The only thing I can think of, is for the mouse area to act as a touch screen, or a derivative.
Oh wait, that already exists, its called a Wacom Cintiq, and people use a pen or a mouse with it, when it could just as well (probably more expensive? I'm guessing Cintiqs are like other Wacom tablets, and not actually using normal touchscreen technology) be a touch screen...its just not what people want...
So I think we have proof right there that indeed, it will not work... people could have it TODAY, and they don't want it. Full touchscreen interfaces are only useful for Tablet PCs...things you fold the keyboard around and carry with you, where a mouse is very inconvenient.
On top of what you said, I can't even understand how they could bank on Vista for RAM sales. If I look at new computers, Macs, servers with Linux or Windows, whatever... they basically sell with RAM installed that don't seem to consider whats installed on it. Back when machines still sold with XP, they sold with the same amount of RAM as Vista...
Machines that sell with a 32 bit version of Windows have 4 gigs of RAM installed (which, even if Windows didn't have the 3.5~ gig limit, still cannot be used because of the videocard eating up on the address space, as well as other hardware), and so on. They could consider banking if there was an announcement that Vista was going to be 64 bit only, and that chipset makers are making more motherboards that support higher amounts of RAM (like 8-16 gigs+), with software to use it... But right now, with 2.8 gigs accessible on my machine, I've never a single time hit swap... so unless you have a professional workstation, RAM requirements barely changed at all!
The only thing I can think of, is the keyboard being a touch screen itself (think the newer Wacom tablets), and would extent to the mouse "section" of your desk (or you'd have two).
So you'd have a touchscreen "keyboard" with tactil feedback (that already exists, they'd have to improve it though), and a "pointer" touchscreen that would act as the mouse.
Considering all the effort that has went through making mice comfier, I don't see it changing in 3-5 years. And mice would stay around if only as a gaming peripherical... no one has yet found a good replacement for the mouse for FPS and the like... even the Wii remote is hit or miss. On top of that, considering all the people who hurt themselves using a mouse from being in a poor position for too long, I can't see, as you point out, how an alternative touchscreen-based solution would work without making all of that worse.
Was that fixed in XP SP1 or something? because I have a spare Windows XP Pro SP1 install disk here that I bought a while back, and it works fine with my SATA drives... I only had issues with a proprietary Intel Raid controller (but that came with the floppy...so I just need to make sure I have a floppy for the install)... Any insight?
The funny thing is, with most OEMs, you don't even get to pick a 64 bit OS. They stick 4 gigs of RAM in anyway, all of the hardware is 64 bit compatible, yet you can't put a 64 bit OS on it. What the hell.
At least you can order the 64 bit disks from Microsoft by using the OEM CD key taped on the machine, and do a reinstall, but its really not the most user friendly experience there is.
Your non-techie friend really has to stop buying his hardware in the bargain bin or something. I can take a several years old USB wireless adapter from my pile of junk behind, plug it in a random Vista 64 bit machine, and it works out of the box. He must have seriously been look flipping hard to find something "pretty recent" that wouldn't work. The only piece of hardware I ever had issues with on Vista was creative sound cards, since Creative has a history of killing OS support as early as possible as a way to sell newer crap... aside that? My router is a cheap netgear I got for sale at Bestbuy for 20$, and im using random junk I salvaged from old computers or randomly picked at the local store without really looking if it supported the OS or not, and it always worked (and that includes all the computers of a company I used to work for, that are all running Vista).
Your friend must be a master at Where's Waldo, to be able to pull that off.
Basically, their habit seems to be to ship with DRM to try to preserve initial sales, and then bow to customer demand to keep bargain sales reasonable and keep old fans happy.
It makes sense when you think about it (and a few publishers admitted to that). The initial sales are the ones that matter. The big numbers, the fanboys raving, the little kids who need it NOW NOW NOW NOW... If you can stop piracy until the day -after- the game hit the stores, you catch all of the impulse buyers and OCDs, which is a seizable market. A week after the game came out, whoever wants to pirate it will, whoever wants to buy it will to, so it doesn't matter anymore. Same logic behind those schemes (I think its Valves who did that?) where the game isn't actually complete on the disks, you need to download the last couple of files, which are only available at launch?
DRM is only there for launch day, and to keep joesixpack from installing the game on all his friend's PC without effort.
Now that someone is actually assuming customers are not criminals
I'll do the same, a game without DRM (that I wanted anyway, but was going to get for console) is worth it. That said... I see that quote splashed all over... "They treat their customers like if they were criminals!"...though, they pretty much are:) Thats just human nature... people would be robbing banks, killing and murdering left and right if it wasn't for the fear of getting caught.. The 6 of us that wouldn't are just flukes.
Section 508 isn't the end of the world, yeah (though some sections of it get somewhat ignored...thankfully, else it would quickly get out of hand)... but there is precedents outside of that, like the judgement against Target in 2006. Now granted, for that one it was a fairly stupid thing that Target could have fixed easily, but its still a scary precedent. There are some colleges that have similar policites for accessibility that have caused issues over the internal web sites that stopped some people from publishing content flat.
My point though, wasn't that its all that bad now. Just that if these things were enforced across the board, many would choose to simply not publish their stuff instead, which would be a net loss.
long before all this well-intentioned madness starts to limit the amount of good material that is published?
It already does. Some companies that are bound by these standards or regulation (since in certain case, it is enforced by law) have been slapped on the wrists (or more) for publishing things without following all accessibility rules, and the result sometimes has been to simply not publish them at all, because it ended up being too much worse (let say, for a professor who wanted to publish some extra info cuz he had it on hand, but would have had to make it "accessible", which would have taken time he simply did not have).
So yes, it already happens, a lot. Its an awkward situation, because people lose out no matter what you to... Don't have any standards and regulations, and no one will give a shit about people with disabilities... Have them enforced, and people simply will not publish things that are covered under the standard.
The best solution is to improve the tooling, and give insensive for the people that makes tools to enhance the experience for those with disabilities to make even more tools. If there's something semi-reliable to make a captioning of any podcast in real time, well, it won't be perfect, but better than nothing no? Stuff like that.
Indeed. What would be good is if you have the choice. Either buy an Xbox, or a PC that is "Xbox compliant", and both can run the exact same binaries, from the exact same disk. Now that would have potential, and I don't see why it wouldn't be possible. (the XNA framework is close...you do need 2 versions of the game, but its -almost-the same)
Then if you can afford the PC, you only need one machine. If you cannot, then you get the console. That would be pretty cool from a user's point of view IMO.
Actually, consoles' influence on PC has simplified game development... so it just depends on the definition of "merge".
For example, Microsoft is implementing (now its game specific, soon it will be stand alone too) Xbox Live for PC. So games can use the Xbox Live API to integrate games together and with consoles... You have the XNA Framework, lets you make games for PC in a similar way you would on the console... You have the Xbox controller integration, which can (while pissing off everyone who doesn't have it, though, and is probably bordering anti-thrust) let you assume everyone with a controller has a similar one, thus you can have a default configuration that you know will work... In Vista, games are integrated in a dashboard, AND in Windows Media Center (I think thats true for XP too).
All that together means games are easier to make and more intuitive for the users. Its not a total merge though, but consoles definately have things to bring to the PC. The article talks of having something like "PS4 compliance". Something like a set of common denominators on PC, so the platform wouldn't be such a moving target anymore... Let say a set of API that can be implemented by hardware, like Direct X, but with added constraints (like "Must be able to run some benchmarks and demos at X speed"), which would allow developers to have a more static target.
It WOULD leave people with $10000 computers with 3 videocards and 2 quad core CPUs in the dust, but it would certainly help with development. Lately, games have been running a lot smoother out of the box, and have had much friendlier minimum requirement, aside for some flukes like Crysis. Devs have basically been aiming at 8800GT and equivalent, and Core 2 Duo CPUs, which is fairly standard...so many new games run at max settings out of the box even if they're not brand new. That didn't use to happen.
All around, it does have potential, if you don't mine hearing geeks in their basements crying that their 2000$ videocard was a waste of money.
Developing for PC -is- a pain in the ass though. If you have a PC with XYZ videocard for a specific version of the driver that is stable, with one of the extremely few soundcard that support most features correctly with a stable driver, make the game work in only a few resolutions, and have a fairly high minimum requirement, with no built in ability in the game to scale up or down...
Then sure, developing for the PC is easy and great. I've been working on a little game demo in my spare time (that I'll never publish, its just for fun), and making things work on MY computer, and MY COMPUTER ONLY, is really easy. When you add all of the integrated sound card with buggy drivers, the 5 billion videocard configurations, the different versions of the operating systems, and the edge cases... it quickly becomes a nightmare.
Unfortunately, every in very large project in heaviy audited code of multi-national companies, code reviews aren't the norm. It should be, but its really not, so its fairly easy to push something in production for the world to see, without any safety nets to catch crap like this...
Oh, i'm an idiot... I just noticed that I have scheduled defragging every night on wednesday... never noticed that before, so I guess its a default configuration. That would do it. Learn something new everyday!
Yeah, something like that I guess is what I meant:) I didn't look at it in very much detail... I was mostly refering to whatever XP is doing that trash the hell out of my HDD while the computer is idle. I assumed it was defragging, because even after several year of usage of my machines as developer workstation and for gaming, my disk fragmentation was always very low. I guess it may have just been a coincidence.
They meant relevent things. For example, XP will defrag your disk without you asking it to as soon as you're marginally idle... Vista the same, but will also index your disk continually...
I tried it for kicks, and in case I'm doing something wrong, it doesn't work in Vista if IE's protected mode is at on (that is, if you didn't disable UAC, pretty much).
Didn't try without it cuz im too lazy, but it definately doesnt work on my computer. (Vista SP1, protected mode on)
Unfortunately if you want every versions of Visual Studio, its more like 12k... 1200$ is for the MSDN Pro subscription, which is missing a lot of stuff. One pro trick though, is if you buy 2 years of MSDN Subscription at once, you fall in the volume licensing agreements, and the second year is like 100$, so you save a lot.
That said, aside for Windows (the desktop version) and Office 2007, in a Premium subscription, all that stuff is for dev use only. Still cool that they give you Windows and Office 2007 now, they didn't use to (it was Office 2003 even long after 2007 came out, for one).
Thing too, is Microsoft caved in on their user's requests... There's no reason for this. It was originally so sysadmins would have a more stable schedule to test updates, to ease the strain. But with the tools that are provided by MS to manage updates on a network, you can throttle and control them extremely well, decide when you update what on a network of pretty much any size, block certain updates, delay others... So sysadmins really could go at their own pace, with the only drawback that they may not update fast enough on after a patch is release and hackers use the patch code to exploit unpatched machines...but thats really the sysadmin's problem (and as we see, it doesn't change anything anyway, like in this situation).
So they basicallly just caved in to the demands of sysadmins who can't do their jobs (be it because they suck, or because their employers are morons). Its sad really.
To be fair, this comes from a legacy component of Windows, that was not only written long ago, but is also not vulnerable in the latest versions. So they DID learn, just too late.
It does remind me of the Twilight Princess exploit on the Wii though. With all the trouble game companies go to DRM their shit to hell and beyond, one of their programmers didn't check bounds while reading the save file (not checking bounds when reading a fucking FILE, WHAT THE FUCK), and it got pwned. So Nintendo defeated its own protection scheme. What morons...
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The only thing I can think of, is for the mouse area to act as a touch screen, or a derivative.
Oh wait, that already exists, its called a Wacom Cintiq, and people use a pen or a mouse with it, when it could just as well (probably more expensive? I'm guessing Cintiqs are like other Wacom tablets, and not actually using normal touchscreen technology) be a touch screen...its just not what people want...
So I think we have proof right there that indeed, it will not work... people could have it TODAY, and they don't want it. Full touchscreen interfaces are only useful for Tablet PCs...things you fold the keyboard around and carry with you, where a mouse is very inconvenient.
On top of what you said, I can't even understand how they could bank on Vista for RAM sales. If I look at new computers, Macs, servers with Linux or Windows, whatever... they basically sell with RAM installed that don't seem to consider whats installed on it. Back when machines still sold with XP, they sold with the same amount of RAM as Vista...
Machines that sell with a 32 bit version of Windows have 4 gigs of RAM installed (which, even if Windows didn't have the 3.5~ gig limit, still cannot be used because of the videocard eating up on the address space, as well as other hardware), and so on. They could consider banking if there was an announcement that Vista was going to be 64 bit only, and that chipset makers are making more motherboards that support higher amounts of RAM (like 8-16 gigs+), with software to use it... But right now, with 2.8 gigs accessible on my machine, I've never a single time hit swap... so unless you have a professional workstation, RAM requirements barely changed at all!
What did they expect exactly? Idiots...
The only thing I can think of, is the keyboard being a touch screen itself (think the newer Wacom tablets), and would extent to the mouse "section" of your desk (or you'd have two).
So you'd have a touchscreen "keyboard" with tactil feedback (that already exists, they'd have to improve it though), and a "pointer" touchscreen that would act as the mouse.
Considering all the effort that has went through making mice comfier, I don't see it changing in 3-5 years. And mice would stay around if only as a gaming peripherical... no one has yet found a good replacement for the mouse for FPS and the like... even the Wii remote is hit or miss. On top of that, considering all the people who hurt themselves using a mouse from being in a poor position for too long, I can't see, as you point out, how an alternative touchscreen-based solution would work without making all of that worse.
Was that fixed in XP SP1 or something? because I have a spare Windows XP Pro SP1 install disk here that I bought a while back, and it works fine with my SATA drives... I only had issues with a proprietary Intel Raid controller (but that came with the floppy...so I just need to make sure I have a floppy for the install)... Any insight?
The funny thing is, with most OEMs, you don't even get to pick a 64 bit OS. They stick 4 gigs of RAM in anyway, all of the hardware is 64 bit compatible, yet you can't put a 64 bit OS on it. What the hell.
At least you can order the 64 bit disks from Microsoft by using the OEM CD key taped on the machine, and do a reinstall, but its really not the most user friendly experience there is.
Your non-techie friend really has to stop buying his hardware in the bargain bin or something. I can take a several years old USB wireless adapter from my pile of junk behind, plug it in a random Vista 64 bit machine, and it works out of the box. He must have seriously been look flipping hard to find something "pretty recent" that wouldn't work. The only piece of hardware I ever had issues with on Vista was creative sound cards, since Creative has a history of killing OS support as early as possible as a way to sell newer crap... aside that? My router is a cheap netgear I got for sale at Bestbuy for 20$, and im using random junk I salvaged from old computers or randomly picked at the local store without really looking if it supported the OS or not, and it always worked (and that includes all the computers of a company I used to work for, that are all running Vista).
Your friend must be a master at Where's Waldo, to be able to pull that off.
Dell has to support the softwares it sells as an OEM. Go look around and see if support services for older software. It goes up, not down.
You do know UAC can be turned off, yes?
He would if its a single player game (like Prince of Persia) and he wants to spread the joy.
It makes sense when you think about it (and a few publishers admitted to that). The initial sales are the ones that matter. The big numbers, the fanboys raving, the little kids who need it NOW NOW NOW NOW... If you can stop piracy until the day -after- the game hit the stores, you catch all of the impulse buyers and OCDs, which is a seizable market. A week after the game came out, whoever wants to pirate it will, whoever wants to buy it will to, so it doesn't matter anymore. Same logic behind those schemes (I think its Valves who did that?) where the game isn't actually complete on the disks, you need to download the last couple of files, which are only available at launch?
DRM is only there for launch day, and to keep joesixpack from installing the game on all his friend's PC without effort.
I'll do the same, a game without DRM (that I wanted anyway, but was going to get for console) is worth it. That said... I see that quote splashed all over... "They treat their customers like if they were criminals!"...though, they pretty much are :) Thats just human nature... people would be robbing banks, killing and murdering left and right if it wasn't for the fear of getting caught.. The 6 of us that wouldn't are just flukes.
When you buy for 2 billion worth, you tend to get better deals, so I'm not sure those numbers will be on the dot.
Section 508 isn't the end of the world, yeah (though some sections of it get somewhat ignored...thankfully, else it would quickly get out of hand)... but there is precedents outside of that, like the judgement against Target in 2006. Now granted, for that one it was a fairly stupid thing that Target could have fixed easily, but its still a scary precedent. There are some colleges that have similar policites for accessibility that have caused issues over the internal web sites that stopped some people from publishing content flat.
My point though, wasn't that its all that bad now. Just that if these things were enforced across the board, many would choose to simply not publish their stuff instead, which would be a net loss.
long before all this well-intentioned madness starts to limit the amount of good material that is published?
It already does. Some companies that are bound by these standards or regulation (since in certain case, it is enforced by law) have been slapped on the wrists (or more) for publishing things without following all accessibility rules, and the result sometimes has been to simply not publish them at all, because it ended up being too much worse (let say, for a professor who wanted to publish some extra info cuz he had it on hand, but would have had to make it "accessible", which would have taken time he simply did not have).
So yes, it already happens, a lot. Its an awkward situation, because people lose out no matter what you to... Don't have any standards and regulations, and no one will give a shit about people with disabilities... Have them enforced, and people simply will not publish things that are covered under the standard.
The best solution is to improve the tooling, and give insensive for the people that makes tools to enhance the experience for those with disabilities to make even more tools. If there's something semi-reliable to make a captioning of any podcast in real time, well, it won't be perfect, but better than nothing no? Stuff like that.
Indeed. What would be good is if you have the choice. Either buy an Xbox, or a PC that is "Xbox compliant", and both can run the exact same binaries, from the exact same disk. Now that would have potential, and I don't see why it wouldn't be possible. (the XNA framework is close...you do need 2 versions of the game, but its -almost-the same)
Then if you can afford the PC, you only need one machine. If you cannot, then you get the console. That would be pretty cool from a user's point of view IMO.
Actually, consoles' influence on PC has simplified game development... so it just depends on the definition of "merge".
For example, Microsoft is implementing (now its game specific, soon it will be stand alone too) Xbox Live for PC. So games can use the Xbox Live API to integrate games together and with consoles... You have the XNA Framework, lets you make games for PC in a similar way you would on the console... You have the Xbox controller integration, which can (while pissing off everyone who doesn't have it, though, and is probably bordering anti-thrust) let you assume everyone with a controller has a similar one, thus you can have a default configuration that you know will work... In Vista, games are integrated in a dashboard, AND in Windows Media Center (I think thats true for XP too).
All that together means games are easier to make and more intuitive for the users. Its not a total merge though, but consoles definately have things to bring to the PC. The article talks of having something like "PS4 compliance". Something like a set of common denominators on PC, so the platform wouldn't be such a moving target anymore... Let say a set of API that can be implemented by hardware, like Direct X, but with added constraints (like "Must be able to run some benchmarks and demos at X speed"), which would allow developers to have a more static target.
It WOULD leave people with $10000 computers with 3 videocards and 2 quad core CPUs in the dust, but it would certainly help with development. Lately, games have been running a lot smoother out of the box, and have had much friendlier minimum requirement, aside for some flukes like Crysis. Devs have basically been aiming at 8800GT and equivalent, and Core 2 Duo CPUs, which is fairly standard...so many new games run at max settings out of the box even if they're not brand new. That didn't use to happen.
All around, it does have potential, if you don't mine hearing geeks in their basements crying that their 2000$ videocard was a waste of money.
Developing for PC -is- a pain in the ass though. If you have a PC with XYZ videocard for a specific version of the driver that is stable, with one of the extremely few soundcard that support most features correctly with a stable driver, make the game work in only a few resolutions, and have a fairly high minimum requirement, with no built in ability in the game to scale up or down...
Then sure, developing for the PC is easy and great. I've been working on a little game demo in my spare time (that I'll never publish, its just for fun), and making things work on MY computer, and MY COMPUTER ONLY, is really easy. When you add all of the integrated sound card with buggy drivers, the 5 billion videocard configurations, the different versions of the operating systems, and the edge cases... it quickly becomes a nightmare.
Unfortunately, every in very large project in heaviy audited code of multi-national companies, code reviews aren't the norm. It should be, but its really not, so its fairly easy to push something in production for the world to see, without any safety nets to catch crap like this...
Oh, i'm an idiot... I just noticed that I have scheduled defragging every night on wednesday... never noticed that before, so I guess its a default configuration. That would do it. Learn something new everyday!
Yeah, something like that I guess is what I meant :) I didn't look at it in very much detail... I was mostly refering to whatever XP is doing that trash the hell out of my HDD while the computer is idle. I assumed it was defragging, because even after several year of usage of my machines as developer workstation and for gaming, my disk fragmentation was always very low. I guess it may have just been a coincidence.
Whoops :)
They meant relevent things. For example, XP will defrag your disk without you asking it to as soon as you're marginally idle... Vista the same, but will also index your disk continually...
I tried it for kicks, and in case I'm doing something wrong, it doesn't work in Vista if IE's protected mode is at on (that is, if you didn't disable UAC, pretty much).
Didn't try without it cuz im too lazy, but it definately doesnt work on my computer. (Vista SP1, protected mode on)
Unfortunately if you want every versions of Visual Studio, its more like 12k... 1200$ is for the MSDN Pro subscription, which is missing a lot of stuff. One pro trick though, is if you buy 2 years of MSDN Subscription at once, you fall in the volume licensing agreements, and the second year is like 100$, so you save a lot.
That said, aside for Windows (the desktop version) and Office 2007, in a Premium subscription, all that stuff is for dev use only. Still cool that they give you Windows and Office 2007 now, they didn't use to (it was Office 2003 even long after 2007 came out, for one).
Thing too, is Microsoft caved in on their user's requests... There's no reason for this. It was originally so sysadmins would have a more stable schedule to test updates, to ease the strain. But with the tools that are provided by MS to manage updates on a network, you can throttle and control them extremely well, decide when you update what on a network of pretty much any size, block certain updates, delay others... So sysadmins really could go at their own pace, with the only drawback that they may not update fast enough on after a patch is release and hackers use the patch code to exploit unpatched machines...but thats really the sysadmin's problem (and as we see, it doesn't change anything anyway, like in this situation).
So they basicallly just caved in to the demands of sysadmins who can't do their jobs (be it because they suck, or because their employers are morons). Its sad really.
To be fair, this comes from a legacy component of Windows, that was not only written long ago, but is also not vulnerable in the latest versions. So they DID learn, just too late.
It does remind me of the Twilight Princess exploit on the Wii though. With all the trouble game companies go to DRM their shit to hell and beyond, one of their programmers didn't check bounds while reading the save file (not checking bounds when reading a fucking FILE, WHAT THE FUCK), and it got pwned. So Nintendo defeated its own protection scheme. What morons...