T-Mobile because they didn't support the AWS band.
As of 2016, how easy is it for someone who's not super technical to buy an Android phone without carrier branding that works well on Verizon or Sprint? Even if hardcore users of Slashdot have a lot of time to learn to do their own research, our non-technical friends and family may not.
For those playing at home and unaware of the differences between the U.S. phone market and that of the rest of the world: Unlike T-Mobile and AT&T, which use GSM, Verizon and Sprint use CDMA2000. Unlike GSM and its successors (UMTS and LTE), CDMA2000 allows a carrier to choose to program the subscriber identity directly into the handset rather than issuing a CSIM card. This gives the carrier far more leverage as to what devices are used on its network. Some people who live in areas without good coverage from T-Mobile, considered the most customer-friendly U.S. carrier, may choose Verizon or Sprint in order to avoid AT&T, the U.S. carrier with the worst customer service.
A publisher or ad network can still protect users by recompressing advertisers' uploaded files. There are two ways to go about this. One is to use a JPEG optimizer such as IJG's jpegtran, which optimizes JPEG files without additional loss. The other is to require advertisers to upload PNGs or high-quality JPEGs and then transcode them to web quality using mozjpeg.
an entire industry is unable to factor the $7,500 tax credit new purchases get
This page claims that you forfeit much of this tax credit if you don't already have a large enough income to pay $7,500 in income tax in a single year:
You'll often hear that a credit is worth "up to" a certain amount. "Up to" is the critical modifier. The federal incentive is usually referred to as a flat $7,500 credit, but it's only worth $7,500 to someone whose tax bill at the end of the year is $7,500 or more. Let's say you buy a Nissan Leaf or other eligible vehicle and you owe $5,000 in income tax for a particular year. That's all the tax credit will be. Uncle Sam's not writing a refund check for the other $2,500. And an unused portion of the credit can't be applied against the following year's taxes.
You know you can RENT a non-EV car for that other 10% right ?
Renting can be impractical before age 25, or if your destination is across a provincial/state line, or if you need to make such a trip every other weekend.
But who's going to drive it? Without enough farebox revenue to pay drivers, a lot of cities have to completely shut down bus service at night and on Sundays and major holidays. (Source: fwcitilink.com)
Does your ISP also fail at IPv6? I've read about a lot of ISPs giving each subscriber his own/56 on IPv6 and using carrier-grade NAT only on IPv4. This technique is called DS-Lite (not to be confused with a Nintendo product).
Netflix is a service you pay for, making you the customer, not just "the product" as with ad-supported services. When you asked Netflix support how to use the service with a PC keyboard, what was the form letter?
Do you have a disability advocate organization near where you live? Perhaps a support request from such an organization might carry more weight than one from an individual.
"the attack surface of plug-ins" oh fuck off. If processes can't be assigned fine-grained permissions then your operating system is shit.
Unfortunately, people have allowed themselves to become locked into incumbent operating systems that are, as you put it, "shit". But given the presence of "sandbox" in the titles of bugs listed at Media/EME, it appears Firefox is at least trying to limit the permissions of the CDM.
It does, however, drastically reduce the attack surface of plug-ins. The CDM is a much narrower, more focused API than NPAPI. And it'll be easier to avoid: don't use any services that offer Hollywood movies for online rental.
In order to buy more DDoS credits, you need to make TLS handshakes with the server chosen by someone paying you. Buying credits from someone else might be easier than mining them yourself by performing DDoSes for others.
How do you make this work on an unrooted phone, other than by selling it and buying a rootable phone?
Why is that not a viable option? For most people, it is one
Switching from an unrootable device to an officially rootable Android device requires you to accept the financial loss due to deprecation of your existing device. (Car analogy: loss of a third of a new car's value the minute you drive it off the dealer's lot.) Thus the new device that you can buy with what you make from selling a used device will likely come with drastically poorer performance, due to less RAM and slower flash memory that causes the device to spend more time swapping apps in and out of memory and less time actually responding to your touches. (Source: my personal experience using a 2012 Nexus 7 tablet)
In addition, switching from an iPod touch, iPhone, or iPad to an Android device causes you to lose access to all your App Store and iTunes Store purchases.
In general, the owner of copyright in a work has the exclusive right to authorize the preparation of derivative works based on that work. This is subject to statutory limits on copyright, such as fair use of a work, some types of private copying, and paid compulsory licenses. In many countries, such as the United States, there exists a paid compulsory license for cover versions of a nondramatic musical work, with a royalty on the order of 10 cents per track. But I'd be very surprised if ocremix.org were to use that as its primary defense because this royalty is far more than an advertiser is willing to pay per page view.
You didn't need to buy new hands to use a touch keyboard though
Are you sure about that? My hands can't tell whether or not the thumbs are centered over the keys of an on-screen keyboard. With a physical keyboard, I could touch-type while keeping my eyes on the text I'm writing rather than the keys. It's ironic that a "touch" screen doesn't allow "touch" typing.
Slashdot Mirror
Uhh, you can buy a computer for like $200 nowadays and I have seen stuff like Crysis being run on Atom powered netbooks by toning down the graphics.
And you can get an Xbox 360 if you want to run Xbox 360-era games.
What exactly is a "living room friendly" case? I think you just made that up right now.
Something not as physically large as a tower. There exist small-form-factor desktop PCs, but they tend not to have a lot of options for graphics expansion. This means a console can run a game at higher settings than a same-size, same-price PC.
PC gets exclusive games too.
I'm well aware of that. But some genres tend to be far better represented on one of the consoles than on PC, such as JRPGs or fighting games. For example, the PC version of Mortal Kombat [9] was delayed for years, and the PC version of the Mortal Kombat XL expansion to Mortal Kombat X was canceled.
Cheating in multiplayer PC games is equally as difficult as cheating in console games.
How so? Cheating in multiplayer PC games is often a matter of hacking up the client app. This is especially true of cheats that are hard to enforce server-side, such as wall translucency or aim assistance.
Also being able to be played easilly on a large screen TV is also a plus as it gives me more to do with my 40 inch TV and nicer then a 19 inch monitor
Essentially all recent PCs support HDMI output to your 40-inch TV, be it through an HDMI port or through HDMI signals on a DVI port. Older PCs instead support VGA + analog audio output to your 40-inch TV.
The whole POINT of a console over a PC is a known quantity for software makers. You don't have to guess at CPU or GPU or RAM or what-have-you
Not always.
Game Boy The Game Boy Pocket had a faster LCD, reducing the need to intentionally slow gameplay just to reduce motion blur. The Game Boy Color had a double speed processor, more RAM (48K instead of 16K), hardware-assisted copying of data to video memory, and a color LCD. Nintendo 64 The stock console had 4 MB of RAM. The optional Expansion Pak increased this to 8 MB. PlayStation Portable Later models had a faster CPU (333 MHz vs. 222 MHz) and more RAM (64 MB vs. 32 MB). Some games were delivered only as a download to Memory Stick, not as a disc, and I'm guessing that was to speed up loading times. Nintendo DS The DSi had a faster CPU, more RAM, a camera, and a Wi-Fi chip capable of WPA. Nintendo 3DS Again with more CPU+RAM in the New Nintendo 3DS. It also includes a C-stick and an NFC reader for the cash grab known as "amiibo", but as I understand it, these are available as add-ons for the original 3DS.Of these systems, only the Game Boy Color had the majority of its library exclusive to the updated platform by the end of its life. Most later N64 games would still run on an unexpanded system, few DSi-only games were ever released, and I'm not aware of any PSP games that absolutely need a PSP-2000, PSP-3000, or PSP Go.
Take that away and what exactly would differentiate Scorpio from a gaming PC?
The same things that distinguish any console: exclusives, an uncluttered download store, better offline use including installation and multiplayer, less online cheating, and lower price (for equivalent CPU and RAM). Also a reasonably sized, uncluttered case, as even the original Xbox from 2001 was less XBOX HUEG than a PC tower.
A PC has third-party virtual machines into which old software can be loaded, usually with no need to re-buy the software.
But why would anyone do that when you could buy a PC and adjust game settings?
For one thing, a PC that can run the game on the same settings is likely to cost more, even if only for the living-room-friendly case and the Windows license. For another, consoles tend to get games that are either exclusive to one console or made for everything-but-PC. Finally, cheating in competitive online pickup multiplayer games is a lot harder on a console.
I've written more about the console gamer's mindset.
Then the question becomes one of which CDMA phones support Verizon's and Sprint's frequency bands. Back in the day, many GSM/UMTS phones were stuck on 2G when used on T-Mobile because they didn't support the AWS band.
As of 2016, how easy is it for someone who's not super technical to buy an Android phone without carrier branding that works well on Verizon or Sprint? Even if hardcore users of Slashdot have a lot of time to learn to do their own research, our non-technical friends and family may not.
For those playing at home and unaware of the differences between the U.S. phone market and that of the rest of the world: Unlike T-Mobile and AT&T, which use GSM, Verizon and Sprint use CDMA2000. Unlike GSM and its successors (UMTS and LTE), CDMA2000 allows a carrier to choose to program the subscriber identity directly into the handset rather than issuing a CSIM card. This gives the carrier far more leverage as to what devices are used on its network. Some people who live in areas without good coverage from T-Mobile, considered the most customer-friendly U.S. carrier, may choose Verizon or Sprint in order to avoid AT&T, the U.S. carrier with the worst customer service.
A publisher or ad network can still protect users by recompressing advertisers' uploaded files. There are two ways to go about this. One is to use a JPEG optimizer such as IJG's jpegtran, which optimizes JPEG files without additional loss. The other is to require advertisers to upload PNGs or high-quality JPEGs and then transcode them to web quality using mozjpeg.
an entire industry is unable to factor the $7,500 tax credit new purchases get
This page claims that you forfeit much of this tax credit if you don't already have a large enough income to pay $7,500 in income tax in a single year:
But what if you live in NYC
Then you have plenty of transit options, making a personal car less necessary.
in an apartment, where you have to fight for a parking place.
If you do end up finding a job in a city less dense than New York City, make sure to lease an apartment with reserved parking and charger ports.
You know you can RENT a non-EV car for that other 10% right ?
Renting can be impractical before age 25, or if your destination is across a provincial/state line, or if you need to make such a trip every other weekend.
I'm looking forward to the nuclear powered bus.
But who's going to drive it? Without enough farebox revenue to pay drivers, a lot of cities have to completely shut down bus service at night and on Sundays and major holidays. (Source: fwcitilink.com)
Does your ISP also fail at IPv6? I've read about a lot of ISPs giving each subscriber his own /56 on IPv6 and using carrier-grade NAT only on IPv4. This technique is called DS-Lite (not to be confused with a Nintendo product).
Hamburger menu > Preferences (or Options) > Content > Play DRM content
Turn it off and no CDM will run.
Netflix is a service you pay for, making you the customer, not just "the product" as with ad-supported services. When you asked Netflix support how to use the service with a PC keyboard, what was the form letter?
Do you have a disability advocate organization near where you live? Perhaps a support request from such an organization might carry more weight than one from an individual.
Uncheck "Options > Content > Play DRM Content".
By "the spec", are you referring broadly to the W3C's EME spec or more narrowly to the spec of how Firefox implements EME?
"the attack surface of plug-ins" oh fuck off. If processes can't be assigned fine-grained permissions then your operating system is shit.
Unfortunately, people have allowed themselves to become locked into incumbent operating systems that are, as you put it, "shit". But given the presence of "sandbox" in the titles of bugs listed at Media/EME, it appears Firefox is at least trying to limit the permissions of the CDM.
It does, however, drastically reduce the attack surface of plug-ins. The CDM is a much narrower, more focused API than NPAPI. And it'll be easier to avoid: don't use any services that offer Hollywood movies for online rental.
In order to buy more DDoS credits, you need to make TLS handshakes with the server chosen by someone paying you. Buying credits from someone else might be easier than mining them yourself by performing DDoSes for others.
I brought up that Pokemon is basically capturing wild animals and training them to fight each other.
And Namco developed a Pokémon-themed fighting game for Wii U called Pokken Tournament. Does that make it Cockfighter II?
Since it is made up money, it does not actually cost them any real money
That's true only until DDoSCoin gets an implementation. Once it does, watch an exchange rate with a better-known cryptocurrency emerge.
How do you make this work on an unrooted phone, other than by selling it and buying a rootable phone?
Why is that not a viable option? For most people, it is one
Switching from an unrootable device to an officially rootable Android device requires you to accept the financial loss due to deprecation of your existing device. (Car analogy: loss of a third of a new car's value the minute you drive it off the dealer's lot.) Thus the new device that you can buy with what you make from selling a used device will likely come with drastically poorer performance, due to less RAM and slower flash memory that causes the device to spend more time swapping apps in and out of memory and less time actually responding to your touches. (Source: my personal experience using a 2012 Nexus 7 tablet)
In addition, switching from an iPod touch, iPhone, or iPad to an Android device causes you to lose access to all your App Store and iTunes Store purchases.
In general, the owner of copyright in a work has the exclusive right to authorize the preparation of derivative works based on that work. This is subject to statutory limits on copyright, such as fair use of a work, some types of private copying, and paid compulsory licenses. In many countries, such as the United States, there exists a paid compulsory license for cover versions of a nondramatic musical work, with a royalty on the order of 10 cents per track. But I'd be very surprised if ocremix.org were to use that as its primary defense because this royalty is far more than an advertiser is willing to pay per page view.
You didn't need to buy new hands to use a touch keyboard though
Are you sure about that? My hands can't tell whether or not the thumbs are centered over the keys of an on-screen keyboard. With a physical keyboard, I could touch-type while keeping my eyes on the text I'm writing rather than the keys. It's ironic that a "touch" screen doesn't allow "touch" typing.