Scary doesn't always have to mean bad. Jumps into the unknown are always scary and this is a huge jump for the UK. But jumps into the unknown aren't always the wrong move (and with today's vote, it is just too soon to judge).
Worth noting that the Remain campaign was slick, disciplined and, by conventional standards, much better than the Leave campaign. But Leave, after spending most of the campaign fighting among themselves, won back a lot of ground in the last fortnight.
In essence, they took ownership of the "scary" thing and flipped the table by asking "what is so great about the status quo?"
This is a long way from business as usual politics.
I voted "remain" in the end, but it was a close run thing. I'm philosophical about the results; we won't know the real implications for some time.
But be under no illusions, this was not just about the EU. Indeed, the EU never really dominated the campaign. It was a rebellion against a long standing political consensus and, in particular, the legacy of Blairism. In essence, Blairism was the marriage of Thatcherite economics to social mores which had previously been the concern of the far left; basically free markets plus multiculturalism.
The intention was that over time, the population would buy into that. In London and Scotland, it more or less happened. But in much of the U.K., the population went the other way. An unbalanced economy dependent on financial services squeezed their finances and living standards, while mass immigration forced down wages and created visible, angry, unassimilated immigrant communities in their midst.
Moreover, the usual channels of democratic restoration were blocked. Blair's biggest achievement was to foster a media environment which labelled any questioning of the social consensus as racist and a legal system which in some cases made it an arrestable offence. Meanwhile, too many of our institutions changed their ethos from public service to "thought leadership"; trying to reform the population rather than meeting its needs.
The vote, I think, needs to be seen as a rebellion against that. I wish the result had been different, but I accept that it wasn't. I live and work in London and my whole circle voted to remain. My parents live in the suburbs of a northern city and they and their circle voted to leave. I had been warning colleagues for weeks that I thought a Leave win was likely; I thought the polling was both running into "social acceptability bias" and underestimating the likelihood that the lower income groups would vote. This, incidentally, is why I would bet on Trump winning in November, scary though that is.
And things feel scary in the UK this morning. But a proper discussion of why the vote went the way it did and an acceptance that we need to at least accept and tolerate our divisions rather than widening them would be good first steps.
You're right, of course, that there is criminal activity here and that getting law enforcement involved would in theory be a better idea than just complaining on the internet.
However, for quite some time there's been a level of criminality around the margins of games-reselling - and I'm not talking about piracy here. As others above have pointed out, what is likely going on here with G2A is money-laundering; people are probably making "unprofitable" trades using the service to convert "dirty" (and hard to use) money from stolen credit cards into "clean" money. This isn't exactly a new concept; when a "bug" in MS's phone-support protocols allowed a large number of Xbox Live accounts to be compromised a few years ago (it got little media coverage, because it wasn't a fancy, high profile attack like the Sony one), the major use of this exploit was to launder money via FIFA Ultimate Team transactions (unique at the time among XBox games for allowing players to monetise and trade in-game rewards).
Hell, even on the high-street, there's a well-known UK brand of second-hand games and movies stores with a distinctive red logo which is (un)affectionately known as "The Fence's Friend", being a favourite destination for smack-heads looking to turn stolen goods into cash quickly. I even spent an afternoon back in 2014 walking around a medium-sized English town with a friend as we hunted its (three) branches in that town for his stolen laptop and games console. And yes, we found them and, as he had proof they were his and was able to find a police officer (who was definitely having deja vu about the situation), he got his stuff back.
The point of the Slashdot moderation scale is to control the visibility of posts. More highly moderated posts are more highly visible, but you can still see the low-moderated ones if you want. It's not really about measuring your e-peen. For the purpose for which it's intended, a 7-point scale is absolutely fine. Capping negative moderation at -1 means that posts which get "unfairly" moderated down soon after going live can be "rescued" relatively easily.
I've seen sites which use uncapped community-moderation scales (e.g. Eurogamer). My experience with them is that they tend to have a much stronger culture of "+1 means agree, -1 means disagree" with less regard for the quality of the post than you get at Slashdot. They give a bigger incentive to try to tailor your posts to the group-think, by allowing users to aim for "high scores", where posts are moderated +100 or something silly like that.
The Reddit thing was pretty toe-curling, wasn't it? I'm always inclined to suspect cock-up rather than conspiracy, and I do think that's the most prominent explanation here. But to be clear, that's not absolving specific moderators of outright malice; the "cock-up" here is in how Reddit gives so much power to badly supported volunteer moderators.
Forum moderation is difficult. Some people are good at it, some people are bad at it. Not everybody who volunteers for it has the best of intentions; some see it as a way to force their own agenda on the conversation (and lose interest and wander away if they are restrained from doing so). My own preference is for sites to have a code of conduct, or at least a cultural expectation, that moderators participate in actual discussions as little as possible - when a moderator gets dragged into the mud alongside the people he or she is responsible for moderating, things tend to go downhill fairly fast.
Slashdot's solution to this, which largely democratises comment moderation, has many flaws, but arguably remains the "least worst" model. You do get bad moderators - those who use -1 to mean "disagree" - but they usually get counteracted by the majority. So there's a groupthink risk, but it's actually less than the risk that exists on a top-down moderated system, where the moderators are often the ones who impose the groupthink.
The display in TFA looks fairly nice. A bit on the small side for a gaming screen, but still, that's pretty decent quality and it's interesting to see OLED spreading in the laptop market.
That said, I'd have serious reservations about buying Alienware. I used to be a fan; in fact, I continued to be a fan some way into the Dell-ownership era. Even as the mark-ups started to rise, the build quality of their desktops remained extremely good; sufficiently so to justify me going for their machines rather than a self-build.
That changed a few years ago and they started to cut corners, while continuing to send the mark-ups soaring even higher. In particular:
- Their customisation options became more limited, generally restricting choices to just CPU, graphics card, RAM and storage. That wouldn't be so bad per se, but at the same time, they started to massively cheap-out on the components you couldn't customise. The motherboards they started using were pretty awful, the power-supplies didn't leave much headroom and were hard to upgrade (more on this in a minute) and while you could choose how much RAM you wanted, that was as far as it went - the RAM they used tended to be cheap and nasty.
- They started using components with non-standard dimensions. In particular, the PSUs in their desktop cases did not conform to any standard set of dimensions, so if you had a wonky PSU (and Alienware PSUs do not have fantastic reliability), then you were either scouring eBay for a replacement and hoping you weren't getting one that had already failed for somebody else, or making use of Alienware's own support. This all felt like an attempt to push the (very expensive) warranty services, by making self-repair of systems harder.
- Oddly for a premium supplier, the latest and greatest kit often wasn't available from them. There was a period of around 6 months where it was widely acknowledged that the Nvidia 980ti was in the sweet-spot of power and cost at the top end of the graphics card market... but Alienware wouldn't sell you a PC with one. Their default configuration had a bizarre 3x Nvidia 960 configuration; fine for games which have well-optimised multi-GPU support, but those are pretty rare (and still capped at 4GB of VRAM, which isn't really enough). They'd sell you a Titan X for a huge mark-up, but it was widely know that the Titan X was only a tiny bit faster than the 980ti, despite being hugely more expensive.
- While Alienware's systems remained blessedly free of the commercial bloatware that a lot of OEMs ship with (including "regular" Dells), their Command Centre software (which manages the case-lighting and cooling) bloated over time and had some stability issues. Moreover, they shipped quite a few PCs, both laptop and desktop, with wonky BIOS versions that caused very odd behaviour, despite their bugs being known at the time (and more stable BIOS versions being available). You could flash the BIOS, sure, but that isn't really an operation you should be expecting the end-user to undertake unless there's a desperate need (and their BIOS flash tool, which runs within Windows, is frankly terrifying to use).
- Oh, and the mark-ups eventually went beyond the "premium" range into the "you must think I'm stupid" range.
So yeah, while the laptop in TFA looks quite nice, I would treat it with great suspicion for the time being.
Yes, that's the most plausible explanation, isn't it? I wouldn't be surprised if the XB1-S also had lower manufacturing costs than the default XB1, so it's a way of keeping the lower-spec model in circulation at a lower price-point.
Also, not a comment about your post, but... aren't the AC fanboy horde out in unusual force today, by slashdot standards? Is there something in the water? Large parts of this comments section read more like Kotaku than slashdot.
I have a high-end PC (i7 6700k and 980ti) and a 4k monitor. Right now, unless you are willing to tolerate very shoddy levels of performance, most of the latest games are not really practical in 4k. 1440p remains the sweet-spot. There are exceptions - Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare 2, Overwatch (if you're willing to drop detail a bit), but those are generally games with low polygon counts and few lighting effects.
Detail levels are not all that much lower in console games these days; Eurogamer's regular Digital Foundry series finds that most console games equate to "high" settings on PC. There is no way on earth the PS4 Neo is driving those settings with a playable framerate at 4k. 1440p... maybe, in some cases (though not the most challenging games, such as The Witcher 3 and Assassin's Creed Syndicate).
One thing it certainly won't be is 4k gaming, despite some of the more excitable comments around this and the PS4 Neo. We know what practical 4k gaming requires on PC (even the new Nvidia 1080 paired with an i7 6700k isn't quite there in terms of consistently acceptable performance) and the PS4 Neo specs fall far short of that. I doubt there's a new iteration of the XB1 on the way that will be significantly more powerful than the PS4 Neo.
If credible reports are to be believed, the XB1-S is the first of two successors to the current XB1. There is a second machine, rumoured to have significantly upgraded internals, which is apparently due next year, to compete with the PS4 Neo. This might, of course, all be proven wrong within the next few hours following MS's E3 presentation.
But if the reports are correct, then things start to look very odd. The XB1-S described in TFA looks like a pretty normal mid-generation hardware refresh, similar to the 360-S or the PS3-slim from the last generation. It reduces the form-factor and apparently adds support for 4k Blu-Rays (the current XB1 can do 4k video output, but there is currently pretty much nothing that makes use of it), but doesn't do much else. So far, so sane. But then this is apparently only going to be given a few months on the market before a significantly more powerful "XB1.5" is released, which will offer a significantly bigger step up.
There's something not quite right with this current console generation. It's hard to put a finger on precisely what - the sales numbers (even for the XB1) are pretty great compared to the last generation - but there is definitely something that isn't quite gelling. Despite being over two and a half years old, the software libraries for the PS4 and XB1 remain fairly thin, being light on the major exclusives that have powered previous generations and heavy on "HD remasters" of old games. If, like me, you prefer to game on a PC, the reasons to own the new consoles look pretty thin (and I sort-of regret my own purchases).
I don't know whether there is something sinister emerging in the financials which the public can't see, but both Sony and MS seem to be spooked in a way that the numbers don't quite support (MS's position isn't what they wanted, but is also by no means bad). I still can't work out why, at a point in the cycle when they should be enjoying the huge third-party licensing fees that should be rolling in thanks to their large installed base, Sony are taking a massive gamble and splitting their user-base with the PS4 Neo. Slightly more understandable is why MS would feel the need to follow suit, but even that doesn't quite feel right. All the omens for Nintendo's NX look pretty dire, so I doubt it's that which has Sony or MS spooked.
As I say, hard to put my finger on it, but there is definitely something odd going on.
It's trickier than that in the UK. Demand for housing, even rental housing, currently outstrips supply in much of the country (certainly in the parts with major economic activity where people want to live). Our planning system mostly dates from the late 1960s and was designed to limit urban sprawl. That's getting very painful in light of the population growth we've seen over the last two decades, but the system has a powerful NIMBY lobby that defends it from any attempts at reform.
Alongside this, we've seen a huge rise in the buy-to-let market. The media focus tends to be on Russian/Chinese oligarchs buying up central London housing, but in reality, this impact of this is largely dwarfed by the armies of baby-boomers who, spurred on by various cultural and economic factors, have decided to invest in buying properties to rent out instead of more traditional pensions/savings/investments. There have been some recent efforts by Government to stem this tide, but it's too soon for them to have had any real effect.
The end result of all this is that getting a place to live in a good chunk of the UK is now an undignified scramble. Even grotty rental places often only remain available for a few hours and are the subject of unseemly (and sometimes illegal) bidding wars between potential tenants.
The startup described in TFA sounds, to be blunt, illegal. I cannot possibly see how what they are doing complies with the data protection act and the degree of coverage they're getting makes me suspect that they will be flipped from start-up to close-down quite quickly. That said, somebody will probably tweak the model to comply with the relevant laws and come back with it in a few months time.
My own solution to this kind of thing is fairly simple. I have Facebook and LinkedIn accounts, but there is absolutely nothing on there that does not need to be on there. These exist purely so that I have something that I can put down on forms for job applications etc. They have some professional biographical information, a few links to the profiles of colleagues who have created profiles for the same purposes (and have similarly bland, corporate profiles) and nothing else. I have no "personal" account on these sites as I feel no need to broadcast my life and I would not touch Twitter with a shitty stick.
So yeah... you want access to my Facebook and LinkedIn, go ahead. Trust me, they have an anaesthetic effect.
Ironic in that, in the UK at least, the elite of the elite are largely headed towards a career path that will pay them less and confer less job security than enjoyed by their middle-of-the-pack elite contemporaries.
Though I gather the picture can be rosier elsewhere in the world.
It's particularly hard at the elite universities. Newly arriving students will have been accustomed to being in the top 1-2% of their peer group. They will have been used to being recognised as outstanding by their teachers. They will have been used to sailing through tests that their classmates struggle with and being only moderately challenged by meetings that their classmates find night-impossible. Depending on their school and its culture, they may have been used to being given particular perks or privileges.
And now, their peer group consists of people who have gone through exactly the same experiences. The people teaching them are going to assume "brilliance" as a default and anything short of that as a failure. Only a tiny handful of them - and generally those who are prepared to forgo almost all of the other pleasures of college life - will manage to rise back to that "academic elite" status. For the rest, they will, for probably the first time in their lives, need to get accustomed to being in the middle, or even near the bottom of their peer group. That is a major, and difficult, self-image adjustment.
I remember going through it myself. It wasn't until my third year at university that I contented myself with the fact that I wasn't going to be among the top tier of my year-group and, more to the point, that I didn't actually need to be in order to have a perfectly good career after graduation. Ironically, the very top-tier were generally those aiming to enter academia themselves, which was definitely not on my agenda.
Compared to some of my contemporaries, I adjusted fairly well. I got to see a few spectacular self-destructions.
I can remember having to cleanse the computer of a friend of my parents who had been downloading warez back in 1998. Since then, attempted piracy (albeit not just of games) has been one of the most common causes I've come across of malware infections. Not only are the torrents themselves often laden with malware, but the sites hosting those torrents are also highly likely to be running malware-pushing javascript.
More irritatingly, I've also noted a growing trend towards legal mods for games being used as a malware vector. World of Warcraft has had particular problems with this in the past (and may still have them for all I know); entirely legal and EULA-compliant UI modifications being distributed with malware designed to steal login details.
You might possibly have been a little more diplomatic in how you expressed that, but I suspect you are pretty much bang on the money.
Here in the UK, gross obesity that would once have been vanishingly rare is now merely uncommon. Meanwhile, "regular" obesity barely even counts as uncommon and "overweight" is the new normal. When I go to the US, what I see tends to suggest that you are one step further along the scale than us - that obesity is now normal and gross obesity is rapidly becoming normal. We are, however, closing the gap quite quickly.
Against this backdrop, it's absolutely no surprise that the death rate is rising, with heart disease as a particular contributing factor.
And before anybody says that it has become "too expensive" to eat healthily, I will pre-emptively point out that this is a load of crap. If I avoid "organic" and "premium" branded groceries, I can walk into the average supermarket and buy fresh foods (meat and veg) far more cheaply than the equivalent in pre-prepared meals.
Indeed, for they will not be on speaking terms with me after I render their PC essentially useless for their purposes by sticking on an OS that is not supported by the various bits of propriety work-related software they need (they're still 3-4 years from retirement).
It's not just Samsung. If anything, I'd give Samsung at least some credit (compared to a couple of their competitors) for being willing to talk about this.
My parents have a ~5 year old Dell laptop. Back in November, they tried to move to Windows 10, but the machine locked into a BSOD-on-boot loop in the latter stages of the install. After a lot of digging into the problem, it turned out that the onboard graphics adapter for that particular model wasn't supported in Win10, so the OS crashed at the point it tried to initialise it. I had to travel 2 hours to get their PC to boot from the recovery partition and back into Windows 7.
On Monday, the parents must have missed a step in the "dodge the near-forced update" dance, because the laptop decided it was going to move itself to Windows 10 again while they were out - with exactly the same result. Cue another two hours on the phone talking my Dad through yet another restore from the recovery partition. I'm normally happy to blame the parents for their self-inflicted PC woes, but in this case, MS have made dodging the update so hard for the average user that I can't really bring myself to do so.
Their machine is not unique; it was from a fairly common line of low-end Dell laptops that was popular 5 years ago. There are plenty of similar tales in the Dell support forums.
For what it's worth, I'm running Win10 on my own home desktop and while I had to do a bit of router-fettling to block the worst of the telemetry, I actually like the OS for day to day use. But then, I have a PC that can run it.
In principle, I'm basically in agreement with you on this one. If nothing else, for the average low-engagement user right now, moving to Win10 is probably just easier than doing the "dodge the update" dance on Win7 or Win8. I know it's wrong to reward MS for that behaviour, but if it's a quiet life you're after (and that is what most people seem to want from their PCs), then going for the update seems to be the best solution, bearing in mind your entirely legitimate advice about the install process.
The problem, however, arises from the number of problems I've seen Win10 throw up on older hardware, particularly the graphics hardware in many older laptops (Dells in particular, from what I've seen). I've seen a good number of circa 5 year old laptops whose graphics hardware simply refuses to initialise when booting into Win10, resulting in an infinite BSOD-loop and the need to boot from the recovery partition to get things working again. And, unfortunately, those older laptops are disproportionately likely to be owned by just the kind of casual user we're talking about here.
And yes, I am a bit bitter. When my parents tried to move their 5 year old Win7 laptop to Win10 late last year, they got hit by just this issue, resulting in me having to make a 2-hour-each-way journey to get the thing back into Win7. They must have made a mis-step in the dodge the update dance, because it tried to update itself again on Monday, with identical results (though this time, just 2 hours on the phone to get things back, as my dad remembered some of the steps).
Yeah, I've been there. There's nothing quite like the sinking feeling you get when you first hear the "bird chirp" sound which is the first sign of impending catastrophic failure.
I had 3 of those drives fail in a 6 month period, all of them relatively new and only subjected to consumer-level usage. It got to the point where I was getting agitated every time there was birdsong outside my window. Seagate drives don't get anywhere near my home PC since then.
I did more or less the same thing. Made quite an elaborate map based on my school, with multiple buildings replicated in as much detail as was possible within the fairly restrictive boundaries of what Doom's engine would allow. I remember doing the same thing in Duke Nukem 3d's editor, pretty much as soon as that game was released (before I'd even finished the campaign) and being delighted by how much further that engine let me go in terms of authenticity (multi-floored buildings etc.). There were a fair few gamers in my class and those levels ended up shared around quite widely using floppy disks. I'd have been amazed if staff didn't know about it. It didn't set any alarm bells ringing at the time.
The Columbine shooting and the ensuring moral panic about Doom happened a year or so after I went on to University. That panic wasn't quite as intense here in the UK as it was in the US, but I still had absolutely no doubt that those levels would have got me in a lot of trouble indeed if I'd been a year or two younger. I'm not sure I've ever had quite such a profound sense of having dodged a bullet.
My big memory of Doom comes from the same era. Myself and a couple of friends worked together on a mod for it, based around Winnie the Pooh. It was the kind of thing that was hilarious if you were 16; the enemies were replaced by Winnie the Pooh characters and the BFG9000 was replaced by Piglet with a stick of dynamite jammed up his arse. It never went outside our immediate circle; it wasn't actually very good and we knew enough by then to realise it would just be lawsuit fodder the moment it touched the net. But it was a great introduction to working on a collaborative project (much better than any of our "formal" school projects). Plus one of the two guys who did the art for it (I was the level-designer) is now fairly senior in the art-department at a well-known AAA developer.
The trend towards the traditional "gap year" (spend Daddy's money for a year before going to college) has been on the decline in the UK since 2012 or so. Going to university is a more expensive proposition here than it used to be (though still a long way short of US levels and mostly loan-funded) and spending a year fannying around before getting it over with has lost some of the appeal. Plus, of course, the whole concept came in for some fairly relentless pisstaking.
There are still a fair few who take a year out of studying before going to university, but that's mostly for the purposes of working to earn money to help with fees and living costs. The traditional Gap Yah was mostly a product of the pre-recession years of plenty.
I addressed this in my post. Valve needed Half-Life 2 to get Steam off the ground and give it an initial user-base. But it has that user-base now. Half-Life 3 would not persuade anybody who does not currently use Steam to start using it.
For console-manufacturers, the best part of the cycle is typically the mid-late part. The installed base is significant and games sales are strong. The money is rolling in without them having to do very much (although if they're smart, they will be beginning development on a successor). By contrast, new console launches are horrible for them; lots of cost, lots of risk and those expensive first-party games are only selling to early-adopters.
Until something happens to undermine their business model, Valve essentially gets to live perpetually in the mid-late part of the cycle. PC hardware means that there are no "big bangs" that mean you have to start over from scratch in terms of the installed base. They can sit back, rake in the profits they make from the third party eco-system and put their own investment into longer-term ventures such as SteamOS and VR. Putting out new AAA first-party games would be a pointless risk at this point.
Half-Life 3 will never happen. It's not in Valve's commercial interest any more.
Valve isn't really a games developer any more; it's a platform holder. Remember that, while the precise arrangements sometimes vary per customer, it generally takes around 30% of the value of each sale on Steam. It's putting very little money into the development of those games (hosting/bandwidth costs for the store and some multiplayer/social backend for the majority of games), but is taking a huge amount of revenue from them. By contrast, when it develops and sells its own games, it needs to front up the costs and take a lot more of the commercial risk.
This is broadly similar to how things work on the consoles. Sony and MS take the costs of hardware development and fund first and third-party exclusive titles to grow the installed base, but their real income comes from the licensing fees. Nintendo still tries to make the first-party model work, but has been struggling with it since the launch of the 3DS.
Valve has a further advantage over Sony and MS in that its platform is an evolutionary one, rather than one with major hardware shifts once or twice a decade. Once the installed base for Steam was there, Valve didn't really need to put much effort into growing it through first-party development. It therefore focusses its first-party development on new markets; see its recent investment in VR via the HTC Vive and its software suite.
But even if Valve doesn't need to make Half-Life 3, is there a reason why it shouldn't do so anyway, given the game would almost certainly be profitable?
Actually, yes...
Steam's success is predicated on wide participation by developers and publishers. The one thing that could really hurt Steam would be for a critical mass of major publishers to withdraw. EA have already taken their ball and gone home to Origin. Ubisoft has tried to draw people over to uPlay, but has had less success so far and still tends to depend on Steam for the backend of some of its games. But if Valve wants to keep the major publishers on board, then it can't afford to compete with them directly. Most of Valve's output since HL2 has taken the form of experimental or niche titles, like Portal or Left 4 Dead. For Valve to put out a major AAA shooter would send worrying signals to a lot of its major parties. So it won't.
At this point, the only real prospect for seeing HL3 would be if Valve sold the rights to the series to a third party, which is itself vanishingly unlikely.
There's usually a market for successful consoles (and the 360 was successful) for a couple of years after their successors are launched, particularly if that successor has no or limited back compatibility.
It's basically about people buying replacements for broken consoles. The 360 has never, to put it mildly, had a good reputation for reliability (even if later versions were much better than the early ones). People will have large software libraries for their 360s, much of which is still not playable on the XB1 (and nor is there workable emulation of commercial games on PC). So there will be a continuing level of demand for the 360, despite the XB1's growing software library and installed base.
The PS2, an even more successful console (which also had hardware-reliability issues), only finally ended production in January 2013, less than a year before the launch of the PS4, even though production numbers had fallen pretty low by the end.
There has been extensive research into and testing off grills in more recent years. This New Scientist piece from 2009 sums up where it has reached; the grills are either too lightweight and shatter on being struck, or else they are too heavy and bulky, reducing efficiency and playing havoc with airflow.
Always be wary of the Dunning-Kruger effect when asking why people "don't just do something" in a given specialist field. If there's a seemingly "obvious" solution that isn't implemented, chances are it has been tested and found to be impractical.
Slashdot Mirror
Scary doesn't always have to mean bad. Jumps into the unknown are always scary and this is a huge jump for the UK. But jumps into the unknown aren't always the wrong move (and with today's vote, it is just too soon to judge). Worth noting that the Remain campaign was slick, disciplined and, by conventional standards, much better than the Leave campaign. But Leave, after spending most of the campaign fighting among themselves, won back a lot of ground in the last fortnight. In essence, they took ownership of the "scary" thing and flipped the table by asking "what is so great about the status quo?" This is a long way from business as usual politics.
I voted "remain" in the end, but it was a close run thing. I'm philosophical about the results; we won't know the real implications for some time. But be under no illusions, this was not just about the EU. Indeed, the EU never really dominated the campaign. It was a rebellion against a long standing political consensus and, in particular, the legacy of Blairism. In essence, Blairism was the marriage of Thatcherite economics to social mores which had previously been the concern of the far left; basically free markets plus multiculturalism. The intention was that over time, the population would buy into that. In London and Scotland, it more or less happened. But in much of the U.K., the population went the other way. An unbalanced economy dependent on financial services squeezed their finances and living standards, while mass immigration forced down wages and created visible, angry, unassimilated immigrant communities in their midst. Moreover, the usual channels of democratic restoration were blocked. Blair's biggest achievement was to foster a media environment which labelled any questioning of the social consensus as racist and a legal system which in some cases made it an arrestable offence. Meanwhile, too many of our institutions changed their ethos from public service to "thought leadership"; trying to reform the population rather than meeting its needs. The vote, I think, needs to be seen as a rebellion against that. I wish the result had been different, but I accept that it wasn't. I live and work in London and my whole circle voted to remain. My parents live in the suburbs of a northern city and they and their circle voted to leave. I had been warning colleagues for weeks that I thought a Leave win was likely; I thought the polling was both running into "social acceptability bias" and underestimating the likelihood that the lower income groups would vote. This, incidentally, is why I would bet on Trump winning in November, scary though that is. And things feel scary in the UK this morning. But a proper discussion of why the vote went the way it did and an acceptance that we need to at least accept and tolerate our divisions rather than widening them would be good first steps.
You're right, of course, that there is criminal activity here and that getting law enforcement involved would in theory be a better idea than just complaining on the internet.
However, for quite some time there's been a level of criminality around the margins of games-reselling - and I'm not talking about piracy here. As others above have pointed out, what is likely going on here with G2A is money-laundering; people are probably making "unprofitable" trades using the service to convert "dirty" (and hard to use) money from stolen credit cards into "clean" money. This isn't exactly a new concept; when a "bug" in MS's phone-support protocols allowed a large number of Xbox Live accounts to be compromised a few years ago (it got little media coverage, because it wasn't a fancy, high profile attack like the Sony one), the major use of this exploit was to launder money via FIFA Ultimate Team transactions (unique at the time among XBox games for allowing players to monetise and trade in-game rewards).
Hell, even on the high-street, there's a well-known UK brand of second-hand games and movies stores with a distinctive red logo which is (un)affectionately known as "The Fence's Friend", being a favourite destination for smack-heads looking to turn stolen goods into cash quickly. I even spent an afternoon back in 2014 walking around a medium-sized English town with a friend as we hunted its (three) branches in that town for his stolen laptop and games console. And yes, we found them and, as he had proof they were his and was able to find a police officer (who was definitely having deja vu about the situation), he got his stuff back.
The point of the Slashdot moderation scale is to control the visibility of posts. More highly moderated posts are more highly visible, but you can still see the low-moderated ones if you want. It's not really about measuring your e-peen. For the purpose for which it's intended, a 7-point scale is absolutely fine. Capping negative moderation at -1 means that posts which get "unfairly" moderated down soon after going live can be "rescued" relatively easily.
I've seen sites which use uncapped community-moderation scales (e.g. Eurogamer). My experience with them is that they tend to have a much stronger culture of "+1 means agree, -1 means disagree" with less regard for the quality of the post than you get at Slashdot. They give a bigger incentive to try to tailor your posts to the group-think, by allowing users to aim for "high scores", where posts are moderated +100 or something silly like that.
The Reddit thing was pretty toe-curling, wasn't it? I'm always inclined to suspect cock-up rather than conspiracy, and I do think that's the most prominent explanation here. But to be clear, that's not absolving specific moderators of outright malice; the "cock-up" here is in how Reddit gives so much power to badly supported volunteer moderators.
Forum moderation is difficult. Some people are good at it, some people are bad at it. Not everybody who volunteers for it has the best of intentions; some see it as a way to force their own agenda on the conversation (and lose interest and wander away if they are restrained from doing so). My own preference is for sites to have a code of conduct, or at least a cultural expectation, that moderators participate in actual discussions as little as possible - when a moderator gets dragged into the mud alongside the people he or she is responsible for moderating, things tend to go downhill fairly fast.
Slashdot's solution to this, which largely democratises comment moderation, has many flaws, but arguably remains the "least worst" model. You do get bad moderators - those who use -1 to mean "disagree" - but they usually get counteracted by the majority. So there's a groupthink risk, but it's actually less than the risk that exists on a top-down moderated system, where the moderators are often the ones who impose the groupthink.
The display in TFA looks fairly nice. A bit on the small side for a gaming screen, but still, that's pretty decent quality and it's interesting to see OLED spreading in the laptop market.
That said, I'd have serious reservations about buying Alienware. I used to be a fan; in fact, I continued to be a fan some way into the Dell-ownership era. Even as the mark-ups started to rise, the build quality of their desktops remained extremely good; sufficiently so to justify me going for their machines rather than a self-build.
That changed a few years ago and they started to cut corners, while continuing to send the mark-ups soaring even higher. In particular:
- Their customisation options became more limited, generally restricting choices to just CPU, graphics card, RAM and storage. That wouldn't be so bad per se, but at the same time, they started to massively cheap-out on the components you couldn't customise. The motherboards they started using were pretty awful, the power-supplies didn't leave much headroom and were hard to upgrade (more on this in a minute) and while you could choose how much RAM you wanted, that was as far as it went - the RAM they used tended to be cheap and nasty.
- They started using components with non-standard dimensions. In particular, the PSUs in their desktop cases did not conform to any standard set of dimensions, so if you had a wonky PSU (and Alienware PSUs do not have fantastic reliability), then you were either scouring eBay for a replacement and hoping you weren't getting one that had already failed for somebody else, or making use of Alienware's own support. This all felt like an attempt to push the (very expensive) warranty services, by making self-repair of systems harder.
- Oddly for a premium supplier, the latest and greatest kit often wasn't available from them. There was a period of around 6 months where it was widely acknowledged that the Nvidia 980ti was in the sweet-spot of power and cost at the top end of the graphics card market... but Alienware wouldn't sell you a PC with one. Their default configuration had a bizarre 3x Nvidia 960 configuration; fine for games which have well-optimised multi-GPU support, but those are pretty rare (and still capped at 4GB of VRAM, which isn't really enough). They'd sell you a Titan X for a huge mark-up, but it was widely know that the Titan X was only a tiny bit faster than the 980ti, despite being hugely more expensive.
- While Alienware's systems remained blessedly free of the commercial bloatware that a lot of OEMs ship with (including "regular" Dells), their Command Centre software (which manages the case-lighting and cooling) bloated over time and had some stability issues. Moreover, they shipped quite a few PCs, both laptop and desktop, with wonky BIOS versions that caused very odd behaviour, despite their bugs being known at the time (and more stable BIOS versions being available). You could flash the BIOS, sure, but that isn't really an operation you should be expecting the end-user to undertake unless there's a desperate need (and their BIOS flash tool, which runs within Windows, is frankly terrifying to use).
- Oh, and the mark-ups eventually went beyond the "premium" range into the "you must think I'm stupid" range.
So yeah, while the laptop in TFA looks quite nice, I would treat it with great suspicion for the time being.
Yes, that's the most plausible explanation, isn't it? I wouldn't be surprised if the XB1-S also had lower manufacturing costs than the default XB1, so it's a way of keeping the lower-spec model in circulation at a lower price-point.
Also, not a comment about your post, but... aren't the AC fanboy horde out in unusual force today, by slashdot standards? Is there something in the water? Large parts of this comments section read more like Kotaku than slashdot.
I have a high-end PC (i7 6700k and 980ti) and a 4k monitor. Right now, unless you are willing to tolerate very shoddy levels of performance, most of the latest games are not really practical in 4k. 1440p remains the sweet-spot. There are exceptions - Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare 2, Overwatch (if you're willing to drop detail a bit), but those are generally games with low polygon counts and few lighting effects.
Detail levels are not all that much lower in console games these days; Eurogamer's regular Digital Foundry series finds that most console games equate to "high" settings on PC. There is no way on earth the PS4 Neo is driving those settings with a playable framerate at 4k. 1440p... maybe, in some cases (though not the most challenging games, such as The Witcher 3 and Assassin's Creed Syndicate).
Might be right.
One thing it certainly won't be is 4k gaming, despite some of the more excitable comments around this and the PS4 Neo. We know what practical 4k gaming requires on PC (even the new Nvidia 1080 paired with an i7 6700k isn't quite there in terms of consistently acceptable performance) and the PS4 Neo specs fall far short of that. I doubt there's a new iteration of the XB1 on the way that will be significantly more powerful than the PS4 Neo.
If credible reports are to be believed, the XB1-S is the first of two successors to the current XB1. There is a second machine, rumoured to have significantly upgraded internals, which is apparently due next year, to compete with the PS4 Neo. This might, of course, all be proven wrong within the next few hours following MS's E3 presentation.
But if the reports are correct, then things start to look very odd. The XB1-S described in TFA looks like a pretty normal mid-generation hardware refresh, similar to the 360-S or the PS3-slim from the last generation. It reduces the form-factor and apparently adds support for 4k Blu-Rays (the current XB1 can do 4k video output, but there is currently pretty much nothing that makes use of it), but doesn't do much else. So far, so sane. But then this is apparently only going to be given a few months on the market before a significantly more powerful "XB1.5" is released, which will offer a significantly bigger step up.
There's something not quite right with this current console generation. It's hard to put a finger on precisely what - the sales numbers (even for the XB1) are pretty great compared to the last generation - but there is definitely something that isn't quite gelling. Despite being over two and a half years old, the software libraries for the PS4 and XB1 remain fairly thin, being light on the major exclusives that have powered previous generations and heavy on "HD remasters" of old games. If, like me, you prefer to game on a PC, the reasons to own the new consoles look pretty thin (and I sort-of regret my own purchases).
I don't know whether there is something sinister emerging in the financials which the public can't see, but both Sony and MS seem to be spooked in a way that the numbers don't quite support (MS's position isn't what they wanted, but is also by no means bad). I still can't work out why, at a point in the cycle when they should be enjoying the huge third-party licensing fees that should be rolling in thanks to their large installed base, Sony are taking a massive gamble and splitting their user-base with the PS4 Neo. Slightly more understandable is why MS would feel the need to follow suit, but even that doesn't quite feel right. All the omens for Nintendo's NX look pretty dire, so I doubt it's that which has Sony or MS spooked.
As I say, hard to put my finger on it, but there is definitely something odd going on.
It's trickier than that in the UK. Demand for housing, even rental housing, currently outstrips supply in much of the country (certainly in the parts with major economic activity where people want to live). Our planning system mostly dates from the late 1960s and was designed to limit urban sprawl. That's getting very painful in light of the population growth we've seen over the last two decades, but the system has a powerful NIMBY lobby that defends it from any attempts at reform.
Alongside this, we've seen a huge rise in the buy-to-let market. The media focus tends to be on Russian/Chinese oligarchs buying up central London housing, but in reality, this impact of this is largely dwarfed by the armies of baby-boomers who, spurred on by various cultural and economic factors, have decided to invest in buying properties to rent out instead of more traditional pensions/savings/investments. There have been some recent efforts by Government to stem this tide, but it's too soon for them to have had any real effect.
The end result of all this is that getting a place to live in a good chunk of the UK is now an undignified scramble. Even grotty rental places often only remain available for a few hours and are the subject of unseemly (and sometimes illegal) bidding wars between potential tenants.
The startup described in TFA sounds, to be blunt, illegal. I cannot possibly see how what they are doing complies with the data protection act and the degree of coverage they're getting makes me suspect that they will be flipped from start-up to close-down quite quickly. That said, somebody will probably tweak the model to comply with the relevant laws and come back with it in a few months time.
My own solution to this kind of thing is fairly simple. I have Facebook and LinkedIn accounts, but there is absolutely nothing on there that does not need to be on there. These exist purely so that I have something that I can put down on forms for job applications etc. They have some professional biographical information, a few links to the profiles of colleagues who have created profiles for the same purposes (and have similarly bland, corporate profiles) and nothing else. I have no "personal" account on these sites as I feel no need to broadcast my life and I would not touch Twitter with a shitty stick.
So yeah... you want access to my Facebook and LinkedIn, go ahead. Trust me, they have an anaesthetic effect.
Ironic in that, in the UK at least, the elite of the elite are largely headed towards a career path that will pay them less and confer less job security than enjoyed by their middle-of-the-pack elite contemporaries.
Though I gather the picture can be rosier elsewhere in the world.
It's particularly hard at the elite universities. Newly arriving students will have been accustomed to being in the top 1-2% of their peer group. They will have been used to being recognised as outstanding by their teachers. They will have been used to sailing through tests that their classmates struggle with and being only moderately challenged by meetings that their classmates find night-impossible. Depending on their school and its culture, they may have been used to being given particular perks or privileges.
And now, their peer group consists of people who have gone through exactly the same experiences. The people teaching them are going to assume "brilliance" as a default and anything short of that as a failure. Only a tiny handful of them - and generally those who are prepared to forgo almost all of the other pleasures of college life - will manage to rise back to that "academic elite" status. For the rest, they will, for probably the first time in their lives, need to get accustomed to being in the middle, or even near the bottom of their peer group. That is a major, and difficult, self-image adjustment.
I remember going through it myself. It wasn't until my third year at university that I contented myself with the fact that I wasn't going to be among the top tier of my year-group and, more to the point, that I didn't actually need to be in order to have a perfectly good career after graduation. Ironically, the very top-tier were generally those aiming to enter academia themselves, which was definitely not on my agenda.
Compared to some of my contemporaries, I adjusted fairly well. I got to see a few spectacular self-destructions.
I can remember having to cleanse the computer of a friend of my parents who had been downloading warez back in 1998. Since then, attempted piracy (albeit not just of games) has been one of the most common causes I've come across of malware infections. Not only are the torrents themselves often laden with malware, but the sites hosting those torrents are also highly likely to be running malware-pushing javascript.
More irritatingly, I've also noted a growing trend towards legal mods for games being used as a malware vector. World of Warcraft has had particular problems with this in the past (and may still have them for all I know); entirely legal and EULA-compliant UI modifications being distributed with malware designed to steal login details.
You might possibly have been a little more diplomatic in how you expressed that, but I suspect you are pretty much bang on the money.
Here in the UK, gross obesity that would once have been vanishingly rare is now merely uncommon. Meanwhile, "regular" obesity barely even counts as uncommon and "overweight" is the new normal. When I go to the US, what I see tends to suggest that you are one step further along the scale than us - that obesity is now normal and gross obesity is rapidly becoming normal. We are, however, closing the gap quite quickly.
Against this backdrop, it's absolutely no surprise that the death rate is rising, with heart disease as a particular contributing factor.
And before anybody says that it has become "too expensive" to eat healthily, I will pre-emptively point out that this is a load of crap. If I avoid "organic" and "premium" branded groceries, I can walk into the average supermarket and buy fresh foods (meat and veg) far more cheaply than the equivalent in pre-prepared meals.
Indeed, for they will not be on speaking terms with me after I render their PC essentially useless for their purposes by sticking on an OS that is not supported by the various bits of propriety work-related software they need (they're still 3-4 years from retirement).
It's not just Samsung. If anything, I'd give Samsung at least some credit (compared to a couple of their competitors) for being willing to talk about this.
My parents have a ~5 year old Dell laptop. Back in November, they tried to move to Windows 10, but the machine locked into a BSOD-on-boot loop in the latter stages of the install. After a lot of digging into the problem, it turned out that the onboard graphics adapter for that particular model wasn't supported in Win10, so the OS crashed at the point it tried to initialise it. I had to travel 2 hours to get their PC to boot from the recovery partition and back into Windows 7.
On Monday, the parents must have missed a step in the "dodge the near-forced update" dance, because the laptop decided it was going to move itself to Windows 10 again while they were out - with exactly the same result. Cue another two hours on the phone talking my Dad through yet another restore from the recovery partition. I'm normally happy to blame the parents for their self-inflicted PC woes, but in this case, MS have made dodging the update so hard for the average user that I can't really bring myself to do so.
Their machine is not unique; it was from a fairly common line of low-end Dell laptops that was popular 5 years ago. There are plenty of similar tales in the Dell support forums.
For what it's worth, I'm running Win10 on my own home desktop and while I had to do a bit of router-fettling to block the worst of the telemetry, I actually like the OS for day to day use. But then, I have a PC that can run it.
In principle, I'm basically in agreement with you on this one. If nothing else, for the average low-engagement user right now, moving to Win10 is probably just easier than doing the "dodge the update" dance on Win7 or Win8. I know it's wrong to reward MS for that behaviour, but if it's a quiet life you're after (and that is what most people seem to want from their PCs), then going for the update seems to be the best solution, bearing in mind your entirely legitimate advice about the install process.
The problem, however, arises from the number of problems I've seen Win10 throw up on older hardware, particularly the graphics hardware in many older laptops (Dells in particular, from what I've seen). I've seen a good number of circa 5 year old laptops whose graphics hardware simply refuses to initialise when booting into Win10, resulting in an infinite BSOD-loop and the need to boot from the recovery partition to get things working again. And, unfortunately, those older laptops are disproportionately likely to be owned by just the kind of casual user we're talking about here.
And yes, I am a bit bitter. When my parents tried to move their 5 year old Win7 laptop to Win10 late last year, they got hit by just this issue, resulting in me having to make a 2-hour-each-way journey to get the thing back into Win7. They must have made a mis-step in the dodge the update dance, because it tried to update itself again on Monday, with identical results (though this time, just 2 hours on the phone to get things back, as my dad remembered some of the steps).
Yeah, I've been there. There's nothing quite like the sinking feeling you get when you first hear the "bird chirp" sound which is the first sign of impending catastrophic failure.
I had 3 of those drives fail in a 6 month period, all of them relatively new and only subjected to consumer-level usage. It got to the point where I was getting agitated every time there was birdsong outside my window. Seagate drives don't get anywhere near my home PC since then.
I did more or less the same thing. Made quite an elaborate map based on my school, with multiple buildings replicated in as much detail as was possible within the fairly restrictive boundaries of what Doom's engine would allow. I remember doing the same thing in Duke Nukem 3d's editor, pretty much as soon as that game was released (before I'd even finished the campaign) and being delighted by how much further that engine let me go in terms of authenticity (multi-floored buildings etc.). There were a fair few gamers in my class and those levels ended up shared around quite widely using floppy disks. I'd have been amazed if staff didn't know about it. It didn't set any alarm bells ringing at the time.
The Columbine shooting and the ensuring moral panic about Doom happened a year or so after I went on to University. That panic wasn't quite as intense here in the UK as it was in the US, but I still had absolutely no doubt that those levels would have got me in a lot of trouble indeed if I'd been a year or two younger. I'm not sure I've ever had quite such a profound sense of having dodged a bullet.
My big memory of Doom comes from the same era. Myself and a couple of friends worked together on a mod for it, based around Winnie the Pooh. It was the kind of thing that was hilarious if you were 16; the enemies were replaced by Winnie the Pooh characters and the BFG9000 was replaced by Piglet with a stick of dynamite jammed up his arse. It never went outside our immediate circle; it wasn't actually very good and we knew enough by then to realise it would just be lawsuit fodder the moment it touched the net. But it was a great introduction to working on a collaborative project (much better than any of our "formal" school projects). Plus one of the two guys who did the art for it (I was the level-designer) is now fairly senior in the art-department at a well-known AAA developer.
The trend towards the traditional "gap year" (spend Daddy's money for a year before going to college) has been on the decline in the UK since 2012 or so. Going to university is a more expensive proposition here than it used to be (though still a long way short of US levels and mostly loan-funded) and spending a year fannying around before getting it over with has lost some of the appeal. Plus, of course, the whole concept came in for some fairly relentless pisstaking.
There are still a fair few who take a year out of studying before going to university, but that's mostly for the purposes of working to earn money to help with fees and living costs. The traditional Gap Yah was mostly a product of the pre-recession years of plenty.
I addressed this in my post. Valve needed Half-Life 2 to get Steam off the ground and give it an initial user-base. But it has that user-base now. Half-Life 3 would not persuade anybody who does not currently use Steam to start using it.
For console-manufacturers, the best part of the cycle is typically the mid-late part. The installed base is significant and games sales are strong. The money is rolling in without them having to do very much (although if they're smart, they will be beginning development on a successor). By contrast, new console launches are horrible for them; lots of cost, lots of risk and those expensive first-party games are only selling to early-adopters.
Until something happens to undermine their business model, Valve essentially gets to live perpetually in the mid-late part of the cycle. PC hardware means that there are no "big bangs" that mean you have to start over from scratch in terms of the installed base. They can sit back, rake in the profits they make from the third party eco-system and put their own investment into longer-term ventures such as SteamOS and VR. Putting out new AAA first-party games would be a pointless risk at this point.
Half-Life 3 will never happen. It's not in Valve's commercial interest any more.
Valve isn't really a games developer any more; it's a platform holder. Remember that, while the precise arrangements sometimes vary per customer, it generally takes around 30% of the value of each sale on Steam. It's putting very little money into the development of those games (hosting/bandwidth costs for the store and some multiplayer/social backend for the majority of games), but is taking a huge amount of revenue from them. By contrast, when it develops and sells its own games, it needs to front up the costs and take a lot more of the commercial risk.
This is broadly similar to how things work on the consoles. Sony and MS take the costs of hardware development and fund first and third-party exclusive titles to grow the installed base, but their real income comes from the licensing fees. Nintendo still tries to make the first-party model work, but has been struggling with it since the launch of the 3DS.
Valve has a further advantage over Sony and MS in that its platform is an evolutionary one, rather than one with major hardware shifts once or twice a decade. Once the installed base for Steam was there, Valve didn't really need to put much effort into growing it through first-party development. It therefore focusses its first-party development on new markets; see its recent investment in VR via the HTC Vive and its software suite.
But even if Valve doesn't need to make Half-Life 3, is there a reason why it shouldn't do so anyway, given the game would almost certainly be profitable?
Actually, yes...
Steam's success is predicated on wide participation by developers and publishers. The one thing that could really hurt Steam would be for a critical mass of major publishers to withdraw. EA have already taken their ball and gone home to Origin. Ubisoft has tried to draw people over to uPlay, but has had less success so far and still tends to depend on Steam for the backend of some of its games. But if Valve wants to keep the major publishers on board, then it can't afford to compete with them directly. Most of Valve's output since HL2 has taken the form of experimental or niche titles, like Portal or Left 4 Dead. For Valve to put out a major AAA shooter would send worrying signals to a lot of its major parties. So it won't.
At this point, the only real prospect for seeing HL3 would be if Valve sold the rights to the series to a third party, which is itself vanishingly unlikely.
There's usually a market for successful consoles (and the 360 was successful) for a couple of years after their successors are launched, particularly if that successor has no or limited back compatibility.
It's basically about people buying replacements for broken consoles. The 360 has never, to put it mildly, had a good reputation for reliability (even if later versions were much better than the early ones). People will have large software libraries for their 360s, much of which is still not playable on the XB1 (and nor is there workable emulation of commercial games on PC). So there will be a continuing level of demand for the 360, despite the XB1's growing software library and installed base.
The PS2, an even more successful console (which also had hardware-reliability issues), only finally ended production in January 2013, less than a year before the launch of the PS4, even though production numbers had fallen pretty low by the end.
There has been extensive research into and testing off grills in more recent years. This New Scientist piece from 2009 sums up where it has reached; the grills are either too lightweight and shatter on being struck, or else they are too heavy and bulky, reducing efficiency and playing havoc with airflow.
Always be wary of the Dunning-Kruger effect when asking why people "don't just do something" in a given specialist field. If there's a seemingly "obvious" solution that isn't implemented, chances are it has been tested and found to be impractical.