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Author | Topic: Anyone else here in the post-PC era? | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
crashfrog Member (Idle past 1495 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
This assumes a few things that I may not be following, but oh well I’ll take a swing. 1. It assumes that PC gamers have the same attention spans of the tweens (kids) that play on consoles. 2. It assumes that Developers for PC platform games rush games out like their console Dev cousins. 3. It assumes that the same devs are making the same games for both platforms. You can’t design something for the latest version of directX when your directXbox is preprogrammed with the version of directX that was available when the console was designed. I don't see how anything of the sort has been assumed. Game devs have to sell games, which means they have to gear their efforts towards producing games that sell. Releasing a game that nobody has the hardware to run, yet, doesn't make them any money. Who would buy that game? "Oh, I'm sure going to enjoy playing this game two years from now when I pick up a vid card that supports DX11." That makes no sense. PC game devs design to the system they can expect their install base to be using, because who else is going to buy the game?
Diablo 3, and SWTOR to name two off the top of my head. I bet when they finally come out we will be able to use the latest on them. You misapprehend the argument, I think. I'm not saying that DIII won't run on top-notch hardware when it comes out. But it's likely that it won't take full advantage of the features of that hardware when it comes out, because Blizz is designing DIII for the hardware that most people will own when it comes out. And the design decisions that they'll make in that regard are already made; were made several years ago in fact. They made a guess back then about what people would eventually run DIII on, but if it turns out that they were wrong it's far too late to go back and guess again. That's partly why WoW has so much lower hardware requirements than other MMO's, partly it's a conscious decision based on getting as broad a user base as possible, but it's also a consequence of Blizzard's much, much longer dev cycle.
PC gaming is for adults. Consoles are for kids. Yeah, that's pretty stupid. Consoles and PC's usually have the same games. The most popular game on the PC is Farmville. How do you explain the enduring popularity of World of Warcraft? I'm not saying it's for children, but a lot of children play it. What's "more adult" about the PC? The constant upgrade treadmill?
Now I am not him, but having to have itunes for apps and music is garbage. If it's not one walled garden, it's another. Who cares?
There is no real apple open source. No, it's called "Cydia." Remember when I mentioned that?
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1495 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
Not to brag too much, but I put together a pretty killer gaming rig for not a lot of money (just under 1,000 including monitor). That's cool, we just had a thread on that. You should pop over and drop in your specs. I was on the PC treadmill once, too, and it's total bullshit. You wouldn't believe the cash I dropped once to play Mass Effect on my PC, and then imagine my dismay when the PC port of Mass Effect was so buggy I couldn't even keep it running. I dropped 250 on an Xbox 360 and I've not looked back. Plays Netflix, too (they're all doing that these days, I know.)
However, they have closed themselves off to the DIY market which is where I am at. Yeah, that's true. They started in the DIY market, back in the days of the Apple I, but the intent probably always was to move computers to a place where you didn't have to be DIY to use them.
I'm not looking to piss on anyone's parade. Me neither. I think all platforms have strengths and weaknesses, and that they should be compared on that basis instead of on AE's stupid basis of "PC's are for adults, you lamer."
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1495 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
We should start an EvC steam group.
I'm "crashfrog", natch.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1495 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
Lemme see what I have on my account... TF2, Left 4 Dead (the first one), Borderlands, some old shit. I'm not especially good at any of these.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1495 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
And: bah! Just realised you guys are talking about Steam, not Live. I play on Live, too! Username "crashfrog." (Seriously.)
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1495 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
It’s even nicer to purchase the game from home, and download it in minutes, and not have to mess with hardware like disk drives, or even disks. Hi, it's called "Xbox Live Marketplace." Or PS Network or something.
PCs are just more powerful, take more work, and more thinking to get them to function. And a lot more money, too. Why does any of that make them "better"? Is it more adult to waste your time and money?
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1495 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
if you cannot understand the difference between adult things and child things I doubt I can explain it to you. LOL! Says the guy who's telling me all about video games. Yeah, just keep telling yourself how "adult" you are.
what makes a Mercedes "better" if the power, and engineering, is not part of the equation In point of fact, nothing makes the Mercedes better. Luxury cars are a scam for man-children who don't know the difference between price and quality.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1495 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
The problem for me is that I enjoy MMO's (just to brag, currently in the SWTOR beta). No one has made a decent MMO (IMHO) for consoles that I have seen. Yeah, I think that's true. If MMO's are your thing then yeah, you've got to be on PC. But you can ease off on the upgrade treadmill because of their generally lower requirements. It's the guys who want to run Crysis or want Assassins Creed to look like it does on the consoles who are dropping tons of cash. They have to. What a waste.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1495 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
iOS devices aren't Macs. Remember when we were talking about that?
I suggested we use Google Earth to figure it out, since I had done that before on Google Earth. So my niece downloaded Google Earth onto her iPad2 and we set up to figure it out. OK, where's the tool bar? It doesn't have a tool bar. Where's the main menu? It doesn't have that either. Why would it have any of those things? It's a program you use with your fingers.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1495 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
A toy that you and your friends can geek out over. It depends what you mean by "toy." People are getting useful work done on these devices, in part because sometimes work is more useful when you don't have to do it chained to your desk. I mean, let's look at your family gathering again - what did you pull out to answer the question? Oh, that's right - nothing at all, because your PC, which you could have used to answer the question, was back at your house instead of with you. It was literally useless to you because of a trick of geography - it was somewhere you weren't. I know we're talking about "post-PC", but in fact we're not really talking about phones and tablets that are exactly the same as PC's. We're talking about devices that are a lot more useful than a PC at home when I'm at the store (that is, useless.) My iPhone isn't as capable as my PC, not by a long shot. But when I'm waiting at the bus stop, my iPhone can come out and be used. My PC can't, because it's not there. None of this is meant as a defense of Apple devices in particular - as an aside, though, the criticism that Apple products are too hard to use is just bizarre - but as a defense of limited mobile devices in general. Of course you have to use an iPad with your fingers - if you're sitting at a bus stop, what are you going to use a mouse on? If you're sitting on a beach, where are you going to put the keyboard? Think it through. Also, just curious, since your post doesn't say: what kind of phone did you get? (And, like, on what planet did you live that Win XP Search ever did anything useful?)
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1495 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
So a device that you have in your hands that cannot do the job is somehow superior to a device that can do the job but which you don't have your hands on. You really think an iPad can't tell you the distance between two cities? (Hint: it's called "Maps." It was probably right there on the home screen. The name should have indicated that it had something to do with geography and maybe directions and distances. Why did you think you needed to use Google Earth?) Couldn't it maybe be that you couldn't figure it out, because it's not exactly like a PC?
And yet the OP of this topic has them replacing PCs. Yes. Why do they have to be exactly like PC's to replace a PC?
What? No touchpad? Sorry, I hate touchpads and find them so generally unusable that I tend to forget that laptops have them. And, of course, desktop PC's don't have them at all. So, yeah - no touchpad.
Now if only I could pull up a context menu for that icon, but how the frak do you right-click with a fracking stupid one-button mouse? Control-click, but Macs have two-button mice. Have for ages. Your "brand new studio Mac" did, too.
I forget what double-clicking on the folder icon did, but it was the entirely wrong thing. Double-clicking on folder icons opens folders, same as any other computer.
Then it turned out that Macs refuse to recognize AVI files, even though it's been an established video format for over a decade. Quicktime plays AVI and has for decades.
Oh, I'm sure that Macs are good computers for people who don't know anything about computers and who don't want to do anything useful outside of writing and graphics. Except that you don't seem to know anything about computers except how to use them in very specific, very circumscribed ways. The issue you have seems to be that if it doesn't work exactly the same way it works in a specific version of Windows XP, you can't learn any new way to do it. That's the problem you're having with Vista/Win7, that's the problem you seem to have with Macs - you learned to do things one specific way, and if that way doesn't work, you have no idea what to do. It's something you see a lot in the way senior citizens use computers. They don't understand the conceptual basis of what they're doing, they only understand it as a list of concrete actions. They don't understand "check your email, write a letter, upload to YouTube", they only understand "double-click the envelope, press the Start menu, bwa-bwa You-what?"
My Android can hook up to my PC as an external drive so that I can transfer files in and out; what about on an iPhone or an iPad? iPhone and iPad does that too.
It came preloaded with a number of common apps, but there's no explanation how to use those apps or even what they are supposed to do. And "play around with it" never occurred to you? Again, that's something that you see in technology users of a certain age - they're convinced that any deviation from a specific, circumscribed set of routines will "break it", so they're just not capable of exploratory learning. Anybody who's had the experience of having to fix their relatives' computers knows what I'm talking about. That's the reason your criticism is so bizarre. That's the reason your iPod didn't come with a full instruction manual - you're supposed to fuck around with it for a few minutes, make mistakes, discover serendipitously. ("Oh, it does that too! Awesome!") Anybody younger than about 45, at this point, is completely comfortable with this process, because it works better than reading the manual. You remember more because you worked for it, and because you got the "reward" from independent discovery. Apple products really are verifiably easier to use - there's all kinds of videos of pre-verbal infants, for instance, using iPads with a great degree of proficiency - it's just that it's not any easier for you because of the flawed way in which you approach technology.
Com'on, you're just jerking me around, aren't you? You can't really be serious. Dead-on serious. Never in my life has Search in Windows done anything useful. If I want to search my computer for a file, I have to install Google desktop. Of course, they're not making that any more. (Fuck!)
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1495 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
I have been playing them since 1982, there is nothing childish about them No, but you know what is childish? Having a big chip on your shoulder about being an adult. If you were really an adult, you'd play what you want. And you wouldn't be so threatened by people who do different things than you.
evidence you haven't a clue what you are talking about. that was probably the stupidest post in this whole thread. So you don't have an argument that I'm wrong. Got it.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1495 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
Try getting something off of or onto an iPhone/iPad by just hooking them up to your pc via USB and going into explorer. I do that all the time. I didn't even have to jailbreak - the first time I plugged my iPhone in, it showed up as a removable storage device. I can drag and drop stuff right off of it. Now that I'm jailbroken, I don't even have to plug it in; I can SSH and SFTP into it and grab whatever I want, peruse the entire filetree, and so on.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1495 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
Ok, maybe off of it then, but putting something on there most definately requires itunes, at least, if you want to use it on the iPhone/iPad. You certainly wouldn't want to copy music that way, but why would you? You don't put songs on an iOS device, you put playlists on.
That's really how it should be, even without a jailbreak. At least, that's what I think. Eh, I'm not convinced. Until I changed the root password, anybody could have gotten in and taken full control of my phone, downloaded all of my pictures, even turned the mic on and used it to spy on me. These are computers with full sense capabilities that we're carrying around at all times of the day and that are never more than a few feet from us, even during the most intimate and personal moments of our lives. I think a fair degree of out-of-the-box restriction is appropriate. Aren't we at Day Two of the ScarJo Age, due to hackers grabbing nudie pics off her phone remotely?
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1495 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
You are just making shit up now. No, I'm reading your posts. Nobody's fooled by your childish posturing.
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