That is an interesting idea. There would definitely be legal battles over. I'm pretty sure that the music locker sites have already paved the way for the storing of media on a server as being legal. The could even go so far as to list the number of copies that are currently available in (near) real time so you would know whether you could stream or not right from the menu.
I intended to respond to the parent of your post. I don't know why it attached to yours. Your post was obviously said in jest. The post you responded to was not said it jest. It was totally serious.
I'm sure there are people that are in poverty b/c of their choices, just as their are people that are rich despite their choices. But I find it very difficult to believe that someone making less than $10,000/year really has a lot of upward mobility available to them, barring a few exceptional cases. Someone making less than $5000/year is probably close to starving, especially in a metro area. So we're talking 3.5 million households [census.gov] that are on the desperate edge, another 6 million that probably have little hope of a brighter future. And that's actually households, not individuals. So some of those making $10,000 might be supporting a family of four. Sure, there are people in complete shit-holes around the world that are worse off, but that sounds bad enough to me to deserve a little help and sympathy.
Pretty much nobody goes hungry in the US without a personal choice being made to go hungry. Either by the person themselves, or for children, by the child's parents. Pretty much every school in the country will feed poor kids between 1 and 3 meals a day. Poor adults can literally stand on the street corner and make 50 buck a day just asking for it. No, this is not a life I want to live, but it is untrue to claim that people are starving in the streets without any personal choice in the matter. People making less than $5000 are working less than 14 hours a week. At $10000 a year they are working less than 28 hours a week. While I know that jobs can be hard to find, but if someone is chronically only working 1.5 to 3 days a week, it is hard to claim that they are not making some personal choices in their income.
"people that make poor choices that lead to poverty are more likely to be the kind of person that engages in crime"
That is making the wrong statement. It isn't that being poor makes you engage in crime. It is that engaging in blue collar crime leads to being poor. The crime is ONE of the bad choices people make that leads to them being poor. You mixed up your cause and effect, and then dismissed it because the effect doesn't cause the cause.
OK Mister SuperCreationist(tm)....
Whatever, asshole.
The fact that you think the world was created 1994 doesn't make me an asshole.
Commander Keen
Dos games. Please try and keep up with the very basic premise that you have been arguing this whole time
Chips Challenge, Sim City,...Battle Chess
Each of which is an example that shows you couldn't get decent gaming performance out of windows prior to 1994.
All of this predated the 3dfx Voodoo graphics card, which accelerated graphics. At the same time the 3dfx cards came out, we began to see more 3D games such as Descent and Descent II and Quake, of which only Descent predated Windows 95, but was released in 1995, and all of them ran fine under Windows 95.
Again with this SuperCreationist(tm) drivel. If you can't accept that the world was created prior to 1994, you should bow out of conversations concerning products and events that predate the year you believe the universe was called into being.
The only thing about your SuperCreationist(tm) views I am curious about is which sect you belong to. Do you believe that the world was called into creation by Bill Gates or Steve Jobs? I can see by your ramblings that you are not of the Jay Minor sect, as you wouldn't be holding Commander Keen up as an example of good game performance for DOS much less Windows. The fact that you think it was a Windows game implies a lack of familiarity with gaming in what your people would call "The first days(tm)". So, that implies that you are from the Steve Jobs sect of SuperCreationism(tm), but giving any credit to Windows contradicts that. You must be a convert. A SuperCreationist(tm) that converted from the Steve Jobs sect to the Bill Gates sect at some point in the past. That still leave the question over which one you believe called the universe into being in 1994....
That likely comes from their (not entirely inaccurate) perception that the poor people "over there" don't have a way out, while "over here" many of the poor are poor because of personal choices they make.
It may not be PC to say, and no doubt it does not apply to ALL poor people in the US, but a huge segment of the poor in the US work very hard to stay in their current situation. I have lived in poor areas. As a youth, because my family was poor. As an adult, because I wanted to live cheap and save money. I have interacted with a lot of poor people as well as having been one of them my self.
"Poor" is a relative term. You can only be poor in comparison to other people. In the US, our "poor" have it really good compared the "poor" of other countries. In fact, if you look at the whole world, we don't have "poor", other than a small number of the truly insane that are living on the streets. Most of the homeless are not even poor compared to other parts of the world. That being said, when you look at our "poor", there is a lot of screwed up stuff that is instigated in those areas that perpetuate the situation.
Poor dangerous neighborhoods are usually not dangerous because of outside influences. They tend to be dangerous because of the people that live in them. Obviously not everyone that lives in them, but enough. What is often missed is the people in those neighborhoods that supply a support structure to the primary dangers. I owned and lived in a condo in a poor dangerous neighborhood about 5 years ago. The most dangerous people in our HOA were old single women. Not because they committed violent acts themselves, but because they would move their violent drug dealing children into their homes, and no one would hold the old single woman responsible for inviting that element into the neighbor hood. Instead of shunning them as the accomplices they were, neighbors would see them as "victims" and thus become accomplices to the violence themselves. Sometimes they would go so far as to fund the violent drug dealers. Neighbors would bring food to the poor old mother, and the mother would give the cash she would have spent on food to her violent drug dealing child.
And the racist trolling begins. You racists jump out on every political conversation. The US is not at war over race. There is only one color that the people pushing these wars car about. That color is "green". The reason that we are not fighting countries that are primarily Caucasian isn't because we want to fight your so called "brown" people. It is because all of the Caucasian nations were close enough together that they already got most of their with each other out of the way. They have developed stable economies that rely on not fighting wars on their own turf. This means that they try to fight as far away from their own countries as possible. The fact that they are "brown people" as you put it, is purely coincidence.
Your attempt to prove your point with the racist strawman argument of calling people in the Middle East "brown people" and attributing it to the warmongers who don't care what color the people's skin is, doesn't make you enlightened. It just makes you a racist.
It's not intended to be practical. It is like buying a Batmobile. You don't buy it for practicality. You buy it because it looks exactly like the Batmobile. Once you change the look, you might as well get a standard vehicle.
OK Mister SuperCreationist(tm).... While you may have scrolls that describe dinosaurs and cavemen battling each other on early versions of Windows games, they are flights of fancy. Doom for windows 3.1 was the proof of concept for WinG. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinG
WinG was released in 1994. This was one year before Win95 and it was the direct progenitor of DirectX. WinG in 1994 was THE turning point that showed it was possible to have games run decent under Windows. WinG itself was a proof of concept.
As for your examples. Chips challenge looks like a shitty shareware game for the Vic20. It is graphically less impressive than Solitaire and Sim City, while a fun game is, much like Solitaire, graphically minimalistic. Not much more graphically intensive than Solitaire.
Are you really using Windows 95 as a reference to say I am wrong? Are you one of the SuperCreationist(tm) that think the world was created in 1995? Windows 95 was (depending on how you count versions) somewhere between the 4th and 11th version of Windows. You might have to dust off those old buried scrolls to find out about it, but the first Widely populare version of Windows was 3.0, and it was unusable for games more complex than Solitaire.
While they will continue to advance, we already see that they have dramatically slowed in their advance. Screen resolutions are already becoming a non-issue, and most people will settle on 1920x1080. Color depth has been topped out for a long time. We are getting pretty close to looking photo realistic, and when that happens, you have pretty well topped out the graphics requirements for all but a niche market. Graphics processing will soon be where CPU processing is. A small niche see running faster as a fun hobby, and the majority of people will not care because even the low end is more than they use.
I agree, but the terms "Cache" and "Install" predate 2001. They predate personal computers. Thus, saying that the terms are defined by the design of Windows XP is incorrect. If I break out my Amiga 500, it can still install software, and it can still cache data, even though it does not have any kind of "Administrative Privileges".
Correct. The Atari 2600 had a 4k memory limit due to the socket size. This was overcome later with various techniques, but 4k was the maximum size for first gen Atari 2600 media. And yes. When the Atari 2600 was released it was considered a computer. The idea of a game console not being a computer came quite a while later.
I remember the last time this happened. When the FPS demographic started to overshadow us old school gamers. It was a sad time as we watched fewer and fewer good games come out, and more and more of the me too FPS arrive on the scene. I don't play many FPS's so maybe they have improved more than I thought, but I don't think we will ever see a games that are the likes of Ultima 4-6 ever again.
I can remember when the idea of running an OS in the background while gaming seemed ridiculous. The power of computers out paced the increased needs of games, and now we all leave Windows (or OS of choice) running in the background while we play games. Worrying about the long term overhead of an abstraction requires a firm belief that our shade of gray is better than their shade of gray.
While we are not their yet, I can believe we could get there. The ONLY problem with abstraction is that it slows things down. Computers have been fast enough for most users for a while. It is likely that the speed of the computer will stop being the limiting factor in making games. Most people will be satisfied with a system that looks as good as their HDTV, and a lot of those people will be playing on those HDTVs. So, rendering 1920x1080 is likely as far as the market will push games. Yes, for the time being we can install to higher resolutions, but as more and more 1920x1080 screens end up in households, we will likely see less and less developers worrying about the minority of players using higher resolutions.
With that being the case, it starts to become more and more feasible to have a machine that will run the exact same environment in a browser as on the bare metel. If an emulator written to run in JavaScript and HTML5 is written with high accuracy, there is no reason that it could not perform just as well as the speed limited games that run on the bare metal. There are already emulators that run in the browser, so the path has already been started.
I doubt that we will see a huge increase in game sizes anytime soon. The exploding sizes of games is just that, an explosion. It happens all at once, then settles down for a while. This usually happens when a bottle neck is removed that had previously limited the size. Cassette tape to Floppy disk, 5.25" floppy to 3.5" floppy. Hard disks becoming practical. CDs being introduced. As far as I can see, the current bottleneck is monitors. As much as many of us are using monitors that are larger than 1920x1080, 1080p is the new 'standard'. It is good enough for most people, and the economies of scale for the sellers, and the convenience for the buyers, from the convergence of TVs and computer monitors is likely going peg our graphics at that resolution. This will put a soft limit on the size of games.
I don't want the prediction of everything going streaming to be true, but I didn't want things like Steam to exist either. The good old days of gaming were largely destroyed by a larger demographic of new gamers pulling virtually all development away from the really good stuff. The current crop of gamers may have to face the same reality that as soon as a larger demographic can be hit, every game producer will abandon them the way the previous generation of gamers were abandoned.
If you want to keep playing games like you get today, you may want to start sharpening your Linux development skills, because that may be the only way you will see them.
On that tangent, why the heck has no one produced a Gamebuntu distribution that loads up to a 6' interface by default, supports use by a remote control or gamepad out of the box, and has an installation screen that looks like the Apple/Android market? I know, I know, Linux is open source, so I could do it myself......
Your definition of "installation" is made up to fit what you want it to be. "Administrative Privileges" is a relatively new concept for for the kind of system a person would install games on. Auto installing hasn't been common because dumping things on peoples hard drives without their express permission is considered a bad thing. It has been possible since the early 80's.
By infrastructure, I hope that you mean pipes that let ISPs run cable through at dramatically lower costs than digging up roads and burying cables one by one. It would also mean that once the first right of was was pushed through, new companies could enter the market without the roadblock of right of ways.
A particular upshot of this is that pipes are something that most municipalities have a huge amount of experience with.
If you can't trust the manufacturer to not put in such backdoors, how can you trust that they have not already put it in and just not given you an interface to it?
You rationalize why furry porn is great for kids, and you accuse me of having issues. You seem to think that continuing to repeat why your perticular fetish is OK somehow makes it not sexual. The reason licking your penis in public is socially awkward is because it is sexual. You probably don't think the transvestite bar keep is a transvestite either. I get it. You REALLY want Shrek to be appropriate, so you tell yourself that they are even though half the point of series is to be "edgy" and inappropriate.
That might be their goal. The ridiculous notion that kids who kill animals are serial killers in training has already taken root and is now considered "common knowledge". Perhaps they are hoping to get an equally ridiculous meme going about killing animals being a perverted sexual act.
Slashdot Mirror
That is an interesting idea. There would definitely be legal battles over. I'm pretty sure that the music locker sites have already paved the way for the storing of media on a server as being legal. The could even go so far as to list the number of copies that are currently available in (near) real time so you would know whether you could stream or not right from the menu.
I intended to respond to the parent of your post. I don't know why it attached to yours. Your post was obviously said in jest. The post you responded to was not said it jest. It was totally serious.
I'm sure there are people that are in poverty b/c of their choices, just as their are people that are rich despite their choices. But I find it very difficult to believe that someone making less than $10,000/year really has a lot of upward mobility available to them, barring a few exceptional cases. Someone making less than $5000/year is probably close to starving, especially in a metro area. So we're talking 3.5 million households [census.gov] that are on the desperate edge, another 6 million that probably have little hope of a brighter future. And that's actually households, not individuals. So some of those making $10,000 might be supporting a family of four. Sure, there are people in complete shit-holes around the world that are worse off, but that sounds bad enough to me to deserve a little help and sympathy.
Pretty much nobody goes hungry in the US without a personal choice being made to go hungry. Either by the person themselves, or for children, by the child's parents. Pretty much every school in the country will feed poor kids between 1 and 3 meals a day. Poor adults can literally stand on the street corner and make 50 buck a day just asking for it. No, this is not a life I want to live, but it is untrue to claim that people are starving in the streets without any personal choice in the matter. People making less than $5000 are working less than 14 hours a week. At $10000 a year they are working less than 28 hours a week. While I know that jobs can be hard to find, but if someone is chronically only working 1.5 to 3 days a week, it is hard to claim that they are not making some personal choices in their income.
"people that make poor choices that lead to poverty are more likely to be the kind of person that engages in crime"
That is making the wrong statement. It isn't that being poor makes you engage in crime. It is that engaging in blue collar crime leads to being poor. The crime is ONE of the bad choices people make that leads to them being poor. You mixed up your cause and effect, and then dismissed it because the effect doesn't cause the cause.
OK Mister SuperCreationist(tm).... Whatever, asshole.
The fact that you think the world was created 1994 doesn't make me an asshole.
Commander Keen
Dos games. Please try and keep up with the very basic premise that you have been arguing this whole time
Chips Challenge, Sim City,...Battle Chess
Each of which is an example that shows you couldn't get decent gaming performance out of windows prior to 1994.
All of this predated the 3dfx Voodoo graphics card, which accelerated graphics. At the same time the 3dfx cards came out, we began to see more 3D games such as Descent and Descent II and Quake, of which only Descent predated Windows 95, but was released in 1995, and all of them ran fine under Windows 95.
Again with this SuperCreationist(tm) drivel. If you can't accept that the world was created prior to 1994, you should bow out of conversations concerning products and events that predate the year you believe the universe was called into being.
The only thing about your SuperCreationist(tm) views I am curious about is which sect you belong to. Do you believe that the world was called into creation by Bill Gates or Steve Jobs? I can see by your ramblings that you are not of the Jay Minor sect, as you wouldn't be holding Commander Keen up as an example of good game performance for DOS much less Windows. The fact that you think it was a Windows game implies a lack of familiarity with gaming in what your people would call "The first days(tm)". So, that implies that you are from the Steve Jobs sect of SuperCreationism(tm), but giving any credit to Windows contradicts that. You must be a convert. A SuperCreationist(tm) that converted from the Steve Jobs sect to the Bill Gates sect at some point in the past. That still leave the question over which one you believe called the universe into being in 1994....
That likely comes from their (not entirely inaccurate) perception that the poor people "over there" don't have a way out, while "over here" many of the poor are poor because of personal choices they make.
It may not be PC to say, and no doubt it does not apply to ALL poor people in the US, but a huge segment of the poor in the US work very hard to stay in their current situation. I have lived in poor areas. As a youth, because my family was poor. As an adult, because I wanted to live cheap and save money. I have interacted with a lot of poor people as well as having been one of them my self.
"Poor" is a relative term. You can only be poor in comparison to other people. In the US, our "poor" have it really good compared the "poor" of other countries. In fact, if you look at the whole world, we don't have "poor", other than a small number of the truly insane that are living on the streets. Most of the homeless are not even poor compared to other parts of the world. That being said, when you look at our "poor", there is a lot of screwed up stuff that is instigated in those areas that perpetuate the situation.
Poor dangerous neighborhoods are usually not dangerous because of outside influences. They tend to be dangerous because of the people that live in them. Obviously not everyone that lives in them, but enough. What is often missed is the people in those neighborhoods that supply a support structure to the primary dangers. I owned and lived in a condo in a poor dangerous neighborhood about 5 years ago. The most dangerous people in our HOA were old single women. Not because they committed violent acts themselves, but because they would move their violent drug dealing children into their homes, and no one would hold the old single woman responsible for inviting that element into the neighbor hood. Instead of shunning them as the accomplices they were, neighbors would see them as "victims" and thus become accomplices to the violence themselves. Sometimes they would go so far as to fund the violent drug dealers. Neighbors would bring food to the poor old mother, and the mother would give the cash she would have spent on food to her violent drug dealing child.
And the racist trolling begins. You racists jump out on every political conversation. The US is not at war over race. There is only one color that the people pushing these wars car about. That color is "green". The reason that we are not fighting countries that are primarily Caucasian isn't because we want to fight your so called "brown" people. It is because all of the Caucasian nations were close enough together that they already got most of their with each other out of the way. They have developed stable economies that rely on not fighting wars on their own turf. This means that they try to fight as far away from their own countries as possible. The fact that they are "brown people" as you put it, is purely coincidence.
Your attempt to prove your point with the racist strawman argument of calling people in the Middle East "brown people" and attributing it to the warmongers who don't care what color the people's skin is, doesn't make you enlightened. It just makes you a racist.
It's not intended to be practical. It is like buying a Batmobile. You don't buy it for practicality. You buy it because it looks exactly like the Batmobile. Once you change the look, you might as well get a standard vehicle.
OK Mister SuperCreationist(tm).... While you may have scrolls that describe dinosaurs and cavemen battling each other on early versions of Windows games, they are flights of fancy. Doom for windows 3.1 was the proof of concept for WinG. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinG
WinG was released in 1994. This was one year before Win95 and it was the direct progenitor of DirectX. WinG in 1994 was THE turning point that showed it was possible to have games run decent under Windows. WinG itself was a proof of concept.
As for your examples. Chips challenge looks like a shitty shareware game for the Vic20. It is graphically less impressive than Solitaire and Sim City, while a fun game is, much like Solitaire, graphically minimalistic. Not much more graphically intensive than Solitaire.
Only if you count Solitaire and Mine Sweeper as "Gaming". Gaming on Windows was farther behind Dos than web games are behind Windows games today.
Are you really using Windows 95 as a reference to say I am wrong? Are you one of the SuperCreationist(tm) that think the world was created in 1995? Windows 95 was (depending on how you count versions) somewhere between the 4th and 11th version of Windows. You might have to dust off those old buried scrolls to find out about it, but the first Widely populare version of Windows was 3.0, and it was unusable for games more complex than Solitaire.
While they will continue to advance, we already see that they have dramatically slowed in their advance. Screen resolutions are already becoming a non-issue, and most people will settle on 1920x1080. Color depth has been topped out for a long time. We are getting pretty close to looking photo realistic, and when that happens, you have pretty well topped out the graphics requirements for all but a niche market. Graphics processing will soon be where CPU processing is. A small niche see running faster as a fun hobby, and the majority of people will not care because even the low end is more than they use.
I agree, but the terms "Cache" and "Install" predate 2001. They predate personal computers. Thus, saying that the terms are defined by the design of Windows XP is incorrect. If I break out my Amiga 500, it can still install software, and it can still cache data, even though it does not have any kind of "Administrative Privileges".
Correct. The Atari 2600 had a 4k memory limit due to the socket size. This was overcome later with various techniques, but 4k was the maximum size for first gen Atari 2600 media. And yes. When the Atari 2600 was released it was considered a computer. The idea of a game console not being a computer came quite a while later.
I remember the last time this happened. When the FPS demographic started to overshadow us old school gamers. It was a sad time as we watched fewer and fewer good games come out, and more and more of the me too FPS arrive on the scene. I don't play many FPS's so maybe they have improved more than I thought, but I don't think we will ever see a games that are the likes of Ultima 4-6 ever again.
The whole idea of any kind of decent performing game running on a browser is just braindead...
I remember when we used to say that about running games in Windows.
I can remember when the idea of running an OS in the background while gaming seemed ridiculous. The power of computers out paced the increased needs of games, and now we all leave Windows (or OS of choice) running in the background while we play games. Worrying about the long term overhead of an abstraction requires a firm belief that our shade of gray is better than their shade of gray.
While we are not their yet, I can believe we could get there. The ONLY problem with abstraction is that it slows things down. Computers have been fast enough for most users for a while. It is likely that the speed of the computer will stop being the limiting factor in making games. Most people will be satisfied with a system that looks as good as their HDTV, and a lot of those people will be playing on those HDTVs. So, rendering 1920x1080 is likely as far as the market will push games. Yes, for the time being we can install to higher resolutions, but as more and more 1920x1080 screens end up in households, we will likely see less and less developers worrying about the minority of players using higher resolutions.
With that being the case, it starts to become more and more feasible to have a machine that will run the exact same environment in a browser as on the bare metel. If an emulator written to run in JavaScript and HTML5 is written with high accuracy, there is no reason that it could not perform just as well as the speed limited games that run on the bare metal. There are already emulators that run in the browser, so the path has already been started.
I doubt that we will see a huge increase in game sizes anytime soon. The exploding sizes of games is just that, an explosion. It happens all at once, then settles down for a while. This usually happens when a bottle neck is removed that had previously limited the size. Cassette tape to Floppy disk, 5.25" floppy to 3.5" floppy. Hard disks becoming practical. CDs being introduced. As far as I can see, the current bottleneck is monitors. As much as many of us are using monitors that are larger than 1920x1080, 1080p is the new 'standard'. It is good enough for most people, and the economies of scale for the sellers, and the convenience for the buyers, from the convergence of TVs and computer monitors is likely going peg our graphics at that resolution. This will put a soft limit on the size of games.
I don't want the prediction of everything going streaming to be true, but I didn't want things like Steam to exist either. The good old days of gaming were largely destroyed by a larger demographic of new gamers pulling virtually all development away from the really good stuff. The current crop of gamers may have to face the same reality that as soon as a larger demographic can be hit, every game producer will abandon them the way the previous generation of gamers were abandoned.
If you want to keep playing games like you get today, you may want to start sharpening your Linux development skills, because that may be the only way you will see them.
On that tangent, why the heck has no one produced a Gamebuntu distribution that loads up to a 6' interface by default, supports use by a remote control or gamepad out of the box, and has an installation screen that looks like the Apple/Android market? I know, I know, Linux is open source, so I could do it myself......
Your definition of "installation" is made up to fit what you want it to be. "Administrative Privileges" is a relatively new concept for for the kind of system a person would install games on. Auto installing hasn't been common because dumping things on peoples hard drives without their express permission is considered a bad thing. It has been possible since the early 80's.
By infrastructure, I hope that you mean pipes that let ISPs run cable through at dramatically lower costs than digging up roads and burying cables one by one. It would also mean that once the first right of was was pushed through, new companies could enter the market without the roadblock of right of ways.
A particular upshot of this is that pipes are something that most municipalities have a huge amount of experience with.
If you can't trust the manufacturer to not put in such backdoors, how can you trust that they have not already put it in and just not given you an interface to it?
You are what they call a "Fanboy". No. People don't buy Android phones because they can't afford iPhones.
You rationalize why furry porn is great for kids, and you accuse me of having issues. You seem to think that continuing to repeat why your perticular fetish is OK somehow makes it not sexual. The reason licking your penis in public is socially awkward is because it is sexual. You probably don't think the transvestite bar keep is a transvestite either. I get it. You REALLY want Shrek to be appropriate, so you tell yourself that they are even though half the point of series is to be "edgy" and inappropriate.
No, Larry Flynt had ethics.
That might be their goal. The ridiculous notion that kids who kill animals are serial killers in training has already taken root and is now considered "common knowledge". Perhaps they are hoping to get an equally ridiculous meme going about killing animals being a perverted sexual act.