You can buy a non-gaming/office PC for the price of a console, but those rather suck for playing games on.
But a console also sucks for playing non-games on. So buy a gaming PC kit and a $50 Steam Link thin client for the price of an office PC and a major console.
The Xbox One is $279 retail with two games at the moment
How many games will a player buy for that $279 console over its service life, and how deep are Xbox sales compared to Steam and Humble sales?
Social gaming around a centralized monitor (TV) with plug-in-play functionality.
Now that TVs are thin and affordable, I was under the impression that families had become willing to buy one TV and console per person rather than one TV and console per household. A LAN game from one bedroom to the other, combined with the runtime performance cost of calculating PVS and environment mapping for each split window, makes same-screen slightly less of a selling point now than it used to be. Plus online gaming supports play with friends who have moved away or with friends you met online.
And if you do want same-screen but can't afford to build a second gaming PC to keep next to the TV, laptops and the Steam Link thin client bring PC games into the living room.
Because it's hard to assure high bandwidth and low latency over an external bus.
I assume you're referring to later Super NES games that contained a GSU coprocessor designed by Argonaut (Graphics Support Unit, branded as "Super FX"). Most of these had much lower frame rate than 2D or mode 7 games and thick black borders due to the limited bandwidth to get the rendered frame from the GSU to VRAM. The only GSU game without low frame rate was Yoshi's Island, which used the GSU for the less demanding task of rotating 2D sprites.
So wait, I get all the fun of an unexpandable PC, plus all the fun of an OS which will spy on me? WHERE DO I SIGN?!?!?!?!??!
What makes you think your Xbox One console isn't spying on you just as much?
Also, while I am not an expert on Steam Machines, I just looked at several of them and they are offered only with SteamOS, and not Windows.
True, the big-M "Steam Machine" brand is used for devices that ship with SteamOS. But a small form factor PC running the Steam client, which you might colloquially call a small-m Steam machine, can also be a Mac mini or a Windows PC. And as I understand it, a lot of manufacturers of Steam Machines offer identical hardware configurations with Windows.
The case, power supply, hard disk, operating system, controller etc can be re-used from one generation to the next.
As new games become bigger from one generation to the next, it becomes harder to reuse the hard disk. Games got bigger from the PS1 generation (CD, with games only rarely multi-disc) to the PS2 generation (DVD, with dual layer common later) to the PS3 generation (usually single layer BD on PS3 or usually one or two DVDs on Xbox 360) to the PS4 generation (2-layer BD on both PS4 and Xbox One).
Walmart special keyboard, Walmart special mouse, that's what, $25 total?
OS (everyone forgets the OS)
Valve didn't; its Steam OS is a Debian fork. Windows-only Steam games won't work without Wine, but Valve made it easy to port Mac-compatible Steam games to Linux.
Ubuntu is also a Debian fork. Install Xubuntu and the Steam client on a PC, and you can run both Steam games and non-Steam apps, including apps from Canonical's repository, apps from PPAs, and apps compiled from source. This means you can use the same system for both entertainment and actual work.
Can I finance it by making game makers pay me to be allowed to make games for the system?
Yes, and gamers might even get better games that way because only serious studios will consider the overhead of a console developer program worth it to reach the market. Compared to PC gamers, users of the console maker's download store theoretically have to skip past less "amateur hour" to get to a worthwhile game. This sort of uncertainty as to whether you'll end up with "amateur hour" is what killed the Atari 2600 back in 1983 and almost brought down the North American video game market with it. The licensing scheme is how Nintendo managed to restore North America's trust in video games, despite the NES not being that much more powerful than the ColecoVision and Commodore 64.
A console game does not need to cater to lower spec hardware
Yes it does. A lot of Game Boy Color games, especially earlier ones, included a backward compatibility mode for 4-gray systems (Game Boy, Super Game Boy, and Game Boy Pocket). Compromises in gray mode often involved lower frame rate and less graphical detail, due to a slower CPU, less VRAM, lack of hardware-assisted copying of data to VRAM, and the dramatically slower green LCD of the original Game Boy. Later GBC games on monochrome systems would allow playing only the first chapter (Conker's Pocket Tales) or even just display an error message.
I imagine the same will be true of PlayStation 4 Neo games.
nor does it need to deal with disparate configurations or other background software impeding the game, nor is your memory wasted by os features that are unrelated to gaming.
Including social features, such as Xbox Live notifications, text chat, and voice chat?
That and I'm pretty sure console games can store textures pre-swizzled for a particular GPU's cache architecture, or shaders pre-compiled for a particular shader ISA.
Nvidia 1080GTX = $599 Go build a $400 system with a $600 GPU.
$600 != $599
Colloquial price quotations like this follow the significant figures rule. 600 has one significant figure and can thus represent any value between 550.00 and 650.00. 599 has three significant figures and can thus represent any value between 598.50 and 599.50. These ranges overlap.
In mid-September, about a dozen Xbox one games will support Xbox Play Anywhere. This feature adds a copy of select games to your Windows Store purchases when you buy them on Xbox One or vice versa. So you're right only in the sense that Windows 10 Anniversary Update is a dependency for Xbox Play Anywhere. It's not clear to what extent other existing and future Xbox One games will come to support Xbox Play Anywhere.
Why is using radiation okay but inserting a specific gene at a specific location not okay?
Because only the latter is clearly patentable.
That's patently (ha ha) false. I don't know where these absurd ideas come from.
I concede that I have deep misconceptions. What should someone as clueless about this field as I read first in order to become no longer clueless? Google radiation plant patent produces nuclear power-related patents. Google radiation plant patent -nuclear produces grow lamps.
If you're into traditional farming you aren't going to want to use hybridized seed, either.
Is a farmer considered to be "using" seeds that spill from a neighboring farm?
The only way this can work is if the record labels - who own everything and do not have to pay themselves - offer a service.
One service offered by labels is relationships with vehicular listening platforms that do not require a cellular data subscription, namely FM stations and SiriusXM. (SiriusXM requires a subscription, but the annual rate is less than that of a typical postpaid cellular data plan.)
I make an educated guess that another such service is familiarity with a large repertoire of music. Clearance personnel in a label and/or its affiliated music publisher might help review your songs to catch having accidentally copied part of someone else's song before you publish and get sued.
Having to finalize the content before performing any formatting, even italicization of titles of works or emphasized phrases, is waterfall in the extreme.
As for spreadsheets, how do you express a workbook with multiple sheets, each with formulas on it, as a text file?
what is better depends on what lets you communicate with your [...] collaborators
.doc,.docx,.xls,.xlsx, etc are _not_ data exchange formats. You should be sending PDFs to outsiders.
Nor are PDFs designed to be editable. I mentioned "collaborators" in the sense of editing a document together. And no, in not all industries are the majority of employees inclined to learn LaTeX markup. So what's the alternative to an editable word processor document or an editable spreadsheet?
Why is using radiation okay but inserting a specific gene at a specific location not okay?
Because only the latter is clearly patentable. The EULA imposed by GMO plant patent holders tends to forbid saving seeds for replanting, and this is antithetical to traditional sustainable farming. It's the same reason that some people prefer free software.
Browsers from the App Store are either wrappers around WebKit, which is the same engine used by Safari
Apple's restriction is that browsers must use WebKit.
That's what I said.
Both Chrome and Firefox are available on iOS.
But are they counted as Chrome hits and Firefox hits, or are they counted as Safari hits because they use WebKit?
And just to make sure I'm up to date with the latest changes to iOS, has Apple started to let the user change the default browser? Or do users end up back in Safari when they follow an HTTPS or HTTP link from within a native app?
[The WebKit requirement] was not a problem for Chrome
I thought Chrome for all platforms except iOS had switched from WebKit to Blink, a fork of WebKit. Or is there still a lot of upstream code sharing from Blink back to WebKit? And how well do things like offline web application support (such as Service Workers) work in Chrome for iOS?
"Desktop" in operating system usage share metrics includes both the desktop and laptop form factors. Convertible tablets that run a desktop operating system, such as Transformer Book, Surface Pro, and Surface 3, are also included in desktop OS usage share.
So are desktops declining in favor of laptops, or are they declining in favor of tablets that run a smartphone operating system?
Slashdot Mirror
You can buy a non-gaming/office PC for the price of a console, but those rather suck for playing games on.
But a console also sucks for playing non-games on. So buy a gaming PC kit and a $50 Steam Link thin client for the price of an office PC and a major console.
The Xbox One is $279 retail with two games at the moment
How many games will a player buy for that $279 console over its service life, and how deep are Xbox sales compared to Steam and Humble sales?
Social gaming around a centralized monitor (TV) with plug-in-play functionality.
Now that TVs are thin and affordable, I was under the impression that families had become willing to buy one TV and console per person rather than one TV and console per household. A LAN game from one bedroom to the other, combined with the runtime performance cost of calculating PVS and environment mapping for each split window, makes same-screen slightly less of a selling point now than it used to be. Plus online gaming supports play with friends who have moved away or with friends you met online.
And if you do want same-screen but can't afford to build a second gaming PC to keep next to the TV, laptops and the Steam Link thin client bring PC games into the living room.
Because it's hard to assure high bandwidth and low latency over an external bus.
I assume you're referring to later Super NES games that contained a GSU coprocessor designed by Argonaut (Graphics Support Unit, branded as "Super FX"). Most of these had much lower frame rate than 2D or mode 7 games and thick black borders due to the limited bandwidth to get the rendered frame from the GSU to VRAM. The only GSU game without low frame rate was Yoshi's Island, which used the GSU for the less demanding task of rotating 2D sprites.
Both the Neo Geo AES and 3DO Interactive Multiplayer broke $1,000 after adjustment for inflation to 2013 dollars. Intellivision came close at $935. The 3DO sort of flopped, but the Neo Geo retains a following.
So wait, I get all the fun of an unexpandable PC, plus all the fun of an OS which will spy on me? WHERE DO I SIGN?!?!?!?!??!
What makes you think your Xbox One console isn't spying on you just as much?
Also, while I am not an expert on Steam Machines, I just looked at several of them and they are offered only with SteamOS, and not Windows.
True, the big-M "Steam Machine" brand is used for devices that ship with SteamOS. But a small form factor PC running the Steam client, which you might colloquially call a small-m Steam machine, can also be a Mac mini or a Windows PC. And as I understand it, a lot of manufacturers of Steam Machines offer identical hardware configurations with Windows.
The case, power supply, hard disk, operating system, controller etc can be re-used from one generation to the next.
As new games become bigger from one generation to the next, it becomes harder to reuse the hard disk. Games got bigger from the PS1 generation (CD, with games only rarely multi-disc) to the PS2 generation (DVD, with dual layer common later) to the PS3 generation (usually single layer BD on PS3 or usually one or two DVDs on Xbox 360) to the PS4 generation (2-layer BD on both PS4 and Xbox One).
input peripherals
Walmart special keyboard, Walmart special mouse, that's what, $25 total?
OS (everyone forgets the OS)
Valve didn't; its Steam OS is a Debian fork. Windows-only Steam games won't work without Wine, but Valve made it easy to port Mac-compatible Steam games to Linux.
Ubuntu is also a Debian fork. Install Xubuntu and the Steam client on a PC, and you can run both Steam games and non-Steam apps, including apps from Canonical's repository, apps from PPAs, and apps compiled from source. This means you can use the same system for both entertainment and actual work.
Can I finance it by making game makers pay me to be allowed to make games for the system?
Yes, and gamers might even get better games that way because only serious studios will consider the overhead of a console developer program worth it to reach the market. Compared to PC gamers, users of the console maker's download store theoretically have to skip past less "amateur hour" to get to a worthwhile game. This sort of uncertainty as to whether you'll end up with "amateur hour" is what killed the Atari 2600 back in 1983 and almost brought down the North American video game market with it. The licensing scheme is how Nintendo managed to restore North America's trust in video games, despite the NES not being that much more powerful than the ColecoVision and Commodore 64.
A console game does not need to cater to lower spec hardware
Yes it does. A lot of Game Boy Color games, especially earlier ones, included a backward compatibility mode for 4-gray systems (Game Boy, Super Game Boy, and Game Boy Pocket). Compromises in gray mode often involved lower frame rate and less graphical detail, due to a slower CPU, less VRAM, lack of hardware-assisted copying of data to VRAM, and the dramatically slower green LCD of the original Game Boy. Later GBC games on monochrome systems would allow playing only the first chapter (Conker's Pocket Tales) or even just display an error message.
I imagine the same will be true of PlayStation 4 Neo games.
nor does it need to deal with disparate configurations or other background software impeding the game, nor is your memory wasted by os features that are unrelated to gaming.
Including social features, such as Xbox Live notifications, text chat, and voice chat?
That and I'm pretty sure console games can store textures pre-swizzled for a particular GPU's cache architecture, or shaders pre-compiled for a particular shader ISA.
I think the end goal is to find a new home for Windows when nobody is buying desktops any more
"Nobody"? Without desktops, on what machines will people develop applications for tablets, phones, and servers?
Nvidia 1080GTX = $599
Go build a $400 system with a $600 GPU.
$600 != $599
Colloquial price quotations like this follow the significant figures rule. 600 has one significant figure and can thus represent any value between 550.00 and 650.00. 599 has three significant figures and can thus represent any value between 598.50 and 599.50. These ranges overlap.
In mid-September, about a dozen Xbox one games will support Xbox Play Anywhere. This feature adds a copy of select games to your Windows Store purchases when you buy them on Xbox One or vice versa. So you're right only in the sense that Windows 10 Anniversary Update is a dependency for Xbox Play Anywhere. It's not clear to what extent other existing and future Xbox One games will come to support Xbox Play Anywhere.
Fred's assertion, as I understand it, is that the advertiser base underlying the no-charge tier of Pandora and Spotify isn't "robust".
Do you actually believe a large number of performers write their own music?
The number of singer-songwriters is large enough to be notable. Otherwise, the Wikipedia article about them would probably have been deleted by now.
Why is using radiation okay but inserting a specific gene at a specific location not okay?
Because only the latter is clearly patentable.
That's patently (ha ha) false. I don't know where these absurd ideas come from.
I concede that I have deep misconceptions. What should someone as clueless about this field as I read first in order to become no longer clueless? Google radiation plant patent produces nuclear power-related patents. Google radiation plant patent -nuclear produces grow lamps.
If you're into traditional farming you aren't going to want to use hybridized seed, either.
Is a farmer considered to be "using" seeds that spill from a neighboring farm?
The only way this can work is if the record labels - who own everything and do not have to pay themselves - offer a service.
One service offered by labels is relationships with vehicular listening platforms that do not require a cellular data subscription, namely FM stations and SiriusXM. (SiriusXM requires a subscription, but the annual rate is less than that of a typical postpaid cellular data plan.)
I make an educated guess that another such service is familiarity with a large repertoire of music. Clearance personnel in a label and/or its affiliated music publisher might help review your songs to catch having accidentally copied part of someone else's song before you publish and get sued.
Having to finalize the content before performing any formatting, even italicization of titles of works or emphasized phrases, is waterfall in the extreme.
As for spreadsheets, how do you express a workbook with multiple sheets, each with formulas on it, as a text file?
as a Gartner analyst wrote, there is no equivalent concept of "privacy" in the Chinese language.
Then what does yinsi mean?
what is better depends on what lets you communicate with your [...] collaborators
.doc, .docx, .xls, .xlsx, etc are _not_ data exchange formats. You should be sending PDFs to outsiders.
Nor are PDFs designed to be editable. I mentioned "collaborators" in the sense of editing a document together. And no, in not all industries are the majority of employees inclined to learn LaTeX markup. So what's the alternative to an editable word processor document or an editable spreadsheet?
Why is using radiation okay but inserting a specific gene at a specific location not okay?
Because only the latter is clearly patentable. The EULA imposed by GMO plant patent holders tends to forbid saving seeds for replanting, and this is antithetical to traditional sustainable farming. It's the same reason that some people prefer free software.
And they're mostly philosophical or theoretical dangers, such as effects of biological "intellectual property".
Monsanto v. Schmeiser is not "theoretical".
Browsers from the App Store are either wrappers around WebKit, which is the same engine used by Safari
Apple's restriction is that browsers must use WebKit.
That's what I said.
Both Chrome and Firefox are available on iOS.
But are they counted as Chrome hits and Firefox hits, or are they counted as Safari hits because they use WebKit?
And just to make sure I'm up to date with the latest changes to iOS, has Apple started to let the user change the default browser? Or do users end up back in Safari when they follow an HTTPS or HTTP link from within a native app?
[The WebKit requirement] was not a problem for Chrome
I thought Chrome for all platforms except iOS had switched from WebKit to Blink, a fork of WebKit. Or is there still a lot of upstream code sharing from Blink back to WebKit? And how well do things like offline web application support (such as Service Workers) work in Chrome for iOS?
"Desktop" in operating system usage share metrics includes both the desktop and laptop form factors. Convertible tablets that run a desktop operating system, such as Transformer Book, Surface Pro, and Surface 3, are also included in desktop OS usage share.
So are desktops declining in favor of laptops, or are they declining in favor of tablets that run a smartphone operating system?
Does it run in Ubuntu 12.04's Wine?
I use Wine in Xubuntu 14.04, and it runs most of what I've thrown at it. What's blocking the LTS to LTS dist-upgrade for you?