@beowulf1211: As you said, I use mine constantly for voice commands. One funny, but really useful example is that it is perfect for changing channels, changing volume, pausing, etc. when you're sitting there with a pile of hot wings and buffalo sauce all over your fingers. It's also great to just say "Xbox turn off" as I'm heading out the door with my hands full.
Gestures, however...not so much. They will never be accepted until the Kinect or some future device can register gestures with perfect accuracy and zero latency. I don't see that being possible any time soon. Mine worked pretty well sometimes and failed miserably other times. The worst is when you can't get it to even respond to you, but then it locks on to the dog and goes crazy panning through menus and launching random stuff. The typical home is just an infinitely more unpredictable environment than the perfectly laid out test environments Microsoft used to demonstrate Kinect.
You haven't the faintest idea what you are talking about. Wind and solar only exist because of large government subsidies to wind and solar manufacturers and energy producers, combined with a number of "renewable energy" mandates at the state level. Politicians and environmentalists can claim that wind and solar-produced electricity is cost competitive only because someone else (you, me, and other taxpayers) is paying the bill.
Wind in particular is an extremely inefficient way to produce electricity. Have you ever learned about economies of scale? Large, centralized power plants are efficient because they take advantage of scale - all of the infrastructure necessary to supply the power inputs and to distribute the power produced is built to one location, and then the plant is made large enough to leverage the investment by producing as much power as possible, resulting in decreased per unit cost. Taking this very efficient, centralized model and instead duplicating the infrastructure (generators, nacelles, blades, towers, power distribution equipment, etc.) hundreds or thousands of times over is incredibly wasteful and inefficient. It is akin to putting dozens of lawnmower engines under your car's hood instead of one efficient and powerful engine. Which do you think would be more efficient and have lower maintenance costs? In fact, as wind turbines inevitably break down many are now being abandoned by the companies that built them. There are thousands of inoperative turbines across the country, abandoned because companies only built them to receive the government-provided tax credit, but receive no benefit for maintaining them. It's a scam and we all are paying for it. A hot topic these days is how to dismantle the derelict wind turbines, because they are expensive to remove and no one wants to pay to do it.
Solar is marginally better, and may some day make some sense in certain applications, but like wind it makes no economic sense at the present time. The installations that exist today have only been built (as with wind) because of federal tax credits (subsidies). The reality is that at best a solar plant will just barely break even by the time the panels are worn out and must be replaced (about 20 years). We may yet achieve efficiency gains that will make solar viable, but those improvements have been "just around the corner" since the 1970s and have yet to materialize. Until then, the government is just incentivizing solar companies to put on a very expensive charade for the gullible "save the planet" greenies out there.
What an absurd non-issue. Of course, it is completely within character for a single-minded radical environmental group like NRDC to make a big deal out of nothing. That's how they attempt to maintain visibility and relevance so that the donations keep flowing in.
We're only talking 15 watts here, which is certainly outweighed by minor differences in appliance choice throughout the rest of the house. It's almost nothing, and the additional related cost is minuscule.
I also take exception with the entire premise, which is that we all must revert to a more primitive lifestyle in order to "save the Earth." Utter nonsense. Energy usage equates directly with civilization and quality of life. Ever see that nighttime satellite photo of North Korea? Hardly a light is visible, and we all know how wonderful their lives are. Well, if the radical environmentalists have their way our lives will become much more like that than any of us want to contemplate. They are at war with civilized society, particularly industrialized civilized society.
Do you ever wonder why they only focus on one side of the energy supply/demand equation? They only talk about "conserving" on the demand side, but never talk about how to produce more energy on the supply side to meet demand. Of course, this is because they don't want any more energy production. They are opposed to building power plants (real power plants, not useless windmills), and since the population continues to grow their only answer is for each person to keep using less and less energy. What that means in real terms is if these wackos have their way we each will have to get used to an ever-declining quality of life. Like other liberals, they view every resource, like natural resources or financial resources, as a pie of fixed size that must be evenly distributed among the people (Marxism). And with more and more people, in their world that means that we each receive less and less. They never realize that it is possible instead to enlarge the pie, thereby not only meeting everyone's needs, but actually improving what they receive.
Don't buy into this bogus story. Use common sense.
Actually, Sony is going bankrupt, so I'm not sure how much they can afford to play around with the PS4's price. Not that they need to right now since the PS4 is selling very well, but the poor financial state of the company overall should be a concern.
I agree. It's like saying if Chevy puts cup holders in the Corvette then it's no longer a sports car, but if their competitor were to offer essentially the same car without the cup holders, then that company is truly devoted to performance. Ridiculous.
To those who think the reflections in the side mirrors are showing the wrong side of the road (and I thought the same initially): I think they're showing the correct side, but there may be a bug that is permitting you to see through the car.
When you see the rumble strips on the left side of the track reflected in the right side mirror, think about the angle of the mirror for a second. Angle of incidence = angle of reflection. There is no way from that chase view that you would see the right side of the track in the right mirror. The mirror is simply angled in the opposite direction (toward the left).
What seems to be happening is that the right mirror is displaying the correct reflection of the LEFT side of the track, but you shouldn't be able to see it because the body of the car should be in the way. I think we're just seeing through the car due to a bug in the game.
I said that a PC could be used in the same way (reading comprehension?), but if it is a desktop machine and you use it for productivity in addition to gaming it has to be situated on a desk. You could move it between rooms every time I suppose, but that would be a major pain. A laptop would work better, presuming it's powerful enough, but it's still a pain connecting and disconnecting every time you want to play.
The final option would be to build a smaller, lower-cost PC (like a HTPC) and dedicate it to use in the living room. That's not a bad option, but I suspect that for the same cost the new consoles will prove to be far more powerful than an equivalently-priced small PC due to the optimized nature of their designs. Despite the generally off the shelf nature of the major components, these consoles are still heavily-customized machines, particularly in the case of the XBOX ONE. That's a difference that will become apparent over time, but to expect them to compete with multi-thousand dollar top of the line gaming PCs at any point in their lifespan is unfair. That's not the intent of either Sony or Microsoft.
You do realize, do you not, that frame rate on any device, yes even a PC, depends largely upon how ambitious the developers get with their software (and how well they optimize it). Frame rate alone doesn't mean anything unless you compare it to the complexity of the software.
It in fact would be dead simple to design a game that would bring even a mighty Nvidia Titan to its knees. Every computing device has limits, and if developers push those limits compromises must be made. That's not a bad thing, it's just reality.
"Underpowered" compared to what? I have a $5,000 Falcon Northwest Mach V sitting on my desk, but to expect my upcoming $500 XBOX ONE to compete with it is not realistic. The fact that these new consoles can produce experiences for a few hundred dollars that are at at least generally comparable to what a much more expensive PC can produce is a good thing, not something to sneer at. Plus, I'd actually rather play a game on a console, on my 56" TV, through my home theater system, and relaxing in my recliner, than sitting at my computer desk.
I still use my PC for high-end simulations that don't translate well to consoles anyway due to the need for keyboard and mouse, but for most other games I far prefer the comfort of my living room and my XBOX. (I know, I could just move my PC to the living room, but it is in a huge tower case and doing so would then make it much more difficult to use it for non-gaming purposes. That's why consoles still exist - they are much more practical for integration into the living room.)
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