I think you should also take into account the cost of
A. Insurance
B. Losing the worker, even if it only takes you 1 day to find a replacement how much work wasn't produced because there was one less guy on the floor?
C. How many days will it take to ramp a "new guy" up to the old guys level of productivity?
D. How much money in administrative costs will be spent handling the workers comp claim finding a new guy ect.
E. What if you need to pay your lawyer to "look things over" at easily $100+ bucks an hour?
F. What if the new guy sucks, and his production is below the norm? What if it takes you a week, 2 weeks, a month to find that out?
Losing a worker can mean serious money, a lot of people don't realize this. And I mean a lot. Most assume that the cost of worker turnover #'s are BS put out by unions/"workers rights advocates", and that's true of some, but a lot aren't. I am an independent consultant, and I see a lot of jobs being held up put behind schedule for lack of low-pay, low-skill workers. I think it's because people don't realize that low-skill doesn't mean "easily accomplished", it still takes time to get these low-skill things done. And low-skill doesn't mean no-skill a veteran worker will get things done at the very least 20% faster than a green-horn. Typically a new guy will come on the job at about 20% of the speed of a worker that is familiar with the job. A new worker also requires more oversight at the start, even if they are a veteran. This is because of the "where do I find more paper clips" getting to know the job site type of things.
I highly doubt that a tool like this if it works wouldn't result in a significant cost savings after it prevented its first "loss of appendage" accident.
"All along our objection has not simply been that we can't copy the stuff."
Right but it was an objection. and that's why it's called meetting 1/2 way you see they don't completly yeild to you, and you don't completely yeild to them, that's 1/2 way. I don't like to break the law to watch my DVD's in Linux either, but this is a step in the right direction.
You should adjust your tinfoil hat. I can see a few hairs straying from underneath it. Oh no their going to charge us for work they've done those BASTARDS! I have a few friends that work in the biz, specificaly the DVD creation part. They're the guys that make the menues ect. You see the studios PAY them with MONEY to do that WORK. They do that in hopes of selling that DVD for money. Even if the studios were non profit organizations, they would still have to charge for DVD's because they have offices, and employees, janitors, secretaries, paperclips, rented office space. Pirating is messed up charging for your work isn't. That's all they're doing, I know you probably don't believe me. I don't get the impression that you're going to listen to a non-tin-hatter such as myself.
That and the RIAA tried this with blank "Audio" CD's they charge a royalty on each CD so they get compensated when you buy one, but people buy blank "Data" CD's and the RIAA gets no compensation. I know the RIAA gets money for blank analog audio tapes, and the MPAA may have a simmalar scheme going with video tapes. They're just extending this model to DVD's. I think it's fair, though not ideal. This way I don't pay an MPAA tax on my data DVD's, but they recieve compensation on the DVD's I use for personal coppies. No it's not ideal, but niether is the fact that people make coppies of their work, and go selling them on the street.
Whoa, whoa, whoa... no need to fly off the hook like that. I agree that this isn't a total about face on their part, but more of a meeting in the middle. This way they can tax us on media that we can use for burning backup CSS DVDs, and still allow us to buy non css data DVD's untaxed. I like this move it shows that media companies are starting to come to their senses.
Yeah the business thing actually scares me, the personal thing just peeves me.
You're thinking in terms of now... that's the problem. In 1 or 2 years WiMax will be out forcing cell companies to compete you won't need to synch your MP3 player, it will get the songs, and videos off your home PC. Automagicaly, and your wife can do that, and your kids can do that. You won't run your own VPN, you'll pick out a username and password the rest will be done automatically. All without you knowing how it works or that it's a form of something called vee-pee-en.
You're right however it's not a motivator for high bandwidth... clearly. Once we've had it and used it, and connected it to our car, our MP3 player, our Outlook calendar/contacts/emails, cell phone, xbox 360, and Gameboy 3. We'll all wonder how the heck we ever functioned without it. Your home network will be everywhere you are, and accessible from every wireless device you use. The idea of "Synching" your mp3 player will be as novel to your kids as the though of having to hand-crank your car to start it.
GoToMyPC is a great example, imagine being able to use a service like that and work on your documents at native speeds rather than having to save a copy to your local system change it and upload it back you to your sever instead you just work on it locally like you would on a 10Mb LAN 5 years ago. 40Mbs upload is over 2 orders of magnitude greater than what we are using currently. This is no joke paradigm shift junk. Lifestyle altering
That's just the crap peeps have been talking about for the last 20 years, once we have that type of bandwidth... we will find some awesome ways to fill it.
...And at one point in time 1GB of hard disk spaced seemed like more than I would ever need.
Trust me people will find awesome uses for 40Mb of bandwidth up. I honestly believe VPN for home will catch on, or a service with remote storage that works similarly. with 80Mb down, 40Mb up and a VPN connection to your home PC from anywhere an OS from MS/Apple/distro-of-the-day could create a way for you to set up a network share that would allow you to treat your WAN like your LAN. You could download your media collection from your home PC to wherever you are. Personal Video/Music on demand. Think TIVO-to-go no need to use email to transfer files from one PC to another one located at a remote location. VPN will become seamless in the not to distant future. It's that way for me already, if you haven't tried it out yet, use OpenVPN. If you use it in tunnel mode on Windows XP you can make it start up and connect to your VPN server automatically, and treat your network share as a mapped drive or folder... The only drawback? US DSL/Cable upload bandwidth. I'm talking working on remote files at local speeds.
A more likely scenario would be a company like Google offering 50-100GB of storage, and you'll log onto it with every PC you use to get your music, videos, everything. Thinking about a 80mb down/40mb up in terms of "it's like a 6mb down 0.375Mb up only faster" is wrong. If French telecom can manage to deliver 50% of that bandwidth "to the jack" this is going to be HUGE. The key hear again is UPLOAD.
Speaking as a US citizen to the other US citizens - We are shooting ourselves in the foot leaving our national IT infrastructure in the hands of people spending more time on finding a cheaper easier way to line their pockets rather than the old fashioned entrepreneurs who would find an undeserved market, and offer them a fair service at a fair price. If not addressed soon this will be a huge problem. Again home bandwidth would be nice but it's business BW that's really going to screw us over in the long run.
1. VPN 2. VNC 3. Game Servers - Battlefield 2 reccomends a minimum of 64kb a player for a 64 player map that's 4Mb. If you want to eventualy double players to 128, or go crazy with 256 you will need 8Mb, and 16Mb respectively. 4. HD video from youtube/google.video 5. VOIP telephone banks 6. Website hosting 7. Remote backups 9. Anything that is bandwidth intensive
Asking what use this would have is kind of missing the point. You put this type of bandwidth in every home, and uses will be made the download speed is nice, but it's the bandwidth up that's going to cause HUGE changes.
Make no mistake the US being this far behind is hurting us, how much does it cost for a US based buisiness a month to get a 40Mb of upload? literaly Thousands if not tens of thousands. It costs, a French company less than $90. Yes I would like to get this to my home, but the bandwidth gap in the home is not what concerns me. The US had better get its but in gear or else we will be left in the dust on this whole information age thing. It's still the wild wild west out there and anything can happen. French companies now have a huge leg up on thier US counterparts.
He also is overlooking the fact that for the Romans war was a profitable endevor. They always took slaves, land, and looted anywher they invaded... Our wars don't seem to work out that way. Sorry your analogy is wrong.
Dude I have to be honest the first thing I would have done, is plugged it in, to see if I coulg get it back to the owner. Now I know better, but this scam would have worked on me no problem.
Not everyone's a zealot some of us use AMD chips simply because they're faster, run cooler, and suck less juice than P4's. Conroe looks to have adressed these issues, I was going to buy a opty 165 last week, for $325, but then I saw that Intel was scheduled to relese the better performing Conroe next month at some highly competative prices.
1.86GHz/2M for $183 2.13GHz/2M for $224 2.40GHz/4M for $316
Those were the prices posted before this anouncement, I hope they have dropped further. Even if they havn't I'm eyeing that 2.4 with the 4MB cahce HARD. I would gladly pay an extra $80-$90(CPU+Mobo) next month, than get an opty 165 this month that will suck more juice, and be significantly slower. I'm not loyal to any corperation, I'm going to put my money where it will give me the best return on investment...
You raise some good points, but I believe that a good amount of people play games for good clean fun, and are good people. while there may end up being more "evil" towns than good towns, and inflatin might be a problem at stores. Traders could go to good towns and buy cheap, and sell goods in bad towns for a profit. If you make moral classes like Paladins the most powerful, I'd think that would be all the incentive players would need to make good towns. I have never played a mmorpg, and only played D&D once, but his ideas sound pretty good. I play a lot of FPS's though, and play with(not on) some clans. For the most part clan players are the most honest playrs, and take the game the most seriously. I'd think making moral players stronger than immoral players would only encourage fair-play. It would also force immoral palyers to be more creative in thier playstyle, making it more challenging, and fun.
Are you sure? I'm fairly sure you can play single player games without an Internet connection or CD. As I have played HL2 on the plane without an Internet connection...
Obviously I need to log onto steam to play Counter-Strike. The only legit complaint I can think of is if they make you log onto steam to play LAN games. That could really present some problems for some users. I wouldn't call it DRM though I'd call it copy protection, and while it helps the content creators, it also has some great features for users too.
For instance I can play steam on any Windows PC I want. Once I purchase a game on Steam itself I have access to all my games even though I don't have the CD's. Meaning that if I visit my family in NY, and they don't have Steam on any computer, I just need to install the Steam client, and it lets me download any game I own on that account to any PC I'm on, without even having an install CD within 3,000 miles of me. This is a feature that has come in handy many-a-time. It's Greatly superior to EA's moronic Battlefield 2 solution that forces you to log onto their central server and have the CD in the tray. Hardly RIAA level of security. I personally like and welcome our new Steam overlords.
not to mention the fact that the taxes "given back" probably add up to fractions of a cent once divided by your state/city's population. I'll mail him 10 cents, and for the next 30 years he can rest assured that he's made out like a bandit on this one.
Performance wise it's not great, but it is designed from the ground up with size, and battery life in mind. So choose a laptop with dedicated 3D graphics, that have to juice an extra chip, and extra RAM, and run traces for both of those on the mobo, or a smaller one with better battery life? On a thin-and-light portable like this I'd take battery life over 1-5 frames per second any day of the week. It's not like they were going to put x1600 in these things. A chip like that needs way more cooling, ie. a big hunk of metal, and possibly a fan even. It also consumes more juice. If they were going to throw in dedicated graphics think more along the lines of a 9200, or god willing a x1300, the GMA beats the 9200 and is within %10 of the x1300. So you get 90% of the performance and you don't have to pay extra for battery sucking, weight adding, realestate consuming discreet graphics.
There's a reason all ultra portables use the GMA, they're not made for gaming they're made to be small, light, and hopefully run for a while on batteries. I'm a gamer, it's why I won't switch to Mac or Linux, and I have a lugable gaming laptop. That doesn't mean I can't see the advantage to a thin-and-light portable with crappy video though.
What forum did you read that one in? Sager is a whitebox redistributer, and Dell is an OEM. Sagers are bottom of the line piles of trash and that's compared to Dells that are just piles of trash. We've owned a number of sagers, and they all died within 2 years. I mean dead dead, not a dead harddrive dead. I'm talking fried mobo dead that's after having to replace lord know how many of their powerbricks. I have a Dell Inspiron 2650 from 4 years ago, and it's still going strong... despite my ill wishes. The thing gets HOT that's capital "H" "O" "T". That's with a P4 "M". At the office we use some IBM Desktop P4's those things are crazy soldid and actualy run cool, and quiet. Hopfully my dell will die and give me an excuse to get another laptop... I won't go Dell again, and I for damn sure won't touch a Sager with a 40' pole. Anyone here tried an Asus? How's Lenovo? I wish IBM was still making laptops.
If I had mod points you'd get one. But this whole talk of video game as not art is kind of BS particularly coming from a guy that doesn't play them. Maybe I have a broad definition of art, but I consider sports to be an art particularly when played by players, or teams of equal ability, it really is a thing of beauty to see equally matched opponents dodge, and parry, as each one tries to get the high ground in a match. They each have their own style, their faults, their strengths. It's the human condition in real time in full motion. Action, and reaction 3rd and 10, 1-1, deuce, 15-15, win by 2. That's performance art at it's highest, each side has a set of rules to abide by, and an objective, the rest is fair game. It's an art form plain and simple. Weather you're playing or watching it's all about "what it means to be human".
I'd easily say the same for video games. Is he right about them not being like epic novels... for the most part yes, though I'm sure there are some people out there that played Final Fantasy... whatever that would disagree. Is comedy art? Yes, but does it delve into the same aspects of "what it means to be human" as "The Great Gatsby"? No, but it's still an art. How about a guy that covers an image of "The Holly Mary" with elephant feces? It's art to some, others an insult, and still nothing of significance to another group. He's structuring the argument in a manner that benefits his opinion. He's not asking are video games, an art, he's asking if they are like "The Great Gatsby". Because to him "The Great Gatsby" is art, and video games are not. I doubt his opinion will change as well, he's just not going to get that into games at this point in time.
There are few times in my life I've felt as on the edge of my seat as when I would play "Street Fighter II" against my equally skilled little brother in one of our Ryu-Ken match-ups. He was Ken, I was Ryu and. We hardly ever switched. Why because each character spoke to the other individually, they were so similar, and different, Ken was in Bright Red with Golden blond locks, and Ryu just plain black and white. Ken had a bold flare for the dramatic, Ryu was reserved, and cautious. And the two characters matched my brother and I fairly well. The fights were intense, and had a meaning to them that was beyond "just a game". We played as other characters a lot, just to take a break, because the Ken-Ryu fights were so... intense they drained you emotionally. While tiring they were what made the game so great. When my brother pulled off a good combo I was torn between thinking "wow nice shot", and "son-of-a..."! I was watching my little brother learn and adapt to my style, and as a result I had to relearn and adapt to his. That's the human condition my friends. That's art.
A FPS match between two well matched players is the same thing. Each player has their favorite weapon, their own style camper, zone controler, hunter. In a 24-24 game to 25 frags, when 2 of you hit jump pads, pulling off that double mid air railgun shot sure as heck looks and feels like art, and when you're on the receiving end it certainly feels like a tragedy.
Ebert will probably never see games as art because it's a different type of art form. There are people that see boxing as an art, and others that see it as legalized assault and battery. He's stating his opinion, and in this case he's just as right saying games aren't an art as I am saying they are.
Wish I was off to make art by splitting skulls, -manno
Slashdot Mirror
I think you should also take into account the cost of
A. Insurance
B. Losing the worker, even if it only takes you 1 day to find a replacement how much work wasn't produced because there was one less guy on the floor?
C. How many days will it take to ramp a "new guy" up to the old guys level of productivity?
D. How much money in administrative costs will be spent handling the workers comp claim finding a new guy ect.
E. What if you need to pay your lawyer to "look things over" at easily $100+ bucks an hour?
F. What if the new guy sucks, and his production is below the norm? What if it takes you a week, 2 weeks, a month to find that out?
Losing a worker can mean serious money, a lot of people don't realize this. And I mean a lot. Most assume that the cost of worker turnover #'s are BS put out by unions/"workers rights advocates", and that's true of some, but a lot aren't. I am an independent consultant, and I see a lot of jobs being held up put behind schedule for lack of low-pay, low-skill workers. I think it's because people don't realize that low-skill doesn't mean "easily accomplished", it still takes time to get these low-skill things done. And low-skill doesn't mean no-skill a veteran worker will get things done at the very least 20% faster than a green-horn. Typically a new guy will come on the job at about 20% of the speed of a worker that is familiar with the job. A new worker also requires more oversight at the start, even if they are a veteran. This is because of the "where do I find more paper clips" getting to know the job site type of things.
I highly doubt that a tool like this if it works wouldn't result in a significant cost savings after it prevented its first "loss of appendage" accident.
-manno
"All along our objection has not simply been that we can't copy the stuff."
Right but it was an objection. and that's why it's called meetting 1/2 way you see they don't completly yeild to you, and you don't completely yeild to them, that's 1/2 way. I don't like to break the law to watch my DVD's in Linux either, but this is a step in the right direction.
You should adjust your tinfoil hat. I can see a few hairs straying from underneath it. Oh no their going to charge us for work they've done those BASTARDS! I have a few friends that work in the biz, specificaly the DVD creation part. They're the guys that make the menues ect. You see the studios PAY them with MONEY to do that WORK. They do that in hopes of selling that DVD for money. Even if the studios were non profit organizations, they would still have to charge for DVD's because they have offices, and employees, janitors, secretaries, paperclips, rented office space. Pirating is messed up charging for your work isn't. That's all they're doing, I know you probably don't believe me. I don't get the impression that you're going to listen to a non-tin-hatter such as myself.
That and the RIAA tried this with blank "Audio" CD's they charge a royalty on each CD so they get compensated when you buy one, but people buy blank "Data" CD's and the RIAA gets no compensation. I know the RIAA gets money for blank analog audio tapes, and the MPAA may have a simmalar scheme going with video tapes. They're just extending this model to DVD's. I think it's fair, though not ideal. This way I don't pay an MPAA tax on my data DVD's, but they recieve compensation on the DVD's I use for personal coppies. No it's not ideal, but niether is the fact that people make coppies of their work, and go selling them on the street.
-matt
Whoa, whoa, whoa... no need to fly off the hook like that. I agree that this isn't a total about face on their part, but more of a meeting in the middle. This way they can tax us on media that we can use for burning backup CSS DVDs, and still allow us to buy non css data DVD's untaxed. I like this move it shows that media companies are starting to come to their senses.
This has the potential to be one of the coolest fight sceenes ever.
I stand corrected.
Thank you,
-manno
That's a good point.
Yeah the business thing actually scares me, the personal thing just peeves me.
You're thinking in terms of now... that's the problem. In 1 or 2 years WiMax will be out forcing cell companies to compete you won't need to synch your MP3 player, it will get the songs, and videos off your home PC. Automagicaly, and your wife can do that, and your kids can do that. You won't run your own VPN, you'll pick out a username and password the rest will be done automatically. All without you knowing how it works or that it's a form of something called vee-pee-en.
You're right however it's not a motivator for high bandwidth... clearly. Once we've had it and used it, and connected it to our car, our MP3 player, our Outlook calendar/contacts/emails, cell phone, xbox 360, and Gameboy 3. We'll all wonder how the heck we ever functioned without it. Your home network will be everywhere you are, and accessible from every wireless device you use. The idea of "Synching" your mp3 player will be as novel to your kids as the though of having to hand-crank your car to start it.
GoToMyPC is a great example, imagine being able to use a service like that and work on your documents at native speeds rather than having to save a copy to your local system change it and upload it back you to your sever instead you just work on it locally like you would on a 10Mb LAN 5 years ago. 40Mbs upload is over 2 orders of magnitude greater than what we are using currently. This is no joke paradigm shift junk. Lifestyle altering
That's just the crap peeps have been talking about for the last 20 years, once we have that type of bandwidth... we will find some awesome ways to fill it.
...And at one point in time 1GB of hard disk spaced seemed like more than I would ever need.
Trust me people will find awesome uses for 40Mb of bandwidth up. I honestly believe VPN for home will catch on, or a service with remote storage that works similarly. with 80Mb down, 40Mb up and a VPN connection to your home PC from anywhere an OS from MS/Apple/distro-of-the-day could create a way for you to set up a network share that would allow you to treat your WAN like your LAN. You could download your media collection from your home PC to wherever you are. Personal Video/Music on demand. Think TIVO-to-go no need to use email to transfer files from one PC to another one located at a remote location. VPN will become seamless in the not to distant future. It's that way for me already, if you haven't tried it out yet, use OpenVPN. If you use it in tunnel mode on Windows XP you can make it start up and connect to your VPN server automatically, and treat your network share as a mapped drive or folder... The only drawback? US DSL/Cable upload bandwidth. I'm talking working on remote files at local speeds.
A more likely scenario would be a company like Google offering 50-100GB of storage, and you'll log onto it with every PC you use to get your music, videos, everything. Thinking about a 80mb down/40mb up in terms of "it's like a 6mb down 0.375Mb up only faster" is wrong. If French telecom can manage to deliver 50% of that bandwidth "to the jack" this is going to be HUGE. The key hear again is UPLOAD.
Speaking as a US citizen to the other US citizens - We are shooting ourselves in the foot leaving our national IT infrastructure in the hands of people spending more time on finding a cheaper easier way to line their pockets rather than the old fashioned entrepreneurs who would find an undeserved market, and offer them a fair service at a fair price. If not addressed soon this will be a huge problem. Again home bandwidth would be nice but it's business BW that's really going to screw us over in the long run.
-manno
I can think of a number off the top of my head.
1. VPN
2. VNC
3. Game Servers - Battlefield 2 reccomends a minimum of 64kb a player for a 64 player map that's 4Mb. If you want to eventualy double players to 128, or go crazy with 256 you will need 8Mb, and 16Mb respectively.
4. HD video from youtube/google.video
5. VOIP telephone banks
6. Website hosting
7. Remote backups
9. Anything that is bandwidth intensive
Asking what use this would have is kind of missing the point. You put this type of bandwidth in every home, and uses will be made the download speed is nice, but it's the bandwidth up that's going to cause HUGE changes.
Make no mistake the US being this far behind is hurting us, how much does it cost for a US based buisiness a month to get a 40Mb of upload? literaly Thousands if not tens of thousands. It costs, a French company less than $90. Yes I would like to get this to my home, but the bandwidth gap in the home is not what concerns me. The US had better get its but in gear or else we will be left in the dust on this whole information age thing. It's still the wild wild west out there and anything can happen. French companies now have a huge leg up on thier US counterparts.
-manno
He also is overlooking the fact that for the Romans war was a profitable endevor. They always took slaves, land, and looted anywher they invaded... Our wars don't seem to work out that way. Sorry your analogy is wrong.
Dude I have to be honest the first thing I would have done, is plugged it in, to see if I coulg get it back to the owner. Now I know better, but this scam would have worked on me no problem.
peace,
-manno
Not everyone's a zealot some of us use AMD chips simply because they're faster, run cooler, and suck less juice than P4's. Conroe looks to have adressed these issues, I was going to buy a opty 165 last week, for $325, but then I saw that Intel was scheduled to relese the better performing Conroe next month at some highly competative prices.
1.86GHz/2M for $183
2.13GHz/2M for $224
2.40GHz/4M for $316
Those were the prices posted before this anouncement, I hope they have dropped further. Even if they havn't I'm eyeing that 2.4 with the 4MB cahce HARD. I would gladly pay an extra $80-$90(CPU+Mobo) next month, than get an opty 165 this month that will suck more juice, and be significantly slower. I'm not loyal to any corperation, I'm going to put my money where it will give me the best return on investment...
You raise some good points, but I believe that a good amount of people play games for good clean fun, and are good people. while there may end up being more "evil" towns than good towns, and inflatin might be a problem at stores. Traders could go to good towns and buy cheap, and sell goods in bad towns for a profit. If you make moral classes like Paladins the most powerful, I'd think that would be all the incentive players would need to make good towns. I have never played a mmorpg, and only played D&D once, but his ideas sound pretty good. I play a lot of FPS's though, and play with(not on) some clans. For the most part clan players are the most honest playrs, and take the game the most seriously. I'd think making moral players stronger than immoral players would only encourage fair-play. It would also force immoral palyers to be more creative in thier playstyle, making it more challenging, and fun.
I bought the CD, and I don't beleive I needed an internet connection to install the game. I did need the CD in the tray to play it though.
Are you sure? I'm fairly sure you can play single player games without an Internet connection or CD. As I have played HL2 on the plane without an Internet connection...
Obviously I need to log onto steam to play Counter-Strike. The only legit complaint I can think of is if they make you log onto steam to play LAN games. That could really present some problems for some users. I wouldn't call it DRM though I'd call it copy protection, and while it helps the content creators, it also has some great features for users too.
For instance I can play steam on any Windows PC I want. Once I purchase a game on Steam itself I have access to all my games even though I don't have the CD's. Meaning that if I visit my family in NY, and they don't have Steam on any computer, I just need to install the Steam client, and it lets me download any game I own on that account to any PC I'm on, without even having an install CD within 3,000 miles of me. This is a feature that has come in handy many-a-time. It's Greatly superior to EA's moronic Battlefield 2 solution that forces you to log onto their central server and have the CD in the tray. Hardly RIAA level of security. I personally like and welcome our new Steam overlords.
Peace,
-manno
That's interesting what type of software did it use? Was it Sharp's ot Sony's?
Ever had a fire, flood, or robery? Trust me back up your media, the unexpected happens.
not to mention the fact that the taxes "given back" probably add up to fractions of a cent once divided by your state/city's population. I'll mail him 10 cents, and for the next 30 years he can rest assured that he's made out like a bandit on this one.
-manno
These arn't the game development ninjas we're looking for.
Performance wise it's not great, but it is designed from the ground up with size, and battery life in mind. So choose a laptop with dedicated 3D graphics, that have to juice an extra chip, and extra RAM, and run traces for both of those on the mobo, or a smaller one with better battery life? On a thin-and-light portable like this I'd take battery life over 1-5 frames per second any day of the week. It's not like they were going to put x1600 in these things. A chip like that needs way more cooling, ie. a big hunk of metal, and possibly a fan even. It also consumes more juice. If they were going to throw in dedicated graphics think more along the lines of a 9200, or god willing a x1300, the GMA beats the 9200 and is within %10 of the x1300. So you get 90% of the performance and you don't have to pay extra for battery sucking, weight adding, realestate consuming discreet graphics.
There's a reason all ultra portables use the GMA, they're not made for gaming they're made to be small, light, and hopefully run for a while on batteries. I'm a gamer, it's why I won't switch to Mac or Linux, and I have a lugable gaming laptop. That doesn't mean I can't see the advantage to a thin-and-light portable with crappy video though.
-manno
They're just notebooks from Sagers manufacturing lines (http://sagernotebooks.com/ and relabeled.
What forum did you read that one in? Sager is a whitebox redistributer, and Dell is an OEM. Sagers are bottom of the line piles of trash and that's compared to Dells that are just piles of trash. We've owned a number of sagers, and they all died within 2 years. I mean dead dead, not a dead harddrive dead. I'm talking fried mobo dead that's after having to replace lord know how many of their powerbricks. I have a Dell Inspiron 2650 from 4 years ago, and it's still going strong... despite my ill wishes. The thing gets HOT that's capital "H" "O" "T". That's with a P4 "M". At the office we use some IBM Desktop P4's those things are crazy soldid and actualy run cool, and quiet. Hopfully my dell will die and give me an excuse to get another laptop... I won't go Dell again, and I for damn sure won't touch a Sager with a 40' pole. Anyone here tried an Asus? How's Lenovo? I wish IBM was still making laptops.
Peace,
-manno
If I had mod points you'd get one. But this whole talk of video game as not art is kind of BS particularly coming from a guy that doesn't play them. Maybe I have a broad definition of art, but I consider sports to be an art particularly when played by players, or teams of equal ability, it really is a thing of beauty to see equally matched opponents dodge, and parry, as each one tries to get the high ground in a match. They each have their own style, their faults, their strengths. It's the human condition in real time in full motion. Action, and reaction 3rd and 10, 1-1, deuce, 15-15, win by 2. That's performance art at it's highest, each side has a set of rules to abide by, and an objective, the rest is fair game. It's an art form plain and simple. Weather you're playing or watching it's all about "what it means to be human".
I'd easily say the same for video games. Is he right about them not being like epic novels... for the most part yes, though I'm sure there are some people out there that played Final Fantasy... whatever that would disagree. Is comedy art? Yes, but does it delve into the same aspects of "what it means to be human" as "The Great Gatsby"? No, but it's still an art. How about a guy that covers an image of "The Holly Mary" with elephant feces? It's art to some, others an insult, and still nothing of significance to another group. He's structuring the argument in a manner that benefits his opinion. He's not asking are video games, an art, he's asking if they are like "The Great Gatsby". Because to him "The Great Gatsby" is art, and video games are not. I doubt his opinion will change as well, he's just not going to get that into games at this point in time.
There are few times in my life I've felt as on the edge of my seat as when I would play "Street Fighter II" against my equally skilled little brother in one of our Ryu-Ken match-ups. He was Ken, I was Ryu and. We hardly ever switched. Why because each character spoke to the other individually, they were so similar, and different, Ken was in Bright Red with Golden blond locks, and Ryu just plain black and white. Ken had a bold flare for the dramatic, Ryu was reserved, and cautious. And the two characters matched my brother and I fairly well. The fights were intense, and had a meaning to them that was beyond "just a game". We played as other characters a lot, just to take a break, because the Ken-Ryu fights were so... intense they drained you emotionally. While tiring they were what made the game so great. When my brother pulled off a good combo I was torn between thinking "wow nice shot", and "son-of-a..."! I was watching my little brother learn and adapt to my style, and as a result I had to relearn and adapt to his. That's the human condition my friends. That's art.
A FPS match between two well matched players is the same thing. Each player has their favorite weapon, their own style camper, zone controler, hunter. In a 24-24 game to 25 frags, when 2 of you hit jump pads, pulling off that double mid air railgun shot sure as heck looks and feels like art, and when you're on the receiving end it certainly feels like a tragedy.
Ebert will probably never see games as art because it's a different type of art form. There are people that see boxing as an art, and others that see it as legalized assault and battery. He's stating his opinion, and in this case he's just as right saying games aren't an art as I am saying they are.
Wish I was off to make art by splitting skulls,
-manno
ummm... in Comunist Russia the OneBox searches you!