Unfortunatly, the flight attendents will deliver half our your concontion to you, and they have a device in the onboard bathrooms that will deliver very large quantities.
That might be because the SNES generation of systems were the first systems to have good graphics. They couldn't do photo realistic, or fantastic 3D, but I believe that many games had graphics that looked just like the developer wanted them to. Everything after that was no longer a matter of making the graphics look good, but making the graphics look more realistic, and moving from 2D to 3D.
After the games looked good, a new kind of gammer entered the market. The old school gamers that were more concerned with gameplay than graphics (because there were no good graphics) started getting out numbered by the new gamers that were more concerned with graphics than play. Once this tip happened, the developers started looking at numbers and saw that games with good graphics sold more, and good gameplay didn't affect sales in a significan enough way to matter. After all, good gameplay takes a lot of time and talent. Then when you are done, you still will be taking a gamble on whether you have succeded or not. Good graphics are a much easier defined characteristic, and it is a whole lot easier to find a good 3D artist than it is to find a good game designer.
Basically video games have become a victim of their own success.
They are both open. If you compare them to the console market. If you compare them to the PC market, they will both be very closed. The thing is that consoles are now powerful enough to handle most home computing tasks. This means that if people move over to the consoles for home computing, they will be ripe for vendor lock in, given that the entire console industry is predicated on making money with vendor lock in. Just pay attention to the number of times you hear the statement "It's their system, so they can do what they want." in reference to console makers. Anti-competative and anti-consume behavior that would never be tolorated in the PC world are not only allowed in the console world, but embraced by many of the console fanboys.
Microsoft would think that is great! It would be even better if it became the dominent OS. Remember it will cost $99 EVERY year to run this game called 'Linux Kernel' on your Xbox. They have never been able to charge that much for their own OS.
Of course this may just be the beginning of the great PC lockdown. I suspected that the point of the XBOX was to move people away from the open PC architecture that we all know, to a closed architecture that they can control. It seemed obviouse. Make a closed x86 box, and sneak it into households as a console. This would avoid all of the nasty monopoly laws they would face if they started selling standard hardware at a loss in an attempt to control the hardware market.
When they switched to PPC, it appeared that my theory was wrong. But maybe not. Of course this could also play into the theory that Xbox has seriously hurt Windows. The reason being that a very large section of the PC buying pubic only needs windows for their games. Everything else they need is available on Linux. When MS bought a bunch of top game developers and moved them away from Windows and onto the Xbox, they lowered the value of Windows.
That would likely sell, and the bible belt outrage would make sure that every person in the country knew about it. Of course they should definitly be encouraged to show their outrage by each buying 20 copies and burning them in protest.
Unfortunatly that is a common story. I have to wonder how many of the people who blame you for getting mugged would take responsibility for their mugging if their coworker punched them in the face and stole their wallet every day.
I have a hard time calling $122 dollars 'very expensive'. Perticularly when the only things not onboard are the memory and hard drive. Keep in mind that even though 1.2ghz fanless processors are available, if you are currently running fine on a 350mhz machine, the 600mhz of the lowest cost Via board should handle your system fine.
It is of course difficult to beat the price of 'I already have'. For me it is more a matter of noise, heat, and space reduction. That and sometimes it just fun to get a new toy. If I can reduce energy use and noise as a gimme when I buy a new toy, that is just a plus. Not to mention I will get extra kudos from the wife, as she will get a noticable benefit from me buying new toys.
Is that sarcasm? If so, it doesn't work. The reason is that it might not be that long before XP does not work. Remember, XP requires activation. When MS decides to pull the plug, what you have on your hard drive will be the last install you will every legally do. Unless you plan to reinstall every 30 days. I don't have a single game that requirs XP. I have simply done without. Lucky for me, my favorite games are now old, and run just fine on Win2k. This way I don't have to worry about loosing them just because MS decides it wan't more of my money.
It's not a matter of loyalty. Whether I like Linux, Windows, Mac, or if somehow I believed that AmigaOS 1.3 is the best thing since sliced bread is totally irrelevent. My statement was that I believe Linux will gain critical mass and force Windows out. I am hesitent to invest in a system that will likely be unsupported in the near future. So, the games I play are the games that I purchased before it became obvious that Linux will displace Windows.
The term sheep was not to indicate that the users did or will make a right or wrong decision. It was to indicate that their choice would be made based off of where they precieve the rest of the group was going.
I haven't purchased from this store, but http://www.logicsupply.com/ carries pretty much the entire line of fanless x86 motherboards. I've been reading reviews for a while, and most of them recommend going with the actual VIA motherboard rather than third part brands with the VIA processor. If you already have a noisy envirionment, you can save a few dollars or get a few hundred extra mhz by getting a MB with a fan. The boards are still low power, but do require a fan that as far as i can tell is similar to what we had on 386s. This would be a reasonable option for a car PC where the car would produce more noise than the fan. They also sell car power supplies for the VIA motherboards. These will send a soft shutdown when the engine turns off. The will also do a hard power down if the sytstem hangs.
While I don't necesarily agree with the why, my next round of computers are going to be considered downgrades by many. In the next few months, I will be replacing many of my full blow machines with much slower VIA systems. My wife mostly does email and web browsing. She likes her computer to be in the bedroom. She hates waiting for it to boot, and hates the fan noise even more. I will replace her system with a fanless VIA. This way she can leave it on 24/7 and not be bothered by the noise. I will reinstall Windows (she is currently on linux) on her current machine, and she can boot it up on the rare occasion that she wants to play a game or two.
My son is in a similar boat. At two years old, he watches movies, plays music, and plays gComprise on his system. All of these can be handled on a fanless, low power VIA system. While his can boot his computer and load his software fine, he is not the best at turning everything off when he is done, so a no noise system would help.
My file server, email server, car PC, and camper PC don't need much power so those can go to fanless low power boards too. Heck, I figure that at the end of the day, I will only need one monster machine total. All the rest can be low power fanless systems.
The reasons that PC gaming is having a hard time are:
1) Microsoft XBOX. Microsoft started buying up PC game companies. They put their focus on XBox gaming. They stopped treating Windows as a first class gaming platform.
2) No Linux Support. For some like me, I really believe that if and when Linux will reach a critical mass. When everyone knows a Linux user like they knopw a Windows user, I believe that the sheep will switch very quickly, and Windows will become a bit player if that. I don't want to buy a game that I will have to buy an OS to play, when my primary OS was free. So, I go without.
3) No cross platform support. There was a time that you could buy one box and get a disk containing the C64, Apple II, Spectrum, and IBM version of a game. It is dramatically easier to write cross platform software today than it ever has been, and given that 90% or more of any game is content, the disk space is less of an issue than it ever has been. But, even when the game is available on Linux or Mac, you are expected to buy seperate copies. My wife and son are exlusively on Linux. I primarily run Windows because of work. I want to know that I don't have to pay a second time if/when I join my wife and son in linux land. Besides, XP has 'activation', and Vista will likely be worse. I still pull out old games now and then to play. I don't want find out that I can't play them because MS is no longer supporting the old OS. So, I do without.
4) FPS. While there have been a few FPS that I really did enjoy, some of us are not obsessed with FPS. The market became so over saturated with FPS that it has to have driven off a lot of customers. So, I do without.
5) Multi-player. I don't know if there are more people that want to play multiplayer or single player, but the multiplayer group is definitly more vocal. The companies have listened. Unfortunatly, there are a lot of us with busy schedules. We can't get time scheduled to play with others, or we don't have enough friends that like the same games, or gaming at all. We like to play games that we can sit down to at 2 in the morning when the wife and kids are asleep. We don't want to play with a bunch of people we don't know, and quite frankly don't like. MMO gaming was a great idea on paper, but in practice it tends to draw exactly the kind of people I don't want to play with. Besides, I don't want to pay $10 or $15 a month to play for a total of 8 hours a month. So I do without.
6) Copy protection. Yes, this has been here since the C64 days, but back then we didn't have to worry about the copy protection breaking everything else. Some copy protection schemes prevent selling used games. Besides, we tolorated the copy protection. Given the other problems with PC gaming, it just isn't worth it anymore. So I do without.
7) Consoles. No, not that they are more convienent. But that many PC game manufacturers will cripple a PC game to make sure that it will play well on a console. PC's have you sitting 2 feet away with a keyboard and mouse. Consoles have you sitting 6-10 feet away with a game pad. These lend themselves to different kinds of play. Unfortunaly many PC game manufactures will write the game to be playable with only a gamepad because they feel the need to port it to a console. Can you imagine trying to play starcraft, or Master of Orion on a console with a gamepad? It would suck. So, even when a game is being made for the PC, it is often a console game being shoe horned in.
8) Cost. There is very little innovation going on in the PC gaming area. I'm not complaining about that, just as I don't complain that there is very little innovation going on in board game area. It is possible that the platform has been thoroughly explored. But if your going to sell me the same game with different graphics, give me the price break that that deserves. I don't need a new engine in every game, but I don't want to pay for a new engines development, and only get new content.
It still amazes me that screen savers are not run in virtual machines. They are a well known malware vector. They only kick in when you are not actively using the machine, so the overhead is largely irrelevent. There are very few reasons for a screen saver to access any resources that are not internal to the screen saver package. If you had to specifically allow access to shares via the OS for things like picture slide shows, the only damage a screen saver could do would be to eat too many cpu cycles. Given the none critical nature of screen savers, this seems like it would be a good security/functionality trade off.
Remember, barring truly attrocious spelling/grammer, where the actual content is no longer understandable, correcting a previous posters spelling/grammer is standard internet practice for complete agreement. In essence it translates to:
"I really don't want to agree with what you said, but given that your point was so well thought out and obviously true, I must find SOMETHING that is incorrect. Given that your post was 100% correct in content, I will change the subject and criticize your spelling or grammer."
Slashdot Mirror
Watch out, the FAA may now ban you from bringing that device on board an airplane. They just might confiscate it at the security gate.
Unfortunatly, the flight attendents will deliver half our your concontion to you, and they have a device in the onboard bathrooms that will deliver very large quantities.
That might be because the SNES generation of systems were the first systems to have good graphics. They couldn't do photo realistic, or fantastic 3D, but I believe that many games had graphics that looked just like the developer wanted them to. Everything after that was no longer a matter of making the graphics look good, but making the graphics look more realistic, and moving from 2D to 3D.
After the games looked good, a new kind of gammer entered the market. The old school gamers that were more concerned with gameplay than graphics (because there were no good graphics) started getting out numbered by the new gamers that were more concerned with graphics than play. Once this tip happened, the developers started looking at numbers and saw that games with good graphics sold more, and good gameplay didn't affect sales in a significan enough way to matter. After all, good gameplay takes a lot of time and talent. Then when you are done, you still will be taking a gamble on whether you have succeded or not. Good graphics are a much easier defined characteristic, and it is a whole lot easier to find a good 3D artist than it is to find a good game designer.
Basically video games have become a victim of their own success.
Just like their great great great grandparents.
It's not just the rich that hate other social classes.
They are both open. If you compare them to the console market. If you compare them to the PC market, they will both be very closed. The thing is that consoles are now powerful enough to handle most home computing tasks. This means that if people move over to the consoles for home computing, they will be ripe for vendor lock in, given that the entire console industry is predicated on making money with vendor lock in. Just pay attention to the number of times you hear the statement "It's their system, so they can do what they want." in reference to console makers. Anti-competative and anti-consume behavior that would never be tolorated in the PC world are not only allowed in the console world, but embraced by many of the console fanboys.
Microsoft would think that is great! It would be even better if it became the dominent OS. Remember it will cost $99 EVERY year to run this game called 'Linux Kernel' on your Xbox. They have never been able to charge that much for their own OS.
Of course this may just be the beginning of the great PC lockdown. I suspected that the point of the XBOX was to move people away from the open PC architecture that we all know, to a closed architecture that they can control. It seemed obviouse. Make a closed x86 box, and sneak it into households as a console. This would avoid all of the nasty monopoly laws they would face if they started selling standard hardware at a loss in an attempt to control the hardware market.
When they switched to PPC, it appeared that my theory was wrong. But maybe not. Of course this could also play into the theory that Xbox has seriously hurt Windows. The reason being that a very large section of the PC buying pubic only needs windows for their games. Everything else they need is available on Linux. When MS bought a bunch of top game developers and moved them away from Windows and onto the Xbox, they lowered the value of Windows.
2.5 billion kiloliters.
2.5 kiloliters.
I too was doing this long ago. But if Amazon's one-click is new and innovative, AJAX must be too.
That would likely sell, and the bible belt outrage would make sure that every person in the country knew about it. Of course they should definitly be encouraged to show their outrage by each buying 20 copies and burning them in protest.
Unfortunatly that is a common story. I have to wonder how many of the people who blame you for getting mugged would take responsibility for their mugging if their coworker punched them in the face and stole their wallet every day.
I have a hard time calling $122 dollars 'very expensive'. Perticularly when the only things not onboard are the memory and hard drive. Keep in mind that even though 1.2ghz fanless processors are available, if you are currently running fine on a 350mhz machine, the 600mhz of the lowest cost Via board should handle your system fine.
It is of course difficult to beat the price of 'I already have'. For me it is more a matter of noise, heat, and space reduction. That and sometimes it just fun to get a new toy. If I can reduce energy use and noise as a gimme when I buy a new toy, that is just a plus. Not to mention I will get extra kudos from the wife, as she will get a noticable benefit from me buying new toys.
Was there some announcement that DirectX was being broken in XP, or did you mean that it wouldn't work in Vista?
Is that sarcasm? If so, it doesn't work. The reason is that it might not be that long before XP does not work. Remember, XP requires activation. When MS decides to pull the plug, what you have on your hard drive will be the last install you will every legally do. Unless you plan to reinstall every 30 days. I don't have a single game that requirs XP. I have simply done without. Lucky for me, my favorite games are now old, and run just fine on Win2k. This way I don't have to worry about loosing them just because MS decides it wan't more of my money.
It's not a matter of loyalty. Whether I like Linux, Windows, Mac, or if somehow I believed that AmigaOS 1.3 is the best thing since sliced bread is totally irrelevent. My statement was that I believe Linux will gain critical mass and force Windows out. I am hesitent to invest in a system that will likely be unsupported in the near future. So, the games I play are the games that I purchased before it became obvious that Linux will displace Windows.
The term sheep was not to indicate that the users did or will make a right or wrong decision. It was to indicate that their choice would be made based off of where they precieve the rest of the group was going.
I haven't purchased from this store, but http://www.logicsupply.com/ carries pretty much the entire line of fanless x86 motherboards. I've been reading reviews for a while, and most of them recommend going with the actual VIA motherboard rather than third part brands with the VIA processor. If you already have a noisy envirionment, you can save a few dollars or get a few hundred extra mhz by getting a MB with a fan. The boards are still low power, but do require a fan that as far as i can tell is similar to what we had on 386s. This would be a reasonable option for a car PC where the car would produce more noise than the fan. They also sell car power supplies for the VIA motherboards. These will send a soft shutdown when the engine turns off. The will also do a hard power down if the sytstem hangs.
While I don't necesarily agree with the why, my next round of computers are going to be considered downgrades by many. In the next few months, I will be replacing many of my full blow machines with much slower VIA systems. My wife mostly does email and web browsing. She likes her computer to be in the bedroom. She hates waiting for it to boot, and hates the fan noise even more. I will replace her system with a fanless VIA. This way she can leave it on 24/7 and not be bothered by the noise. I will reinstall Windows (she is currently on linux) on her current machine, and she can boot it up on the rare occasion that she wants to play a game or two.
My son is in a similar boat. At two years old, he watches movies, plays music, and plays gComprise on his system. All of these can be handled on a fanless, low power VIA system. While his can boot his computer and load his software fine, he is not the best at turning everything off when he is done, so a no noise system would help.
My file server, email server, car PC, and camper PC don't need much power so those can go to fanless low power boards too. Heck, I figure that at the end of the day, I will only need one monster machine total. All the rest can be low power fanless systems.
The reasons that PC gaming is having a hard time are:
1) Microsoft XBOX. Microsoft started buying up PC game companies. They put their focus on XBox gaming. They stopped treating Windows as a first class gaming platform.
2) No Linux Support. For some like me, I really believe that if and when Linux will reach a critical mass. When everyone knows a Linux user like they knopw a Windows user, I believe that the sheep will switch very quickly, and Windows will become a bit player if that. I don't want to buy a game that I will have to buy an OS to play, when my primary OS was free. So, I go without.
3) No cross platform support. There was a time that you could buy one box and get a disk containing the C64, Apple II, Spectrum, and IBM version of a game. It is dramatically easier to write cross platform software today than it ever has been, and given that 90% or more of any game is content, the disk space is less of an issue than it ever has been. But, even when the game is available on Linux or Mac, you are expected to buy seperate copies. My wife and son are exlusively on Linux. I primarily run Windows because of work. I want to know that I don't have to pay a second time if/when I join my wife and son in linux land. Besides, XP has 'activation', and Vista will likely be worse. I still pull out old games now and then to play. I don't want find out that I can't play them because MS is no longer supporting the old OS. So, I do without.
4) FPS. While there have been a few FPS that I really did enjoy, some of us are not obsessed with FPS. The market became so over saturated with FPS that it has to have driven off a lot of customers. So, I do without.
5) Multi-player. I don't know if there are more people that want to play multiplayer or single player, but the multiplayer group is definitly more vocal. The companies have listened. Unfortunatly, there are a lot of us with busy schedules. We can't get time scheduled to play with others, or we don't have enough friends that like the same games, or gaming at all. We like to play games that we can sit down to at 2 in the morning when the wife and kids are asleep. We don't want to play with a bunch of people we don't know, and quite frankly don't like. MMO gaming was a great idea on paper, but in practice it tends to draw exactly the kind of people I don't want to play with. Besides, I don't want to pay $10 or $15 a month to play for a total of 8 hours a month. So I do without.
6) Copy protection. Yes, this has been here since the C64 days, but back then we didn't have to worry about the copy protection breaking everything else. Some copy protection schemes prevent selling used games. Besides, we tolorated the copy protection. Given the other problems with PC gaming, it just isn't worth it anymore. So I do without.
7) Consoles. No, not that they are more convienent. But that many PC game manufacturers will cripple a PC game to make sure that it will play well on a console. PC's have you sitting 2 feet away with a keyboard and mouse. Consoles have you sitting 6-10 feet away with a game pad. These lend themselves to different kinds of play. Unfortunaly many PC game manufactures will write the game to be playable with only a gamepad because they feel the need to port it to a console. Can you imagine trying to play starcraft, or Master of Orion on a console with a gamepad? It would suck. So, even when a game is being made for the PC, it is often a console game being shoe horned in.
8) Cost. There is very little innovation going on in the PC gaming area. I'm not complaining about that, just as I don't complain that there is very little innovation going on in board game area. It is possible that the platform has been thoroughly explored. But if your going to sell me the same game with different graphics, give me the price break that that deserves. I don't need a new engine in every game, but I don't want to pay for a new engines development, and only get new content.
The should be under the same risk as they would be using a web proxy. Web proxies can distribute illegal content just as easily as bittorrent.
It still amazes me that screen savers are not run in virtual machines. They are a well known malware vector. They only kick in when you are not actively using the machine, so the overhead is largely irrelevent. There are very few reasons for a screen saver to access any resources that are not internal to the screen saver package. If you had to specifically allow access to shares via the OS for things like picture slide shows, the only damage a screen saver could do would be to eat too many cpu cycles. Given the none critical nature of screen savers, this seems like it would be a good security/functionality trade off.
Because those darn kids with their rock and ro...er...uh...comic bo...uh...Rap mus...um...MySpace are just trouble makers.
What does the internet have to do with ADHD? Ohhhh... That's right. Anything we don't like kids doing must cause ADHD.
Remember, barring truly attrocious spelling/grammer, where the actual content is no longer understandable, correcting a previous posters spelling/grammer is standard internet practice for complete agreement. In essence it translates to:
"I really don't want to agree with what you said, but given that your point was so well thought out and obviously true, I must find SOMETHING that is incorrect. Given that your post was 100% correct in content, I will change the subject and criticize your spelling or grammer."
It could be worse. You could be the writers of BSG and actually had to copy Voyager to get your characters.