why do you consider investing in a PS4 (or XBox One, for that matter) "starting over". You can keep the PS2 and PS3... can't you?
I have a fairly large AV setup, but at some point, you have to put a limit on the shelf space you're going to dedicate to the various game machines. There are other contenders for that space here: the prepro, 9 power amps, an apple tv, a mac mini, a Roku, a DVR security system, power conditioning, network switch, etc. Limits occur also with the number of devices I can plug into the prepro before I end up having to deal with external switches and the like. Then there is this march of game machines: Ps3 (which contains a PS2, no need for a PS2 because of that), XBox, XBox360, and the Wii.
There's another issue, too. Time and use will kill these machines. The drives will fail, and eventually specialized hardware will go as well. Because there is no backwards compatibility, barring illicit emulation on PCs and the like, the software will become obsolete. I don't like that idea. If I spend $50 on a piece of software, the guy who makes the decision to obsolete that software is not my friend.
Finally, and this is just my taste of course, but IMHO, the best games ever are a generation or more back. Ever more polygons in a shooter doesn't make me do anything but yawn. It's all about the gameplay, and VERY few games get that exactly right. I would point to mechassault's online play (and to a lesser extent, the game in single user mode) as an example of getting it "exactly" right. Then there's Maximo -- the penultimate platformer. Not designed for kids, that game was actually difficult as well as pretty damned cute. And funny. The only new thing to come along recently is guitar hero and similar, and they've got significant appeal to me (I'm a rock musician among other things) but the controllers are so cheap and simplistic... not great. Then there's the one that actually uses your guitar (Ubisoft's Rocksmith), and that was a nice swing at the ball, but in the end a strikeout for the irritating, plodding pace.
So yes, older games do get played regularly here, and likely that will be the case for some time. I don't have the urge to go for the latest and greatest. I just want to have fun. Sometimes those things go together, sometimes they don't. Both Sony and Microsoft are in my doghouse, as it were, for poor treatment of the customer -- me. Would I buy one (or both) if there was some terrific title? Yeah, I might. But it'd have to be bleeding-at-the-gums awesome.:)
However, look where the presidential elections put their campaigns and money. Just a few states. Why? Because the other states are known quantities. California is blue; Texas is red; etc. No point in campaigning in either place. You put your arguments in the ears of those that can make a difference, and that's not going to be found in those places.
Discover web site? Who are you going to convince? New-age crystal-waving UFO advocates? People who know the science already? Both groups are fixed in position. It's a waste of time.
...citation not needed -- just go read a comment thread and watch how many people change position.
Ok, here's my take. Consider the voters. There's a huge bunch of dedicated, unswayable republicans. There's a huge bunch of dedicated, unswayable democrats. Almost nothing can make these people change their position. These are in almost perfect balance, because they're not making decisions rationally; they're making decisions based upon a random distribution of single party planks or other factors (like, that's how my wife votes, or that's how the family votes.)
In between are the swing voters who actually decide things. Arguments on web sites don't make them swing. They are thinkers. Arguments on web sites don't make either of the dedicated voter groups change their mind either. They're just talking to hear themselves talk and get a rah-rah from like minded types.
How does this relate to science? I think we have a very similar breakdown. There's a group of people who aren't science oriented, even if they know a few facts. They're influenced by things like religion, "dad told me", the enticement of rumors, etc. These people are not going to change their minds. Then there's a group who knows science is... well, science, and they're aware that it's a process that, in large part, delivers new and reliable knowledge, as well as new and interesting paths where knowledge may be found. They're not going to change their minds either.
Swing science types? Not so many. That would be people who aren't sciency, as it were, and could be convinced (but if someone wasn't convinced by their science classes, I don't hold out much hope for them, unless their science classes were truly awful.) Or, it would be people who are aware of science and its wonderful track record, who are currently going along with yes, science is the bomb, but who would easily be convinced that science is consistently wrong. Know anyone like that? I don't.
Consoles are for geeks who know that computer games have a history of trashing the computer they're run on. My consoles keep me from ever even thinking about buying another computer game. My experience with computer games -- as opposed to dedicated consoles -- was almost entirely bad. Since I stopped running them, I've enjoyed unprecedented stability. Furthermore, I've never seen a console harmed in any way by a game, so there's that.
So far with the PS4 they are trying to tout that they've learned their lesson
I bought the PS2 and PS3 because at the time, they offered backward compatibility. To this day, I can run PS1 and PS2 stuff, awesome games like Crash Bandicoot and Maximo. With the PS4 they're telling me that the media library of titles I spent a *lot* of money on will not run on the new hardware. My reaction to that is simply to not buy a PS4. Instead, I bought a couple more used, working copies of the original (meaning, have those that have the PS2 hardware in 'em) PS3s to keep in a very low use state for the likely day when the one I'm using dies. I'm *really* tired of having to start all over again, and this time -- I'm just not gonna do it. The (considerable) up side is that PS3 titles and PS2 titles can be had for pennies, and I'll never run out of "new" games to try. And my favorite game of all time isn't a PS title anyway -- MechAssault -- so phhbbbbt.
What I don't understand is this bogus association between the DSLR and not sharing. I shoot 99% DSLR, and I share like mad -- almost everything I shoot gets posted, unless I outright foul up the shot, which isn't typical. I have cameras in my iPad, my phone, I even have a small video camera I carry, but almost everything comes from the DSLR. First, the images are MUCH better, even when crushed down to "sharing size", and second, the lens selection gives me many times the flexibility as compared to the various P&S hardware.
So it's fine if you shoot the way you do, but I don't see that it points up anything inherent in DSLRs that represents a shortcoming.
Why would you be surprised that someone buying an entry level ($800, your number) DSLR would be a beginner?
When they spend $3000 or $5000 or more on the camera -- plus perhaps as much on lenses -- and they don't know how to use any of it, now we're talking smile-into-your-napkin time. Even so, there's nothing saying they won't learn how to use it eventually.
After all, it's a lot more fun learning to play guitar on a Martin dreadnaught than it is on some cheap box from the low price specials category of Musician's Friend. You dig?
Not only that, but the thesis that one can take "good" photos varies hugely with the definition of what a "good photo" is. It's one thing for social media; perhaps another for family; another for marketing; another for deep space; another for stacked macros and stacked low light; another for historical archives; another for forensic analysis; another for HDR; another for sports and other rapid-motion incorporating shots; another for time lapse; another for journalism... you get the idea.
DSLRs are to point and shoots what high end sports cars are to volkswagons. They have a great deal more potential, said potential rather easily tapped by one with expertise in hand, but getting that potential out of them requires more than picking them up and pushing a button without some supporting knowledge.
The biggest upside, at least in my opinion, is that if you decide to go for a DSLR, all that's between you and expertise is your learning capacity and available time. Truly invest the one in the other and you'll never, ever consider going back to a point and shoot.
...does not speak for me. The only time I've spent with the star wars movies, all six of them, was thoroughly entertaining. More? Bring it on. Also judging by the rousing success of the movies and later DVDs and Blurays, Designer Prescott Harvey doesn't speak for much of anyone else, either. Perhaps he should go back to... designing.
Their own internet might simply mean "not connected or dependent upon" the current network, and in technical terms, it's quite practical.
Furthermore, with the continued erosion of the US economy into a non-producing one, the value of our participation is changing from supplier and consumer of useful things into primarily consumer of things. For countries that are not marketing to us, that can change the value proposition of being connected to us.
A very large number of US network users see the net as twitter, facebook, etc. These are not nodes of productivity. Loss of connectivity to those people wouldn't make much -- if any -- difference to, say, Brazil.
Don't think it can't happen. It might be an uphill battle for a while, but then again, perhaps not. There's a damn big world out there outside the borders of homeland stupidity.
...and that's why perfectly good comments are modded down, the equivalent of "I disagree" but also, because of Slashdot's thresholds, the equivalent of one user hiding another's comments.
That's also why high quality comments from anonymous posters are often buried from the moment they are posted -- because moderation isn't designed to foster high quality, it's designed to foster group-think. Fortunately, a bunch of very smart posters means that "group think" here isn't nearly as uniform as it is elsewhere.
Slashdot's moderation/metamod system is BADLY broken. The site survives because it has unusually intelligent commenters overall; not because moderation is working.
I'm still using an old version of XCode. Never upgraded XCode past the point where I started using it to develop apps; so never had to drop support for old versions, either iOS or OSX.
The problem -- at least as it seems to me -- is primarily developers jumping on new versions of XCode, and using new, OS-level specific APIs, which in turn make old devices unable to run the code unless you're *very* careful and catch every instance of new API and make an alternate, home-brewed version available to do that job (or disable a feature.) That's possible, but not easy. And most developers don't do it consistently, which again seems to indicate it isn't all that easy (with Objective C, you can actually tell if a particular call is available to you, and of course, you can just pay attention to the OS rev level.) But basically, the more OS levels you concurrently support, the larger your support load is. No matter how you do it.
To a lesser extent, but still problematic, Apple deprecates or breaks older APIs. That can be a real problem. Sometimes they never fix bugs, too; they just leave an older OS behind, bugs and broken features as-shipped, and wander off into the sunset with a new version, as if that was appropriate behavior. It's not: if you advertise X as having Y feature under, or as, Z OS, as far as I'm concerned, you're on the hook to make it work as advertised and you can't get off the hook by saying "oh, we fixed that in the next version (that doesn't work with a lot of your stuff, sucker.)"
I've been able to keep earlier applications up and running and relatively healthy by simply not upgrading XCode. Do I miss some functionality? Yep. But my customers and users can at least count on their apps continuing to work as long as it remains in my power to manage that. And they don't have to upgrade their OS to make it happen, although they can still do so if they choose to without my stuff breaking.
I went through this with Windows, but in the end, Microsoft so radically changed the way Windows worked -- from window metrics to internal operations -- that it became impossible. That's when I abandoned developing for Windows.
Something that has shown considerable promise is Qt. They're still on the "we don't need to fix bugs, we'll just upgrade" train, but as a cross platform development tool, it really has potential. I've got a software defined radio application developed with Qt 4.7 (Qt 5 was very seriously broken last I looked) that makes some pretty serious demands in terms of CPU and a broad swath of APIs, and have been able to keep it running under both OSX and Windows, which I think says a lot for Qt. Again, staying away from the "upgrade" is one of the things that has kept my users in working software.
Oh, I don't expect it to *happen*, I said it was what we needed. We're headed for a completely crashed economy. We're pretty far along already. Three million unemployed in the gulags, unemployable when they come out, and tens of millions more depending on the government for a dole of one type or another, already far exceeding said government's ability to deliver. Congress isn't going to do what's needed, they're already rich, and getting richer, off of destroying the country. The business sector is similarly engaged.
Nope, just making an observation. Y'all have inherited a broken economy, a corrupt political system, and a set of values that makes you mortally afraid to lift a finger against it all. It's fascinating to watch.
Yes, well, when your in-garage 3d printer can make more than shapely lumps, as in, solid state integrated circuitry, working mechanicals, etc., such that you can (for instance) print something as complex as say, an R/c car, please let me know. In the meantime, your 3d printing does not stand as a general manufacturing capability.
First, no trade wars, because there would be no trade. Internal economy. We have both abundant resources and a huge consuming base. Barriers up, both ways. You can't have a trade war if you aren't engaged in trade.
Second, protectionism will have to include hard borders -- no further immigration.
Slashdot Mirror
ok, sure. Where can I get Mechassault for the PS4, then?
I have a fairly large AV setup, but at some point, you have to put a limit on the shelf space you're going to dedicate to the various game machines. There are other contenders for that space here: the prepro, 9 power amps, an apple tv, a mac mini, a Roku, a DVR security system, power conditioning, network switch, etc. Limits occur also with the number of devices I can plug into the prepro before I end up having to deal with external switches and the like. Then there is this march of game machines: Ps3 (which contains a PS2, no need for a PS2 because of that), XBox, XBox360, and the Wii.
There's another issue, too. Time and use will kill these machines. The drives will fail, and eventually specialized hardware will go as well. Because there is no backwards compatibility, barring illicit emulation on PCs and the like, the software will become obsolete. I don't like that idea. If I spend $50 on a piece of software, the guy who makes the decision to obsolete that software is not my friend.
Finally, and this is just my taste of course, but IMHO, the best games ever are a generation or more back. Ever more polygons in a shooter doesn't make me do anything but yawn. It's all about the gameplay, and VERY few games get that exactly right. I would point to mechassault's online play (and to a lesser extent, the game in single user mode) as an example of getting it "exactly" right. Then there's Maximo -- the penultimate platformer. Not designed for kids, that game was actually difficult as well as pretty damned cute. And funny. The only new thing to come along recently is guitar hero and similar, and they've got significant appeal to me (I'm a rock musician among other things) but the controllers are so cheap and simplistic... not great. Then there's the one that actually uses your guitar (Ubisoft's Rocksmith), and that was a nice swing at the ball, but in the end a strikeout for the irritating, plodding pace.
So yes, older games do get played regularly here, and likely that will be the case for some time. I don't have the urge to go for the latest and greatest. I just want to have fun. Sometimes those things go together, sometimes they don't. Both Sony and Microsoft are in my doghouse, as it were, for poor treatment of the customer -- me. Would I buy one (or both) if there was some terrific title? Yeah, I might. But it'd have to be bleeding-at-the-gums awesome. :)
No point. Wouldn't convince anyone. :)
However, look where the presidential elections put their campaigns and money. Just a few states. Why? Because the other states are known quantities. California is blue; Texas is red; etc. No point in campaigning in either place. You put your arguments in the ears of those that can make a difference, and that's not going to be found in those places.
Discover web site? Who are you going to convince? New-age crystal-waving UFO advocates? People who know the science already? Both groups are fixed in position. It's a waste of time.
Yes... yes.... Walk in, strike a pose, and declare "I shall pour for you -- I, and no one else. For I Am Sancho. Now give me the wine bottle."
Ok, here's my take. Consider the voters. There's a huge bunch of dedicated, unswayable republicans. There's a huge bunch of dedicated, unswayable democrats. Almost nothing can make these people change their position. These are in almost perfect balance, because they're not making decisions rationally; they're making decisions based upon a random distribution of single party planks or other factors (like, that's how my wife votes, or that's how the family votes.)
In between are the swing voters who actually decide things. Arguments on web sites don't make them swing. They are thinkers. Arguments on web sites don't make either of the dedicated voter groups change their mind either. They're just talking to hear themselves talk and get a rah-rah from like minded types.
How does this relate to science? I think we have a very similar breakdown. There's a group of people who aren't science oriented, even if they know a few facts. They're influenced by things like religion, "dad told me", the enticement of rumors, etc. These people are not going to change their minds. Then there's a group who knows science is... well, science, and they're aware that it's a process that, in large part, delivers new and reliable knowledge, as well as new and interesting paths where knowledge may be found. They're not going to change their minds either.
Swing science types? Not so many. That would be people who aren't sciency, as it were, and could be convinced (but if someone wasn't convinced by their science classes, I don't hold out much hope for them, unless their science classes were truly awful.) Or, it would be people who are aware of science and its wonderful track record, who are currently going along with yes, science is the bomb, but who would easily be convinced that science is consistently wrong. Know anyone like that? I don't.
Bottom line? The comments... they do nothing. :)
Consoles are for geeks who know that computer games have a history of trashing the computer they're run on. My consoles keep me from ever even thinking about buying another computer game. My experience with computer games -- as opposed to dedicated consoles -- was almost entirely bad. Since I stopped running them, I've enjoyed unprecedented stability. Furthermore, I've never seen a console harmed in any way by a game, so there's that.
I bought the PS2 and PS3 because at the time, they offered backward compatibility. To this day, I can run PS1 and PS2 stuff, awesome games like Crash Bandicoot and Maximo. With the PS4 they're telling me that the media library of titles I spent a *lot* of money on will not run on the new hardware. My reaction to that is simply to not buy a PS4. Instead, I bought a couple more used, working copies of the original (meaning, have those that have the PS2 hardware in 'em) PS3s to keep in a very low use state for the likely day when the one I'm using dies. I'm *really* tired of having to start all over again, and this time -- I'm just not gonna do it. The (considerable) up side is that PS3 titles and PS2 titles can be had for pennies, and I'll never run out of "new" games to try. And my favorite game of all time isn't a PS title anyway -- MechAssault -- so phhbbbbt.
That is certainly not a "fantastic lens" :)
What I don't understand is this bogus association between the DSLR and not sharing. I shoot 99% DSLR, and I share like mad -- almost everything I shoot gets posted, unless I outright foul up the shot, which isn't typical. I have cameras in my iPad, my phone, I even have a small video camera I carry, but almost everything comes from the DSLR. First, the images are MUCH better, even when crushed down to "sharing size", and second, the lens selection gives me many times the flexibility as compared to the various P&S hardware.
So it's fine if you shoot the way you do, but I don't see that it points up anything inherent in DSLRs that represents a shortcoming.
Why would you be surprised that someone buying an entry level ($800, your number) DSLR would be a beginner?
When they spend $3000 or $5000 or more on the camera -- plus perhaps as much on lenses -- and they don't know how to use any of it, now we're talking smile-into-your-napkin time. Even so, there's nothing saying they won't learn how to use it eventually.
After all, it's a lot more fun learning to play guitar on a Martin dreadnaught than it is on some cheap box from the low price specials category of Musician's Friend. You dig?
No, no. This is being cute.
Not only that, but the thesis that one can take "good" photos varies hugely with the definition of what a "good photo" is. It's one thing for social media; perhaps another for family; another for marketing; another for deep space; another for stacked macros and stacked low light; another for historical archives; another for forensic analysis; another for HDR; another for sports and other rapid-motion incorporating shots; another for time lapse; another for journalism... you get the idea.
DSLRs are to point and shoots what high end sports cars are to volkswagons. They have a great deal more potential, said potential rather easily tapped by one with expertise in hand, but getting that potential out of them requires more than picking them up and pushing a button without some supporting knowledge.
The biggest upside, at least in my opinion, is that if you decide to go for a DSLR, all that's between you and expertise is your learning capacity and available time. Truly invest the one in the other and you'll never, ever consider going back to a point and shoot.
"Push the button.... don't push the button... Lemme just flip a coin!"
...does not speak for me. The only time I've spent with the star wars movies, all six of them, was thoroughly entertaining. More? Bring it on. Also judging by the rousing success of the movies and later DVDs and Blurays, Designer Prescott Harvey doesn't speak for much of anyone else, either. Perhaps he should go back to... designing.
Their own internet might simply mean "not connected or dependent upon" the current network, and in technical terms, it's quite practical.
Furthermore, with the continued erosion of the US economy into a non-producing one, the value of our participation is changing from supplier and consumer of useful things into primarily consumer of things. For countries that are not marketing to us, that can change the value proposition of being connected to us.
A very large number of US network users see the net as twitter, facebook, etc. These are not nodes of productivity. Loss of connectivity to those people wouldn't make much -- if any -- difference to, say, Brazil.
Don't think it can't happen. It might be an uphill battle for a while, but then again, perhaps not. There's a damn big world out there outside the borders of homeland stupidity.
...and that's why perfectly good comments are modded down, the equivalent of "I disagree" but also, because of Slashdot's thresholds, the equivalent of one user hiding another's comments.
That's also why high quality comments from anonymous posters are often buried from the moment they are posted -- because moderation isn't designed to foster high quality, it's designed to foster group-think. Fortunately, a bunch of very smart posters means that "group think" here isn't nearly as uniform as it is elsewhere.
Slashdot's moderation/metamod system is BADLY broken. The site survives because it has unusually intelligent commenters overall; not because moderation is working.
Don't go to those people, man. You don't get the same zombie back!
Well, clearly, there's your problem. Your ceilings are too high!
Me too. Every time I get my hopes up, it turns out they haven't done it.
I'm still using an old version of XCode. Never upgraded XCode past the point where I started using it to develop apps; so never had to drop support for old versions, either iOS or OSX.
The problem -- at least as it seems to me -- is primarily developers jumping on new versions of XCode, and using new, OS-level specific APIs, which in turn make old devices unable to run the code unless you're *very* careful and catch every instance of new API and make an alternate, home-brewed version available to do that job (or disable a feature.) That's possible, but not easy. And most developers don't do it consistently, which again seems to indicate it isn't all that easy (with Objective C, you can actually tell if a particular call is available to you, and of course, you can just pay attention to the OS rev level.) But basically, the more OS levels you concurrently support, the larger your support load is. No matter how you do it.
To a lesser extent, but still problematic, Apple deprecates or breaks older APIs. That can be a real problem. Sometimes they never fix bugs, too; they just leave an older OS behind, bugs and broken features as-shipped, and wander off into the sunset with a new version, as if that was appropriate behavior. It's not: if you advertise X as having Y feature under, or as, Z OS, as far as I'm concerned, you're on the hook to make it work as advertised and you can't get off the hook by saying "oh, we fixed that in the next version (that doesn't work with a lot of your stuff, sucker.)"
I've been able to keep earlier applications up and running and relatively healthy by simply not upgrading XCode. Do I miss some functionality? Yep. But my customers and users can at least count on their apps continuing to work as long as it remains in my power to manage that. And they don't have to upgrade their OS to make it happen, although they can still do so if they choose to without my stuff breaking.
I went through this with Windows, but in the end, Microsoft so radically changed the way Windows worked -- from window metrics to internal operations -- that it became impossible. That's when I abandoned developing for Windows.
Something that has shown considerable promise is Qt. They're still on the "we don't need to fix bugs, we'll just upgrade" train, but as a cross platform development tool, it really has potential. I've got a software defined radio application developed with Qt 4.7 (Qt 5 was very seriously broken last I looked) that makes some pretty serious demands in terms of CPU and a broad swath of APIs, and have been able to keep it running under both OSX and Windows, which I think says a lot for Qt. Again, staying away from the "upgrade" is one of the things that has kept my users in working software.
Oh, I don't expect it to *happen*, I said it was what we needed. We're headed for a completely crashed economy. We're pretty far along already. Three million unemployed in the gulags, unemployable when they come out, and tens of millions more depending on the government for a dole of one type or another, already far exceeding said government's ability to deliver. Congress isn't going to do what's needed, they're already rich, and getting richer, off of destroying the country. The business sector is similarly engaged.
Nope, just making an observation. Y'all have inherited a broken economy, a corrupt political system, and a set of values that makes you mortally afraid to lift a finger against it all. It's fascinating to watch.
oh, look, how cute. a "-1, I disagree" mod.
Yes, well, when your in-garage 3d printer can make more than shapely lumps, as in, solid state integrated circuitry, working mechanicals, etc., such that you can (for instance) print something as complex as say, an R/c car, please let me know. In the meantime, your 3d printing does not stand as a general manufacturing capability.
Don't you know beauty is in the eye of the becoder?
First, no trade wars, because there would be no trade. Internal economy. We have both abundant resources and a huge consuming base. Barriers up, both ways. You can't have a trade war if you aren't engaged in trade.
Second, protectionism will have to include hard borders -- no further immigration.