Well, gee. The crapware business model for getting preloaded shitty tool software onto PCs doesn't work well when it can be simply uninstalled (paying $30 for this "service" is a small indicator that you don't have any business touching a keyboard or even staring at it for too long... that's another topic... I digress). Whodathunkit?
I mean, seriously, is that the depths of sinkage we're seeing here? Useless services and crap software are causing their providers to sink down the money pit simply because the user has the option to nuke it off the drive and we're supposed to feel bad about this, I guess?
The business model adopted here is astounding. Provide zero-value items and zero-value services, charge for them, and hope people are stupid enough to take "advantage" of them... then on top, whine when it doesn't work as well as you planned.
Here's a crazy thought. Make a good product or provide a good service. Something people want. Charge a fair price for it. And maybe, just maybe... there will be some (ZOMG!1!!!1) PROFIT!
Best choice for performance magnetic drives are? The bankability of SSDs concern they with worry?
Well, if these manufacturers would spend the few frickin' dollars for a decent HEAT SINK, I wouldn't be so gung ho to replace them in all of there power-sucking heat-generating glory.
My laptop: WHIIRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR... [silence for three seconds] WHIRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR... [burns lap] WHIRRRRRRRRRRRRRR... [drys wet clothes out of the washer with air stream from fans in three seconds flat.] WHIRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR... [scorches paint] WHIIRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR... [finally melts a hole in case]... WHIRRRR... [silence]
Guess the drive and the CPU are getting enough air now.
Never said Communist regimes weren't guilty of unsustainable resource consumption. That not withstanding, the "Mr. Marx" bit in the subject line was intended as a bit of comic license presented facetiously, but perhaps I should remember that people on Slashdot are an iffy bunch where humor is concerned. Some of them are OK with humor, some don't appreciate it, and some simply just couldn't detect it if someone kicked them in the head with a pair of clown shoes.
And I also never said it was the political system that was the problem either. Capitalism isn't a political system, anyway. It's an economic system.
So, really, what conversation are we having here, precisely?
Well, this is the point I was making. Capitalism, as practiced, breeds consumption. Think about it. Object: wealth. Method: use resources to produce product or service for intent of sale at greater price than cost to produce. Profit! Profit gained parlayed into capital investment toward growth or greater production to meed demand for product. Repeat.
Now to lay the entire causation of this on capitalism itself belies the fact that without demand there is no need for supply, and hence, the consumption of resources to create that supply, and consumers are the source of the demand.
However, I put forth the idea that, while excessive consumption will certainly lead to the ends you say and certainly would be madness to continue, subsistence consumption is unlikely to gain traction as a method of living for modern attitudes, and thus would be madness to suggest.
These are the poles of the argument. At each is an unwelcome or undesirable situation. To occupy a position at either would be tantamount to destroying one's credibility while trying to defend the indefensible. Between the two poles, somewhere, lies the sustainable compromise between obligate consumption and obligate conservation.
The ends of the poles? The poles are the ends. The logical extremes. You are taking a position at one. That's madness. That's what I do get.
Benjamin Franklin once opined "everything in moderation." It continues to sadden me how few people can wrap their brain around the true wisdom it represents and take it to heart rather than running full speed towards the extreme positions on such issues.
On the one hand, there are those who, as you mention, consume every bloody natural resource that exists with nary a thought to the future and extol capitalism as God's favorite economic system.
And on the other hand, there are those who believe we should be living in caves, use palm fronds as loincloths, and eat off of rice mats to make sure we have no "carbon footprint" whatsoever, while deriding capitalism as Satan's favorite economic system.
As others have pointed out, there isn't that level of control over the RSS feed.
Well, there IS a level of control over whether or not you read or don't read an article, isn't there? But I do understand the sentiment. My TV has the same problem, sometimes there's stuff on I don't like, and I really don't have much control over some of the pap they show there, but you know, it never would occur to me that I have to like or appreciate everything that's on. It takes so much effort for me to just click a button on the remote to either change the channel or turn it off. So is what you're basically saying is that you only want stuff you LIKE in the RSS feed? Ahh. That's a pretty reasonable thing to ask for. Perhaps I was a bit too hasty in my response.
And we are trying to do Slashdot a favor by pointing out the things that piss its precious users off, since without those users the site is worthless.
Given the level of conversation around here most of the time, I'd say it has little to do with the fact that either the users are precious or that without them the site is worthless. Personally, the links to the articles are infinitely more valuable than about 99% of the comments posted in their wake. But that's just a personal observation.
But you are doing such a great service posting a poll which is either "yes" or "abstain". If you really wanted to get the feel for the user on the ground, you would have given them a "no, I rather enjoy this" option. But this isn't about them, it's about you, as your poll so gracefully illustrates.
You know you're in trouble if the inflation of your ego causes your hat to feel tight. Time to get a bigger cap, there?
If you are saying that you enjoy kdawson's work and the Idle section, then do so clearly for the benefit of the discussion. If you just want to be a prick, well, I guess you've come to the right place but it sure doesn't give you a lot of credibility.
You want a contribution to the obviously highbrow intellectual discourse? Fine, not a problem.
I don't necessarily like kdawson's work OR the Idle section, as I find it a little hit or miss. Sometimes good. Sometimes bad. Like all things. Yet I find it a bit on the side of unacceptably presumptuous of you to assume (as your poll illustrates) that your particular detestation is so widely shared as to be axiomatic, and this in light of the fact that you KNOW you don't like it as a more general rule and feel the need to say so. Is it so unlikely that some might enjoy it? And is it also so unlikely that THEY don't necessarily feel the need to comment on just how much they do? And what is your motivation for your little one-option poll? It's clogging up your RSS feed? To up the quality quotient of Slashdot as a whole to a level you feel owed? I can almost see the righteous purpose behind your post if it weren't obfuscated by a haze of self-importance.
I guess if I'm a prick, I did come to the right place, and responded to the right person. As for MY credibility, well I'm not really concerned about that. If there is room for it, it will come out by my words and my deeds. And if I was found to be lacking in this regard in your opinion, well, I'd probably sleep OK knowing that a person who hasn't exactly gone out of the way to earn MY respect (and, judging by your comment, probably never will earn my respect,) finds my opinions and comments unworthy of his consideration.
But I will say that a person valuing "the benefit of discussion" so much as to basically tout a joke poll as "discussion," while taking a strident comment which lambastes it (and IMHO, deservedly so) is the one truly lacking in credibility. Hypocrisy is the wormsign of a person who shouldn't be taken as particularly credible.
Besides, I've been here way longer than you have.:P
Turn the f'n channel if you don't like it. Christ, I'm sorry this little bunch of bytes isn't yet another putrefied article gobbling Steve Jobs' cock, but damn, is the Back button too much for you to handle?
How on earth can this possibly "spoil" a console specifically conceived and designed to have a broader-based appeal than to just traditional gamers? Did Ward and June Cleaver think that this meant all games would be family friendly (read: having appeal to only the by 3-6 year old demographic)? I assume that "traditional gamers" who may like their content a little more on the... ahem... "mature" side are included in this broad base of appeal.
If anything, the progression of some violent games to the Wii console represents a step toward the realization of broad-based appeal rather than spoiling the console.
Sooo... let me see if I understand this properly. One part prefix + one part noun =... verb?
Cool, let me see if I can un-chicken the kichen table just before I inter-poop. Woo. Epic fail there. And now I've got feathers and feces all over the linoleum.
Is not subject to the "my blank is cooler and better than your blank" ethos.
Slashdot, of course, must be contrarian on this point. "My blank is the best of all possible blanks, and you can blank off if you don't blanking think so."
Tell me, do you want to spend the rest of your life window shopping for the awsumest browser or do you just want to pick one that doesn't splash buttcrack juice all over your hard drive and use the bloody thing?
You know, that question I just asked seems rhetorical, but/. rules of etiquette demand a response.
But d0000000d, yer missing the point. He wants to do something 1337 hAxXoRz with all these drives. I mean, really, selling them on eBay would be what the n0rmLz would do.
Grand total $1100. Good for 5+ years. Everything else is largely game purchases.
Gaming rig good for Doom3 or Quake4: $2000+ Good for however long until the next vid card comes out, then its $$$ for upgrades.
Seems to me, there is an enormous cost advantage to buying consoles. That coupled with the fact that every game looks the same on every Wii, XBox360, or PS3 and those games are tuned to the machine specs rather than the machine trying to match game specs, makes them ideal vehicles for gaming.
It's not a question that you don't have to have the latest and greatest hardware, but your gameplay will be affected. Yes I can play Doom3 on my 3 year old PC, but with horrible chop. I turn down the resolution. Ok a little better. But that's not what I bought. I paid for "OMG!!!" and I got "OMG!!!"'s blocky third cousin.
You see, it is the few that DO require the latest and greatest that I see as the problem. If I buy an above average rig in 20XX, I should be able to "turn up all the knobs" on a game made in 20XX and get a pretty seamless experience. This is usually no problem. The problem is that invariably a "must have" comes out in 20XX+1 and nVidia has come out with the HyperRaptorXZX 4 bajillion gigaphlanson Video Card with Real-Time Tachyon Transfer Surface Mapping Core... capable of rendering full images even before the program knows it requires them (!!!). And good old iD comes along and creates a new rendering engine which writhes like a salted slug if you use anything with less horsepower than that. Well, that $2000 to $3000 I paid now requires that I purchase nVidia part number HRXZX4BG-RTTTSMC for the whopping amount that they ALWAYS ask for on first release of a new card...
Now the new card is nothing without the 160 exabytes of RAM that the game will use to show me the actual submolecular quantum fluctuations resulting in the preternatural realism of the flying casings and fangor beast blood spew.
I've had consoles since the Atari 2600 and, with the exception of my Commodore 64, the consoles have always been the reasonable choice for gaming. Consoles are never marketed with completely ridiculous price points, never require much in the way of purchase other than games beyond the initial cash outlay, and have a long shelf life. When PCs can accomplish this, then it might be cause for reevaluation.
...because, invariably, a PC which was good two years ago when I bought it just never seems to be good enough for the games coming out two years later.
Game companies trying to use the high end equipment to "fully develop" their games kept leaving me with abysmal frame rates. I got tired of my wallet smoking from trying to keep up.
Of course, I understand the idea. Can you imagine game development languor if the latest NVidia or ATI was forced to sit on the store shelf because a company is dedicated to the creation of games which will have excellent framerates on boxes carrying cards, memory, and CPU horsepower from four to five year old machines?
It just seems like the only people who can afford "hard core" PC gaming are the ones who are willing to build their own boxes from a la carte parts (already an expensive proposition) hoping that upgrades they'll have to perform are minimal and they get a few years of top-level experience through a generation or two of games before having to do a major overhaul.
I mean, I like the idea of this kind of uber-performance insanity getting reined in a bit, but I just don't see how this could reasonably accomplished. And "speccing" systems doesn't help either. With so many hardware options and combinations thereof, can you really make any real statements about compatibility and performance without caveating the shit out of it?
At least with a console I know that that console is going to be at least 5 years relevant. I know that every game produced for it has been tested against identical or near identical hardware to the hardware that's in my console so I don't have to worry about compatibility issues or a degraded experience. I know that the controllers will not require setup to use properly. In other words, if a game strikes my fancy, I can buy it only with the knowledge that the console it is made for is the same console that I purchased and know its going to work (at least if the disk isn't scratched beyond repair).
Unless this "standardization scheme" can approach this level of confidence, it strikes me as an empty effort.
I'd be careful about giving too much credence to the Misconceptions article...
I am aware of some of the misconceptions taught about electricity in grade school textbooks. However many of the things on that site seem to be quibbling about semantics and some are just outright incorrect. Like this one here:
"1. All electric currents are flows of electrons? Wrong. Electric currents are not just flows of electrons, they are flows of electric charge. Both protons and electrons posses exactly the same amount of 'electricity.' If either the protons *OR* the electrons flow, that flow is an electric current. In salt water, in fluorescent bulbs, and in battery acid, atoms with extra protons can flow along, and this flow is a genuine electric current. And in fuel cell membranes and in solid ice, electric current is actually a flow of protons."
Now it is correct that electric current isn't a flow of electrons, but rather of charge. But it absolutely isn't a flow of protons either.
Let's take the example of a conductive metal. The reason a metal is conductive is because metals (most metals anyway) have either one or maybe two outer valence electrons. These outer electrons are easily swapped with electron absorbers like chlorine or oxygen (which is why metal rusts or forms salts when exposed to highly reactive substances on the other side of the periodic table).
In a metal wire or strip or block or whatever, these electrons exist in close proximity to one another because they are on the outer orbitals of the atom, so they can easily jump from one atom's outer orbital to another. This promoted soup of free electrons is often referred to as an "electron pool". Now, according to the Pauli Exclusion Principle, only two electrons of opposing spin can occupy the same orbital at the same time (so in order to understand really what's going on with electricity it helps to know a little bit about quantum mechanics). When an electron enters the system (via electromotive force... electrical potential... voltage), it tries to get into the electron pool, and it does so by displacing one of the electrons in an orbital, then the displaced electron jumps to another atoms orbital, which in turn displaces another... etc. When you think about it, imagine desk ball-pendulum toy. An electron comes into the wire from one side, the force pushes through the wire through the existing electrons, then pushes out an electron on the other side (provided that it has a path to ground).
Now even this isn't precisely accurate because although the PEP is still in play, the entire electron pool acts like one big shared orbital.
OK, a little simplified, but we get the general gist. It is the electrons that are moving.
Now why not protons?
Think about it. It is a metal. A crystal. The atom nuclei don't move in a crystal... well, they do, but they vibrate around but they don't move relative to one another, not like water flowing or anything. If protons are in the nucleus, how can protons flow? Answer... they can't.
Electricity exists due to the MOTILITY of charge, and in any metal, only the electrons can jump around. More abstractly, we can only talk about electricity, the phenomenon, with respect to the electrons because they are how charge MOVES. Even an ion with a net positive charge is better described as "electron poor" while that with a net negative charge is "electron rich" because it is the oversupply or undersupply of electrons which gives it its charge.
Now, let's look at another statement... a proton and an electron possess the same amount of 'electricity'. This is wrong, they possess equal opposing CHARGES. ELECTRICITY = CHARGE FLOW.
Let's look at another... An atom with extra protons can flow along? Really. You know what you call hydrogen with an extra proton? HELIUM!!! (Well only if you have a neutron or two with it, of course). What he should have said that an atom which is electron poor (positively charged ion) can flow along. Even so, it's the formation of free electron pools which allows negative charge to move, and thus create the potential for electrical current.
Seems to me that trading one set of misconceptions for another may not be the path to enlightenment.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, gee. The crapware business model for getting preloaded shitty tool software onto PCs doesn't work well when it can be simply uninstalled (paying $30 for this "service" is a small indicator that you don't have any business touching a keyboard or even staring at it for too long... that's another topic... I digress). Whodathunkit?
I mean, seriously, is that the depths of sinkage we're seeing here? Useless services and crap software are causing their providers to sink down the money pit simply because the user has the option to nuke it off the drive and we're supposed to feel bad about this, I guess?
The business model adopted here is astounding. Provide zero-value items and zero-value services, charge for them, and hope people are stupid enough to take "advantage" of them... then on top, whine when it doesn't work as well as you planned.
Here's a crazy thought. Make a good product or provide a good service. Something people want. Charge a fair price for it. And maybe, just maybe... there will be some (ZOMG!1!!!1) PROFIT!
Just sayin' the parallels are there.
No accounting for taste I suppose.
Best choice for performance magnetic drives are? The bankability of SSDs concern they with worry?
Well, if these manufacturers would spend the few frickin' dollars for a decent HEAT SINK, I wouldn't be so gung ho to replace them in all of there power-sucking heat-generating glory.
My laptop: WHIIRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR... [silence for three seconds] WHIRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR... [burns lap] WHIRRRRRRRRRRRRRR... [drys wet clothes out of the washer with air stream from fans in three seconds flat.] WHIRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR... [scorches paint] WHIIRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR... [finally melts a hole in case]... WHIRRRR... [silence]
Guess the drive and the CPU are getting enough air now.
I hereby move that we change a Troll moderation to a +1 value.
Never said Communist regimes weren't guilty of unsustainable resource consumption. That not withstanding, the "Mr. Marx" bit in the subject line was intended as a bit of comic license presented facetiously, but perhaps I should remember that people on Slashdot are an iffy bunch where humor is concerned. Some of them are OK with humor, some don't appreciate it, and some simply just couldn't detect it if someone kicked them in the head with a pair of clown shoes.
And I also never said it was the political system that was the problem either. Capitalism isn't a political system, anyway. It's an economic system.
So, really, what conversation are we having here, precisely?
Well, this is the point I was making. Capitalism, as practiced, breeds consumption. Think about it. Object: wealth. Method: use resources to produce product or service for intent of sale at greater price than cost to produce. Profit! Profit gained parlayed into capital investment toward growth or greater production to meed demand for product. Repeat.
Now to lay the entire causation of this on capitalism itself belies the fact that without demand there is no need for supply, and hence, the consumption of resources to create that supply, and consumers are the source of the demand.
However, I put forth the idea that, while excessive consumption will certainly lead to the ends you say and certainly would be madness to continue, subsistence consumption is unlikely to gain traction as a method of living for modern attitudes, and thus would be madness to suggest.
These are the poles of the argument. At each is an unwelcome or undesirable situation. To occupy a position at either would be tantamount to destroying one's credibility while trying to defend the indefensible. Between the two poles, somewhere, lies the sustainable compromise between obligate consumption and obligate conservation.
The ends of the poles? The poles are the ends. The logical extremes. You are taking a position at one. That's madness. That's what I do get.
Benjamin Franklin once opined "everything in moderation." It continues to sadden me how few people can wrap their brain around the true wisdom it represents and take it to heart rather than running full speed towards the extreme positions on such issues.
A stepped pyramid is a ziggurat. No "dubbing" required.
Others are rather violent pieces of abstract art.
Cue the "Big Blue" music...
On the one hand, there are those who, as you mention, consume every bloody natural resource that exists with nary a thought to the future and extol capitalism as God's favorite economic system.
And on the other hand, there are those who believe we should be living in caves, use palm fronds as loincloths, and eat off of rice mats to make sure we have no "carbon footprint" whatsoever, while deriding capitalism as Satan's favorite economic system.
At both of these poles lies madness.
And maybe a nap on the blankie.
Well, there IS a level of control over whether or not you read or don't read an article, isn't there? But I do understand the sentiment. My TV has the same problem, sometimes there's stuff on I don't like, and I really don't have much control over some of the pap they show there, but you know, it never would occur to me that I have to like or appreciate everything that's on. It takes so much effort for me to just click a button on the remote to either change the channel or turn it off. So is what you're basically saying is that you only want stuff you LIKE in the RSS feed? Ahh. That's a pretty reasonable thing to ask for. Perhaps I was a bit too hasty in my response.
Given the level of conversation around here most of the time, I'd say it has little to do with the fact that either the users are precious or that without them the site is worthless. Personally, the links to the articles are infinitely more valuable than about 99% of the comments posted in their wake. But that's just a personal observation.
But you are doing such a great service posting a poll which is either "yes" or "abstain". If you really wanted to get the feel for the user on the ground, you would have given them a "no, I rather enjoy this" option. But this isn't about them, it's about you, as your poll so gracefully illustrates.
You know you're in trouble if the inflation of your ego causes your hat to feel tight. Time to get a bigger cap, there?
You want a contribution to the obviously highbrow intellectual discourse? Fine, not a problem.
I don't necessarily like kdawson's work OR the Idle section, as I find it a little hit or miss. Sometimes good. Sometimes bad. Like all things. Yet I find it a bit on the side of unacceptably presumptuous of you to assume (as your poll illustrates) that your particular detestation is so widely shared as to be axiomatic, and this in light of the fact that you KNOW you don't like it as a more general rule and feel the need to say so. Is it so unlikely that some might enjoy it? And is it also so unlikely that THEY don't necessarily feel the need to comment on just how much they do? And what is your motivation for your little one-option poll? It's clogging up your RSS feed? To up the quality quotient of Slashdot as a whole to a level you feel owed? I can almost see the righteous purpose behind your post if it weren't obfuscated by a haze of self-importance.
I guess if I'm a prick, I did come to the right place, and responded to the right person. As for MY credibility, well I'm not really concerned about that. If there is room for it, it will come out by my words and my deeds. And if I was found to be lacking in this regard in your opinion, well, I'd probably sleep OK knowing that a person who hasn't exactly gone out of the way to earn MY respect (and, judging by your comment, probably never will earn my respect,) finds my opinions and comments unworthy of his consideration.
But I will say that a person valuing "the benefit of discussion" so much as to basically tout a joke poll as "discussion," while taking a strident comment which lambastes it (and IMHO, deservedly so) is the one truly lacking in credibility. Hypocrisy is the wormsign of a person who shouldn't be taken as particularly credible.
Woo. You want a cookie? Perhaps a balloon?
Turn the f'n channel if you don't like it. Christ, I'm sorry this little bunch of bytes isn't yet another putrefied article gobbling Steve Jobs' cock, but damn, is the Back button too much for you to handle?
Caller ID... the ORIGINAL whitelisting algorithm.
How on earth can this possibly "spoil" a console specifically conceived and designed to have a broader-based appeal than to just traditional gamers? Did Ward and June Cleaver think that this meant all games would be family friendly (read: having appeal to only the by 3-6 year old demographic)? I assume that "traditional gamers" who may like their content a little more on the... ahem... "mature" side are included in this broad base of appeal.
If anything, the progression of some violent games to the Wii console represents a step toward the realization of broad-based appeal rather than spoiling the console.
Sooo... let me see if I understand this properly. One part prefix + one part noun = ... verb?
Cool, let me see if I can un-chicken the kichen table just before I inter-poop. Woo. Epic fail there. And now I've got feathers and feces all over the linoleum.
Ludd would reject your neo-Ludditism as being too newfangled.
Is not subject to the "my blank is cooler and better than your blank" ethos.
Slashdot, of course, must be contrarian on this point. "My blank is the best of all possible blanks, and you can blank off if you don't blanking think so."
Tell me, do you want to spend the rest of your life window shopping for the awsumest browser or do you just want to pick one that doesn't splash buttcrack juice all over your hard drive and use the bloody thing?
You know, that question I just asked seems rhetorical, but /. rules of etiquette demand a response.
It isn't the things I can think of them doing with it that worries me, it's the things that I haven't thought of that are worrisome.
But d0000000d, yer missing the point. He wants to do something 1337 hAxXoRz with all these drives. I mean, really, selling them on eBay would be what the n0rmLz would do.
e Bay.
Why don't they make a laptop with an impression of a LAP... you know, so it fits on a LAP.
XBox360... $300 PS3...$600 Wii...$200
Grand total $1100. Good for 5+ years. Everything else is largely game purchases.
Gaming rig good for Doom3 or Quake4: $2000+ Good for however long until the next vid card comes out, then its $$$ for upgrades.
Seems to me, there is an enormous cost advantage to buying consoles. That coupled with the fact that every game looks the same on every Wii, XBox360, or PS3 and those games are tuned to the machine specs rather than the machine trying to match game specs, makes them ideal vehicles for gaming.
It's not a question that you don't have to have the latest and greatest hardware, but your gameplay will be affected. Yes I can play Doom3 on my 3 year old PC, but with horrible chop. I turn down the resolution. Ok a little better. But that's not what I bought. I paid for "OMG!!!" and I got "OMG!!!"'s blocky third cousin.
You see, it is the few that DO require the latest and greatest that I see as the problem. If I buy an above average rig in 20XX, I should be able to "turn up all the knobs" on a game made in 20XX and get a pretty seamless experience. This is usually no problem. The problem is that invariably a "must have" comes out in 20XX+1 and nVidia has come out with the HyperRaptorXZX 4 bajillion gigaphlanson Video Card with Real-Time Tachyon Transfer Surface Mapping Core... capable of rendering full images even before the program knows it requires them (!!!). And good old iD comes along and creates a new rendering engine which writhes like a salted slug if you use anything with less horsepower than that. Well, that $2000 to $3000 I paid now requires that I purchase nVidia part number HRXZX4BG-RTTTSMC for the whopping amount that they ALWAYS ask for on first release of a new card...
Now the new card is nothing without the 160 exabytes of RAM that the game will use to show me the actual submolecular quantum fluctuations resulting in the preternatural realism of the flying casings and fangor beast blood spew.
I've had consoles since the Atari 2600 and, with the exception of my Commodore 64, the consoles have always been the reasonable choice for gaming. Consoles are never marketed with completely ridiculous price points, never require much in the way of purchase other than games beyond the initial cash outlay, and have a long shelf life. When PCs can accomplish this, then it might be cause for reevaluation.
...because, invariably, a PC which was good two years ago when I bought it just never seems to be good enough for the games coming out two years later.
Game companies trying to use the high end equipment to "fully develop" their games kept leaving me with abysmal frame rates. I got tired of my wallet smoking from trying to keep up.
Of course, I understand the idea. Can you imagine game development languor if the latest NVidia or ATI was forced to sit on the store shelf because a company is dedicated to the creation of games which will have excellent framerates on boxes carrying cards, memory, and CPU horsepower from four to five year old machines?
It just seems like the only people who can afford "hard core" PC gaming are the ones who are willing to build their own boxes from a la carte parts (already an expensive proposition) hoping that upgrades they'll have to perform are minimal and they get a few years of top-level experience through a generation or two of games before having to do a major overhaul.
I mean, I like the idea of this kind of uber-performance insanity getting reined in a bit, but I just don't see how this could reasonably accomplished. And "speccing" systems doesn't help either. With so many hardware options and combinations thereof, can you really make any real statements about compatibility and performance without caveating the shit out of it?
At least with a console I know that that console is going to be at least 5 years relevant. I know that every game produced for it has been tested against identical or near identical hardware to the hardware that's in my console so I don't have to worry about compatibility issues or a degraded experience. I know that the controllers will not require setup to use properly. In other words, if a game strikes my fancy, I can buy it only with the knowledge that the console it is made for is the same console that I purchased and know its going to work (at least if the disk isn't scratched beyond repair).
Unless this "standardization scheme" can approach this level of confidence, it strikes me as an empty effort.
I'd be careful about giving too much credence to the Misconceptions article...
I am aware of some of the misconceptions taught about electricity in grade school textbooks. However many of the things on that site seem to be quibbling about semantics and some are just outright incorrect. Like this one here:
"1. All electric currents are flows of electrons? Wrong.
Electric currents are not just flows of electrons, they are flows of electric charge. Both protons and electrons posses exactly the same amount of 'electricity.' If either the protons *OR* the electrons flow, that flow is an electric current. In salt water, in fluorescent bulbs, and in battery acid, atoms with extra protons can flow along, and this flow is a genuine electric current. And in fuel cell membranes and in solid ice, electric current is actually a flow of protons."
Now it is correct that electric current isn't a flow of electrons, but rather of charge. But it absolutely isn't a flow of protons either.
Let's take the example of a conductive metal. The reason a metal is conductive is because metals (most metals anyway) have either one or maybe two outer valence electrons. These outer electrons are easily swapped with electron absorbers like chlorine or oxygen (which is why metal rusts or forms salts when exposed to highly reactive substances on the other side of the periodic table).
In a metal wire or strip or block or whatever, these electrons exist in close proximity to one another because they are on the outer orbitals of the atom, so they can easily jump from one atom's outer orbital to another. This promoted soup of free electrons is often referred to as an "electron pool". Now, according to the Pauli Exclusion Principle, only two electrons of opposing spin can occupy the same orbital at the same time (so in order to understand really what's going on with electricity it helps to know a little bit about quantum mechanics). When an electron enters the system (via electromotive force... electrical potential... voltage), it tries to get into the electron pool, and it does so by displacing one of the electrons in an orbital, then the displaced electron jumps to another atoms orbital, which in turn displaces another... etc. When you think about it, imagine desk ball-pendulum toy. An electron comes into the wire from one side, the force pushes through the wire through the existing electrons, then pushes out an electron on the other side (provided that it has a path to ground).
Now even this isn't precisely accurate because although the PEP is still in play, the entire electron pool acts like one big shared orbital.
OK, a little simplified, but we get the general gist. It is the electrons that are moving.
Now why not protons?
Think about it. It is a metal. A crystal. The atom nuclei don't move in a crystal... well, they do, but they vibrate around but they don't move relative to one another, not like water flowing or anything. If protons are in the nucleus, how can protons flow? Answer... they can't.
Electricity exists due to the MOTILITY of charge, and in any metal, only the electrons can jump around. More abstractly, we can only talk about electricity, the phenomenon, with respect to the electrons because they are how charge MOVES. Even an ion with a net positive charge is better described as "electron poor" while that with a net negative charge is "electron rich" because it is the oversupply or undersupply of electrons which gives it its charge.
Now, let's look at another statement... a proton and an electron possess the same amount of 'electricity'. This is wrong, they possess equal opposing CHARGES. ELECTRICITY = CHARGE FLOW.
Let's look at another... An atom with extra protons can flow along? Really. You know what you call hydrogen with an extra proton? HELIUM!!! (Well only if you have a neutron or two with it, of course). What he should have said that an atom which is electron poor (positively charged ion) can flow along. Even so, it's the formation of free electron pools which allows negative charge to move, and thus create the potential for electrical current.
Seems to me that trading one set of misconceptions for another may not be the path to enlightenment.