Vulkan is not close to OpenGL at all, the design API is completely different.
Is it bigger than the difference between OpenGL 1.x, with its fixed-function pipeline and state machine, and OpenGL ES, which abandoned the fixed-function pipeline in favor of shaders and vertex buffers?
Developers need to eat. Therefore developers do what's profitable. Something the majority does not adopt is unprofitable. The majority prefers adware to paid apps. What's the solution that allows developers to eat?
But I'm willing to bet that their English is better than your Polish, or German, or whatever language is official in the non-Five Eyes countries where mod authors tend to live.
I don't login to my email, banking, or any other sensitive accounts. I don't pay bills with my phone.
So how do you deposit paper checks?
Occasionally I receive a paper check from a relative who tells me she's too old and set in her ways to consider using the electronic funds transfer button on the bank's website. Some other people may be working for employers that issue paper checks because they are too small to offer payroll direct deposit. Chase Bank has a check deposit app for phones, which operates by photographing the front and back of a check with the phone's rear-facing camera, but none for desktop computers. (A Chase representative confirmed this to me.) During much of the year, I ride my bicycle to an ATM seven minutes away from my house and deposit the check there. But during about one-third of the year, the weather makes cycling impractical.
Yet somehow my Nexus 7 (2012; codename grouper) tablet got much slower when upgrading from KitKat (4.4) to Lollipop (5.0 and 5.1). It gets so bad that the UI has multi-second pauses if the Google Play Store app is downloading or installing an application update in the background. And it's not just an app's UI; it's the system UI including swiping down from the top.
Just avoid the less reputable ones until you learn the basics of computer use, like not installing dodgy cracked apps
I agree: someone new to Android should stick to the reputable repositories, which are Google Play, Amazon, and F-Droid, and avoid any app that seeks administrative permissions unless required by an employer. But if there are two apps for reading Cracked on a reputable store, how do I know which are and aren't dodgy? There's the official app but also a third-party app.
You paid Apple a premium for the iDevice; you can pay Apple a premium for the Mac. Or you could buy a Mac the next time it's time to replace your computer with a new one anyway.
I think the "Rats of Nihm" is probably more realistic
National Institute of Hental Mealth?
although equal in intelligence they definitely were not equal in societal standing.
One option is to let the rodents reproduce and then make the human the outsider. For that see Gulliver's Travels by Swift. The human protagonist shipwrecks on an island populated by roughly 15 cm tall humanoids but comes to appreciate their (quite socialist) culture. But a more direct parallel to the suggested situation might be his interaction with the giants of Brobdingnag. A girl brings him home and carries him around in what amounts to a dollhouse, but he eventually proves himself worthy of an audience with their king.
I also found the world depicted in the Maze Cycle fascinating. (It consists of Who Moved My Cheese by Johnson, Who Cut the Cheese by Jarlsberg, Who Cut the Cheese by Brown, Who Stole My Cheese by Hochberg, and I Moved Your Cheese by Malhotra.) But are they a sequel to Gulliver's Travels or to Mrs. Brisby and the Rats of NIMH? At this point, I'm guessing both. Imagine a world in which Lilliputians coexist with laboratory mice whose genes have been spliced.
Intel chipsets may be weak compared to current generation AMD and NVidia hardware, but compared to the cards of a decade ago they're pretty powerful.
Agreed. A previous Intel CPU (Ivy Bridge with HD 4000) runs Skyrim playably at 720p according to Anandtech. This puts it at least at parity with the PlayStation 3, which also runs Skyrim. In turn, because so many AAA PC games prior to 2013 were also released for PS3 and/or Xbox 360, they should have settings that scale down to PC hardware comparable in performance to those consoles.
Heck, they would even be better off porting their games to Windows Phone first.
That depends on whether or not the game's control model can be adapted to a 5 inch touch screen. Point-and-click games work well, such as Fruit Ninja, Pipe Dream, match three games, Threes clones, or much of the ScummVM library. So do shmups, Marble Madness-type games, or anything else that can be adapted well to a laptop's trackpad. So do one-button endless runners, such as Temple Run or Jetpack Joyride or SFCave clones with "Flappy" in the title.
Other genres, not so much. I tried the Mario/Giana-style platformer Pixeline and the Jungle Treasure on a touch screen device, and I kept missing jumps because I kept accidentally pressing outside the on-screen gamepad's active area. I imagine Mega Man would be even worse. For games that aren't well suited for touch, a port to OS X and GNU/Linux might bring in more sales than a port to Windows Phone.
Xubuntu 14.04 has Settings > Display, which lets me mirror or span my desktop between my laptop's monitor and my HDTV. If that's too coarse-grained for you, you can sudo apt-get install arandr, which is what I did during 12.04 when Settings > Display supported only mirroring, not spanning.
Part of the problem is a bias from the user; if Linux performance sucks for a game, it's Linux' fault; if the Windows performance sucks, it's the vendor's fault. In reality, it'll almost always be the vendor's issue, either because the video card manufacturer's drivers suck or because the game did not properly optimize.
Optimization takes time, and time is money. If the publisher didn't optimize the game, it could be thought of as GNU/Linux's fault for not being enough of a market to make optimization profitable for the publisher.
I own two kinds of "random gamepad": several brands of "generic human interface device" and Xbox 360 game controllers. Both work in SDL on Xubuntu 14.04. The biggest practical problem, whether on Windows or on GNU/Linux, is button layout Babel for anything that's not an Xbox 360 game controller.
I'm saying there are entire studios that have no reason to support SteamOS.
There are also entire studios that have no reason to support Windows. One of them is Nintendo, and another is whichever company is developing the next Halo for Microsoft.
There's a huge section of the smartphone, tablet and console gaming market that doesn't and won't run DirectX
Smartphone and tablet games are touch-controlled. Because touch is so different from keyboard or gamepad control, you might as well write a completely separate game with a separate engine for mobile platforms. And for games released on both PC and a console, DirectX still runs on Xbox One; in fact the X in Xbox stands for DirectX.
I read so often the only reason people are running Windows is the games.
That and the fact that very few laptops ship with Linux. Those that do, such as from System76, come in a restricted range of sizes. I looked at two 10" detachables (ASUS Transformer Book and Acer Aspire Switch), and essential things were broken on both.
The game world is so dependant on proprietary software. [...] It just reinforces this idea that proprietary bits are OK
How would you recommend to fund the development of free games with AAA-class production values? Or would you prefer that the engine be free and the assets (models, textures, maps, audio, and scripts) be proprietary?
AAA games, players for rented movies, and tax preparation software are three classes of software for which the free software community has failed to produce a viable business model.
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I have never used paper checks the last 20 years. They are considered obsolete here.
So how do individuals send payments to individuals, especially if the sender doesn't subscribe to a cellular data plan?
Even at shops you are almost a suspect for fraud if you show up with a check unless you are over 70.
Which this relative is. In shops, she pays with her debit card, but she mails checks with birthday cards and the like.
Every employer here do direct deposit to your bank account
So should someone who gets "I'm sorry; our payroll processor declined my request to add direct deposit" update his resume?
Vulkan is not close to OpenGL at all, the design API is completely different.
Is it bigger than the difference between OpenGL 1.x, with its fixed-function pipeline and state machine, and OpenGL ES, which abandoned the fixed-function pipeline in favor of shaders and vertex buffers?
Developers need to eat. Therefore developers do what's profitable. Something the majority does not adopt is unprofitable. The majority prefers adware to paid apps. What's the solution that allows developers to eat?
Linux is not a binary stable platform, and you can have two users who claim to run Linux but share almost nothing except the kernel and possibly libc.
3. X.Org X11 Server, and 4. Steam Runtime. Valve is trying to counteract this ABI instability.
Half the mod authors speak broken english too
But I'm willing to bet that their English is better than your Polish, or German, or whatever language is official in the non-Five Eyes countries where mod authors tend to live.
I don't login to my email, banking, or any other sensitive accounts. I don't pay bills with my phone.
So how do you deposit paper checks?
Occasionally I receive a paper check from a relative who tells me she's too old and set in her ways to consider using the electronic funds transfer button on the bank's website. Some other people may be working for employers that issue paper checks because they are too small to offer payroll direct deposit. Chase Bank has a check deposit app for phones, which operates by photographing the front and back of a check with the phone's rear-facing camera, but none for desktop computers. (A Chase representative confirmed this to me.) During much of the year, I ride my bicycle to an ATM seven minutes away from my house and deposit the check there. But during about one-third of the year, the weather makes cycling impractical.
F-Droid also tended to be lacking in high-production-value games the last time I checked.
Yet somehow my Nexus 7 (2012; codename grouper) tablet got much slower when upgrading from KitKat (4.4) to Lollipop (5.0 and 5.1). It gets so bad that the UI has multi-second pauses if the Google Play Store app is downloading or installing an application update in the background. And it's not just an app's UI; it's the system UI including swiping down from the top.
Amusingly, the original iPhone was about standards for web based content.
Yet the web browser in iOS didn't support web access to the accelerometer until iOS 4, <input type="file"> until iOS 6, nor WebGL until iOS 8.
In other words, all Windows PCs are like unlocked Nexus phones: they get updates directly from the operating system publisher.
Just avoid the less reputable ones until you learn the basics of computer use, like not installing dodgy cracked apps
I agree: someone new to Android should stick to the reputable repositories, which are Google Play, Amazon, and F-Droid, and avoid any app that seeks administrative permissions unless required by an employer. But if there are two apps for reading Cracked on a reputable store, how do I know which are and aren't dodgy? There's the official app but also a third-party app.
You paid Apple a premium for the iDevice; you can pay Apple a premium for the Mac. Or you could buy a Mac the next time it's time to replace your computer with a new one anyway.
I think the "Rats of Nihm" is probably more realistic
National Institute of Hental Mealth?
although equal in intelligence they definitely were not equal in societal standing.
One option is to let the rodents reproduce and then make the human the outsider. For that see Gulliver's Travels by Swift. The human protagonist shipwrecks on an island populated by roughly 15 cm tall humanoids but comes to appreciate their (quite socialist) culture. But a more direct parallel to the suggested situation might be his interaction with the giants of Brobdingnag. A girl brings him home and carries him around in what amounts to a dollhouse, but he eventually proves himself worthy of an audience with their king.
I also found the world depicted in the Maze Cycle fascinating. (It consists of Who Moved My Cheese by Johnson, Who Cut the Cheese by Jarlsberg, Who Cut the Cheese by Brown, Who Stole My Cheese by Hochberg, and I Moved Your Cheese by Malhotra.) But are they a sequel to Gulliver's Travels or to Mrs. Brisby and the Rats of NIMH? At this point, I'm guessing both. Imagine a world in which Lilliputians coexist with laboratory mice whose genes have been spliced.
Intel chipsets may be weak compared to current generation AMD and NVidia hardware, but compared to the cards of a decade ago they're pretty powerful.
Agreed. A previous Intel CPU (Ivy Bridge with HD 4000) runs Skyrim playably at 720p according to Anandtech. This puts it at least at parity with the PlayStation 3, which also runs Skyrim. In turn, because so many AAA PC games prior to 2013 were also released for PS3 and/or Xbox 360, they should have settings that scale down to PC hardware comparable in performance to those consoles.
Heck, they would even be better off porting their games to Windows Phone first.
That depends on whether or not the game's control model can be adapted to a 5 inch touch screen. Point-and-click games work well, such as Fruit Ninja, Pipe Dream, match three games, Threes clones, or much of the ScummVM library. So do shmups, Marble Madness-type games, or anything else that can be adapted well to a laptop's trackpad. So do one-button endless runners, such as Temple Run or Jetpack Joyride or SFCave clones with "Flappy" in the title.
Other genres, not so much. I tried the Mario/Giana-style platformer Pixeline and the Jungle Treasure on a touch screen device, and I kept missing jumps because I kept accidentally pressing outside the on-screen gamepad's active area. I imagine Mega Man would be even worse. For games that aren't well suited for touch, a port to OS X and GNU/Linux might bring in more sales than a port to Windows Phone.
Xubuntu 14.04 has Settings > Display, which lets me mirror or span my desktop between my laptop's monitor and my HDTV. If that's too coarse-grained for you, you can sudo apt-get install arandr, which is what I did during 12.04 when Settings > Display supported only mirroring, not spanning.
Part of the problem is a bias from the user; if Linux performance sucks for a game, it's Linux' fault; if the Windows performance sucks, it's the vendor's fault. In reality, it'll almost always be the vendor's issue, either because the video card manufacturer's drivers suck or because the game did not properly optimize.
Optimization takes time, and time is money. If the publisher didn't optimize the game, it could be thought of as GNU/Linux's fault for not being enough of a market to make optimization profitable for the publisher.
I own two kinds of "random gamepad": several brands of "generic human interface device" and Xbox 360 game controllers. Both work in SDL on Xubuntu 14.04. The biggest practical problem, whether on Windows or on GNU/Linux, is button layout Babel for anything that's not an Xbox 360 game controller.
Text mode Tetris
I wonder how long until The Tetris Company uses its 2012 legal victory over Xio Software to go after Free Software Foundation for including M-x tetris in Emacs. Tetris co-founder Alexey Pajitnov is an out enemy of free software.
I'm saying there are entire studios that have no reason to support SteamOS.
There are also entire studios that have no reason to support Windows. One of them is Nintendo, and another is whichever company is developing the next Halo for Microsoft.
Wii U uses four customized PowerPC G3 cores and a Radeon-derived GPU that has presumably also been customized.
There's a huge section of the smartphone, tablet and console gaming market that doesn't and won't run DirectX
Smartphone and tablet games are touch-controlled. Because touch is so different from keyboard or gamepad control, you might as well write a completely separate game with a separate engine for mobile platforms. And for games released on both PC and a console, DirectX still runs on Xbox One; in fact the X in Xbox stands for DirectX.
I read so often the only reason people are running Windows is the games.
That and the fact that very few laptops ship with Linux. Those that do, such as from System76, come in a restricted range of sizes. I looked at two 10" detachables (ASUS Transformer Book and Acer Aspire Switch), and essential things were broken on both.
Why doesn't your keyboard work well with the generic USB Human Interface Device class driver built into Linux?
The game world is so dependant on proprietary software. [...] It just reinforces this idea that proprietary bits are OK
How would you recommend to fund the development of free games with AAA-class production values? Or would you prefer that the engine be free and the assets (models, textures, maps, audio, and scripts) be proprietary?
AAA games, players for rented movies, and tax preparation software are three classes of software for which the free software community has failed to produce a viable business model.