"At that point it was obvious that we're only a couple of orders of bandwidth-magnitude away from not caring where our apps live."
Speak for yourself, I dont want to go to the orwellian business models of some Capitalists wet dreams where they control access and we pay for access or "property tax" for use of the software for the rest of our lives, sorry I would never do such a thing. I dont know about you but I dont want to have offline software phone home over the internet to see if I owe billy gates any money after I purchased the software, no one is going to want to go to the "eternal lease" software model for many applications, because it takes way too much control out of your hands and leaves Orwellian dreams of people in business and/or government wide open.
The internet is bad enough as an orwell device, any thing you type can be recorded, any forums you visit your thoughts permanently recorded and added to search engines, usenet posts, etc. A good chunk of who a person is can be pieced together by what he says and what he leaves all over the net, and lets not even talk about reverse DNS revealing the location of the user on the globe and even what town and city he lives and who he's getting his internet from.
Not all people want to even bother understanding the technology they are too caught up in making money and old habits to really give a damn. It's especially about the illusion of control being lost. Then theres issue with wanting to be the controlling force in the markets and dominating them. They fear the internet because they wont be the only guys in town anymore, they wont be able to "tax" consumers for gross profit anymore (i.e. no consumer surplus companies try so hard to avoid in regular retail and supermarkets)
What are you talking about? You can get hour long episodes compressed into less then half a gig pretty easily, sure some of the detail (resolution) is missing and its nota full DVD but many people are satisfied with lower resolution or just watching the show, its not like games where people are really THAT concerned about resolution. It sure beats the pants off what most people were satisfied with before: VHS.
Everyone at some point is bound to be replaced, the development of true artificial intelligence will eliminate the need for human beings for most anything.
I just dont think the culture is as obsessed with anime as japan is, that is a huge difference in my mind. Sure some of the anime here has been popular but it was disney esque (i.e. family friendly).
Anime is just another name for disney or cartoon for the average american. Most people frown upon cartoon watching, it's ENGRAINED in the culture as something "kids" do, sure they have stuff like Adult swim but it's the backward steretype mentality of north american culture for the most part.
... of a lot of bad grammar and spelling, english itself is bastardized ever shifting and evolving language.
I don't personally think the grammar and spelling is horrible. I think the fact is commonly mispelled words and whatnot are inevitable, people spell things "unaware" that they are typing them or writing them how they SOUND instead of how they are SPELLED (definitely versus definAtely) or their versus there. English has plenty of fucked up words that do not spell the way they sound and the human minds when accessing memory sometimes combines phonetically sounding words with the most "hard" learned rules of spellings i.e. Fear would be FEER, or vice versa, their and there, and you could go on and on about how many words in english sound very similar in pronounciation versus their spellings and you end up with a lot of mispelled words then and THAN, I mean come on, english has to be one of the worst languages for word re-use with slightly different sounding vowels and they wonder why words are mispelled.
If you think people's command of the language today is bad, try reading some old stuff from 100 to 150 years ago, like Kant, etc. Almost impossible to comprehend what the hell he is saying even though he is speaking english he's expressing himself in an entirely different way then most "common" people would.
Either way I dont think being smart guarantee's success, riches or a good life IMHO, there are plenty of genius's that were pretty fucked up people. Also there were geniuses that preferred to live their lives quietly then use their abilities "for humanity" (Google William James Sidis for example).
1. order: a degree in a continuum of size or quantity; "it was on the order of a mile"; "an explosion of a low order of magnitude"
2. a number assigned to the ratio of two quantities; two quantities are of the same order of magnitude if one is less than 10 times as large as the other; the number of magnitudes that the quantities differ is specified to within a power of 10
The bandwidth problem isn't going to go away, the pace at which GPU's can adopt new memories outpaces the memory standards available for a platform.
For instance, how long have we been using DDR SDRAM now? For a long time, now they are just getting around to DDR-II but we have yet to see any truly significant increases in performance.
Meanwhile another video card release is around the corner. I just dont think you understand the complexity and seriousness of the problem. The cycles on which video card operate are much quicker then PC platforms could ever hope to move, by virtue of that fact alone unless a stunning breakthrough is made (like we're talking serious breakthrough or some radically new cost effective tech) nothing is going to radically change.
The problem is of course in online poker you cannot read your physical presence so that eliminates a whole section of the game. So it would be equivalent to guessing unless you are using software to track your opponents habits and your own playing habits, so you know when to switch up (which most pro online poker players do).
Re:The Hypervisor will use 'em, I tell ya!
on
AMD Quad Cores, Oh My
·
· Score: 2, Informative
There is only one problem with your virtualized GPU, memory bandwidth.
Current CPU memory bandwidth is 3-6x orders of magnitude less then current GPU bandwidth. As long as main memory bandwidth stays well behind local onboard memory bandwidth on the videocard you simply cannot keep framerates high enough with FSAA and what have you which require enormous amounts of bandwidth. It doesn't matter how many cores you have if the pipes feeding the CPU data dont get bigger or you get more pipes to feed the cores themselves. CPU memory bandwidth has always lagged behind more modern GPU's with ~33 GB/s versus today's Intel and AMD systems with between 2.3GB/sec and ~5.2GB/sec
There may be dangers with Nanotechnology but come on the ENTIRE planet is covered with already nano-tech, it's called LIFE. It's been around for billions of years as well, but I don't see people protesting bacteria, viruses, etc.
Sometimes I have to wonder if anyone knows anything at all about life/biology anymore.
Notice it's all the young and naive people who are still young and aren't thinking about the future who are concerned and so self-absorbed with sleeping with a girl that fits some pre-concieved notion of what has value and is beautiful. The fact is, if you want sex and not love then go ahead and screw all the hot girls you want but the law of diminishing returns sets in after you've experienced them, if you do anything too much you get burnt out on it, this includes sex with hot girls. The fact is such pleasure is self-created because you are getting a high from the challenge of scoring a hot chick, but in the end after it becomes easy it loses its value.
The fact is what are your goals in life is ultimately the question people should be asking themselves. If you want to be an eternal bachelor (or bachelorette) all your life, with no kids, more power to you. But I'd think anyone with any sense want's a person they are able to like and love years down the road with a family and not end up lonely in some old age home trying to remember the good times while they they are staring into eternity alone. Just remember its the people who have families that create workers that pay for things like Social security, disability, etc. To each his own.
"What that section means is that the dead don't care about the doings of the living. Also all the things that they did while alive don't have the same (emotional) meaning as they once did.
But they do exist in a spiritual way, they just have other things on their mind."
No it means what it says, in all translations it says the dead are INCAPABLE of knowing, you can't have consciously aware spirits with thoughts if they are INCAPABLE of knowing now can you? It goes onto say that their very memories and knowledge perish, in all bible translations they come out saying the same thing: The dead are gone, this is why Jeremiah 51:39 describes the destruction of a people as "sleeping the sleep of forever, or sleeping perpetually to never awake". It's perfectly understandable that such prose refers to non-existence.
What you stated doesn't mean anything, witness the fact that they knew about death, there is plenty more evidence then the following...
"For the living [b]know that they shall die: but the dead know not anything, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten. As well their love, as their hatred and their envy, is perished long ago; neither have they any more a portion for ever in anything that is done under the sun" Eccl. (9:5-6).[/b]
If the dead can't know anything, they can't be in purgatory or talking to other people now can they? It's that simple.
No jews don't believe in hell, sorry. They speak of death in idioms but there are other places in the old testament that make clear they know people are dead in the scientific sense. It is not compatable with purgatory unless you think being unconscious and utterly destroyed means something else.
"Let the wicked...be silent in the grave" (sheol [Ps. 31:17]) - (i.e. they will not be screaming in agony).
Jeremiah 51:39 (New International Version)
But while they are aroused, I will set out a feast for them and make them drunk, so that they shout with laughter-- then sleep forever and not awake," declares the LORD.
(speaking of the destruction)
The bible makes clear that the jews know the dead are dead/unconscious/non-existent.
How the parent post got rated insightful is pretty insane. I don't see game developers abandoning the PC, I just see two different markets. I mean if the parent poster was blizzard he would be rolling in the money from all those sales of World of Warcraft, the Sims and other games. Good games sell, bad ones don't it's that simple. Half the reason PC gaming started to shrink was video card requirements. People forget that games like Doom and the original quake didn't NEED a 3D card which expanded their audience, this is why games which dont require them (i.e. diablo) in part sold so well.
"I think real PC gaming is done. My friends still play Starcraft, all own PS2s, don't want to learn the difference between NVidia and ATI, AMD FX and Intel EE, or spend hours setting up LANs, toting computers around, troubleshooting technical problems. Once the A-list titles disappear, the investment goes elsewhere, and this is already happening."
Again this is moronic, and shows you how dumb people are. It doesn't take hours to setup LANS with modern routers and switches. If you have interent access and a router you plug in the router and connect everyone to it and everyone is assigned an IP address autotically when they turn on their computer if it is internet access ready (which most are). Online PC gaming has been relatively bug free and stable for a long time, lets not pretend console online gaming doesn't have problems and issues when it is subject to the exact same internet.
Just because game developers develop for both the PC and console does not mean they will abandon a market where they can make money. Tell me how much money and how many copies of world of warcraft have been sold, or warcraft 3 or diablo, or starcraft DESPITE being on a platform that enables and has had rampant piracy since the DOS gaming days? How was it possible for these people to make profit if everyone's such a criminal? How is WoW, The Sims, Halo and guild wars on the top of the PC sales charts if everyone is not buying their product because gee golly garsh batman... PC gaming sucks? After the sales of World of warcraft and other major online PC games in Korea and other parts of the world you'd be stupid not to still make games for them. The guys who made World of Warcraft are rolling in the money, wouldn't you like to be them? OH WAIT but it's not for consoles it's for the PC only.
The death of PC gaming arguments have always been a silly arguments as long as there is a market and money to be made.
"For me, the graphics I get on my XBox and GameCube are pretty much "good enough".
Which doesn't mean a lot, look at the sales of Warcraft, Starcraft, and other such hot PC titles they easily rival console games. As long as a market exists to expoit for money games will be made for it, it simply makes good business sense.
Why does a company like Ncsoft and a company like blizzard continue to make PC games if there is no one who can afford to buying? Just because something is cheaper doesn't mean there aren't people with more disposable income who will pay for quality games no matter the platform.
"You know, you can buy video cards that are well under $100 that have enough power to play any PC game out there. Only a fool spends $400 on a video card for their home gaming rig. "
I take issue with that, you spend what you can afford and if you have the money and you handle your money well. Then $400 is nothing for a video card, plus new video cards have very good resale value on ebay between releases of video cards, as long as you sell your card before people get wind of the next video card, you lose virtually nothing. You swap out your current amazing gen video card for an older one that can run games (but not maxed) until the new card releases and you have the money from the Ebay sale and being patient (waiting some months) you can buy a brand new video card every year and enjoy it for playing single player games in all their glory then sell it, after all what you are buying is the experience, it's all about how you spend your time and how smart you are in managing your money.
PC gaming is expensive say the detracters, but most people own PC's for othe things anyway, if you're buying a computer every 3-5 years anyway not just for entertainment, spending a little more on a decent video card isn't going to be a big deal. Many PC games simply do not really have anagolous experiences in the console world.
Diablo 2, Warcraft 3, Guild wars, UT2K4, etc?
Just look at the sales of World of warcraft and then tell me developers think PC gaming is dead. It's not dead it has just changed and goes through periods of waxing and waning, does no one remembe the video game crash in the 80's and then Nintendo rose to power?
These kinds of games will always be better on PC due to the fact that user maps and modability of games will never come to consoles for fear of making console users even more tech savvy and learn or come into contact with people that know how to pirate the games.
"People today are using BT to download games for their modern consoles and PCs. Instead of relying on game reviews and rentals, they're making their own digital duplicates and then deciding if it's worth their money.
That's not how it's supposed to work.
You either make an informed decision or gamble. Either way, you pay for the game."
Please don't give me that crap, playing a demo is one thing but it can't be fully representative of a game. Plus if you only rent games, you save yourself what, 5 bucks of which the publishers dont see any money? If I pirate twenty games I would have only rented I would have dropped 100 bucks, wow 100 for 20 games. Or what about blockbuster or online rentals, that promise you all the games you can rent for 30 dollars? If I am only paying 30/monthly to play or try 10-20 games month how are the game companies and publishers seeing my money? Face it, even with rentals and piracy they still make money. So please lets not be idiotic here. Gaming is a luxury business not a necessity like electricity, insurance and car payments. People will take what they will considering the ease and amost supernatural quality of replicaitng copyrighted works. Dont like it? Touch. That's the market, thats supply and demand. I hate how people go on and on about market economies without realizing how many people get fucked over by them by people who are in control not because of their ability but because they simply have money.
There aren't even 20 games worth pirating for most consoles. They usually have 10 games tops that every single console owner can enjoy. Not everyone shares the same tastes, sorry to burst your bubble.
Yeah but the things that make the series so unique and popular is the fact that they are done with proper japanese voice actors. I hate the english dubs of most animes and the people downloading the fansubs would easily agree that they would not want to hear Naruto or their favorite anime hero's dubbed into english because the voice inflection and character is totally lost. I loved Inuyasha in japanese but I couldn't stand the english dubs on my local TV station (where is public so therefore I dont feel guilty for downloading fansubs of it).
Well maybe it's time for a change in the social economic order or the laws, think about it. If you could replciate food and housing like copyrighted materials would you be stingy motherfuck about it? Most people understand that if you dont pay for something that it will no longer be produced. That's too bad for people that produce that stuff, but I don't feel sorry for the anarchy of marke economies that have no concern for human beings who work two jobs but can barely afford to pay the rent and food or are actually in the whole because of inflation. If people applied naturalism and science consistently they'd realize the stupidity of saying the poor deserve their place.
"... little do they (kids) realise that sooner or later their formative years are going to be gone and the workforce will be waiting for them. In a way I guess they have to be forced, but it is not the best way to learn IMHO."
Maybe that says something about the socio-economic order of the world that needs to be fundamentally changed. Schools are nothing more then worker factories for the economy. Most people are no long self-sufficient because of technology and being willingly or unconsciously among the disposessed and displaced under a constantly changing and anarchic economy that cannot promise steady jobs or streams of money to pay for the necessities of life. It is in the long run a recipe for unhappyness for everyone as companies try to squeeze out every last bit of profit from the their workers and keep governments, schools and all people of all nations on devestating economic treadmills which is directly responsible for the explosion of depression, people can no longer live life at their own pace, but they are forced to live at the pace set by someone elses money, ownership of goods and property and "societies" idealogical standards which may in fact be inherently destructive to peoples happyness and ability to cope.
Think about why people even need such advanced education (because there are no jobs for more "basic" skills) and you knowing that human beings are born under natural laws that govern their potential, you slowly begin to understand the gravity of the problem. Society is attempting to order and mold how people to live around their economic idealogy, instead of being rationally based on what is true and factual about a persons working or skill potential.
Why should someone live poor or a life of hardship just because he learning disability and cannot excel in school for example? Our society is still backward and ignorant by any kind of sane or rational standard when it comes to taking care of others less well endowed with potential to suceed on their own in their current unnatural human made environment.
Slashdot Mirror
"At that point it was obvious that we're only a couple of orders of bandwidth-magnitude away from not caring where our apps live." Speak for yourself, I dont want to go to the orwellian business models of some Capitalists wet dreams where they control access and we pay for access or "property tax" for use of the software for the rest of our lives, sorry I would never do such a thing. I dont know about you but I dont want to have offline software phone home over the internet to see if I owe billy gates any money after I purchased the software, no one is going to want to go to the "eternal lease" software model for many applications, because it takes way too much control out of your hands and leaves Orwellian dreams of people in business and/or government wide open. The internet is bad enough as an orwell device, any thing you type can be recorded, any forums you visit your thoughts permanently recorded and added to search engines, usenet posts, etc. A good chunk of who a person is can be pieced together by what he says and what he leaves all over the net, and lets not even talk about reverse DNS revealing the location of the user on the globe and even what town and city he lives and who he's getting his internet from.
Not all people want to even bother understanding the technology they are too caught up in making money and old habits to really give a damn. It's especially about the illusion of control being lost. Then theres issue with wanting to be the controlling force in the markets and dominating them. They fear the internet because they wont be the only guys in town anymore, they wont be able to "tax" consumers for gross profit anymore (i.e. no consumer surplus companies try so hard to avoid in regular retail and supermarkets)
What are you talking about? You can get hour long episodes compressed into less then half a gig pretty easily, sure some of the detail (resolution) is missing and its nota full DVD but many people are satisfied with lower resolution or just watching the show, its not like games where people are really THAT concerned about resolution. It sure beats the pants off what most people were satisfied with before: VHS.
Everyone at some point is bound to be replaced, the development of true artificial intelligence will eliminate the need for human beings for most anything.
I just dont think the culture is as obsessed with anime as japan is, that is a huge difference in my mind. Sure some of the anime here has been popular but it was disney esque (i.e. family friendly).
Anime is just another name for disney or cartoon for the average american. Most people frown upon cartoon watching, it's ENGRAINED in the culture as something "kids" do, sure they have stuff like Adult swim but it's the backward steretype mentality of north american culture for the most part.
... of a lot of bad grammar and spelling, english itself is bastardized ever shifting and evolving language.
I don't personally think the grammar and spelling is horrible. I think the fact is commonly mispelled words and whatnot are inevitable, people spell things "unaware" that they are typing them or writing them how they SOUND instead of how they are SPELLED (definitely versus definAtely) or their versus there. English has plenty of fucked up words that do not spell the way they sound and the human minds when accessing memory sometimes combines phonetically sounding words with the most "hard" learned rules of spellings i.e. Fear would be FEER, or vice versa, their and there, and you could go on and on about how many words in english sound very similar in pronounciation versus their spellings and you end up with a lot of mispelled words then and THAN, I mean come on, english has to be one of the worst languages for word re-use with slightly different sounding vowels and they wonder why words are mispelled.
If you think people's command of the language today is bad, try reading some old stuff from 100 to 150 years ago, like Kant, etc. Almost impossible to comprehend what the hell he is saying even though he is speaking english he's expressing himself in an entirely different way then most "common" people would.
Either way I dont think being smart guarantee's success, riches or a good life IMHO, there are plenty of genius's that were pretty fucked up people. Also there were geniuses that preferred to live their lives quietly then use their abilities "for humanity" (Google William James Sidis for example).
Definitions:
1. order: a degree in a continuum of size or quantity; "it was on the order of a mile"; "an explosion of a low order of magnitude"
2. a number assigned to the ratio of two quantities; two quantities are of the same order of magnitude if one is less than 10 times as large as the other; the number of magnitudes that the quantities differ is specified to within a power of 10
www.cogsci.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/webwn2.1
The bandwidth problem isn't going to go away, the pace at which GPU's can adopt new memories outpaces the memory standards available for a platform.
For instance, how long have we been using DDR SDRAM now? For a long time, now they are just getting around to DDR-II but we have yet to see any truly significant increases in performance.
Meanwhile another video card release is around the corner. I just dont think you understand the complexity and seriousness of the problem. The cycles on which video card operate are much quicker then PC platforms could ever hope to move, by virtue of that fact alone unless a stunning breakthrough is made (like we're talking serious breakthrough or some radically new cost effective tech) nothing is going to radically change.
The problem is of course in online poker you cannot read your physical presence so that eliminates a whole section of the game. So it would be equivalent to guessing unless you are using software to track your opponents habits and your own playing habits, so you know when to switch up (which most pro online poker players do).
There is only one problem with your virtualized GPU, memory bandwidth.
Current CPU memory bandwidth is 3-6x orders of magnitude less then current GPU bandwidth. As long as main memory bandwidth stays well behind local onboard memory bandwidth on the videocard you simply cannot keep framerates high enough with FSAA and what have you which require enormous amounts of bandwidth. It doesn't matter how many cores you have if the pipes feeding the CPU data dont get bigger or you get more pipes to feed the cores themselves. CPU memory bandwidth has always lagged behind more modern GPU's with ~33 GB/s versus today's Intel and AMD systems with between 2.3GB/sec and ~5.2GB/sec
There may be dangers with Nanotechnology but come on the ENTIRE planet is covered with already nano-tech, it's called LIFE. It's been around for billions of years as well, but I don't see people protesting bacteria, viruses, etc.
Sometimes I have to wonder if anyone knows anything at all about life/biology anymore.
I have to agree with the parent post (lumpy).
Notice it's all the young and naive people who are still young and aren't thinking about the future who are concerned and so self-absorbed with sleeping with a girl that fits some pre-concieved notion of what has value and is beautiful. The fact is, if you want sex and not love then go ahead and screw all the hot girls you want but the law of diminishing returns sets in after you've experienced them, if you do anything too much you get burnt out on it, this includes sex with hot girls. The fact is such pleasure is self-created because you are getting a high from the challenge of scoring a hot chick, but in the end after it becomes easy it loses its value.
The fact is what are your goals in life is ultimately the question people should be asking themselves. If you want to be an eternal bachelor (or bachelorette) all your life, with no kids, more power to you. But I'd think anyone with any sense want's a person they are able to like and love years down the road with a family and not end up lonely in some old age home trying to remember the good times while they they are staring into eternity alone. Just remember its the people who have families that create workers that pay for things like Social security, disability, etc. To each his own.
"What that section means is that the dead don't care about the doings of the living. Also all the things that they did while alive don't have the same (emotional) meaning as they once did.
But they do exist in a spiritual way, they just have other things on their mind."
No it means what it says, in all translations it says the dead are INCAPABLE of knowing, you can't have consciously aware spirits with thoughts if they are INCAPABLE of knowing now can you? It goes onto say that their very memories and knowledge perish, in all bible translations they come out saying the same thing: The dead are gone, this is why Jeremiah 51:39 describes the destruction of a people as "sleeping the sleep of forever, or sleeping perpetually to never awake". It's perfectly understandable that such prose refers to non-existence.
What you stated doesn't mean anything, witness the fact that they knew about death, there is plenty more evidence then the following...
"For the living [b]know that they shall die: but the dead know not anything, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten. As well their love, as their hatred and their envy, is perished long ago; neither have they any more a portion for ever in anything that is done under the sun" Eccl. (9:5-6).[/b]
If the dead can't know anything, they can't be in purgatory or talking to other people now can they? It's that simple.
No jews don't believe in hell, sorry. They speak of death in idioms but there are other places in the old testament that make clear they know people are dead in the scientific sense. It is not compatable with purgatory unless you think being unconscious and utterly destroyed means something else.
"Let the wicked...be silent in the grave" (sheol [Ps. 31:17]) - (i.e. they will not be screaming in agony).
Jeremiah 51:39 (New International Version)
But while they are aroused,
I will set out a feast for them
and make them drunk,
so that they shout with laughter--
then sleep forever and not awake,"
declares the LORD.
(speaking of the destruction)
The bible makes clear that the jews know the dead are dead/unconscious/non-existent.
How the parent post got rated insightful is pretty insane. I don't see game developers abandoning the PC, I just see two different markets. I mean if the parent poster was blizzard he would be rolling in the money from all those sales of World of Warcraft, the Sims and other games. Good games sell, bad ones don't it's that simple. Half the reason PC gaming started to shrink was video card requirements. People forget that games like Doom and the original quake didn't NEED a 3D card which expanded their audience, this is why games which dont require them (i.e. diablo) in part sold so well.
"I think real PC gaming is done. My friends still play Starcraft, all own PS2s, don't want to learn the difference between NVidia and ATI, AMD FX and Intel EE, or spend hours setting up LANs, toting computers around, troubleshooting technical problems. Once the A-list titles disappear, the investment goes elsewhere, and this is already happening."
Again this is moronic, and shows you how dumb people are. It doesn't take hours to setup LANS with modern routers and switches. If you have interent access and a router you plug in the router and connect everyone to it and everyone is assigned an IP address autotically when they turn on their computer if it is internet access ready (which most are). Online PC gaming has been relatively bug free and stable for a long time, lets not pretend console online gaming doesn't have problems and issues when it is subject to the exact same internet.
Just because game developers develop for both the PC and console does not mean they will abandon a market where they can make money. Tell me how much money and how many copies of world of warcraft have been sold, or warcraft 3 or diablo, or starcraft DESPITE being on a platform that enables and has had rampant piracy since the DOS gaming days? How was it possible for these people to make profit if everyone's such a criminal? How is WoW, The Sims, Halo and guild wars on the top of the PC sales charts if everyone is not buying their product because gee golly garsh batman... PC gaming sucks? After the sales of World of warcraft and other major online PC games in Korea and other parts of the world you'd be stupid not to still make games for them. The guys who made World of Warcraft are rolling in the money, wouldn't you like to be them? OH WAIT but it's not for consoles it's for the PC only.
The death of PC gaming arguments have always been a silly arguments as long as there is a market and money to be made.
"For me, the graphics I get on my XBox and GameCube are pretty much "good enough".
Which doesn't mean a lot, look at the sales of Warcraft, Starcraft, and other such hot PC titles they easily rival console games. As long as a market exists to expoit for money games will be made for it, it simply makes good business sense.
Why does a company like Ncsoft and a company like blizzard continue to make PC games if there is no one who can afford to buying? Just because something is cheaper doesn't mean there aren't people with more disposable income who will pay for quality games no matter the platform.
"You know, you can buy video cards that are well under $100 that have enough power to play any PC game out there. Only a fool spends $400 on a video card for their home gaming rig. "
I take issue with that, you spend what you can afford and if you have the money and you handle your money well. Then $400 is nothing for a video card, plus new video cards have very good resale value on ebay between releases of video cards, as long as you sell your card before people get wind of the next video card, you lose virtually nothing. You swap out your current amazing gen video card for an older one that can run games (but not maxed) until the new card releases and you have the money from the Ebay sale and being patient (waiting some months) you can buy a brand new video card every year and enjoy it for playing single player games in all their glory then sell it, after all what you are buying is the experience, it's all about how you spend your time and how smart you are in managing your money.
PC gaming is expensive say the detracters, but most people own PC's for othe things anyway, if you're buying a computer every 3-5 years anyway not just for entertainment, spending a little more on a decent video card isn't going to be a big deal. Many PC games simply do not really have anagolous experiences in the console world.
Diablo 2, Warcraft 3, Guild wars, UT2K4, etc?
Just look at the sales of World of warcraft and then tell me developers think PC gaming is dead. It's not dead it has just changed and goes through periods of waxing and waning, does no one remembe the video game crash in the 80's and then Nintendo rose to power?
These kinds of games will always be better on PC due to the fact that user maps and modability of games will never come to consoles for fear of making console users even more tech savvy and learn or come into contact with people that know how to pirate the games.
"People today are using BT to download games for their modern consoles and PCs. Instead of relying on game reviews and rentals, they're making their own digital duplicates and then deciding if it's worth their money.
That's not how it's supposed to work.
You either make an informed decision or gamble. Either way, you pay for the game."
Please don't give me that crap, playing a demo is one thing but it can't be fully representative of a game. Plus if you only rent games, you save yourself what, 5 bucks of which the publishers dont see any money? If I pirate twenty games I would have only rented I would have dropped 100 bucks, wow 100 for 20 games. Or what about blockbuster or online rentals, that promise you all the games you can rent for 30 dollars? If I am only paying 30/monthly to play or try 10-20 games month how are the game companies and publishers seeing my money? Face it, even with rentals and piracy they still make money. So please lets not be idiotic here. Gaming is a luxury business not a necessity like electricity, insurance and car payments. People will take what they will considering the ease and amost supernatural quality of replicaitng copyrighted works. Dont like it? Touch. That's the market, thats supply and demand. I hate how people go on and on about market economies without realizing how many people get fucked over by them by people who are in control not because of their ability but because they simply have money.
There aren't even 20 games worth pirating for most consoles. They usually have 10 games tops that every single console owner can enjoy. Not everyone shares the same tastes, sorry to burst your bubble.
Yeah but the things that make the series so unique and popular is the fact that they are done with proper japanese voice actors. I hate the english dubs of most animes and the people downloading the fansubs would easily agree that they would not want to hear Naruto or their favorite anime hero's dubbed into english because the voice inflection and character is totally lost. I loved Inuyasha in japanese but I couldn't stand the english dubs on my local TV station (where is public so therefore I dont feel guilty for downloading fansubs of it).
Well maybe it's time for a change in the social economic order or the laws, think about it. If you could replciate food and housing like copyrighted materials would you be stingy motherfuck about it? Most people understand that if you dont pay for something that it will no longer be produced. That's too bad for people that produce that stuff, but I don't feel sorry for the anarchy of marke economies that have no concern for human beings who work two jobs but can barely afford to pay the rent and food or are actually in the whole because of inflation. If people applied naturalism and science consistently they'd realize the stupidity of saying the poor deserve their place.
"... little do they (kids) realise that sooner or later their formative years are going to be gone and the workforce will be waiting for them. In a way I guess they have to be forced, but it is not the best way to learn IMHO."
Maybe that says something about the socio-economic order of the world that needs to be fundamentally changed. Schools are nothing more then worker factories for the economy. Most people are no long self-sufficient because of technology and being willingly or unconsciously among the disposessed and displaced under a constantly changing and anarchic economy that cannot promise steady jobs or streams of money to pay for the necessities of life. It is in the long run a recipe for unhappyness for everyone as companies try to squeeze out every last bit of profit from the their workers and keep governments, schools and all people of all nations on devestating economic treadmills which is directly responsible for the explosion of depression, people can no longer live life at their own pace, but they are forced to live at the pace set by someone elses money, ownership of goods and property and "societies" idealogical standards which may in fact be inherently destructive to peoples happyness and ability to cope.
Think about why people even need such advanced education (because there are no jobs for more "basic" skills) and you knowing that human beings are born under natural laws that govern their potential, you slowly begin to understand the gravity of the problem. Society is attempting to order and mold how people to live around their economic idealogy, instead of being rationally based on what is true and factual about a persons working or skill potential.
Why should someone live poor or a life of hardship just because he learning disability and cannot excel in school for example? Our society is still backward and ignorant by any kind of sane or rational standard when it comes to taking care of others less well endowed with potential to suceed on their own in their current unnatural human made environment.