Oh fuck me, I was wrong, you really are just too dumb to cope with any of this. You're now trying to say that whether something is a blurring effect is defined entirely on whether an article on an AA algorithm explicitly uses the word "blur".
You really didn't think before making even more of a tit of yourself it might be prudent to actually understand what a blur is? You realise the no matter what dictionary you check the term blur and it's synonyms describe the effect of AA exactly?
I can't believe you've reached the point where you're trying to argue a blurring effect isn't in a desperate attempt to save face. You really are a lost cause, a perfect example of someone who just wants to be right even when they're oh so wrong and will jump to extraordinary extremes like arguing that something that is the very definition of a blur isn't. You always know that someone is hopeless when they drop to the point of trying to redefine the dictionary to suit their argument and that's exactly where you're at. It's pathetic.
There's no point in going any further, I can't help you, I've explained multiple times, I've given you everything you need, but you're just beyond it, you're just far too retarded to be able to rationally take part in this topic.
Yeah it's still a crime, that's not in dispute, but we do have the concepts of extenuating circumstances and public interest in British law.
I can't see what the public interest would be if it turns out there are no charges to answer, it's not like anyone and everyone can just get an embassy to put them up in order to skip bail, even Ecuador very nearly didn't take him. It's not like people are going to start running to embassies left and right under the assumption they'll get given protection- Assange was an extreme exception because of the politics of his case.
Yeah I'm interested to see how that plays out. If Sweden drops it's extradition request, there's every possibility that the British courts may deem that that adds weight to his argument that there was no case to answer, that it was political, and that he shouldn't have had to be on bail in the first place making his fleeing of that effectively irrelevant.
But then if there is a political dimension, it may be that they'll be happy to get him on whatever they can, and they do indeed punish him for skipping bail.
It'd be interesting to see how that plays out, but it really depends what happens after the questioning that is finally going ahead.
It's interesting that Ny cites the impending statute of limitations date as the reason for the change of heart. There have been two other key events in the last 6 months that I suspect were more relevant:
1) Assange's petition to the Swedish courts to have the case dropped failed, but in the ruling the Swedish judiciary was clear that it could not understand why Ny hadn't just questioned him over here, that it was incredibly odd that she hadn't and that she must do this ASAP.
2) There has been growing political pressure to stop guarding the embassy. When £10million has been spent on guarding the embassy whilst police forces have been cut MPs have faced increasing pressure from the public and even policing unions to stop wasting time on it. Recent cuts have meant that some crimes such as car crime have become defacto decriminalised because the police no longer have the resources to pursue them. In that context it's rather galling for the police and public alike to hear we're spending millions just to have officers stood around doing nothing.
So I imagine the weight of these two events have been the key reasons for this shift rather than expiry of statute of limitations for the most minor allegations. If Ny defied the Swedish courts a further appeal to have the case dropped would likely succeed due to Ny refusing to do her job and actually pursue a prosecution. Similarly, the Ecuadorian embassy might stop being watched and Assange could flee anyway.
She's really been left little choice. At least the case is finally moving, and Ny has been forced to do her job properly rather than simply persisting with long discredited excuses not to do it (the most amusing of which is that the Swedish justice system doesn't allow overseas questioning - what a laughing stock the folks that persisted in pushing that myth have now become).
Saying you want to learn when all question posed have clearly been answered multiple times shows a clear disconnect between what you're saying you want to do, and what you actually want to do.
You're still displaying a fundamental lack of understanding about most things here. You're trying to explain MSAA and using that as an obscure argument that in some cases an estimated pixel is blurring, and in others it's not. This makes no sense - blurring occurs when you have an approximation of a set of pixels, rather than the actual pixels. An approximation of 4 pixels downscaled to 1, is still an approximation, as is 1 pixel upscaled into 4 approximated pixels. Have a look at the font example here:
What do you think those intermediate pixels between the black and the white when anti-aliased are if not a literal blurring of the lines to make a jagged edge look smoother?
You're reaching for a single very specific algorithm, and using very arbitrary (and hypocritical) definitions to try and argue your point. This tells me that you've already decided what's what, which again shows what a farce your claim to want to learn is- if you've already decided you know best (whilst admitting you're wholly unqualified on the subject) then why are you pretending you care? why are you even discussing? don't say you're doing so because you want to learn whilst simultaneously proving that you do not.
You're arguing as someone whose taken their knowledge from a "my graphics card is better than your graphics card" type website or forum discussion with maybe a bit of Googling thrown in to try and mask the most embarrassing elements of your lack of knowledge. What you're not showing is an understanding of the visual impact these algorithms and techniques have on a finalised scene and it's that that makes it clear that you're out of your depth.
If you want to lecture on discussion etiquette whilst complaining about not getting detailed answers - consider this, don't enter a discussion posting in a manner where it's clear you're looking for a fight, continue on with "I've no idea about any of this but here's a logical fallacy" and then persist with "I want to learn but I can't be arsed to think so you're wrong". I don't owe you anything, much less am I willing to put any effort into providing more detailed an in depth explanations with examples when you act like an ass from the very outset and persist through the duration.
You strike me as someone that could actually get into this in a bit more detail and could, if you wanted to, learn to write your own rendering engine. But before you do that you need to sort your attitude out and actually want to learn rather than pretend to want to learn but actually just be looking for a fight. You're so nearly there, you recognise that learning is important, and that wanting to learn is important, but you've not quite crossed the line yet where you're willing to put self-pride aside to actually do it.
If you're not going to do that and finally cross that line you may want to consider that there's a reason you're the sort of person that ended up working in a fast food joint as you mentioned in another post. It's your choice, but I think you probably do have the potential to actually get into this stuff properly and actually do it, rather than skirt about on the edges with half-arsed third hand knowledge learnt from the second hand knowledge of some bottom of the rung gaming website faux-journalist.
If you want to do that I can tell you exactly what you need to do to get going, and how to avoid or deal with the inevitable roadblocks that learning this stuff creates because whilst being a game developer is easy, being a graphics developer isn't - anyone can chuck something together with Unity, Unreal Engine and so forth, but far fewer people can write those engines in the first place. Don't look upto game developers as rockstars, they're not. The days where
"The upshot is that enforcement is now in the jurisdiction of the criminal justice system, rather than the civil system."
No it's not. License fee evasion is still dealt with entirely in the civil justice system. I doubt the BBC would even want it reclassified because it'd require a higher standard of evidence for a criminal trial than for a civil trial and that'd massively increase the cost to them of enforcement. Right now they can win trials by knocking up shoddy, and frankly unacceptably poor standards of evidence, if it went criminal they'd probably never win a case again.
"by abolishing the TV Licence and reintroducing it as an all-households tax (call it an "Air tax"?), so you have to pay it whether you have a TV or not, to also remove the requirement and burden of proof that a TV is in fact present."
Right but that actually makes an awful lot of sense. The license fee doesn't just pay for the BBC, it helps fund ITV, Channel 4, and Channel 5. It pays for all our broadcast infrastructure including for both TV and radio. It pays for iPlayer and the BBC website.
I doubt there's a person in the UK that can't honestly say they haven't consumed a service at least in part paid for by the license fee. If you've ever read an article on the BBC website, or using their numerous apps you've done it. If you've watched iPlayer you've done it, if you've watched any of the hundred odd Terrestrial freeview channels you've done it, if you've ever listened to the radio you've done it.
The license fee isn't even close to fit for purpose anymore, because the range of things it covers is necessarily expanding as technology improves and habits change. It makes sense to keep our tax system uptodate to represent reality, rather than have it outdated and nonsensical.
Why should people who own TVs subsidise everyone else? It makes far more sense to spread the cost and have everyone pay for something that everyone uses. We can finally get rid of free TV licenses for elderly millionaires and other such idiocy at the same time.
"The problem is that it's so damn difficult to get an easy suicide: Guns, sure.. In the UK, we're not allowed them"
Yes we are. Guns and hunting rifles are perfectly legal in the UK.
What you can't have is something like a submachine gun, an assault rifle or a hand gun unless you can get an exemption from the Home Secretary because you have a need for one (for example, if you're part of a foreign dignitary's personal security detail like those Obama and the Pope can't leave home without).
When you talk about sharpness in photography as opposed to bluriness, you're talking about a picture that more accurately represents the scene as you see it. When you defocus, you lose detail, the scene is not as you expect, and you call it less sharp.
In computer graphics it's not as straightforward, there is no real scene to capture directly, instead we try and make up something that looks like a real scene with a variety of algorithms.
Your view seems to be that a computer image is more sharp if there is always greater contrast between pixels, and that all upscaling algorithms create a decrease in contrast by using estimates of additional pixels on upscale.
These assumptions are incorrect, because they neither represent how modern upscaling algorithms used in games work, nor do they take into account that greater contrast is sometimes detrimental in creating a more realistic picture. Your view would imply that a non-anti-aliased scene is better than an anti-aliased scene for say, an FPS where you're looking down a straight road. This is nonsense, because without that blur you're actually going to end up with a scene that looks less real - it fits your definition of sharper. Similarly increased pixelation makes a scene less real, even though you seem to be suggesting a more pixelated scene is a sharper scene.
So you've got this differentiation with the computer graphics world where there are additional criteria that reduce the accuracy of a scene to what you might hope it to be that go beyond simple focus. You're using a definition of sharpness that suggests that a less realistic looking scene (i.e. more pixelated, and with nonsense distance rendering) is sharper. You're saying that if we had a simple game like Minecraft running at a low incredibly pixelated resolution, that the image is somehow sharper than that same scene upscaled with an algorithm that can recognise the typically well defined edges in Minecraft's relatively simple graphics and grow them to a resolution that loses visible pixelation whilst not losing any actual practical detail. Fundamentally you're equating sharpness to increased pixelation, and increased contrast between neighbouring pixels. Neither of which are actually really desirable in many parts of scenes in games gunning for photorealism.
Just like being out of focus can kill the sharpness and realism of a scene with a camera, higher pixelation and lack of decent blending can kill the sharpness and realism of a scene in computer graphics. You can't make a scene sharper by simply increasing contrast, and increasing pixelation all you're doing is creating a digital kind of blur that messes up the scene as much as being out of focus with an analog camera would.
Of course there are other factors, if you can have more polygons at 720p upscaled to 1080p than you can afford if you just go for native 1080p then you can make curves look more like curves, rather than a bunch of triangles desperately trying to represent curves. Or you can simply make the scene look more real in general by having more realistic clutter in it like litter on the ground, rather than a pristine swept street in the middle of a ghetto that makes zero sense and gives zero immersion.
Upscaling is done for a reason - when used with specific intention in a planned manner like this it creates a better, more realistic image than not upscaling. Again yes, if you can afford to render the scene natively at 1080p with full AA and so forth it's bound to look better because there's no guesswork going on, but that guesswork is typically good enough that upscaled to 1080p is going to look way sharper than native 720p because the curves are better defined, distance rendering can be more accurately done and so on and so forth.
Saying you want to learn is meaningless, you have to actually want to learn and be willing to learn. Refusing to read what's in front of you and arguing about something you openly admit you don't have a clue about guarantees you a life of ignorance. This is the last time I'm going to try to explain it to you because beyond this it simply means that you don't want to learn, that you're intentionally ignorant- that you're ignorant by choice.
Um no, I replied to you because you replied to me asking a question which I answered. I've no idea who "the game developer" is but even then what do you mean by game developer? are we talking about an expert in rendering technology? I don't think many if any of those post here anymore, people like Carmack left a long time ago and mostly when people rave on about being a game developer on Slashdot what they really mean is they're a bottom of the rung lacky that implements a few game mechanics- that's a far cry from being one of the handful of developers who actually deal with rendering tech in the industry - there's a reason why most companies just reuse existing engines like Frostbite, Unreal, or id Tech.
You seem to be upset that you asked a question and got an answer you didn't want and are now pushing a classic appeal to authority fallacy. I'm happy to answer questions as I have done, but if you just want to argue for the sake of it by throwing in logical fallacies whilst admitting that you don't really know enough to provide an actual counter-point or correction then I've got better things to do.
If your knowledge of computer graphics and upscaling is limited to resize in paint programs you really are too dumb to be having this conversation.
Even if we stick to your photography oriented view of out of focus blur which is really what you're talking about when you say sharpness when talking about loss of explicit per-pixel detail it's not as if upscaling algorithms are so dumb that a similar blur is a given. Worse, some blurring is even desirable, that's the whole point of spatial anti-aliasing after all.
Of course yes, having AA on a 1080p precisely rendered scene is always going to look best, but an upscaled 720p image to 1080p is always going to look better than a precisely rendered 720p image with modern upscaling algorithms and also nearly always look better than a 1080p precisely rendered scene without AA even.
I think it's important to separate reality and practice. I think in practice it would be nice if all consoles had indie development support, but that's ultimately a personal preference, most consumers of said consoles are wholly uninterested in that so I think in reality whilst I personally think that should be nice, we should not have an expectation of it from console manufacturers - I do not think it's fair to put that obligation on them, as they cannot be expected to be all things to all people.
I think if there was a market for a viable open console platform then that would come about naturally, or those existing manufacturers would tend towards that themselves, but so far attempts have been weak or failed, XNA didn't do a good job of producing great games, it was almost always crap, and for Microsoft it wasn't really therefore commercially beneficial either - the cost of maintaining the tools, libraries, and publishing platform almost certainly exceeded the profits gained from the program. Similarly platforms like Ouya just haven't worked out.
So that's where I stand on what I'd like to see happen, but why I believe it hasn't in practice and might not. Now on to what one can do if they wish to develop a console oriented game.
I would tend towards having some agreement towards your stated option b), but I would sell the game no matter how poorly it did and I do not see having a day job as a hardship. I say this because I've studied a degree full time whilst working full time, and I've done game development myself whilst working full time. To me time management is not an issue, and I do these things because I want to, not because I'm forced to or have an entitlement attitude that the world owes me a living from game development.
I think you should develop indie games because you want to and because you enjoy it. I think if your idea is good it will stand on it's own two feet just as games like Minecraft did- Notch didn't need a massive marketing machine or large publisher support, he built something unique and interesting, and blogged about it and people came to him, and eventually the publishers come to him.
I think many of the problems you're hinting at stem from those developers who cannot accept that maybe their game is not as good as they think it is and/or believe they deserve a living from their game no matter how unpopular it may be. These are false premises and are guaranteed to result in disappointment.
What OAP benefits have they slashed exactly? Winter fuel payments, free bus passes, free TV licenses are all intact regrdless of whether you're a pauper or a billionaire. The state pension has been increased in value, and ever more money has been poured into social care and the NHS to try and resolve the crisis that their failure to pay a fair share through their working life that covers the costs of what they expect to receive from the state now has caused.
All in all they've got it pretty good - the stats show that they're the only demographic whose wealth has increased on average throughout the recession and the failure to start taxing pension withdrawls or the wealthy pensioners or cut their benefits means that everyone younger is now having to pay for services for these folks that the state will never be able to afford to give the folks paying when they get older and that the folks receiving them refuse to pay for for themselves.
It's hard to see how they could reasonably have it any better given that things are currently massively in their favour due to being subsidised by everyone else and at everyone elses expense and to everyone else's long term detriment much less see how they've had any real kind of slashing of benefits.
The figures don't lie, it's a fact that those folks have profited through the recession whilst everyone else has suffered:
Yes, I'll clarify because it is a little ambiguous, I'm well aware not all baby boomers read it, and I'm referring specifically to those that do, or those that at least have the same mindset of believing the world still owes them everything ever and everyone else can go screw themselves.
I absolutely agree that yes, there are at least some good baby boomers:)
Well it can, if all you want is something that lets you read books, in fact, if all you want is to read books then a kindle is a far superior device because you don't have to charge it as much and it's easier on the eyes.
Just like a Pebble smartwatch might happily replace an iWatch if all you want it to do is tell you the time and let you know if you've received an e-mail or text or something and be able to do so for more than just over 2/3rds of a single day without a recharge.
Not all use cases are equal. It's possible, that for the general population, a Pebble smartwatch can in fact quite easily replace an iWatch, because it's possible that people don't give a shit about fancy apps on their wrist when they have something superior for that in their pocket, it's possible they want a watch to be something they only have to charge once a week and that simply tells the time and gives them the odd useful notification.
Whether that's true or not is something only the market can tell us, we simply have to wait and see. My personal guess? I think we'll see convergence of the two, we'll see smartwatches that have superior power management to that available now and that drop to an extremely simple low power state most the time that looks an awful lot like the Pebble coupled with better batteries such that you end up with a hybrid approach and get maybe 3 days usage between charges in practice.
To me it's not the long day that's the problem, it's that I've not had a single device ever that's hit it's advertised battery life in practice. Doesn't matter if it's Samsung, Apple, Dell, Microsoft or whoever else, I've never seen a battery last as long as it should and that's because such timings are given based on perfect situations - if you're in perfect isolation where there's no wireless noise, and the temperature is exact then you can hit it, but in the real world where there's wireless signals everywhere and where devices have to constantly decipher signals to see if it's meant for them the batteries just end up failing well before they should. This coupled with the fact such timings are based on "average useage" which is normally an arbitrary figure that doens't represent real useage and advertised battery life is normally a fairly useless metric.
So even if an 18 hour day was as much as I do, I'm skeptical that it'll last that long in practice - if past battery experience is anything to go by you'll probably get like 14 hours out the box, and then after a year or two be lucky to get more than 10 hours out of it.
Nowadays when I buy phones and such I try and get something that offers near enough double the battery life I actually need in practice or buy a spare battery if I can and need to.
I wont buy a smart watch until they can advertise something around the 32 - 48 hours battery life mark. I suspect I'll be waiting a while, but I'm sure I'll live.
Consider also that Cameron appeals primarily to the Daily Mail reading baby boomer crowd, because they tend to vote for and he's hoping he can get them all onside. As such he's bound to spout technophobic rhetoric because much of that generation and the Daily Mail crowd find technology and change scary as shit.
It was only a week or two back Cameron stood and said that benefits for the elderly should be protected regardless of wealth (i.e. free bus passes, TV licenses, and money for heating for millionaire retirees are acceptable). His argument was that these people have lived through recessions and fought wars for us. I couldn't watch it with a straight face, I mean, he is aware the last 10 - 15 years happened right? he surely can't have missed the whole Afghanistan and Iraq thing coupled with the worst financial crisis in living memory all of which were fought by and impacted non-pensioners the most?
His pro-pensioner, pro-Daily Mail rhetoric has reached farcical levels in his desperation to keep the pensioners onside because as well as his recent anti-technology views he's also got the gall to tell entire generations that those wars they fought, that financial crisis they've been suffering and dealing with cuts and job losses through? well those just don't matter and it's tough shit. It's not like the vast majority of pensioners alive today even saw, let alone fought in the war - on the contrary most enjoyed a period of unprecedented wealth growth and relative peace.
At this point anything Cameron says is beyond nonsense and UKIP panic induced Daily Mail pandering.
"Apple isn't relevant in the "Oh but Samsung phones are so bloated with Samsungs software" because regardless most people for whatever reason buy the Samsung phones."
Yeah and that's really my point - they don't buy them because they're more powerful, because no Samsung phones that are more powerful than iPhones outsell the less powerful iPhones. A large part of this is because the Samsung UI stuff is crap. When people blow £600 on a phone they go for the one that's most pleasant to use, not the one that's most powerful and okay, sure that's a generalisation, maybe some people do so because they perceive the iPhone to be a better status symbol or similar, but fundamentally all I was getting at was the fact that whilst many geeks focus on specs, the wider market most definitely doesn't, because technology products never win the market based on spec alone - it doesn't matter how powerful your system is perceived to be if no one likes it. The Wii is another fine example, it outsold the PS3 and Xbox 360, yet was far less powerful - the wider market didn't give a shit about specifications of the system.
That doesn't mean people are willing to accept the crappier UI on a cheaper phone, because at that point something like cost or maybe size becomes their overriding concern, and that's why Samsung normally sells more devices, because they offer choices that are far wider ranging than simply higher specs.
You're thinking of sharpness in terms of photography, where level of bluriness depends on focus, but we don't focus computer graphics, we render them. We're not dealing with capture and representation of real images, we're building them ourselves.
Detail will be lost between a natively rendered 1080p image an an upscaled 720p image, because rather than having the extra pixels filled with actual explicit detail, they're being filled with guesses based on one of many algorithms. Depending on the game some algorithms can get this pretty much exactly right (i.e. in a game with relatively simple graphics like Minecraft).
"Consider the following statement, derived from the present status quo: "Platformers, fighting games, and platform fighters ought not to be moddable, and startup developers ought not to have the ability to develop original games in these genres." Do you agree? If so, why?"
Of course I don't agree, but I do agree that they don't necessarily need full unlimited access to all hardware to do it. They only need access to develop on a PC, and end per-system testing can be done with a dev kit, or through a program like Microsoft had with XNA. What you're putting forward is not an argument for complete opening up of every system and every bit of hardware, merely an argument for ensuring we have at least one open platform to develop on - the PC - and that if other platforms are willing to accept indie development that they provide tools to test and debug on that platform.
As I've noted before, Mario Maker gives you freedom to create platformers on the Wii U, and games like Farcry have typically had map editors even on consoles. But consoles aren't designed for modding for the most part, they're designed as a purely entertainment outlet first and foremost, not as a development outlet - that's purely secondary. In contrast, the PC is a wholly generic platform, it doesn't have one single specific focus so you should have the right to develop on it as much as do anything else.
But you're launching off into a tirade about company marketshare now and that's wholly irrelevant to the discussion at hand.
My point is simply that if performance was the ultimate metric by which people purchased devices then Samsung's flagship would outsell Apple's flagship, but it does not, because guess what? as you seem to indirectly have managed to point out, there's more to a purchase than just pure hardware specs.
Yes you're right, Samsung has more choice, and that's exactly the point, they recognise that people don't buy shit based on spec alone, they buy it on any number of different factors. That's exactly what I'm talking about. If it was wholly about spec people would buy Samsung's most powerful smartphone at the time because it's normally at the top of the market, but they don't, because there's far more too it than pure spreadsheet specs. I cited Samsung's poor software as but one example, you're right others include everything from price, to size, to style.
Oh god, your post makes me want to utterly facepalm. Please, I implore you, go read my post history since 2007 when the iPhone came out if you think I'm an Apple fanboy. Seriously, I beg you, you'll be so utterly embarrassed by that post when you do. You will find literally years of criticism of Apple and hype for Android, stemming back to a point in which criticising Apple and talking up Android got you regularly modded down here. I'm about as far from an Apple fanboy as you can get without becoming an outright anti-Apple zealot.
I hate Apple, I literally hate it, but just because I dislike something doesn't mean I'm going to pretend that there's no statistical metric by which the iPhone has done well. That's complete nonsense. It's been outshone by Android because Android offers a superior choice and that's ultimately what people want, but just because Android holds 85% of the market compared to Apple's embarrassingly low 11% doesn't change the fact that I'm able to point out that on an individual basis Apple clearly does something right, because it's flagships outsell Samsung's flagships and that something is the fact that Apple's experience is more polished than Samsung's because of Samsung's 3rd party crap thrown on top of Android.
I love Android, I've stood by Android since it's release, but I like vanilla Android, I like Android without the crap- I think vanilla Android is far better than iOS, but I'm not about to pretend that Samsung don't make the experience on their phones shit by sticking buggy unpolished crap on top that ruins the Android experience and gives iOS the edge against Samsung. I'm not criticising Android and I'm not supporting Apple, I'm criticising Samsung and using their shitty software and the resultant drop in sales they've faced in part because of it as an example as to why better specs don't matter if the overall experience is still crap.
If you can't get that into your head, then you're going to need to consider the fact that perhaps it's you that's the fanboy, you just haven't realised it yet. Just because someone is willing to look at something objectively and see areas where their preferred platform can see improvements, and their disliked platform has some advantages doesn't make them a fanboy, quite the opposite.
"I disagree that only "an incredibly small market" want to mod games."
You're changing the discussion now though, there's a difference between modding in general and modding platformers. Modding FPS on the PC works well because FPS games on the PC work well. That doesn't change the fact that platformers on the PC don't typically work well however.
"would there have even been a Counter-Strike?"
Probably yes, because CounterStrike was just an evolution of Action Quake and Special Forces Quake.
"Locked-down tablets did kill off 10 inch laptops, at least until the Transformer Book came out."
So they didn't then? Netbooks were still selling in the many 10s of millions, that's not killing off in anything other than media rhetoric. Mostly though Netbooks have now been rebranded in a few different ways mostly because manufacturers knew they were going to keep selling small laptops but didn't want the stigma of selling something the media was incorrectly saying had been killed off. Certainly tablets cut into the laptop market, because they did some of the things people were buying laptops for better, but they definitely didn't kill it because you can still buy small laptops, just as they didn't kill PCs.
"I work on hobby coding projects on my 10 inch laptop while riding the city bus to and from my day job. (Outlier yes, liar no.)"
That's a laptop with a keyboard, not a tablet. I don't really know what your point is here.
"The problem here is that some platforms and input methods have historically been associated with cryptographic lockdown to play only games from established publishers and even then only vanilla versions of them."
Right, and I'm worried about TPM type affairs as much as anyone - I believe the PC platform must stay open because that it's speciality and that's what makes it thrive, but I'm not RMS style crazy where I think the whole world is going to bend to my notions of freedom. I realise that whilst the PC must be protected, that that doesn't mean we can expected there to not be locked down platforms. For many, the fact consoles are locked down and hence see inherently fewer cheats the lockdown is actually a bonus for that specific platform. I believe locked down and open platforms can coexist, and whilst I'm fully accepting of the fact that DRM does nothing more than stall hackers at best, sometimes that's good enough. If an AAA shooter can be mostly free of cheats on a console for it's first few months of release before the next game comes out then that's good enough for that platform. On the PC I don't care if people cheat, it's a price I'm happy to pay on that platform for that platform to retain it's openness.
Again, it's entirely about the best tool for the job, we can't expect everything to do everything and still be able to do it well. Consoles are different for a reason and whatever you think of that reason, it works for consumers and ultimately if they're happy with that it's not really anyone's place to change it. If they weren't happy with that there'd be no market - something Microsoft learnt when they initially tried to make the Xbox One just a little bit too locked down for people's tastes.
It's still useful feedback for them, it's just not necessarily overriding or representative of total feedback (although the opposite is also possible, that it is representative and the are full of shit- just playing devil's advocate and suggesting their may be a good reason for their claims!).
Slashdot Mirror
Oh fuck me, I was wrong, you really are just too dumb to cope with any of this. You're now trying to say that whether something is a blurring effect is defined entirely on whether an article on an AA algorithm explicitly uses the word "blur".
You really didn't think before making even more of a tit of yourself it might be prudent to actually understand what a blur is? You realise the no matter what dictionary you check the term blur and it's synonyms describe the effect of AA exactly?
I can't believe you've reached the point where you're trying to argue a blurring effect isn't in a desperate attempt to save face. You really are a lost cause, a perfect example of someone who just wants to be right even when they're oh so wrong and will jump to extraordinary extremes like arguing that something that is the very definition of a blur isn't. You always know that someone is hopeless when they drop to the point of trying to redefine the dictionary to suit their argument and that's exactly where you're at. It's pathetic.
There's no point in going any further, I can't help you, I've explained multiple times, I've given you everything you need, but you're just beyond it, you're just far too retarded to be able to rationally take part in this topic.
Yeah it's still a crime, that's not in dispute, but we do have the concepts of extenuating circumstances and public interest in British law.
I can't see what the public interest would be if it turns out there are no charges to answer, it's not like anyone and everyone can just get an embassy to put them up in order to skip bail, even Ecuador very nearly didn't take him. It's not like people are going to start running to embassies left and right under the assumption they'll get given protection- Assange was an extreme exception because of the politics of his case.
Yeah I'm interested to see how that plays out. If Sweden drops it's extradition request, there's every possibility that the British courts may deem that that adds weight to his argument that there was no case to answer, that it was political, and that he shouldn't have had to be on bail in the first place making his fleeing of that effectively irrelevant.
But then if there is a political dimension, it may be that they'll be happy to get him on whatever they can, and they do indeed punish him for skipping bail.
It'd be interesting to see how that plays out, but it really depends what happens after the questioning that is finally going ahead.
It's interesting that Ny cites the impending statute of limitations date as the reason for the change of heart. There have been two other key events in the last 6 months that I suspect were more relevant:
1) Assange's petition to the Swedish courts to have the case dropped failed, but in the ruling the Swedish judiciary was clear that it could not understand why Ny hadn't just questioned him over here, that it was incredibly odd that she hadn't and that she must do this ASAP.
2) There has been growing political pressure to stop guarding the embassy. When £10million has been spent on guarding the embassy whilst police forces have been cut MPs have faced increasing pressure from the public and even policing unions to stop wasting time on it. Recent cuts have meant that some crimes such as car crime have become defacto decriminalised because the police no longer have the resources to pursue them. In that context it's rather galling for the police and public alike to hear we're spending millions just to have officers stood around doing nothing.
So I imagine the weight of these two events have been the key reasons for this shift rather than expiry of statute of limitations for the most minor allegations. If Ny defied the Swedish courts a further appeal to have the case dropped would likely succeed due to Ny refusing to do her job and actually pursue a prosecution. Similarly, the Ecuadorian embassy might stop being watched and Assange could flee anyway.
She's really been left little choice. At least the case is finally moving, and Ny has been forced to do her job properly rather than simply persisting with long discredited excuses not to do it (the most amusing of which is that the Swedish justice system doesn't allow overseas questioning - what a laughing stock the folks that persisted in pushing that myth have now become).
Saying you want to learn when all question posed have clearly been answered multiple times shows a clear disconnect between what you're saying you want to do, and what you actually want to do.
You're still displaying a fundamental lack of understanding about most things here. You're trying to explain MSAA and using that as an obscure argument that in some cases an estimated pixel is blurring, and in others it's not. This makes no sense - blurring occurs when you have an approximation of a set of pixels, rather than the actual pixels. An approximation of 4 pixels downscaled to 1, is still an approximation, as is 1 pixel upscaled into 4 approximated pixels. Have a look at the font example here:
http://www.geforce.co.uk/whats...
What do you think those intermediate pixels between the black and the white when anti-aliased are if not a literal blurring of the lines to make a jagged edge look smoother?
You're reaching for a single very specific algorithm, and using very arbitrary (and hypocritical) definitions to try and argue your point. This tells me that you've already decided what's what, which again shows what a farce your claim to want to learn is- if you've already decided you know best (whilst admitting you're wholly unqualified on the subject) then why are you pretending you care? why are you even discussing? don't say you're doing so because you want to learn whilst simultaneously proving that you do not.
You're arguing as someone whose taken their knowledge from a "my graphics card is better than your graphics card" type website or forum discussion with maybe a bit of Googling thrown in to try and mask the most embarrassing elements of your lack of knowledge. What you're not showing is an understanding of the visual impact these algorithms and techniques have on a finalised scene and it's that that makes it clear that you're out of your depth.
If you want to lecture on discussion etiquette whilst complaining about not getting detailed answers - consider this, don't enter a discussion posting in a manner where it's clear you're looking for a fight, continue on with "I've no idea about any of this but here's a logical fallacy" and then persist with "I want to learn but I can't be arsed to think so you're wrong". I don't owe you anything, much less am I willing to put any effort into providing more detailed an in depth explanations with examples when you act like an ass from the very outset and persist through the duration.
You strike me as someone that could actually get into this in a bit more detail and could, if you wanted to, learn to write your own rendering engine. But before you do that you need to sort your attitude out and actually want to learn rather than pretend to want to learn but actually just be looking for a fight. You're so nearly there, you recognise that learning is important, and that wanting to learn is important, but you've not quite crossed the line yet where you're willing to put self-pride aside to actually do it.
If you're not going to do that and finally cross that line you may want to consider that there's a reason you're the sort of person that ended up working in a fast food joint as you mentioned in another post. It's your choice, but I think you probably do have the potential to actually get into this stuff properly and actually do it, rather than skirt about on the edges with half-arsed third hand knowledge learnt from the second hand knowledge of some bottom of the rung gaming website faux-journalist.
If you want to do that I can tell you exactly what you need to do to get going, and how to avoid or deal with the inevitable roadblocks that learning this stuff creates because whilst being a game developer is easy, being a graphics developer isn't - anyone can chuck something together with Unity, Unreal Engine and so forth, but far fewer people can write those engines in the first place. Don't look upto game developers as rockstars, they're not. The days where
"The upshot is that enforcement is now in the jurisdiction of the criminal justice system, rather than the civil system."
No it's not. License fee evasion is still dealt with entirely in the civil justice system. I doubt the BBC would even want it reclassified because it'd require a higher standard of evidence for a criminal trial than for a civil trial and that'd massively increase the cost to them of enforcement. Right now they can win trials by knocking up shoddy, and frankly unacceptably poor standards of evidence, if it went criminal they'd probably never win a case again.
"by abolishing the TV Licence and reintroducing it as an all-households tax (call it an "Air tax"?), so you have to pay it whether you have a TV or not, to also remove the requirement and burden of proof that a TV is in fact present."
Right but that actually makes an awful lot of sense. The license fee doesn't just pay for the BBC, it helps fund ITV, Channel 4, and Channel 5. It pays for all our broadcast infrastructure including for both TV and radio. It pays for iPlayer and the BBC website.
I doubt there's a person in the UK that can't honestly say they haven't consumed a service at least in part paid for by the license fee. If you've ever read an article on the BBC website, or using their numerous apps you've done it. If you've watched iPlayer you've done it, if you've watched any of the hundred odd Terrestrial freeview channels you've done it, if you've ever listened to the radio you've done it.
The license fee isn't even close to fit for purpose anymore, because the range of things it covers is necessarily expanding as technology improves and habits change. It makes sense to keep our tax system uptodate to represent reality, rather than have it outdated and nonsensical.
Why should people who own TVs subsidise everyone else? It makes far more sense to spread the cost and have everyone pay for something that everyone uses. We can finally get rid of free TV licenses for elderly millionaires and other such idiocy at the same time.
Yeah, we'd never have held onto the Falklands if it weren't for old Attenborough telling those Argies all about their parrots.
And yet the UK technology industry still manages to piss it all away and be an also-ran.
Seriously. How the fuck do we do it?
Er, just realised my tablet changed shotguns to just Guns for some reason. First sentence should be:
Yes we are. Shotguns and hunting rifles are perfectly legal in the UK.
"The problem is that it's so damn difficult to get an easy suicide: Guns, sure.. In the UK, we're not allowed them"
Yes we are. Guns and hunting rifles are perfectly legal in the UK.
What you can't have is something like a submachine gun, an assault rifle or a hand gun unless you can get an exemption from the Home Secretary because you have a need for one (for example, if you're part of a foreign dignitary's personal security detail like those Obama and the Pope can't leave home without).
When you talk about sharpness in photography as opposed to bluriness, you're talking about a picture that more accurately represents the scene as you see it. When you defocus, you lose detail, the scene is not as you expect, and you call it less sharp.
In computer graphics it's not as straightforward, there is no real scene to capture directly, instead we try and make up something that looks like a real scene with a variety of algorithms.
Your view seems to be that a computer image is more sharp if there is always greater contrast between pixels, and that all upscaling algorithms create a decrease in contrast by using estimates of additional pixels on upscale.
These assumptions are incorrect, because they neither represent how modern upscaling algorithms used in games work, nor do they take into account that greater contrast is sometimes detrimental in creating a more realistic picture. Your view would imply that a non-anti-aliased scene is better than an anti-aliased scene for say, an FPS where you're looking down a straight road. This is nonsense, because without that blur you're actually going to end up with a scene that looks less real - it fits your definition of sharper. Similarly increased pixelation makes a scene less real, even though you seem to be suggesting a more pixelated scene is a sharper scene.
So you've got this differentiation with the computer graphics world where there are additional criteria that reduce the accuracy of a scene to what you might hope it to be that go beyond simple focus. You're using a definition of sharpness that suggests that a less realistic looking scene (i.e. more pixelated, and with nonsense distance rendering) is sharper. You're saying that if we had a simple game like Minecraft running at a low incredibly pixelated resolution, that the image is somehow sharper than that same scene upscaled with an algorithm that can recognise the typically well defined edges in Minecraft's relatively simple graphics and grow them to a resolution that loses visible pixelation whilst not losing any actual practical detail. Fundamentally you're equating sharpness to increased pixelation, and increased contrast between neighbouring pixels. Neither of which are actually really desirable in many parts of scenes in games gunning for photorealism.
Just like being out of focus can kill the sharpness and realism of a scene with a camera, higher pixelation and lack of decent blending can kill the sharpness and realism of a scene in computer graphics. You can't make a scene sharper by simply increasing contrast, and increasing pixelation all you're doing is creating a digital kind of blur that messes up the scene as much as being out of focus with an analog camera would.
Of course there are other factors, if you can have more polygons at 720p upscaled to 1080p than you can afford if you just go for native 1080p then you can make curves look more like curves, rather than a bunch of triangles desperately trying to represent curves. Or you can simply make the scene look more real in general by having more realistic clutter in it like litter on the ground, rather than a pristine swept street in the middle of a ghetto that makes zero sense and gives zero immersion.
Upscaling is done for a reason - when used with specific intention in a planned manner like this it creates a better, more realistic image than not upscaling. Again yes, if you can afford to render the scene natively at 1080p with full AA and so forth it's bound to look better because there's no guesswork going on, but that guesswork is typically good enough that upscaled to 1080p is going to look way sharper than native 720p because the curves are better defined, distance rendering can be more accurately done and so on and so forth.
Saying you want to learn is meaningless, you have to actually want to learn and be willing to learn. Refusing to read what's in front of you and arguing about something you openly admit you don't have a clue about guarantees you a life of ignorance. This is the last time I'm going to try to explain it to you because beyond this it simply means that you don't want to learn, that you're intentionally ignorant- that you're ignorant by choice.
Um no, I replied to you because you replied to me asking a question which I answered. I've no idea who "the game developer" is but even then what do you mean by game developer? are we talking about an expert in rendering technology? I don't think many if any of those post here anymore, people like Carmack left a long time ago and mostly when people rave on about being a game developer on Slashdot what they really mean is they're a bottom of the rung lacky that implements a few game mechanics- that's a far cry from being one of the handful of developers who actually deal with rendering tech in the industry - there's a reason why most companies just reuse existing engines like Frostbite, Unreal, or id Tech.
You seem to be upset that you asked a question and got an answer you didn't want and are now pushing a classic appeal to authority fallacy. I'm happy to answer questions as I have done, but if you just want to argue for the sake of it by throwing in logical fallacies whilst admitting that you don't really know enough to provide an actual counter-point or correction then I've got better things to do.
If your knowledge of computer graphics and upscaling is limited to resize in paint programs you really are too dumb to be having this conversation.
Even if we stick to your photography oriented view of out of focus blur which is really what you're talking about when you say sharpness when talking about loss of explicit per-pixel detail it's not as if upscaling algorithms are so dumb that a similar blur is a given. Worse, some blurring is even desirable, that's the whole point of spatial anti-aliasing after all.
Of course yes, having AA on a 1080p precisely rendered scene is always going to look best, but an upscaled 720p image to 1080p is always going to look better than a precisely rendered 720p image with modern upscaling algorithms and also nearly always look better than a 1080p precisely rendered scene without AA even.
I think it's important to separate reality and practice. I think in practice it would be nice if all consoles had indie development support, but that's ultimately a personal preference, most consumers of said consoles are wholly uninterested in that so I think in reality whilst I personally think that should be nice, we should not have an expectation of it from console manufacturers - I do not think it's fair to put that obligation on them, as they cannot be expected to be all things to all people.
I think if there was a market for a viable open console platform then that would come about naturally, or those existing manufacturers would tend towards that themselves, but so far attempts have been weak or failed, XNA didn't do a good job of producing great games, it was almost always crap, and for Microsoft it wasn't really therefore commercially beneficial either - the cost of maintaining the tools, libraries, and publishing platform almost certainly exceeded the profits gained from the program. Similarly platforms like Ouya just haven't worked out.
So that's where I stand on what I'd like to see happen, but why I believe it hasn't in practice and might not. Now on to what one can do if they wish to develop a console oriented game.
I would tend towards having some agreement towards your stated option b), but I would sell the game no matter how poorly it did and I do not see having a day job as a hardship. I say this because I've studied a degree full time whilst working full time, and I've done game development myself whilst working full time. To me time management is not an issue, and I do these things because I want to, not because I'm forced to or have an entitlement attitude that the world owes me a living from game development.
I think you should develop indie games because you want to and because you enjoy it. I think if your idea is good it will stand on it's own two feet just as games like Minecraft did- Notch didn't need a massive marketing machine or large publisher support, he built something unique and interesting, and blogged about it and people came to him, and eventually the publishers come to him.
I think many of the problems you're hinting at stem from those developers who cannot accept that maybe their game is not as good as they think it is and/or believe they deserve a living from their game no matter how unpopular it may be. These are false premises and are guaranteed to result in disappointment.
What OAP benefits have they slashed exactly? Winter fuel payments, free bus passes, free TV licenses are all intact regrdless of whether you're a pauper or a billionaire. The state pension has been increased in value, and ever more money has been poured into social care and the NHS to try and resolve the crisis that their failure to pay a fair share through their working life that covers the costs of what they expect to receive from the state now has caused.
All in all they've got it pretty good - the stats show that they're the only demographic whose wealth has increased on average throughout the recession and the failure to start taxing pension withdrawls or the wealthy pensioners or cut their benefits means that everyone younger is now having to pay for services for these folks that the state will never be able to afford to give the folks paying when they get older and that the folks receiving them refuse to pay for for themselves.
It's hard to see how they could reasonably have it any better given that things are currently massively in their favour due to being subsidised by everyone else and at everyone elses expense and to everyone else's long term detriment much less see how they've had any real kind of slashing of benefits.
The figures don't lie, it's a fact that those folks have profited through the recession whilst everyone else has suffered:
http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/m...
Yes, I'll clarify because it is a little ambiguous, I'm well aware not all baby boomers read it, and I'm referring specifically to those that do, or those that at least have the same mindset of believing the world still owes them everything ever and everyone else can go screw themselves.
I absolutely agree that yes, there are at least some good baby boomers :)
Well it can, if all you want is something that lets you read books, in fact, if all you want is to read books then a kindle is a far superior device because you don't have to charge it as much and it's easier on the eyes.
Just like a Pebble smartwatch might happily replace an iWatch if all you want it to do is tell you the time and let you know if you've received an e-mail or text or something and be able to do so for more than just over 2/3rds of a single day without a recharge.
Not all use cases are equal. It's possible, that for the general population, a Pebble smartwatch can in fact quite easily replace an iWatch, because it's possible that people don't give a shit about fancy apps on their wrist when they have something superior for that in their pocket, it's possible they want a watch to be something they only have to charge once a week and that simply tells the time and gives them the odd useful notification.
Whether that's true or not is something only the market can tell us, we simply have to wait and see. My personal guess? I think we'll see convergence of the two, we'll see smartwatches that have superior power management to that available now and that drop to an extremely simple low power state most the time that looks an awful lot like the Pebble coupled with better batteries such that you end up with a hybrid approach and get maybe 3 days usage between charges in practice.
To me it's not the long day that's the problem, it's that I've not had a single device ever that's hit it's advertised battery life in practice. Doesn't matter if it's Samsung, Apple, Dell, Microsoft or whoever else, I've never seen a battery last as long as it should and that's because such timings are given based on perfect situations - if you're in perfect isolation where there's no wireless noise, and the temperature is exact then you can hit it, but in the real world where there's wireless signals everywhere and where devices have to constantly decipher signals to see if it's meant for them the batteries just end up failing well before they should. This coupled with the fact such timings are based on "average useage" which is normally an arbitrary figure that doens't represent real useage and advertised battery life is normally a fairly useless metric.
So even if an 18 hour day was as much as I do, I'm skeptical that it'll last that long in practice - if past battery experience is anything to go by you'll probably get like 14 hours out the box, and then after a year or two be lucky to get more than 10 hours out of it.
Nowadays when I buy phones and such I try and get something that offers near enough double the battery life I actually need in practice or buy a spare battery if I can and need to.
I wont buy a smart watch until they can advertise something around the 32 - 48 hours battery life mark. I suspect I'll be waiting a while, but I'm sure I'll live.
Consider also that Cameron appeals primarily to the Daily Mail reading baby boomer crowd, because they tend to vote for and he's hoping he can get them all onside. As such he's bound to spout technophobic rhetoric because much of that generation and the Daily Mail crowd find technology and change scary as shit.
It was only a week or two back Cameron stood and said that benefits for the elderly should be protected regardless of wealth (i.e. free bus passes, TV licenses, and money for heating for millionaire retirees are acceptable). His argument was that these people have lived through recessions and fought wars for us. I couldn't watch it with a straight face, I mean, he is aware the last 10 - 15 years happened right? he surely can't have missed the whole Afghanistan and Iraq thing coupled with the worst financial crisis in living memory all of which were fought by and impacted non-pensioners the most?
His pro-pensioner, pro-Daily Mail rhetoric has reached farcical levels in his desperation to keep the pensioners onside because as well as his recent anti-technology views he's also got the gall to tell entire generations that those wars they fought, that financial crisis they've been suffering and dealing with cuts and job losses through? well those just don't matter and it's tough shit. It's not like the vast majority of pensioners alive today even saw, let alone fought in the war - on the contrary most enjoyed a period of unprecedented wealth growth and relative peace.
At this point anything Cameron says is beyond nonsense and UKIP panic induced Daily Mail pandering.
"Apple isn't relevant in the "Oh but Samsung phones are so bloated with Samsungs software" because regardless most people for whatever reason buy the Samsung phones."
Yeah and that's really my point - they don't buy them because they're more powerful, because no Samsung phones that are more powerful than iPhones outsell the less powerful iPhones. A large part of this is because the Samsung UI stuff is crap. When people blow £600 on a phone they go for the one that's most pleasant to use, not the one that's most powerful and okay, sure that's a generalisation, maybe some people do so because they perceive the iPhone to be a better status symbol or similar, but fundamentally all I was getting at was the fact that whilst many geeks focus on specs, the wider market most definitely doesn't, because technology products never win the market based on spec alone - it doesn't matter how powerful your system is perceived to be if no one likes it. The Wii is another fine example, it outsold the PS3 and Xbox 360, yet was far less powerful - the wider market didn't give a shit about specifications of the system.
That doesn't mean people are willing to accept the crappier UI on a cheaper phone, because at that point something like cost or maybe size becomes their overriding concern, and that's why Samsung normally sells more devices, because they offer choices that are far wider ranging than simply higher specs.
You're thinking of sharpness in terms of photography, where level of bluriness depends on focus, but we don't focus computer graphics, we render them. We're not dealing with capture and representation of real images, we're building them ourselves.
Detail will be lost between a natively rendered 1080p image an an upscaled 720p image, because rather than having the extra pixels filled with actual explicit detail, they're being filled with guesses based on one of many algorithms. Depending on the game some algorithms can get this pretty much exactly right (i.e. in a game with relatively simple graphics like Minecraft).
"Consider the following statement, derived from the present status quo: "Platformers, fighting games, and platform fighters ought not to be moddable, and startup developers ought not to have the ability to develop original games in these genres." Do you agree? If so, why?"
Of course I don't agree, but I do agree that they don't necessarily need full unlimited access to all hardware to do it. They only need access to develop on a PC, and end per-system testing can be done with a dev kit, or through a program like Microsoft had with XNA. What you're putting forward is not an argument for complete opening up of every system and every bit of hardware, merely an argument for ensuring we have at least one open platform to develop on - the PC - and that if other platforms are willing to accept indie development that they provide tools to test and debug on that platform.
As I've noted before, Mario Maker gives you freedom to create platformers on the Wii U, and games like Farcry have typically had map editors even on consoles. But consoles aren't designed for modding for the most part, they're designed as a purely entertainment outlet first and foremost, not as a development outlet - that's purely secondary. In contrast, the PC is a wholly generic platform, it doesn't have one single specific focus so you should have the right to develop on it as much as do anything else.
But you're launching off into a tirade about company marketshare now and that's wholly irrelevant to the discussion at hand.
My point is simply that if performance was the ultimate metric by which people purchased devices then Samsung's flagship would outsell Apple's flagship, but it does not, because guess what? as you seem to indirectly have managed to point out, there's more to a purchase than just pure hardware specs.
Yes you're right, Samsung has more choice, and that's exactly the point, they recognise that people don't buy shit based on spec alone, they buy it on any number of different factors. That's exactly what I'm talking about. If it was wholly about spec people would buy Samsung's most powerful smartphone at the time because it's normally at the top of the market, but they don't, because there's far more too it than pure spreadsheet specs. I cited Samsung's poor software as but one example, you're right others include everything from price, to size, to style.
Oh god, your post makes me want to utterly facepalm. Please, I implore you, go read my post history since 2007 when the iPhone came out if you think I'm an Apple fanboy. Seriously, I beg you, you'll be so utterly embarrassed by that post when you do. You will find literally years of criticism of Apple and hype for Android, stemming back to a point in which criticising Apple and talking up Android got you regularly modded down here. I'm about as far from an Apple fanboy as you can get without becoming an outright anti-Apple zealot.
I hate Apple, I literally hate it, but just because I dislike something doesn't mean I'm going to pretend that there's no statistical metric by which the iPhone has done well. That's complete nonsense. It's been outshone by Android because Android offers a superior choice and that's ultimately what people want, but just because Android holds 85% of the market compared to Apple's embarrassingly low 11% doesn't change the fact that I'm able to point out that on an individual basis Apple clearly does something right, because it's flagships outsell Samsung's flagships and that something is the fact that Apple's experience is more polished than Samsung's because of Samsung's 3rd party crap thrown on top of Android.
I love Android, I've stood by Android since it's release, but I like vanilla Android, I like Android without the crap- I think vanilla Android is far better than iOS, but I'm not about to pretend that Samsung don't make the experience on their phones shit by sticking buggy unpolished crap on top that ruins the Android experience and gives iOS the edge against Samsung. I'm not criticising Android and I'm not supporting Apple, I'm criticising Samsung and using their shitty software and the resultant drop in sales they've faced in part because of it as an example as to why better specs don't matter if the overall experience is still crap.
If you can't get that into your head, then you're going to need to consider the fact that perhaps it's you that's the fanboy, you just haven't realised it yet. Just because someone is willing to look at something objectively and see areas where their preferred platform can see improvements, and their disliked platform has some advantages doesn't make them a fanboy, quite the opposite.
"I disagree that only "an incredibly small market" want to mod games."
You're changing the discussion now though, there's a difference between modding in general and modding platformers. Modding FPS on the PC works well because FPS games on the PC work well. That doesn't change the fact that platformers on the PC don't typically work well however.
"would there have even been a Counter-Strike?"
Probably yes, because CounterStrike was just an evolution of Action Quake and Special Forces Quake.
"Locked-down tablets did kill off 10 inch laptops, at least until the Transformer Book came out."
So they didn't then? Netbooks were still selling in the many 10s of millions, that's not killing off in anything other than media rhetoric. Mostly though Netbooks have now been rebranded in a few different ways mostly because manufacturers knew they were going to keep selling small laptops but didn't want the stigma of selling something the media was incorrectly saying had been killed off. Certainly tablets cut into the laptop market, because they did some of the things people were buying laptops for better, but they definitely didn't kill it because you can still buy small laptops, just as they didn't kill PCs.
"I work on hobby coding projects on my 10 inch laptop while riding the city bus to and from my day job. (Outlier yes, liar no.)"
That's a laptop with a keyboard, not a tablet. I don't really know what your point is here.
"The problem here is that some platforms and input methods have historically been associated with cryptographic lockdown to play only games from established publishers and even then only vanilla versions of them."
Right, and I'm worried about TPM type affairs as much as anyone - I believe the PC platform must stay open because that it's speciality and that's what makes it thrive, but I'm not RMS style crazy where I think the whole world is going to bend to my notions of freedom. I realise that whilst the PC must be protected, that that doesn't mean we can expected there to not be locked down platforms. For many, the fact consoles are locked down and hence see inherently fewer cheats the lockdown is actually a bonus for that specific platform. I believe locked down and open platforms can coexist, and whilst I'm fully accepting of the fact that DRM does nothing more than stall hackers at best, sometimes that's good enough. If an AAA shooter can be mostly free of cheats on a console for it's first few months of release before the next game comes out then that's good enough for that platform. On the PC I don't care if people cheat, it's a price I'm happy to pay on that platform for that platform to retain it's openness.
Again, it's entirely about the best tool for the job, we can't expect everything to do everything and still be able to do it well. Consoles are different for a reason and whatever you think of that reason, it works for consumers and ultimately if they're happy with that it's not really anyone's place to change it. If they weren't happy with that there'd be no market - something Microsoft learnt when they initially tried to make the Xbox One just a little bit too locked down for people's tastes.
It's still useful feedback for them, it's just not necessarily overriding or representative of total feedback (although the opposite is also possible, that it is representative and the are full of shit- just playing devil's advocate and suggesting their may be a good reason for their claims!).