Windows 10 solitaire has ads. Implications for future gaming.

Took me at most an hour to put it together. My personal rate is $125 / hr. for custom development. Of course I could have gone their route and had a factory working in China do it for 2 cents an hour. Still well short. But you missed the point I think. I was making a point about the cost of components. I purchased them retail, no volume discount for me either.

Customize the comparable Dell OptiPlex, the price difference is still $1,100. This is without a second video card, but I also added a Thunderbolt PCIe to support the same input configuration. Same 6-core Xeon processor. The average user would be better off with an i7 than a Xeon. Sorry man, most times I agree with you but so far I've pretty much just heard "it's debunked", "you're wrong", and "factor in fans and your time". I've given you: A homebrew option that is considerable cheaper and more powerful, an Alienware version that is a bit cheaper, and a comparable business machine that is considerably cheaper (comparing all of these to the Mac Pro by the way).

 

There are hundreds of sites where you can get matching or better set with significantly less price than Apple stuff where you just select components from a drop down lists and get the computer delivered as ready package including clear and longer warranty than Apple has (what is it now, 1 year?).

However I came to this thread to read about Windows, solitaire or gaming, what happened?

 

I think we talked it to death and there wasn't much more to say about it. But yeah, I don't have a problem with ads in Solitaire. That's why we have choices.

 

The discussion forum.

 

As Aurore somewhat hinted in another thread, the experienced users happened.

 

There just wasn't that much to say about it. Most of us are used to digital products having horrendous design philosophies to make the most money possible in any way that simultaneously harms the user experience.

And in a rare and magnificent case, this thread happens to have been started by one! It was over before it started.

 

It's like Barrens Chat, but a little more civilized and with better grammar and spelling.

 

I doubt they are paying FoxConn the equivalent of 2 cents an hour. There is also packaging and shipping costs per unit as with anything put together at a remote factory.

 

You're right. The latest information I could find from 2012 puts it at between $1.50 and $2.20 / hour.

Of which everyone is susceptible to.

 

If we're going to nickle and dime the estimated costs we may as well determine every possible way. How about the time of researching the components you want? Or the cost of anti-static equipment? Or, if you're in a rural area, the cost of making off with the absurd degree of packaging materials?

Did you know Visual Studio Community 2015 is 34GB for a complete installation? It took six hours to do a web install. Good thing you don't have to actually be at the computer for it. Next time I am totally going to do it when I sleep.

That last one is a bit of a rant. I never expected the thing to be that huge. People complain about Unity being 1GB...

 

Come on, it's not even close we all know that Apple charges a premium for hardware and PC's are much cheaper, especially if you build your own.

I say this as a person who has bought a macbook pro and a iMac that each cost in the 3.4k+ range and built many PC's. If you like Apple then buy Apple, it's pretty much that simple, but you will pay more for that choice which is really an OS/ecosystem choice.

 

Exactly, and I'm in no way trying to diminish Apple. I prefer Windows because it's what I do and work with. But you mentioned MacBook. Mac Laptops definitely get expensive but I think they're worth every penny. That's one place where their hardware and design qualities really shine and it shows from display quality right down to battery life. Also why I chose to compare desktop builds because there's a case to be made there (nearly identical components), while notebooks to have a big disparity in quality.

 

Yeah the display is what hooked me on the macbook. Still, for the 3,600 or whatever it was back in 2009 I could have bought a pretty beastly windows laptop. Now that I gave the mac a fair shake I definitely have switched back to Windows but I don't see it as a holy war, I just don't like the Apple ecosystem.

 

Don't think it will affect anything since Microsoft is so bad at selling advertisements that no Windows 8 developer ever made any money from Microsoft ads.

 

That is what they pay the workers..not FoxConn. Here are a few relevant links for hardware versus hardware
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/ap...-vs-a-comparable-windows-box-the-tco-lowdown/
http://www.extremetech.com/computin...s-2000-cheaper-than-the-equivalent-windows-pc

I rest my case.

 

I wanted to answer to that that I would bet it takes less than 3 months until we find out MS is collecting stuff even you set all privacy settings (that most normal people will not set). But was too lazy.

But it took much less than 3 months.

MS sends data home even if you turn everything off (what a surprise):
http://arstechnica.com/information-...ndows-10-just-cant-stop-talking-to-microsoft/

 

They oughta just be truthful in advertising and call it the "Microsoft NSA Data Mining OS v10"

 

Except only a tiny bit of that article had anything to do with sending data. Most of it was receiving with the exception of two things. The first of which makes a request to manifest.appcache from Bing. Sounds daunting doesn't it? Except maybe the article writer either didn't bother to research it or just CBA to include it. manifest.appcache is part of a new HTML5 API. It's used for supporting offline HTML5 applications, in this case search support. My guess is that even if it's disabled, the OS keeps the theme updated in case you enable it.

The second was the calls to ssw.live.com/uploaddata.aspx. That one I'm less sure about as it's been repurposed over the years. It does appear that it may be related to OneDrive, however the author only shows the binary content of the message so it's hard to tell, but going to the bottom there is information about a fault and it appears it may be related to error reporting.

There was nothing in that article that pointed to Microsoft sending any personal data with everything turned off. It's a scare piece.

 

I really didn't want to argue these things but calling it "tinfoil hat mentality" is already part of the problem. It's sort of like saying: "Stop being depressed by being more happy in your life."

Sure - not everything will happen in the worst of expectable ways but it is sleeping power that waits to be abused. And even if it's just a very small percentage of people who cannot be trusted - these few people can cause immense problems if they use data the right way or know the right people to make decissions.

We live in an equally wonderful yet f-ed up world. And a lot more people should know what is happening behind the center stage that everybody is shown.

Yes - I am deliberately not giving any straight examples because those will be torn apart and usually either be ridiculed or vivisected until a semantic flame war breaks loose. :-/

Thing is: personal data collected for whatever reason can so easily be linked with data elsewhere to create frightenly personal profiles about a person. Consumers should be able to have full controll over what is submitted and what is saved about them. Maybe if people actually could know what data is collected where, how it's used and that they can realiably delete said data whenever they want to there wouldn't be a need for "tinfoil hattery" (justified or unjustified).

 

The ability to do this could also cause severe depression, because being able to throw a switch on or off for your feelings could make you think that your feelings are insignificant. One minute they're depressed, the next they're happy, and then they're wondering what they're bothering with life for if it's just a series of these unimportant feelings.

That's why I do my best to be inconsistent. It amuses me greatly to think that my anonymous actions online that lack any good or bad motive are driving some information collecting department insane I hate to be misunderstood more than anything, but I find it hilarious when it happens sometimes. Some company got their hands on the information about a car that rolled over the guard rail and collapsed under its own weight and the roof caved in that supposedly should have killed all of the passengers.



But I was the only one in that car and I got out without a scratch. So you can imagine my amusement the next week when I got something in the mail about major accident rehabilitation & a free specialized pillow for neck and back injuries

Isn't it amazing that this tangent is still on topic?

 

Don't use C in the future while driving. And don't drink while parking..accidents cause people.

 

I'm offended on behalf of people caused by accidents.

 

Anybody going to talk about how to use windows ads for Unity?

 

You mean how to put ads into standalone application?

 

How to implement subscription ads like solitaire for windows 10 in Unity.

 

Or more like how to subscribe to not have ads I guess.

 

You need an online service like Playfab to handle online transactions and player accounts. I am not sure where to find ad network providers for standalone games though.
You'll have more luck creating a separate thread about your issue since your question is a bit off-topic here.

 

I would 100% recommend OSX over Windows if it could run Visual Studio. MonoDevelop is poopy at this version.

 

Ah, I remember making this thread. Feels like just a few months ago. So much has happened since then. I got a haircut, I think.