I do live in the UK and do understand BT's network. There's no bottleneck at the cabs, or the exchange, both these are kitted out for far higher speeds than are available right now.
If you're having speed issues it's purely contention at your ISP (or some other problem at your ISP but the symptoms about certain times of day implies contention).
If you sign up for a business package that guarantees you a specific contention ratio, or none at all, or pay for one of the more expensive ISPs where you pay for your bandwidth outright you wont have these issues.
I hope you're right, as I say it was simply a concern so I certainly am not writing the idea off altogether, I just hope they can do it right.
Part the reason for my skepticism is they already tried the same to a lesser degree on the Xbox 360 with Facebook, and Twitter apps, provision of IE on the console and integrated search but frankly all of it sucks and certainly no one I've ever heard of, spoken to, or seen uses the Facebook or Twitter apps precisely for this reason and I don't know that any use the IE search features - it's easier to just pick up your phone or tablet next to you if that's what you want to do. Search particularly doesn't even work well either, the search feature doesn't find stuff which should be easy for it to find (which isn't exactly a great advert for the big "Powered by Bing" stamp!).
"I survived for years on a laptop and a dumbphone. The laptop can't replace a phone because it's not pocketable."
This was precisely my point really though, that sometimes convergence really does just make no sense because different devices have different niches, and whilst you can converge some things like the PDA and the phone (in your case you've not got a desktop, you're happy with a laptop too) you can't go a step further and eliminate the phone by integrating it into the laptop because there's always that divide from laptop being too big to be a phone replacement, and phone being too small to be a laptop replacement. I have a suspicion it's the same with consoles - that consoles became what they are because people wanted an extremely simple device in their living room that provides entertainment features, primarily games, and that as soon as you move away from that you defeat the object of what made the console market the successful market it is in the first place. You only have to look at Windows 8 to see how hard it is to bridge the tablet/PC divide also such that most people would prefer their PC to be a PC and their tablet to be a tablet without convergence of the two creating such a mess. There are limits to convergence and some other posters here don't seem to get that, they seem to be suggesting you can converge everything well.
Again, I like convergence where it makes sense, but I'm yet to be convinced that turning consoles into devices used for anything other than entertainment devices (i.e. for video, games, music) makes sense. Still, I'm getting both next gen consoles regardless (I tend to buy them all anyway- yes I even have a WiiU) so I guess I'll find out how it works out at some point anyway:)
"Oh dear. I really hope that you aren't in charge of anything involving strategic decisions. It takes time for ideas to mature and their time to come."
Right and you are? Because we want someone who supports the idea of bunging completely different paradigms together to create one of the many nonsense devices that have failed over the years? Again, it makes sense when it works, but doing it with everything just for the sake of it is just plain fucking stupid. FWIW I actually am in charge of making strategic decisions and I've been very successful in my career, so you'll have to excuse me if I accept reality's opinion over some random Joe on Slashdot who thinks he's gods gift to technical decision making.
"All of your arguments could be made against tablets. Who wants an expensive device that you can really only consume content on? Apparently now that a usable interface has been designed millions of people."
Except that's not my argument is it? My argument is that it only makes sense to converge where convergence is both beneficial, and makes sense. Obviously with tablets as media consumption devices that makes a lot of sense because it actually works and people want it. You may be right that there is a magical new input device that both works for keyboard style text input and still is great for playing games, but this magical input device that suddenly makes convergence of PC style general computing and games consoles a pleasant reality does not come with the XBox One (the box contents have been published). Of course, you could solve the problem with a keyboard, the PS3 did this, but then what's the point? you might as well go whole hog and have a PC in your living room with a blue tooth keyboard and enjoy the benefits of a multi-purpose OS that lets you do everything, not just some half-arsed apps based thing that no one actually uses purely because it's half-arsed. The XBox 360 came closest with the chat pad but even that was clunky and I think most people that had one rapidly ended up just throwing it aside.
"Computing is ubiquitous but computers are becoming less necessary for the majority of people."
This is a myth. It's often said that PC sales are down because of tablets and so forth making them unnecessary. The reality is PC sales are down because whereas before your PC was out of date and wouldn't run anything new acceptably after 3 years, for some time now even a 6 year old PC will run everything current to a perfectly acceptable level. There may be things people do on phones and tablets now instead of PCs but there are things they don't - which means they are still a necessary item in everyone's home. Also, you're vastly overstating things with "majority". Nowhere near a majority of people who had PCs now have tablets. Not even close.
This is one thing Jobs as much as I dislike him actually got. He could've merged the phone and iPod much earlier than he did, and Apple even had ideas for tablets much earlier than when they released the iPad, but what Jobs was good at was timing - he knew when a market was ready for convergence, when it made sense and when that convergence would not result in a conflicting mess of paradigms.
Consoles are not there, because we still haven't got any solution for that fundamental divide of having a locked down system that requires a simplistic interface for gaming and entertainment controls and having an open generic computing platform that has controls that offer the flexibility of the mouse and keyboard needed to control that. Kinect in the XBox One is still the closest thing but reviews to date suggest the voice recognition isn't even close to 100% reliable yet, let alone finger tracking to, say, allow someone to type on an imaginary keyboard for example and so forth. Consoles excelled because you could slap a game in and play, the more barriers you put in the way of that the less they excel at the market they created.
The problem is that most Slashdot geeks think your average Joe is happy nagivating through a full blown desktop style operating system in their living room with a physical keyboard. They're not, that's not what they want there. Your average Joe wants something simpler, easier, and less cluttered than that to manage their entertainment.
Right, and you sound like the kid that's just learn the term convergence at school and doesn't really understand the practicalities of it and just wants everything to converge.
I'm all for convergence where it makes sense, but some convergence is stupid. I jumped right on the smartphone bandwagon because it was about fucking time that my mobile could decent browse the web and pick up e-mail. If however the next iteration of smartphones came with a toaster, because, well, they run hot enough when they're busy then no, that's not convergence I'd be interested in. Convergence isn't about just bunging everything together into one device, it's about putting together things that make sense, and general purpose apps on a system that doesn't have a general purpose interface does not make sense.
Convergence has always been important in computing, but it's not always been successful. There is a much larger list of attempts at convergence that people didn't buy into than did.
The day consoles converge to become general purpose PCs is the day they no longer have a market because they'll always be inferior at that than PCs which are always ahead in the hardware markets.
A laptop with a 3G or better internet connection is already the end result of convergence between desktop, mobile, and games but surprisingly, people don't just have laptops and nothing else - if you believe convergence is always inevitable then tell me, why do you think people are not already carrying around that device given that it does everything their phone, tablet, games console, and desktop does?
Could it be because, say, it's too big to fit in your pocket? If so then don't you think that means there's kind of a place for phones as well as laptops? If people want a PC in their living room then why is it only a handful of people that have PCs in their living room? Why is it even those that do mostly just use it to replicate the features of existing entertainment focussed consoles like watching media or playing games? Most people want their living room for what it has always been there for - a place to relax and entertain.
There's really more to it than that though, it's about getting everyone to use the same palette for each area, and adhering to the same style - there are a thousand shades of grey on the spectrum between cartoony and realistic. Someone using just a slightly different technique of doing glass or brickwork can stand out rather glaringly. Without proper direction the problem you face is that you can just outright tell that a completely different group of people made one part of the world compared to the other and at that point immersiveness suffers.
Any solution would probably still need an art director of sorts, you'd need to document whatever guidelines you could such as what palettes to use where and when, what techniques to use for things such as water, glass, grass, brickwork or whatever and you'd have to have an art focussed bug tracker where artists submit their work and have the art director comment on any changes that need to be made before they eventually accept the submission.
As I say the problem isn't insurmountable, and I think technology that would need to be created would help - the art bug tracker would ideally be integrated directly into the development pipeline so the art director could fly through submissions and not manually have to convert and work into the engine to prevent them being overwhelmed.
You have the same problems with voice acting, music and so forth but music tends to work much more like you suggest in that it could be grouped and categorised and different types used when it suits so would be a much more easily solved problem.
I actually think it'd be an interesting project creating the tool chain to facilitate that sort of massive scale open source project that reaches into so many disciplines (code, sound, art, gameplay, physics, animations) as much as the project itself in some ways. I wish I had more spare time to start on something like that alone:)
Interesting and something I never knew, but I'm not sure it changes things much. Ultimately consoles became what they were because it was recognised that devices for specific purposes do better at specific purposes and that consoles are best suited to gaming and entertainment, whilst PCs are best kept for general computing. Obviously the Famicom idea died a death, presumably for exactly this reason, that all people wanted to do in their living room was play Mario such that it's not that the general computing features made Mario any less fun, but that because the device was primarily targetted at entertainment, it did a really shit job of anything else.
It's the same now, Microsoft release IE for the 360, and it's shit and useless compared to a tablet or PC and nothing will change that in the same way that FPS games are awful on touch screen phones and tablets. This is also why people are still writing iOS and Android apps on Macs/PCs and not on mobile phones and tablets - because they're a shit medium for most content creation.
The idea of every type of action being able to be done on every type of device has never worked and has always ended miserably with half arsed bodge job features that no one ever uses.
I wouldn't even need an XBox if I could do everything I ever wanted on any device. I'd just do it all on my phone in my pocket, but that's not the case.
"It's clear you don't understand conservativism at all, or my stance on welfare."
That's pretty comical given that the very definition of conservatism is to resist change when you're advocating something the US has never done before (Communism). As I said before, it's always comical when Americans that like to think they fit some ultra-patriotic stereotype do the opposite demonstrating they have no idea what they're on about. It appears it's not me that doesn't understand conservatism, but you that doesn't understand political beliefs full stop, even that which you claim to be your own. You claim to be a conservative whilst arguing against conservatism and for communism. This makes you incredibly ill equipped intellectually to be even having this sort of discussion.
"The left's definition of equal is one way to look at it if the word 'equal' means 'discriminatory'. We give money to those that 'deserve' it (based on gender, race, etc - all those things that it's ILLEGAL to discriminate on)."
You obviously don't understand this either. It's not about "deserve" it's about need. If someone needs unemployment benefits to live because they were made redundant in a failing economy then they need welfare to survive. Gender, race has nothing to do with it, you just made that bit up.
"As I pointed out, that would be cheaper overall than the means-based, divisive, class warfare mess we have now."
Except you also made that up. Googling the US welfare budget and administration costs demonstrates this, but if you still genuinely believe it then feel free to show your working and provide your sources.
"The other way to do federal welfare and still stay within the Constitution would be to allocate money for the states to disburse based solely on population, not any other criterion."
Ah. The constitution. That 300 year old document that people arbitrarily interpret to suit their biases. Please note: I'm from a country capable of dealing with the dynamism of reality without pretending some ancient document does or doesn't say what they want it to say so your constitutional arguments are meaningless though I couldn't see anything in the constitution that classed only giving to those who "need" as discrimination though I'm sure you can point out what you arbitrarily interpreted otherwise.
But at least that sort of functionality has still been entertainment oriented.
The point is that if you start to focus on general computing then you're detracting from the whole point of a console and doing a half-arsed job of something that PCs et. al. already do far better.
The problem you're dealing with there is contention at your ISP.
Stop expecting to get a leased line for the same amount as your average kids pocket money.
Get a better ISP or stump up for a leased line if that's what you want. You can't expect to go for the cheapest ISP offering around and not suffer contention issues - the reason your subscription is as cheap as it is is because you're sharing a segment of bandwidth with a bunch of other people and splitting the cost.
If you don't want to pay for the full amount of bandwidth to be reserved for yourself then you can't complain.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but let's be honest, this is no more sick than half the stuff on hostel which all looks pretty real with modern effects.
I think it's a wider societal problem. I never understood how something like Hostel or the Human Centipede are allowed to be shown and there seems to be very little uproar, but you're allowed to shoot people in CoD's almost cartoonish graphical environment and it's "OMG THIS IS GOING TO DESTROY OUR CHILDREN".
I get what you're saying, and have made the same argument about Apple vs. Android, I've seen numerous Apple fanboy make a claim "Obviously Apple do it right and Android does it wrong because the public prefer the iPhone" but given that Android is outselling iPhones nearly 8:1 I don't know how anyone can seriously make such a claim as "the public" are mostly not buying iPhones by a massive margin which implies "the public" most definitely don't prefer it.
But one thing to keep in mind however is this, even if you have a product that is loved by 1 billion people, there's still another 6 billion people in the world that aren't served by that product. Many of those might simply be because of poverty, but there's a sizeable proportion, more than those who are served by the product who may simply dislike it.
So even if Twilight has half a billion fans that watched it, there could just as well be a billion, 2 billion, even 3 billion people that didn't watch it because they thought it looked fucking awful.
For what it's worth I watched it and thought it was fucking awful, at least past the 3rd film. The first three were okay, the 3rd was by far the best. The last two were shit and stupid IMO.
But ultimately the thing to bear in mind is that just because something is popular, doesn't mean it's more popular than something else, and doesn't mean it's liked by a majority. Popularity is a measure only of how many people like a product, and tells us little about how many people dislike a product.
Actually I think you're exactly right, I was brought up on multiplayer gaming in the Doom and Quake era so I think I am a snob, whether justified or not, my personal feeling is that many modern games just aren't that good. In this respect I imagine someone who has tasted the most expensively made wine on earth doesn't like your average cheap supermarket wine, I guess that does make them a snob, but when you've tasted better your measure of everything else in future is always going to be different.
But don't get me wrong, I buy CoD and BF/MoH religiously every year, I was probably a little over critical, I wouldn't say they all suck, god only knows 300 hours of my life being sucked away because of BF3's multiplayer suggests I certainly enjoyed it and got my money's worth. I do like my mindless entertainment, I also enjoy many films that are slated as exactly that - plenty of criticism about the Transformers films but I actually enjoyed them precisely because I recognised them for what they are - mindless action.
Perhaps I wasn't clear enough but as I say I actually agree with you entirely, and was pointing out the same thing to the GP in a way I hoped he'd understand though I also understand why he thinks such games suck because if he's been around long enough and played enough games he'll also know there are hidden gems that just didn't have the marketing budget or talent to get themselves out to a wider audience. Minecraft is an example of one of those gems that did however for example.
So by suck I wasn't implying I don't enjoy them, I don't buy them, it was probably an overly harsh use of the term - fundamentally my point is that a game can sell well without being better than something that doesn't sell as well, or as I pointed out, perhaps that's just my personal perception, perhaps people really do think CoD is the best game ever and nothing better has ever been produced, though I'm not convinced - you only have to look at how something like GTA V came along that genuinely was a bit more interesting and blew it out the water.
Except even Duke Nukem outsold Payday 2 shifting 1.5million copies and turning a profit in the end. Kane and Lynch did even better.
Even the clones do incredibly well and those that don't simply don't not because they're a clone, but because of underlying quality issues but even DNF with all it's fault was a platinum selling title.
That's exactly the problem, you don't have to bring more to the table than what is hot. People want more CoD clones because CoD is only release once a year and lasts them maybe a month or so at best for most people, they want more clone to fill in that time between, they want more of the same and sure the quality might not quite be there, but if it's partially there then that's good enough for most, and that's good enough to shift a million odd copies.
So "WHOOSH" all you want, but the real problem is that you don't understand the market. You're making that fundamental mistake of projecting and assuming everyone else in the market is exactly like you. They're not. You're an anomaly in the market and I get it, I am too, but we just have to accept that.
There are a lot of engines out there that support that and have scene graphs optimised for it both open source and cheap proprietary source codebases.
Rockstar's problems with GTA are simply a result of the limited RAM on current consoles. On the PS4/XBox One or a PC with 4gb RAM+ this shouldn't be a problem, especially with an SSD.
Server side collision detection only really need act as a check, so rarely has to be done to the level as on the client - the server doesn't care if you ragdoll from an explosion and your arm goes through a wall, that's just cosmetic and upto the client to stop, it only cares that your player as a whole doesn't go through the wall and cheat so could do simpler bounding box or sphere type checks or similar.
I think the tech is all there, it's just as is usual with something like a sandbox the difficulty is producing the content - Rockstar had hundreds, maybe over a 1000 talented people being managed by people with a central vision and overriding control working for what, 6 years?
You'd struggle to do that open source with a distributed project, even if you find 200 artists, 300 world designers, 400 modellers then getting them all to conform to the same art style without having an art director in the same building being able to check around that everything is conforming is going to be a hell of a challenge. I'm not saying it's impossible, but anyone achieving that would deserve one hell of a medal.
"I'm as far from a communist as you could imagine. I'm actually a very conservative conservative. If you want non-discrimination, you have to apply rules equally in all circumstances, not only when discrimination fits in with your liberal 'affirmative action' agenda."
I'm always amused by people who like to think they're red blooded capitalist commie hating Americans, as conservative as they come, and then espouse views that are quite the opposite. The fact is, whether you like it or not, you're asking for communism.
But ultimately the problem with people like you is that you don't actually understand things like communism, you just claim you hate it because that's what all "true" red blooded Americans do and you've never known any different, despite the fact that's exactly what you're claiming you want.
Well it was never a problem for XBox Live Indie games so I don't see why it would be a problem now.
The Windows Store is fairly well vetted much like Apple's app store, and Metro apps are fairly heavily restricted in what they can do much like XBox Live Indie Games were.
I don't think viruses will be a problem therefore, and even if malicious software got on I think with Metro's restrictions there's really fuck all it could do of any interest anyway.
The biggest concern I have is it's going to take a console, which should be a device for playing games in a simple manner and turn it into a computer which will be cluttered with all sorts of irrelevant shit. I don't want that. That's what my PC is for and to a lesser extent my tablet. All I want my console to do is be able to play games, and maybe play movies and music across my network.
If I wanted a PC in my living room, I'd stick one there.
That is after all the only political model that declares equality for everyone including equal access to welfare.
Otherwise you're still asking for two contradictory things and unless you've found a way to phase between two different dimensions then you're asking for the impossible.
I'm afraid communism has never worked though, as much as that's exactly what you're asking for.
But now you're just changing the parameters of the discussion to a different and largely unrelated issue.
You stated, and I quote:
"Religions shouldn't be able to be convicted of fraud, they don't engage in commerce."
That is wrong. They can and often do engage in commerce. This is a different thing to being a registered charity (or a non-profit in general also) vs. being a registered business and the differing legislation surrounding the two.
Perhaps you weren't explicit enough in your original statement, though I'm not sure how being more explicit would help as I think your statement is pretty clear. Charities can and do engage in commerce and should be able to be and can be convicted of fraud.
But that's a different thing from what they can and can't do with any profits they make. How you may and may not use your profits in this case has no relationship to commerce - the very fact they have profits in the first place is evidence of commercial activity and it has really no relevance to the resultant fact that charities can therefore commit fraud through actions related to their commercial activities.
"Once you beat the single player campaign there's nothing to do in single player any more"
There seems to be lots to do, depending on how much of the collecting, strangers and freaks, and various other missions you did beforehand. But out of interest, I never played San Andreas, what post-story stuff did that have that GTA V is missing? I agree I've not really played it post story but that's purely because GTA online exists, otherwise I'd be dicking around in single player instead.
"The online component is horribly buggy; some days I'll have to re-join an online session after every attempt to join one."
Rockstar always said they expected things to be bumpy at first because this is their first time trying to do a real online experience with GTA like this. I agree it's been a pain but things seem to be fixed now, and the turnaround in doing so has been pretty rapid, I mean, 3 weeks or so from opening up the servers to getting everything pretty much rosie? That's not bad for a first attempt at this- I've played MMOs where post-launch and post-expansion issues have gone on for almost a year.
"And since there's no function for "start this job for your crew only", and most players are too stupid to change who a job is open to, you often get to join a job and then get kicked to make room for crew members."
I can see why this would be annoying, though I've honestly never once had it happen to me. If it's a problem though then why not host and let randoms join you instead?
"Still no iFruit app for Android, which is still being advertised within the game, because Android app development is apparently too hard for Rockstar."
Agree this is stupid, really no excuse in this day and age. Android development is mature now and it's not like it wasn't something that couldn't be developed completely in parallel with the main game.
"Thing is, I still like sandbox games. And there's no third-party engine."
You mean something like UnrealEngine available to indie devs and focussed at sandbox games or what? Is there any reason engines like C4 couldn't be trivially adapted to this sort of game?
"Make generic "Call Of Honor: Halo of Killzone Edition" and watch the numbers suck."
This seems a bit of a silly thing to say given that all the games you bundled into that fantasy title are some of the best selling games going all earning multiple platinums without fail each time they release.
The reason generic shooters like that are so common and released every year almost without fail is precisely because they do pay.
In contrast, Payday: The Heist other than showing up free on my PS+ subscription I've not really heard the slightest thing about and according to Google it didn't even make the 1 million sales mark.
I'm not defending the likes of CoD in terms of it's quality and worth as a game and so forth with it's rather tiresome release cycle but you can't argue that it doesn't work and isn't insanely successful - they sell about 10x as many copies on launch day alone each year as Payday has in it's lifetime to date.
Fundamentally the problem is that games that suck seem to be where the money is, or at least, perhaps, the majority of people don't actually think those games suck.
No he's claiming the world is much more complex than that. The irony of you not getting that is demonstrative of the six year old mentality he's referring to.
For example, he states that stealing, however done is wrong.
So if an African warlord forces a village to hand over all it's food leaving the populace starving, it's wrong and immoral if a villagers breaks into the warlord's stores and steals back a loaf of bread?
He says hurting/killing people except in defence of self is wrong. So if a 5 year old keeps flicking rubber bands at me because that's what kids do, I'm allowed to shoot them dead because it was in self defence and it wouldn't be immoral in the slightest for me to do so?
The world is way too complex to generalise. Different cases, different levels of proportionality and so forth making it way too complex to define morality in such a simplistic manner, and yes, that's why it's 6 year old type thinking.
Well I was talking in general. Even if a few places win, the consensus amongst objective reporters seems to be that overall the country will be worse off. The problem is the government did a rather braindead calculation, it calculated that time lost travelling on trains was lost productivity for the economy, so if they have more people travelling faster then all that time saved for those people was additional productivity for the economy, the problem is they ignore two factors:
a) There's no guarantee HS2 will be used to capacity b) Time on trains is not lost productivity due to laptops and mobile phones in the first place c) Teleworking will be even more prominent by 2028
I was under the impression it was the other way around though that it was the south that would win, sucking more talent from outside London - i.e. if Birmingham becomes less than hour commute then why would Birmingham's best and brightest stay in Birmingham and help increase economic productivity there when they could trivially just commute to London and enjoy the massive benefit of overly inflated London wages?
I can't see places like Sheffield benefitting at all, it's something like a 46minute theoretical saving from Sheffield to London but only a 30minute saving or so in practice, the problem is the new station will be at Meadowhall and having commuted to Sheffield a bit in the past with my train sometimes dropping me at Meadowhall my experience is you'll then lose that half hour gain getting into the centre waiting for a train/tram to deposit you there anyway, so for Sheffield it'll offer no actual practical benefit over just catching the 2hr 7min train from Sheffield centre. Leeds is the same, but may gain about 10 - 20minutes at best because the new station is a little closer to the centre, I've no idea about Manchesters stations.
The problem with HS2 is we were sold the route on speed benefits, but the speed benefits are a myth in practice so now the argument has shifted to capacity but there are much better and cheaper methods of increasing capacity using existing infrastructure, and that's why the whole thing is a farce.
Just last week there was a story about how the government took the list of cities that would benefit and publicised them without also publicising the list of cities that will lose out that was in the exact same document. If there was any real economic case for HS2 then they wouldn't need to do any of this sort of thing, it would make the case for itself. The fact that the entire case is built on lies doesn't bode well for itself.
Even the trains and carriages themselves will cost £7.5bn. That's the cost 3 of our new 70,000 ton displacement Queen Elizabeth class aircraft carriers would be. What. The. Fuck.
Slashdot Mirror
I do live in the UK and do understand BT's network. There's no bottleneck at the cabs, or the exchange, both these are kitted out for far higher speeds than are available right now.
If you're having speed issues it's purely contention at your ISP (or some other problem at your ISP but the symptoms about certain times of day implies contention).
If you sign up for a business package that guarantees you a specific contention ratio, or none at all, or pay for one of the more expensive ISPs where you pay for your bandwidth outright you wont have these issues.
I hope you're right, as I say it was simply a concern so I certainly am not writing the idea off altogether, I just hope they can do it right.
Part the reason for my skepticism is they already tried the same to a lesser degree on the Xbox 360 with Facebook, and Twitter apps, provision of IE on the console and integrated search but frankly all of it sucks and certainly no one I've ever heard of, spoken to, or seen uses the Facebook or Twitter apps precisely for this reason and I don't know that any use the IE search features - it's easier to just pick up your phone or tablet next to you if that's what you want to do. Search particularly doesn't even work well either, the search feature doesn't find stuff which should be easy for it to find (which isn't exactly a great advert for the big "Powered by Bing" stamp!).
"I survived for years on a laptop and a dumbphone. The laptop can't replace a phone because it's not pocketable."
This was precisely my point really though, that sometimes convergence really does just make no sense because different devices have different niches, and whilst you can converge some things like the PDA and the phone (in your case you've not got a desktop, you're happy with a laptop too) you can't go a step further and eliminate the phone by integrating it into the laptop because there's always that divide from laptop being too big to be a phone replacement, and phone being too small to be a laptop replacement. I have a suspicion it's the same with consoles - that consoles became what they are because people wanted an extremely simple device in their living room that provides entertainment features, primarily games, and that as soon as you move away from that you defeat the object of what made the console market the successful market it is in the first place. You only have to look at Windows 8 to see how hard it is to bridge the tablet/PC divide also such that most people would prefer their PC to be a PC and their tablet to be a tablet without convergence of the two creating such a mess. There are limits to convergence and some other posters here don't seem to get that, they seem to be suggesting you can converge everything well.
Again, I like convergence where it makes sense, but I'm yet to be convinced that turning consoles into devices used for anything other than entertainment devices (i.e. for video, games, music) makes sense. Still, I'm getting both next gen consoles regardless (I tend to buy them all anyway- yes I even have a WiiU) so I guess I'll find out how it works out at some point anyway :)
"Oh dear. I really hope that you aren't in charge of anything involving strategic decisions. It takes time for ideas to mature and their time to come."
Right and you are? Because we want someone who supports the idea of bunging completely different paradigms together to create one of the many nonsense devices that have failed over the years? Again, it makes sense when it works, but doing it with everything just for the sake of it is just plain fucking stupid. FWIW I actually am in charge of making strategic decisions and I've been very successful in my career, so you'll have to excuse me if I accept reality's opinion over some random Joe on Slashdot who thinks he's gods gift to technical decision making.
"All of your arguments could be made against tablets. Who wants an expensive device that you can really only consume content on? Apparently now that a usable interface has been designed millions of people."
Except that's not my argument is it? My argument is that it only makes sense to converge where convergence is both beneficial, and makes sense. Obviously with tablets as media consumption devices that makes a lot of sense because it actually works and people want it. You may be right that there is a magical new input device that both works for keyboard style text input and still is great for playing games, but this magical input device that suddenly makes convergence of PC style general computing and games consoles a pleasant reality does not come with the XBox One (the box contents have been published). Of course, you could solve the problem with a keyboard, the PS3 did this, but then what's the point? you might as well go whole hog and have a PC in your living room with a blue tooth keyboard and enjoy the benefits of a multi-purpose OS that lets you do everything, not just some half-arsed apps based thing that no one actually uses purely because it's half-arsed. The XBox 360 came closest with the chat pad but even that was clunky and I think most people that had one rapidly ended up just throwing it aside.
"Computing is ubiquitous but computers are becoming less necessary for the majority of people."
This is a myth. It's often said that PC sales are down because of tablets and so forth making them unnecessary. The reality is PC sales are down because whereas before your PC was out of date and wouldn't run anything new acceptably after 3 years, for some time now even a 6 year old PC will run everything current to a perfectly acceptable level. There may be things people do on phones and tablets now instead of PCs but there are things they don't - which means they are still a necessary item in everyone's home. Also, you're vastly overstating things with "majority". Nowhere near a majority of people who had PCs now have tablets. Not even close.
This is one thing Jobs as much as I dislike him actually got. He could've merged the phone and iPod much earlier than he did, and Apple even had ideas for tablets much earlier than when they released the iPad, but what Jobs was good at was timing - he knew when a market was ready for convergence, when it made sense and when that convergence would not result in a conflicting mess of paradigms.
Consoles are not there, because we still haven't got any solution for that fundamental divide of having a locked down system that requires a simplistic interface for gaming and entertainment controls and having an open generic computing platform that has controls that offer the flexibility of the mouse and keyboard needed to control that. Kinect in the XBox One is still the closest thing but reviews to date suggest the voice recognition isn't even close to 100% reliable yet, let alone finger tracking to, say, allow someone to type on an imaginary keyboard for example and so forth. Consoles excelled because you could slap a game in and play, the more barriers you put in the way of that the less they excel at the market they created.
The problem is that most Slashdot geeks think your average Joe is happy nagivating through a full blown desktop style operating system in their living room with a physical keyboard. They're not, that's not what they want there. Your average Joe wants something simpler, easier, and less cluttered than that to manage their entertainment.
Right, and you sound like the kid that's just learn the term convergence at school and doesn't really understand the practicalities of it and just wants everything to converge.
I'm all for convergence where it makes sense, but some convergence is stupid. I jumped right on the smartphone bandwagon because it was about fucking time that my mobile could decent browse the web and pick up e-mail. If however the next iteration of smartphones came with a toaster, because, well, they run hot enough when they're busy then no, that's not convergence I'd be interested in. Convergence isn't about just bunging everything together into one device, it's about putting together things that make sense, and general purpose apps on a system that doesn't have a general purpose interface does not make sense.
Convergence has always been important in computing, but it's not always been successful. There is a much larger list of attempts at convergence that people didn't buy into than did.
The day consoles converge to become general purpose PCs is the day they no longer have a market because they'll always be inferior at that than PCs which are always ahead in the hardware markets.
A laptop with a 3G or better internet connection is already the end result of convergence between desktop, mobile, and games but surprisingly, people don't just have laptops and nothing else - if you believe convergence is always inevitable then tell me, why do you think people are not already carrying around that device given that it does everything their phone, tablet, games console, and desktop does?
Could it be because, say, it's too big to fit in your pocket? If so then don't you think that means there's kind of a place for phones as well as laptops? If people want a PC in their living room then why is it only a handful of people that have PCs in their living room? Why is it even those that do mostly just use it to replicate the features of existing entertainment focussed consoles like watching media or playing games? Most people want their living room for what it has always been there for - a place to relax and entertain.
There's really more to it than that though, it's about getting everyone to use the same palette for each area, and adhering to the same style - there are a thousand shades of grey on the spectrum between cartoony and realistic. Someone using just a slightly different technique of doing glass or brickwork can stand out rather glaringly. Without proper direction the problem you face is that you can just outright tell that a completely different group of people made one part of the world compared to the other and at that point immersiveness suffers.
Any solution would probably still need an art director of sorts, you'd need to document whatever guidelines you could such as what palettes to use where and when, what techniques to use for things such as water, glass, grass, brickwork or whatever and you'd have to have an art focussed bug tracker where artists submit their work and have the art director comment on any changes that need to be made before they eventually accept the submission.
As I say the problem isn't insurmountable, and I think technology that would need to be created would help - the art bug tracker would ideally be integrated directly into the development pipeline so the art director could fly through submissions and not manually have to convert and work into the engine to prevent them being overwhelmed.
You have the same problems with voice acting, music and so forth but music tends to work much more like you suggest in that it could be grouped and categorised and different types used when it suits so would be a much more easily solved problem.
I actually think it'd be an interesting project creating the tool chain to facilitate that sort of massive scale open source project that reaches into so many disciplines (code, sound, art, gameplay, physics, animations) as much as the project itself in some ways. I wish I had more spare time to start on something like that alone :)
Interesting and something I never knew, but I'm not sure it changes things much. Ultimately consoles became what they were because it was recognised that devices for specific purposes do better at specific purposes and that consoles are best suited to gaming and entertainment, whilst PCs are best kept for general computing. Obviously the Famicom idea died a death, presumably for exactly this reason, that all people wanted to do in their living room was play Mario such that it's not that the general computing features made Mario any less fun, but that because the device was primarily targetted at entertainment, it did a really shit job of anything else.
It's the same now, Microsoft release IE for the 360, and it's shit and useless compared to a tablet or PC and nothing will change that in the same way that FPS games are awful on touch screen phones and tablets. This is also why people are still writing iOS and Android apps on Macs/PCs and not on mobile phones and tablets - because they're a shit medium for most content creation.
The idea of every type of action being able to be done on every type of device has never worked and has always ended miserably with half arsed bodge job features that no one ever uses.
I wouldn't even need an XBox if I could do everything I ever wanted on any device. I'd just do it all on my phone in my pocket, but that's not the case.
"It's clear you don't understand conservativism at all, or my stance on welfare."
That's pretty comical given that the very definition of conservatism is to resist change when you're advocating something the US has never done before (Communism). As I said before, it's always comical when Americans that like to think they fit some ultra-patriotic stereotype do the opposite demonstrating they have no idea what they're on about. It appears it's not me that doesn't understand conservatism, but you that doesn't understand political beliefs full stop, even that which you claim to be your own. You claim to be a conservative whilst arguing against conservatism and for communism. This makes you incredibly ill equipped intellectually to be even having this sort of discussion.
"The left's definition of equal is one way to look at it if the word 'equal' means 'discriminatory'. We give money to those that 'deserve' it (based on gender, race, etc - all those things that it's ILLEGAL to discriminate on)."
You obviously don't understand this either. It's not about "deserve" it's about need. If someone needs unemployment benefits to live because they were made redundant in a failing economy then they need welfare to survive. Gender, race has nothing to do with it, you just made that bit up.
"As I pointed out, that would be cheaper overall than the means-based, divisive, class warfare mess we have now."
Except you also made that up. Googling the US welfare budget and administration costs demonstrates this, but if you still genuinely believe it then feel free to show your working and provide your sources.
"The other way to do federal welfare and still stay within the Constitution would be to allocate money for the states to disburse based solely on population, not any other criterion."
Ah. The constitution. That 300 year old document that people arbitrarily interpret to suit their biases. Please note: I'm from a country capable of dealing with the dynamism of reality without pretending some ancient document does or doesn't say what they want it to say so your constitutional arguments are meaningless though I couldn't see anything in the constitution that classed only giving to those who "need" as discrimination though I'm sure you can point out what you arbitrarily interpreted otherwise.
But at least that sort of functionality has still been entertainment oriented.
The point is that if you start to focus on general computing then you're detracting from the whole point of a console and doing a half-arsed job of something that PCs et. al. already do far better.
The problem you're dealing with there is contention at your ISP.
Stop expecting to get a leased line for the same amount as your average kids pocket money.
Get a better ISP or stump up for a leased line if that's what you want. You can't expect to go for the cheapest ISP offering around and not suffer contention issues - the reason your subscription is as cheap as it is is because you're sharing a segment of bandwidth with a bunch of other people and splitting the cost.
If you don't want to pay for the full amount of bandwidth to be reserved for yourself then you can't complain.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but let's be honest, this is no more sick than half the stuff on hostel which all looks pretty real with modern effects.
I think it's a wider societal problem. I never understood how something like Hostel or the Human Centipede are allowed to be shown and there seems to be very little uproar, but you're allowed to shoot people in CoD's almost cartoonish graphical environment and it's "OMG THIS IS GOING TO DESTROY OUR CHILDREN".
I get what you're saying, and have made the same argument about Apple vs. Android, I've seen numerous Apple fanboy make a claim "Obviously Apple do it right and Android does it wrong because the public prefer the iPhone" but given that Android is outselling iPhones nearly 8:1 I don't know how anyone can seriously make such a claim as "the public" are mostly not buying iPhones by a massive margin which implies "the public" most definitely don't prefer it.
But one thing to keep in mind however is this, even if you have a product that is loved by 1 billion people, there's still another 6 billion people in the world that aren't served by that product. Many of those might simply be because of poverty, but there's a sizeable proportion, more than those who are served by the product who may simply dislike it.
So even if Twilight has half a billion fans that watched it, there could just as well be a billion, 2 billion, even 3 billion people that didn't watch it because they thought it looked fucking awful.
For what it's worth I watched it and thought it was fucking awful, at least past the 3rd film. The first three were okay, the 3rd was by far the best. The last two were shit and stupid IMO.
But ultimately the thing to bear in mind is that just because something is popular, doesn't mean it's more popular than something else, and doesn't mean it's liked by a majority. Popularity is a measure only of how many people like a product, and tells us little about how many people dislike a product.
Actually I think you're exactly right, I was brought up on multiplayer gaming in the Doom and Quake era so I think I am a snob, whether justified or not, my personal feeling is that many modern games just aren't that good. In this respect I imagine someone who has tasted the most expensively made wine on earth doesn't like your average cheap supermarket wine, I guess that does make them a snob, but when you've tasted better your measure of everything else in future is always going to be different.
But don't get me wrong, I buy CoD and BF/MoH religiously every year, I was probably a little over critical, I wouldn't say they all suck, god only knows 300 hours of my life being sucked away because of BF3's multiplayer suggests I certainly enjoyed it and got my money's worth. I do like my mindless entertainment, I also enjoy many films that are slated as exactly that - plenty of criticism about the Transformers films but I actually enjoyed them precisely because I recognised them for what they are - mindless action.
Perhaps I wasn't clear enough but as I say I actually agree with you entirely, and was pointing out the same thing to the GP in a way I hoped he'd understand though I also understand why he thinks such games suck because if he's been around long enough and played enough games he'll also know there are hidden gems that just didn't have the marketing budget or talent to get themselves out to a wider audience. Minecraft is an example of one of those gems that did however for example.
So by suck I wasn't implying I don't enjoy them, I don't buy them, it was probably an overly harsh use of the term - fundamentally my point is that a game can sell well without being better than something that doesn't sell as well, or as I pointed out, perhaps that's just my personal perception, perhaps people really do think CoD is the best game ever and nothing better has ever been produced, though I'm not convinced - you only have to look at how something like GTA V came along that genuinely was a bit more interesting and blew it out the water.
Except even Duke Nukem outsold Payday 2 shifting 1.5million copies and turning a profit in the end. Kane and Lynch did even better.
Even the clones do incredibly well and those that don't simply don't not because they're a clone, but because of underlying quality issues but even DNF with all it's fault was a platinum selling title.
That's exactly the problem, you don't have to bring more to the table than what is hot. People want more CoD clones because CoD is only release once a year and lasts them maybe a month or so at best for most people, they want more clone to fill in that time between, they want more of the same and sure the quality might not quite be there, but if it's partially there then that's good enough for most, and that's good enough to shift a million odd copies.
So "WHOOSH" all you want, but the real problem is that you don't understand the market. You're making that fundamental mistake of projecting and assuming everyone else in the market is exactly like you. They're not. You're an anomaly in the market and I get it, I am too, but we just have to accept that.
There are a lot of engines out there that support that and have scene graphs optimised for it both open source and cheap proprietary source codebases.
Rockstar's problems with GTA are simply a result of the limited RAM on current consoles. On the PS4/XBox One or a PC with 4gb RAM+ this shouldn't be a problem, especially with an SSD.
Server side collision detection only really need act as a check, so rarely has to be done to the level as on the client - the server doesn't care if you ragdoll from an explosion and your arm goes through a wall, that's just cosmetic and upto the client to stop, it only cares that your player as a whole doesn't go through the wall and cheat so could do simpler bounding box or sphere type checks or similar.
I think the tech is all there, it's just as is usual with something like a sandbox the difficulty is producing the content - Rockstar had hundreds, maybe over a 1000 talented people being managed by people with a central vision and overriding control working for what, 6 years?
You'd struggle to do that open source with a distributed project, even if you find 200 artists, 300 world designers, 400 modellers then getting them all to conform to the same art style without having an art director in the same building being able to check around that everything is conforming is going to be a hell of a challenge. I'm not saying it's impossible, but anyone achieving that would deserve one hell of a medal.
"I'm as far from a communist as you could imagine. I'm actually a very conservative conservative. If you want non-discrimination, you have to apply rules equally in all circumstances, not only when discrimination fits in with your liberal 'affirmative action' agenda."
I'm always amused by people who like to think they're red blooded capitalist commie hating Americans, as conservative as they come, and then espouse views that are quite the opposite. The fact is, whether you like it or not, you're asking for communism.
But ultimately the problem with people like you is that you don't actually understand things like communism, you just claim you hate it because that's what all "true" red blooded Americans do and you've never known any different, despite the fact that's exactly what you're claiming you want.
Well it was never a problem for XBox Live Indie games so I don't see why it would be a problem now.
The Windows Store is fairly well vetted much like Apple's app store, and Metro apps are fairly heavily restricted in what they can do much like XBox Live Indie Games were.
I don't think viruses will be a problem therefore, and even if malicious software got on I think with Metro's restrictions there's really fuck all it could do of any interest anyway.
The biggest concern I have is it's going to take a console, which should be a device for playing games in a simple manner and turn it into a computer which will be cluttered with all sorts of irrelevant shit. I don't want that. That's what my PC is for and to a lesser extent my tablet. All I want my console to do is be able to play games, and maybe play movies and music across my network.
If I wanted a PC in my living room, I'd stick one there.
When you say back-end are you talking about a multiplayer server for a MMO type experience?
If so then the server emulators for most MMOs are open source and would do the trick.
Ah you're a communist.
That is after all the only political model that declares equality for everyone including equal access to welfare.
Otherwise you're still asking for two contradictory things and unless you've found a way to phase between two different dimensions then you're asking for the impossible.
I'm afraid communism has never worked though, as much as that's exactly what you're asking for.
But now you're just changing the parameters of the discussion to a different and largely unrelated issue.
You stated, and I quote:
"Religions shouldn't be able to be convicted of fraud, they don't engage in commerce."
That is wrong. They can and often do engage in commerce. This is a different thing to being a registered charity (or a non-profit in general also) vs. being a registered business and the differing legislation surrounding the two.
Perhaps you weren't explicit enough in your original statement, though I'm not sure how being more explicit would help as I think your statement is pretty clear. Charities can and do engage in commerce and should be able to be and can be convicted of fraud.
But that's a different thing from what they can and can't do with any profits they make. How you may and may not use your profits in this case has no relationship to commerce - the very fact they have profits in the first place is evidence of commercial activity and it has really no relevance to the resultant fact that charities can therefore commit fraud through actions related to their commercial activities.
I can't help but think most people in the discussion for this article are just re-imagining Windows Workflow Foundation.
"Once you beat the single player campaign there's nothing to do in single player any more"
There seems to be lots to do, depending on how much of the collecting, strangers and freaks, and various other missions you did beforehand. But out of interest, I never played San Andreas, what post-story stuff did that have that GTA V is missing? I agree I've not really played it post story but that's purely because GTA online exists, otherwise I'd be dicking around in single player instead.
"The online component is horribly buggy; some days I'll have to re-join an online session after every attempt to join one."
Rockstar always said they expected things to be bumpy at first because this is their first time trying to do a real online experience with GTA like this. I agree it's been a pain but things seem to be fixed now, and the turnaround in doing so has been pretty rapid, I mean, 3 weeks or so from opening up the servers to getting everything pretty much rosie? That's not bad for a first attempt at this- I've played MMOs where post-launch and post-expansion issues have gone on for almost a year.
"And since there's no function for "start this job for your crew only", and most players are too stupid to change who a job is open to, you often get to join a job and then get kicked to make room for crew members."
I can see why this would be annoying, though I've honestly never once had it happen to me. If it's a problem though then why not host and let randoms join you instead?
"Still no iFruit app for Android, which is still being advertised within the game, because Android app development is apparently too hard for Rockstar."
Agree this is stupid, really no excuse in this day and age. Android development is mature now and it's not like it wasn't something that couldn't be developed completely in parallel with the main game.
"Thing is, I still like sandbox games. And there's no third-party engine."
You mean something like UnrealEngine available to indie devs and focussed at sandbox games or what? Is there any reason engines like C4 couldn't be trivially adapted to this sort of game?
I agree with most of your post but:
"Make generic "Call Of Honor: Halo of Killzone Edition" and watch the numbers suck."
This seems a bit of a silly thing to say given that all the games you bundled into that fantasy title are some of the best selling games going all earning multiple platinums without fail each time they release.
The reason generic shooters like that are so common and released every year almost without fail is precisely because they do pay.
In contrast, Payday: The Heist other than showing up free on my PS+ subscription I've not really heard the slightest thing about and according to Google it didn't even make the 1 million sales mark.
I'm not defending the likes of CoD in terms of it's quality and worth as a game and so forth with it's rather tiresome release cycle but you can't argue that it doesn't work and isn't insanely successful - they sell about 10x as many copies on launch day alone each year as Payday has in it's lifetime to date.
Fundamentally the problem is that games that suck seem to be where the money is, or at least, perhaps, the majority of people don't actually think those games suck.
Commerce is simply defined as buying and selling goods and services. CoS do exactly that.
As for their profits, they do what every other organisation does, pay it out to their "staff" as wages, or reinvest it in property and so forth.
The only thing they don't have is a stock exchange listing and shareholders.
No he's claiming the world is much more complex than that. The irony of you not getting that is demonstrative of the six year old mentality he's referring to.
For example, he states that stealing, however done is wrong.
So if an African warlord forces a village to hand over all it's food leaving the populace starving, it's wrong and immoral if a villagers breaks into the warlord's stores and steals back a loaf of bread?
He says hurting/killing people except in defence of self is wrong. So if a 5 year old keeps flicking rubber bands at me because that's what kids do, I'm allowed to shoot them dead because it was in self defence and it wouldn't be immoral in the slightest for me to do so?
The world is way too complex to generalise. Different cases, different levels of proportionality and so forth making it way too complex to define morality in such a simplistic manner, and yes, that's why it's 6 year old type thinking.
Well I was talking in general. Even if a few places win, the consensus amongst objective reporters seems to be that overall the country will be worse off. The problem is the government did a rather braindead calculation, it calculated that time lost travelling on trains was lost productivity for the economy, so if they have more people travelling faster then all that time saved for those people was additional productivity for the economy, the problem is they ignore two factors:
a) There's no guarantee HS2 will be used to capacity
b) Time on trains is not lost productivity due to laptops and mobile phones in the first place
c) Teleworking will be even more prominent by 2028
I was under the impression it was the other way around though that it was the south that would win, sucking more talent from outside London - i.e. if Birmingham becomes less than hour commute then why would Birmingham's best and brightest stay in Birmingham and help increase economic productivity there when they could trivially just commute to London and enjoy the massive benefit of overly inflated London wages?
I can't see places like Sheffield benefitting at all, it's something like a 46minute theoretical saving from Sheffield to London but only a 30minute saving or so in practice, the problem is the new station will be at Meadowhall and having commuted to Sheffield a bit in the past with my train sometimes dropping me at Meadowhall my experience is you'll then lose that half hour gain getting into the centre waiting for a train/tram to deposit you there anyway, so for Sheffield it'll offer no actual practical benefit over just catching the 2hr 7min train from Sheffield centre. Leeds is the same, but may gain about 10 - 20minutes at best because the new station is a little closer to the centre, I've no idea about Manchesters stations.
The problem with HS2 is we were sold the route on speed benefits, but the speed benefits are a myth in practice so now the argument has shifted to capacity but there are much better and cheaper methods of increasing capacity using existing infrastructure, and that's why the whole thing is a farce.
Just last week there was a story about how the government took the list of cities that would benefit and publicised them without also publicising the list of cities that will lose out that was in the exact same document. If there was any real economic case for HS2 then they wouldn't need to do any of this sort of thing, it would make the case for itself. The fact that the entire case is built on lies doesn't bode well for itself.
Even the trains and carriages themselves will cost £7.5bn. That's the cost 3 of our new 70,000 ton displacement Queen Elizabeth class aircraft carriers would be. What. The. Fuck.