The Linux Mint Planet » March 11, 2008

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March 11, 2008
18:48
The Money Masters - How International Bankers Gained Control of America
» ‎ Shane Joe Lazar

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5:26

Unreal creator Tim Sweeney: â€œPCs are good for anything, just not gamesâ€

» ‎ JJMacey

Sweeney: There are many overpriced computers out there. It’s like sports cars. They are everywhere, everybody writes about them, but there are only a few who can afford them. There isn’t a great amount of people that will spend large amounts of money on that. In the case of PCs, they mostly don’t deliver that amount of performance that you would expect to justify that cost. You pay twice as much money for 30% more performance… That is just not right.

TG Daily: What about those high-end features? Do you think that industry is actually sending the wrong message when it comes to gaming? Do you feel that the hardware industry went with wrong message when it started to talk about 3-Way SLI and other high-end things, while they did not work on expanding the PC gaming message to masses?

Sweeney: Absolutely. That was a terrible mistake. Marketing people believe that there is a small number of people who are gamers and who can afford spending good amount of money on buying high end hardware.

Gaming

TG Daily: You have to admit, the margin is obviously there.

Sweeney: Agreed. But it is very important not to leave the masses behind. This is unfortunate, because PCs are more popular than ever. Everyone has a PC. Even those who did not have a PC in the past are now able to afford one and they use it for Facebook, MySpace, pirating music or whatever. Yesterdayâ€™s PCs were for people that were working and later playing games. Even if those games were lower-end ones, there will always be a market for casual games and online games like World of Warcraft. World of Warcraft has DirectX 7-class graphics and can run on any computer. But at the end of the day, consoles have definitely left PC games behind.

TG Daily: But we mostly talk about conventional retail sales. Do you see an increasing divide between the Pc and consoles?

Sweeney: Retail stores like Best Buy are selling PC games and PCs with integrated graphics at the same time and they are not talking about the difference [to more capable gaming PCs]. Those machines are good for e-mail, web browsing, watching video. But as far as games go, those machines are just not adequate. It is no surprise that retail PC sales suffer from that. Online is different, because people who go and buy games online already have PCs that can play games. The biggest problem in this space right now is that you cannot go and design a game for a high end PC and downscale it to mainstream PCs. The performance difference between high-end and low-end PC is something like 100x.

TG Daily: In other words: Too big?

Sweeney: Yes, that is huge difference. If we go back 10 years ago, the difference between the high end and the lowest end may have been a factor of 10. We could have scaled games between those two. For example, with the first version of Unreal, a resolution of 320×200 was good for software rendering and we were able to scale that up to 1024×768, if you had the GPU power. There is no way we can scale down a game down by a factor of 100, we would just have to design two completely different games. One for low-end and one for high-end.
That is actually happening on PCs: You have really low-end games with little hardware requirements, like Maple Story. That is a $100 million-a-year business. Kids are addicted to those games, they pay real money to buy [virtual] items within the game and the game.

TG Daily: Broken down, that means todayâ€™s mainstream PCs arenâ€™t suitable for gaming?

Sweeney: Exactly. PCs are good for anything, just not games.

Hey, I’ve been thinking the same thing

Linux + Consumer Protection - Youâ€™ll Love This From â€œBlog of helios Tooâ€

» ‎ JJMacey

Hi All,

Here’s a real Linux Hero reporting:

CompUSA It’s old news by now. CompUSA is out of bid’ness. While there are a number of reasons for this, one of them should be obvious. They stubbornly held onto their loyalty to Microsoft. Now, it’s no secret that I made an enemy of CompUSA years ago. I was “strongly advised” to pull that blog down, but in the end…it stayed up.

Hey, I remember the case here

CompUSA went down.

And no…there is not a shred of positive correlation between the two.

On several occasions I walked into CompUSA to see what I could see on the Linux Shelves. I asked them why they didn’t support Linux when there was evidence all around them that it was a desired product. When Linux was finally offered there, I wrote about my experience in finding Suse and Xandros stuffed on the bottom shelves, in obvious disarray. My confrontations with management over this led me to be escorted from the premises on more than one occasion.. On several occasions I found Microsoft products covering Linux offerings, or the Linux boxed distros thrown under the display case.

We launched a dead end investigation when each of these distros disappeared from the shelves within 24 hours of those above named entities making their Deal with the Devil. Yes, it was a dead end. I could never tie anything together to substantiate the “coincidence” of that timing. No one would talk any higher than store managers and they didn’t really have any reason to talk to me anyway. In the case of Linspire, I am assuming the bulging pockets of those top Execs who were shown the door might have bought some silence.

But I could be wrong.

Yeah, right.

Yet, when it comes down to it…CompUSA is gone. I personally will shed no tears. I am convinced that their blindness to consumer needs played some part in their demise if not a large one, whether it was Linux or any other non-microsoft product. You want to argue it? OK…

Walmart is carrying Linux products now. Intel got the religion for obvious reasons - thanks AMD.

So did Acer, and HP, as did IBM/Lenovo. Hell, even Best Buy, that bastion of Microsoft-only products has gotten the hint.

Some say that Dell started the landslide…I disagree but it’s not meant for discussion here.

That Grand-Daddy of all Big Box Stores, Sears Now carries Linux products (online only for now)

That’s right…Sears. The Ultimate Mom and Dad Store. You know you’ve made inroads when Sears carries your product.

And yeah, it’s Linspire…and I have some problems with that but for now, we gotta take what we get. Once we get them understanding Linux, we can get them educated properly.

Thanks Dumper. You raise some excellent points.

As did everyone else contributing to that post. Various deadlines and family commitments deter me from posting other examples of Linux hitting the consumer and hence, the retail awareness. A simple google will spill dozens more examples into your lap.

The biggest story isn’t the above cited cases…it’s the phenomenon of embedded Linux. The explosion of “hidden Linux” far exceeds Tivo sets. Wind River, a company who vocally denounced Linux as a “plaything” has found the value of Open Source. That in itself carries weight you and I have yet to even imagine. The “Linux Inside” thing is huge folks…absolutely huge. You know that it has to eat at the insides of those who made their living knocking FOSS and those who comprise this community.

Companies like Zareason.com are coming into their own. Why? They sell hardware for profit. They offer Linux on principle. That is how an open source venture will survive then thrive, and personally; I am going to go out of my way to see that these particular warriors succeed maddeningly. These folks put Linux on their computers when it was a matter of principle, not profit. You might want to make note of that before you purchase that brand new laptop from Dell or HP.

Now, had CompUSA gotten said religion, would they have survived? It’s hard to say and anything I post here is pure conjecture…sprinkled liberally with doses of wishful thinking, and topped off masterfully with globs of gloating.

Sticking my small, ineffective shiv into CompUSA prior to their demise is gratifying, as wrong as it may be. But that aside, we’ve established momentum…now let’s talk about the menu.

On this menu is only one item, but there are many delicious ways it can be served.

EatingCrow

Cool, overall we are winning support, and fighting the good fight!

Thanks Helios!

Best Regards,

JJMacey
Phoenix, Arizona
The Valley of the Sun!

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1:45

OLPC: Negroponte wants â€œzero dollar laptopâ€ for children - The One LapTop Per Child Project

» ‎ JJMacey

This from heise online:

OLPCLapTop

$100 for a laptop for a child in the poorest countries is still too much for Nicholas Negroponte. The founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, and founder and current chairman. of the One Laptop per Child project (OLPC) wants to give portable computers to all the children in developing countries. If possible, free of charge, he said to German Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper. “$100 is prohibitive. Our computers should and will be zero dollar laptops. There are many ways of achieving this, and we will endeavour to do just that.”

The key is in component integration, he said. “Today, an XO laptop consists of more than 900 individual parts. It has to be 50″, said Negroponte. He doesn’t seem to think that Intel’s leaving the project at the end of last year jeopardises his plans. The computer processor vendor made a sudden exit from the project.

In the interview, Negroponte sharply criticised the US semiconductor group: “Intel came in late after taking a destructive position towards our project, used its insider status to be even more destructive than before, and then pulled out. All in all an unpleasant, time-consuming experience, without any technological benefit. It is a great relief that they’ve finally left.”

The laptop project promoted by the OLPC foundation is developing with far greater difficulty than anticipated. So far, only several 100,000 items have been ordered by governments, while the original target was millions. The project was initiated in 2005 by Negroponte, who now plans to withdraw from the daily running of OLPC.

Just to add something further here Nicholas Negroponte, should not be confused with his brother John Negroponte, the US Statesman.

Best Regards,

JJMacey
Phoenix, Arizona
The Valley of the Sun!

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