It's like that with a lot of things. Many people prefer fast food over real food, even if real food is theoretically better and cooking is not only fun but also a basic human skill (we're losing it though.)

It's far more than a theory. Fast food is, basically, poison.

With PCs, most older people never really learned how they work. They learned Windows, and MS Office, and Outlook. They didn't learn "PC". Among younger people, there was a time when it was cool or interesting to learn about PCs and networks. It was useful to impress girls by making their PCs work. It was necessary to play Doom multiplayer. But that time has passed. Most teenagers today are totally uncritical and expect things working out of the box, and things you can buy with money. Money = problem solver. Knowledge = tedious and time wasting.

That's old-fogey talk to be honest. We learned how everything worked because we HAD to. It wasn't a choice that anyone made. If you wanted to play Doom over a network you HAD to figure out how to make it happen.

It's easier nowadays and that's a good thing. The lower the barrier to entry, the more people will be playing.

They watch TV (several hours per day), do some gardening (same), shopping or talking on the phone instead of investing time into learning how computer things work. My dad has never heard of DirectX and OpenGL. He just wants to play a car racing game now and again, so he bought a gamecube. And suddenly, Larry the cow was in control (like the Gentoo slogan goes.) I do love my parents, make no mistake, but they are pretty typical computer users.

I don't know how my car works. I use it every day and have no idea how to fix it if something goes wrong. The only problem I know how to solve is - "the gas tank needs filling".

How many people here are car mechanics?

Why do we view computers as something that people should spend time learning the mechanical and low level details of? They SHOULD be able to just turn it on and have it work. That's why I switched to using Macs at home for computing and consoles for gaming. They work.

I don't have a TV. Did I say I'm not normal?

That's a shame, you're missing a lot of good shows. 

but 'no video input' means video card is dead right? 

you have to be a car mechanic if you own a russian car :)

letss discuss what can be done to make PC gaming stay afloat 

it means no signal passes to the monitor :P maybe something else died in the 'box' (does it start at all) or the connection is broken 

computer boots up, but the screen displays that message and then nothing happens. 

512M 9800GTX is better than 512M 8800GTS? 

Its is! Extra 10+ fps in crysis, better DX10 support, faster clock speeds...

Heh - get a GX2! :-) 

yeah, like 10% (or less) faster and 150$ higher price http://www.ixbt.com/video/itogi-video/0408/itogi-video-cr2-wxp-1600-pcie.html 

here, it's $20 more :) 

and I dont have vista, so dx10 is out of the picture for now. 

 

Its a fucking good card!!! I run Crysis in 1280x1024 with the dx9 very high hack, 0xAA and its pretty fast!

Everything else runs at that resolution at 60fps+ when maxed out on details.

But the 9800GTX is gonna run Crysis faster, it's more future proof and for $20 I would say it's worth it!

If you really want future proof though then get a 9800 GX2. Those things are mean! >:-\ 

there might be a slight misunderstanding, I wasn't trying to ridicule console users or computer illiterate persons.

I think we are basically saying the same thing. Notice how I said I can understand how console gaming is more accessible, and that _that_ isn't bad. I also said that the era of teenage computer mechanics passed.

:-) you're right. There. But I'm not buying a TV. I wouldn't want to pay a de facto TV tax (Germany, sigh) when I only play some console games and watch DVDs. 

Gb

Heh, OK, that's cool. Hey, sorry about getting so hyper in this thread. Some subjects push my buttons and I sometimes lose sight of the goal - mapping and having fun.

I'm not here to disrupt the community, I'm here to participate. Let me get back to my remix map. :P 

UK top 10 http://kotaku.com/391939/british-sales-charts

NPD PC chart (no numbers tho) http://au.pc.ign.com/articles/872/872243p1.html?RSSwhen2008-05-07_145500&RSSid=872243

some revenue stats from Activision report
Segment/Platform Mix
Publishing:
Console $1,683,204
Hand-held 192,557
PC 115,870
( http://investor.activision.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=%20292694 )

~15x times... these guys have the bestselling PC title - cod4 (#1 PC game in units and dollars in the U.S. and Europe for the quarter ended December 31, 2007)

meanwhile AMD http://game.amd.com/us-en/default.aspx 

games still sell as well as they did before, it's just that there are these non-games (sims, wow, brain training) on top of that.

But since games cost more and more to make nowadays it's not feasible to continue advancing the state of the art in pc games. 

Depends what you call "normal games" but CoD4, Halo, and GoW probably fall into that category, and they all sold ridiculously well.

Games cost more and more, but sales are going up alongside that (on consoles anyways), so it slightly evens out probably.

It's not because the graphics are much better that the games are so much longer/harder to make. That's probably true on a large scale, but you can't ignore the fact that the production tools and workflows have also much improved, making content creation easier/faster. 

In Russia
#384 posted by Speeds [78.37.31.230] on 2008/05/20 12:20:49
you have to be a car mechanic if you own a russian car :)

My first car was a late 70's model Mustang. A lot of real shit came off the assembly lines of Detroit at that time, and it didn't help that I bought it when it had over a hundred thousand miles on the odometer. I would find myself getting up early in the morning working under the hood just so I could go to school. 

are my eyes lying or have you turned slightly pink?

I thought Lada was actually a reasonably reliable car because of its simplicity. Though not as reliable as modern ones. 

Oh no, not at all. I blame Detroit troubles entirely on UAW decadence. Even today, it is impossible for the Big Three to retool plants for modern models without the exhorted cost of union hassles that make doing so unprofitable.

Or do you mean the car being girlie? I 'fess that is true, but then again it was given to me by my older sister. That car was a bright orange, flamboyant pumpkin that looked like it could have fallen out of George Clinton's hair. Possibly, the gayest thing on four wheels. 

if video card's busted, should rest of boot process be as normal or will it actually stop boot process? 

usually the mobo has some lights and it does some beeps during the boot process, you can decipher them with the mobo manual. No display card, no boot device are at least where it stops and shows some lights and beeps so many times.

But I dunno with the stuff nowadays, why would you need a display card for a box you can ssh to? 

disable the pci/agp slot mama and turn on the built-in video card if your motherboard has one (do they all have one?) and it should work. thats what i did when i killed my video card. :)

for me, pc froze before going into windows, but my brother told me i should turn off the pci-e slot, since i just had connected the monitor to the built-in video card, or something like that. i cant remember. :(

still, turning off the pci-e slot, made the problem go away.

i was saving for a new motherboard and a new video card, but i spent the money on ps2 and games for it :) 

I installed Vista as my main (and only) OS on my home desktop and I keep on finding some really nifty thing:

I was wondering why Vista took a very long time to shutdown, so I keep browsing Control Panel and I noticed the "Performance Information and Tools => Advanced Tools" part, when I opened it, it automatically highlighted an issue: "These programs are causing Windows to shutdown slowly: CTXFISPI.EXE, Vendor: Creative. Time Taken: 95,1 seconds". Whoa, nice. 

Sorry to come back to this whole PC dying thing, but here's an interview with Doug Lombardi that was posted on the shack earlier that was kind of interesting:
http://www.shacknews.com/featuredarticle.x?id=873

Obviously it's Valve, so you can't really be sure he's not slighly biased, as it'd be silly for him to claim pc gaming is dead, but it's still a nice read.