Quoting: reaVer

Quoting: DrMcCoy

Quoting: reaVerYes and yes.

This has been debunked over and over and over again. There were no articles for Zoe's games while she was together with Nathan. In fact, the only two articles that Nathan wrote was one for Kotaku, before he was in a relationship with her (and that wasn't even a review) and one for Rock, Paper, Shotgun, where the game is shortly mentioned. No full review, nothing while they were dating.

No one ever managed to produce any of the alleged review articles Zoe allegedly received by "sleeping around". This is and always has been a character assassination.

You think someone would get targeted like that by thousands of people without actually instigating anything?

Yes. Duh.
Mobs and gossips and bullies do that kind of thing all the time. Had you not noticed that large scale cyberbullying has become one of the distinctive social problems of the internet era? People commit suicide from it. In Canada we haven't forgotten Rehtaeh Parsons.
In any case, this is not an argument. If you want to claim person X did thing Y, and someone shows the evidence that person X did not do thing Y, the only valid thing you can do is produce actual evidence that they did.

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Quoting: DrMcCoy

Quoting: Purple Library GuyI guess if I'm not with you, I'm against you?

No, but you do have see who is using a group you belong to, you identify with, to justify doing harm. I do not want to stand idly by while someone who purports to speak for me does harm.

That's why I speak out against Richard Dawkins, despite identifying as an atheist. That's why I speak out against fefe, despite him being in similar computer-ish circles than me. That's why I take a hard stand against the crocodiles, despite being one of those geeks who enjoys the odd game or two.

I just have little patience left for people who so blatently throw in arguments that have been debunked so. many. times. That I have debated so. many. times. This whole blunderbuss boiled over a year ago, and by now, I nearly count people who still unreflectingly parrot the "collusion!" line as lost causes.

And yes, what is "doing harm" is subjective. I do have ideologies and biases -- and I'm quite open about them. And there are certainly issues that are important enough for me that I can't "agree to disagree".

My little digression about certain political issues here in Germany was quite overdrawn, yes. It's a thing that's been on my mind a lot lately, considering I live in the middle of it. There is a significant overlap between the crocs and several factions of neo-reactionaries and identitarians; you just have to look at what Breitbart otherwise publishes, for example.

I don't even mean to insult or implicate Nyamiou; I don't know the person enough to judge one way or another. I wanted them to see from what corner they get their arguments from, their views on culture. And I may have gone a bit overboard there.

Fair enough. Just to be clear, I'm quite in agreement with you about all the vicious knuckle-dragging crap burbling around this "gamergate" thing.
But mistrust of the media is hardly a pastime limited to the dangerous right. I still haven't seen a serious challenge to the validity of Chomsky and Herman's "propaganda model" of the corporate media.

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I had originally thought that maybe if Valve was going to make this push for the Steam Machines, that they'd do an end run around NVidia and AMD's co-operation if necessary by pouring resources into the open source drivers, getting 'em to rough parity with Windows drivers by Steam Machine release. They've had a bunch of extra time, after all. But nope.

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Quoting: DrMcCoy

Quoting: NyamiouVery funny, put it up your ass.

You know, coming back to your earlier post, there are certain people in my country who do claim that the political journals are conspiring to keep the current politicians in power, and to deceive the white German public.
(snip bla de bla)

You know, I generally respect you and like seeing your posts, but that was some pretty nasty coprolite. "Disagree with me and you're a fascist!" Well. I guess if I'm not with you, I'm against you?

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Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: Glog78

Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: Glog78This list goes on. Let me ask a real question here , which market is the target for steam machines right of now?

Console gamers?

Why do you think console gamers should use a steam machine over their console ?

This has been discussed many times before on this very site. Ability to upgrade, number of "launch titles", price of games etc.

More importantly, the ability to play whole categories of games that consoles haven't been able to up until now. Try playing Civilization on an XBone.

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Quoting: SoltrummanMy guess is that Alienware looks at the market and sees a opportunity. People that want a gaming PC but do not want to admin and update a Windows PC.

I had not thought about the relatively hassle-free maintenance of Linux. That is indeed an advantage over Windows on a console-like machine.

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That is frankly the Achilles' heel of the Steam machine, much as I hate to say it: There's no compelling reason from the consumer perspective why the thing should be running SteamOS rather than Windows, and significant reasons in the other direction. That could change, I hope it will change, but it remains something of a chicken-egg problem so far, although already not nearly as bad as it was just a year or two ago.

On the other hand, assuming they do get pulled from the Steam Machine page on Steam, good luck making up for that with whatever other sales channels you got, Origin guys.

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Quoting: PeciskCan we stop being so insecure about Steam Machines? Seriously. No new AAA games? I personally rather have well working current ones, not rushed out of the gate ports with broken things. We all knew it will be low key, slowly moving, gathering pace effort.

I don't think we knew that at all. While it sure seems to be low key, and while Valve may be able to get away with that, and while there is some potential for a slow build on this, that doesn't mean we should have been expecting a low key launch or that that's the best idea.

Valve is a big company with a lot of muscle. There are reasons why big companies with a lot of muscle tend to use it when they're releasing a new product. The iphone would not have succeeded without the hype--it was just a smartphone, with really good fit & finish but a very high price; from a certain perspective it brought nothing really new to the table, and some of the glitz of the iphone actually comes with practical problems (eg it's slippery, easy to drop). It took big hype from a big company to turn it into <b>the phone</b>, the yardstick by which all other phones would be measured. They built a mystique, almost an ideology for the dang things, so now any feature they have must be good and any feature they don't have must have been part of Great Jobs' Plan.
There are tons of products which sell big even though they're mediocre, or even crap, because the hype worked. There are tons of products that are good but never sold because they had no hype. People will evaluate things more positively if they seem to be popular. People will buy the things other people are buying. Relentless hype makes it seem like other people are buying it. And in the case of Steam Machines, a fast hard launch with big resources would have the potential to juice the numbers, and the projected numbers, enough to solve the games problem once and for all--if Steam Machines looked like the next competition for PS 4, suddenly all the AAA companies would be releasing their games for Steam OS. Then the one serious knock on the Steam Machine with Steam OS would be gone, and it would likely be the beginning of the end for Windows domination of computer gaming. So a big splashy launch, a big push at the beginning putting everything behind it, has a very big potential upside.

Of course there is a downside. If Steam pushed the opening hard and it <b>didn't</b> do so well it would be seen as a huge flop, a disastrous mistake, and a long game would be far less workable. They may be thinking that, given the lacklustre pre-reviews by people who maybe in their opinion don't understand what the point or the intended audience are, a big push might be torpedoed by resistance from the typical hype-machine channels, and so they're better off taking their time, letting the things establish themselves and get accepted by the kind of people they think will actually like them, and then they'll be in a better position to push them forward once their niche is a bit better understood. Or something.

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On the whole lack-of-AAA-games issue, I'm on a weird side. I do find that Linux is still lacking a lot of games I'd like to be playing. But, none of them are AAA games. What I'm annoyed by is lack of things like Galactic Civilizations III.

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One thing I've been thinking in terms of the Steam Machine: What is success? What is failure? Especially from our Linux point of view.
It's been pointed out that there are 125 million users on Steam. Out of those, apparently 1%ish are Linux users. We can't trust that figure but we don't have anything better. So anyway, around 1.25 million Linux users on steam. There are doubtless a few Linux users who play--and buy--games but don't use Steam . . . not a ton though.
Meanwhile, on the console side, according to an article I just googled Sony has sold around 25 million PS4, MS has sold around 15 million Xbox One, and Nintendo has sold around 10 million of the latest Wii.
Let's imagine that Steam Machines end up selling a quarter as many as the weakest of those contenders. That would be a failure, right? Not even in the big leagues. But that would be 2.5 million units! For our purposes, it would triple the current number of Linux users on Steam, moving us to 3% and positioning us for more AAA games, better drivers and so on, which in turn would make future Linux gaming, and general desktop, pushes more viable. So for us, even a failure, if it's not a complete blowout, would be a success.

Steam Machines are also in a better position for gradual success than normal console platforms, because they get to piggy-back off of PC games. They won't stop having new games work on them even if success is gradual for the same reason they have such a huge library at launch relative to normal consoles. So an incremental success, representing a flop next to even Nintendo but still big enough to increase that Linux percentage noticeably, would still leave them in position for new, cheaper or more powerful, models to make a big push at Christmas next year and build further.

The launch is still pretty damn underwhelming so far. Seems like they're counting pretty heavily on the Steam channel itself rather than worrying too much about hype driving people into stores.

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