Yeah, it's all great until they tie your wireless signal to your credit card history, and suddenly you're the guy who gets donkey sex ads displayed on the screen in McDonald's because of your porn subscriptions.
Avatars in the virtual reality of Second Life act like real people in this way: boy avatars stand further apart than female ones, and characters tend to avert their gaze from each others' eyes when standing close together.
Yeah, when I'm in 30-second warm up in Wolf:ET and I'm lying on top of my teammate knifing him in the thigh, I try to avert my gaze.
I guess in some small way I can understand a PC gamer's plight. I mean, if I shelled out enough scratch to bail out a small third-world nation I'd take every opportunity to justify my purchase...to everyone I meet. It would make me feel less insecure. And anyone who disagrees with me I'll call a peon, poor, or just plain ignorant. Ok, I'm being unjustly harsh here, but do you recognize the attitude? Every time a hardcore PC gamer blows his load about why PC gaming is the bee's knees you leave the forum feeling like a second class citizen, as if not spending two-month's salary on a computer makes you some sort of toothless Sims-expansion-buying rube. Not so, I say!
"Only one more component and my PC of Doom will be complete! Shashashashasha!"
Here are 10 reasons why console gaming rules the school.
1. It's cheaper. Don't let a PC gamer delude you into thinking that console gaming is more expensive--it's just not true. Console manufacturers take a loss on every machine sold and make up the difference in software sales. When you buy a console, you're getting the machine for cheaper than it costs them to make it. Not so with a gaming PC. You're paying a premium. Sure, some console games might retail for $10 higher than the PC equivalent, but budget-minded shoppers need only wait for a markdown to score some sweet deals.
2. Every game is guaranteed to work. Ever try to convince that pimply-faced teenager at the game store that your computer won't run that hot new game you bought yesterday? He doesn't care. "Read the friggin' box," is what he'll say. "No returns on opened PC games." This won't happen in the console realm. If you own "system X" every game made for it will perform the same way. Guaranteed.
3. You needn't tweak, optimize, or otherwise fiddle with a console game to make it look good. Don't believe the screenshots on the back of a PC game box. Unless your machine resembles the WOPR from War Games, you probably don't have enough juice to run it with all the settings turned up to 11. On a console game, you might have the option to adjust brightness or resolution (Xbox 360) but otherwise you get exactly what was advertised.
4. Lots of console exclusives to choose from. Pick your poison. Whether you're hot for Mario, Kratos, or Ryu Hayabusa, you'll find their newest releases on consoles. Sure, the PC has some exclusive titles, but sooner or later they'll find their way onto your living room television since that's where the money is at.
5. Xbox Live. Aside from Battlefield 2, I can't think of any online game that's currently better on PC (get to work, DICE). Yes, many PC games let you play online multiplayer for free, but the experience is varied (and in some cases, atrocious). With a standardized online service like Xbox Live, all of your online bouts have a unified matchmaking system, friends list features, voice over IP chat, and more, and it all works regardless of what game you're playing. Hell, you could be watching a movie and your pal playing a game and you can send game and chat invites. When's the last time a PC game let you do that?
6. Backwards compatibility. When I upgraded from Windows 98 SE to WinXP, I lost the ability to play some of my favorite classic games. Sure, there are workarounds for some of them, but others I can only play on my pre-Y2K rig. Sony's handled backwards compatibility quite well with their consoles, even making it hard for the competition to match. And you don't have to futz with configuration files to get them to work.
7. Virus, adware, and spyware free. No porn, no viruses. 'Nuff said.
8. Games look better in high-def...from the couch. Yes, yes. We all know your $400 video card can output higher resolution than my equally expensive console. But PC gaming is uncomfortable and hardly a social experience (with people in the same room). If you
I use both services, depending on who has the episode I want, but prefer the DVD if it's available. But I've redownloaded some episodes from Amazon that I had purchased from iTMS, because the quality is so much better and there's a method to regain fair use. From now on, I'll likely be holding out on getting anything from iTMS until it's on Unbox, because I really don't like being stuck with poor quality videos only playable in Quicktime. I honestly can't believe iTMS doesn't offer anything greater than 320x240 iPod videos.
That iTunesHelper service is totally unnecessary if you don't have an iPod. It should not "affect the app's functionality" if you don't have an iPod. Yet it does. None of Apple's software is very good on Windows though*, so it's about what I would expect.
* I was just watching an episode I downloaded from iTMS yesterday, and it kept allowing the screen saver to come on several times during the movie. When I rewoke my comp., the Quicktime viewing area was transparent (showing my desktop through) and wouldn't return to showing the episode until I restarted QT. Other Windows apps would simply disable the screensaver while they're active, or at least function properly when they return.
The difference is that in iTunes, you buy videos from it's built in web browser. With Unbox, it keeps a service running polling the web server for new files that you've purchased outside of their client, in your normal web browser.
I truly don't know how the author didn't realize that when he bought his first video and a few minutes later, the client automatically found it and started downloading it.
You can also purchase videos on one PC and send them to another using that same background service. iTunes doesn't have that feature, so it doesn't require polling a server for new download requests.
Yeah, it's a pretty crappy deal until you run them through FairUse4WM and end up with DVD-quality TV episodes that you can't get in that quality anywhere else.
I actually considered writing them to request that feature. The first (and only) time I've mindlessly clicked the restart button on the Windows Update dialog happened to be in the middle of an Unbox download, which corrupted it real good.
Then the only way I could find to redownload it is to uninstall inbox (with the "Permanent Uninstall" option, which deletes your library) then reinstall it and right-click "download to this PC". Not exactly intuitive.
It should just check it's pieces, check partials when it resumes, and check the whole thing when it's done. Fully automatic, just like BitTorrent.
The article's FUD, and the GP deserves the mod points. The article author is an idiot. What's so hard about going to services.msc and setting "Amazon Unbox Video Service" to Disabled or Manual?
The service connects to the internet a lot to see if you've purchased anything else on the Amazon website to download. You can purchase digital downloads for any PC you want (even if it's not the one you're buying from), and also manage your PC's media library from your web browser.
Both features require communication with the web server. If he even payed attention to how he purchased from his web browser and the client automatically started downloading it, he'd have a pretty good clue as to why it's connecting all the time.
I'd imagine he needed connectivity for the uninstall because he chose "Permanent Uninstall" in the uninstaller, which unlicenses and deletes your library. I'm just guessing though, as I don't expect this unknowledgeable article author to explain the full situation coherently without knee-jerk FUD.
However, when you do stuff that gets the processor hot and uses up all the RAM and some swap space for hours on end, it's going to crash from time to time...unless you've got some really expensive hardware.
Or a midrange pre-built desktop. I've never, ever seen any of my family's 3 Dells crash from hardware problems. And that's with ~350 W PS and limited fans. One was $2000+ a few years ago and the others were ~$600 recently.
I assume custom built computers crash because of their weakest link: whatever you decided to cut corners on. But with all quality parts, they should be even more stable than pre-built.
If compressed with h.264 instead of MPEG-2, at similar bitrates to what iTunes currently uses for TV shows: a typical movie takes up about 400MB.
At 320x240 resolution and ~88 kbps bitrate, compared to 720x480 with 8 Mbps bitrate for DVDs.
If you wanted the same quality with h.264, you'd still need about half the bitrate of DVDs and the same resolution. About what it takes to fill up a DVD-5 (4.5 GB)
However, I can't help but notice that there are a lot of titles at my local DVD store for $6.99 or thereabouts. I don't know if this will be as lucerative a venture as music, especially since you tend to listen to music a lot but only view movies once or twice. Rental may well still be the best movie model for most people.
Yup, NetFlix still seems like the best deal for my money. I hardly ever actually want to own a DVD anyway. There's always something new to watch. Plus, it's not like you really own DRM'd movies.
Of course, you are correct about the disparity in general between watching something on a portable device, versus a nice big TV. Hopefully Apple handles this gracefully, because people won't want 320x240 movies (though, even the 320x240 TV shows are not bad on a standard def TV, for most peoples' tastes).
iTMS videos are noticeably worse than Full D1 (720x480) standard-definition captures, actually. I've purchased the same episode of a show I recorded, hoping the all-digital MP4 would be better. It's not. There's simply not enough pixels. Plus you can't play it in anything except Quicktime/iTunes.
JPEG2000 (which TFA is talking about), on the other hand, defines both lossy and lossless standards.
Except that if they're using lossless compression, the bandwidth required would be more than just leaving it at MPEG-2/4. In other words, they're using lossy.
Yeah, I never understood that. Professors type up their notes in Word and then lecture. Why don't they just give a copy of those notes to each student? I've actually asked teachers for those notes before and they didn't give them. What, are they teaching us all to be transcriptionists or something?
Students could time-shift a lecture and discuss it later, but it seems less likely, and there's something to be said for talking when the lecture is still fresh in their minds. I also wonder how attentive students would be watching a podcast compared to sitting in a lecture hall. Sharing the same physical space demands at least the appearance of attentiveness.
I guess if you consider a blank stare, shuffling around in my seat, and looking around the room for something interesting "attentiveness." My worst method of learning is listening. My best is teaching what I'm learning to others or reading the material on my own.
Lectures are just a method to get the material into my notes where I can read it later. I may be bad at listening but I'm damn good at learning by reading. Having the lectures in podcast form would at least be slightly better for me because I could pause/rewind it when I get distracted or have trouble parsing it. I can also pay better attention to learning material at home.
People like me might be rare, they might not. But I'm surprised after all we know about how people learn better with different methods and about how in general, lectures are the least retained type of learning across the board, with teaching others the material at the top, that we still teach some material using only that one method, with no option to use other methods.
As a consultant, I've never been forced to come in in the mornings. I do if I schedule it that way, but I never schedule meetings for the morning. They're almost always around 1pm.
Working at McDonald's is actually the exact type of people that would have to come in early. They don't usually control even which shift they work.
This sounds like a good idea for music search, but a horrible one for targeted advertising. It would be extremely convenient to be able to identify songs from the radio automatically through google, but then again, I never listen to the radio when I'm on my computer, it's more of a work/car thing.
Strange that Google's thinking of the advertising possibilities instead of the search possibilities. I don't like it.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, it's all great until they tie your wireless signal to your credit card history, and suddenly you're the guy who gets donkey sex ads displayed on the screen in McDonald's because of your porn subscriptions.
Yeah, when I'm in 30-second warm up in Wolf:ET and I'm lying on top of my teammate knifing him in the thigh, I try to avert my gaze.
I wouldn't want to act too gay, you know.
I guess in some small way I can understand a PC gamer's plight. I mean, if I shelled out enough scratch to bail out a small third-world nation I'd take every opportunity to justify my purchase...to everyone I meet. It would make me feel less insecure. And anyone who disagrees with me I'll call a peon, poor, or just plain ignorant. Ok, I'm being unjustly harsh here, but do you recognize the attitude? Every time a hardcore PC gamer blows his load about why PC gaming is the bee's knees you leave the forum feeling like a second class citizen, as if not spending two-month's salary on a computer makes you some sort of toothless Sims-expansion-buying rube. Not so, I say!
"Only one more component and my PC of Doom will be complete! Shashashashasha!"
Here are 10 reasons why console gaming rules the school.
1. It's cheaper. Don't let a PC gamer delude you into thinking that console gaming is more expensive--it's just not true. Console manufacturers take a loss on every machine sold and make up the difference in software sales. When you buy a console, you're getting the machine for cheaper than it costs them to make it. Not so with a gaming PC. You're paying a premium. Sure, some console games might retail for $10 higher than the PC equivalent, but budget-minded shoppers need only wait for a markdown to score some sweet deals.
2. Every game is guaranteed to work. Ever try to convince that pimply-faced teenager at the game store that your computer won't run that hot new game you bought yesterday? He doesn't care. "Read the friggin' box," is what he'll say. "No returns on opened PC games." This won't happen in the console realm. If you own "system X" every game made for it will perform the same way. Guaranteed.
3. You needn't tweak, optimize, or otherwise fiddle with a console game to make it look good. Don't believe the screenshots on the back of a PC game box. Unless your machine resembles the WOPR from War Games, you probably don't have enough juice to run it with all the settings turned up to 11. On a console game, you might have the option to adjust brightness or resolution (Xbox 360) but otherwise you get exactly what was advertised.
4. Lots of console exclusives to choose from. Pick your poison. Whether you're hot for Mario, Kratos, or Ryu Hayabusa, you'll find their newest releases on consoles. Sure, the PC has some exclusive titles, but sooner or later they'll find their way onto your living room television since that's where the money is at.
5. Xbox Live. Aside from Battlefield 2, I can't think of any online game that's currently better on PC (get to work, DICE). Yes, many PC games let you play online multiplayer for free, but the experience is varied (and in some cases, atrocious). With a standardized online service like Xbox Live, all of your online bouts have a unified matchmaking system, friends list features, voice over IP chat, and more, and it all works regardless of what game you're playing. Hell, you could be watching a movie and your pal playing a game and you can send game and chat invites. When's the last time a PC game let you do that?
6. Backwards compatibility. When I upgraded from Windows 98 SE to WinXP, I lost the ability to play some of my favorite classic games. Sure, there are workarounds for some of them, but others I can only play on my pre-Y2K rig. Sony's handled backwards compatibility quite well with their consoles, even making it hard for the competition to match. And you don't have to futz with configuration files to get them to work.
7. Virus, adware, and spyware free. No porn, no viruses. 'Nuff said.
8. Games look better in high-def...from the couch. Yes, yes. We all know your $400 video card can output higher resolution than my equally expensive console. But PC gaming is uncomfortable and hardly a social experience (with people in the same room). If you
Because I already bought one, so they must be better!
Oh, hey, Mr. Jobs!
I didn't know you read slashdot!
No, that would really suck.
I don't want to open up iTunes just to watch a movie I downloaded/purchased from the web.
I've explained the article author's claims about "phoning home" elsewhere, so I won't go over that FUD again.
I use both services, depending on who has the episode I want, but prefer the DVD if it's available. But I've redownloaded some episodes from Amazon that I had purchased from iTMS, because the quality is so much better and there's a method to regain fair use. From now on, I'll likely be holding out on getting anything from iTMS until it's on Unbox, because I really don't like being stuck with poor quality videos only playable in Quicktime. I honestly can't believe iTMS doesn't offer anything greater than 320x240 iPod videos.
Nevermind that WMV DRM is cracked, while QT video DRM isn't.
And that Amazon lets you redownload your videos anytime you want, while iTMS doesn't.
That iTunesHelper service is totally unnecessary if you don't have an iPod. It should not "affect the app's functionality" if you don't have an iPod. Yet it does. None of Apple's software is very good on Windows though*, so it's about what I would expect.
* I was just watching an episode I downloaded from iTMS yesterday, and it kept allowing the screen saver to come on several times during the movie. When I rewoke my comp., the Quicktime viewing area was transparent (showing my desktop through) and wouldn't return to showing the episode until I restarted QT. Other Windows apps would simply disable the screensaver while they're active, or at least function properly when they return.
The difference is that in iTunes, you buy videos from it's built in web browser. With Unbox, it keeps a service running polling the web server for new files that you've purchased outside of their client, in your normal web browser.
I truly don't know how the author didn't realize that when he bought his first video and a few minutes later, the client automatically found it and started downloading it.
You can also purchase videos on one PC and send them to another using that same background service. iTunes doesn't have that feature, so it doesn't require polling a server for new download requests.
Yeah, it's a pretty crappy deal until you run them through FairUse4WM and end up with DVD-quality TV episodes that you can't get in that quality anywhere else.
I actually considered writing them to request that feature. The first (and only) time I've mindlessly clicked the restart button on the Windows Update dialog happened to be in the middle of an Unbox download, which corrupted it real good.
Then the only way I could find to redownload it is to uninstall inbox (with the "Permanent Uninstall" option, which deletes your library) then reinstall it and right-click "download to this PC". Not exactly intuitive.
It should just check it's pieces, check partials when it resumes, and check the whole thing when it's done. Fully automatic, just like BitTorrent.
The article's FUD, and the GP deserves the mod points. The article author is an idiot. What's so hard about going to services.msc and setting "Amazon Unbox Video Service" to Disabled or Manual?
The service connects to the internet a lot to see if you've purchased anything else on the Amazon website to download. You can purchase digital downloads for any PC you want (even if it's not the one you're buying from), and also manage your PC's media library from your web browser.
Both features require communication with the web server. If he even payed attention to how he purchased from his web browser and the client automatically started downloading it, he'd have a pretty good clue as to why it's connecting all the time.
I'd imagine he needed connectivity for the uninstall because he chose "Permanent Uninstall" in the uninstaller, which unlicenses and deletes your library. I'm just guessing though, as I don't expect this unknowledgeable article author to explain the full situation coherently without knee-jerk FUD.
Or a midrange pre-built desktop. I've never, ever seen any of my family's 3 Dells crash from hardware problems. And that's with ~350 W PS and limited fans. One was $2000+ a few years ago and the others were ~$600 recently.
I assume custom built computers crash because of their weakest link: whatever you decided to cut corners on. But with all quality parts, they should be even more stable than pre-built.
Just assume the tech journalists have nothing to talk about.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
At 320x240 resolution and ~88 kbps bitrate, compared to 720x480 with 8 Mbps bitrate for DVDs.
If you wanted the same quality with h.264, you'd still need about half the bitrate of DVDs and the same resolution. About what it takes to fill up a DVD-5 (4.5 GB)
Yup, NetFlix still seems like the best deal for my money. I hardly ever actually want to own a DVD anyway. There's always something new to watch. Plus, it's not like you really own DRM'd movies.
Ahh, just realized you said standard-definition TV. My bad.
iTMS videos are noticeably worse than Full D1 (720x480) standard-definition captures, actually. I've purchased the same episode of a show I recorded, hoping the all-digital MP4 would be better. It's not. There's simply not enough pixels. Plus you can't play it in anything except Quicktime/iTunes.
Except that if they're using lossless compression, the bandwidth required would be more than just leaving it at MPEG-2/4. In other words, they're using lossy.
Yeah, I never understood that. Professors type up their notes in Word and then lecture. Why don't they just give a copy of those notes to each student? I've actually asked teachers for those notes before and they didn't give them. What, are they teaching us all to be transcriptionists or something?
I guess if you consider a blank stare, shuffling around in my seat, and looking around the room for something interesting "attentiveness." My worst method of learning is listening. My best is teaching what I'm learning to others or reading the material on my own.
Lectures are just a method to get the material into my notes where I can read it later. I may be bad at listening but I'm damn good at learning by reading. Having the lectures in podcast form would at least be slightly better for me because I could pause/rewind it when I get distracted or have trouble parsing it. I can also pay better attention to learning material at home.
People like me might be rare, they might not. But I'm surprised after all we know about how people learn better with different methods and about how in general, lectures are the least retained type of learning across the board, with teaching others the material at the top, that we still teach some material using only that one method, with no option to use other methods.
As a consultant, I've never been forced to come in in the mornings. I do if I schedule it that way, but I never schedule meetings for the morning. They're almost always around 1pm.
Working at McDonald's is actually the exact type of people that would have to come in early. They don't usually control even which shift they work.
This sounds like a good idea for music search, but a horrible one for targeted advertising. It would be extremely convenient to be able to identify songs from the radio automatically through google, but then again, I never listen to the radio when I'm on my computer, it's more of a work/car thing.
Strange that Google's thinking of the advertising possibilities instead of the search possibilities. I don't like it.
Assuming his crew had any respect for him at all, it won't be.