Well, there are still questions like how much less of a threat are, what are the cost differences, what amount of electricity can they produce. You know, questions corporate higher ups ask in order to get as much efficiency and get rich without thinking that the world might suffer.

Latest news I had from the HiPER Project did seem quite optimistic. Anyway, conference started, off to see that.

Thank God all our plants are hydro-electric and wind based (there's also an old petroleum one, only turned on in case of a bad drought). And many homes are starting to get solar panels too (the electricity company gives you a bonus on your bills if you install them).

That's good. Clean energy is the best energy in the overall picture.

Clean energy is nice but at the moment its still science fiction that green energy is enough for developed lands. Last year in Germany which is probably the most green country in Europe in winter time the whole electric network almost crashed cause they had cloudy sky for 2 months + almost no wind. They were basically an hour away from whole electric system crash. Green energy just can't cover the rising energy needs. Maybe in developing countries and third world countries but not in developed countries.

German people arent allowed to complain about PC prices. You have cheaper prices than we in Finland and higher purchasing power.

But on to subject. If you buy say 10 AAA games for console, youll be paying that "expensive PC's" price difference anyways. I rather buy the same game for around 20€ games on pc than 70€ for console. But then again, i dont buy that many new games on release.

In short, the more you buy games, the cheaper your PC gets vs console.

I am not certain what you mean by "PC gaming doesnt really offer more than console gaming" - could you elaborate that?

According to Yale's Environmental Performance Index, the top spots belong to Switzerland, Luxembourg, Australia, Singapore, Czech Republic and Germany is "only" ranked 6th as of January 2014.

http://epi.yale.edu/epi --> move the mouse cursor over your country to see how it's ranked


(Btw, Switzerland isn't a member of the EU so one doesn't need all those EU regulations to be effective and efficient in terms of environmental performance)

The vast majority of AAA games will be DRMed on some form or another. That's just how the market it.

However, buying a physical medium for games on consoles place 2 very important restrictions:

1) If the medium breaks, you lose the game

2) Should the medium outlive your console, you are dependant on the console manufacturer for backward support of their older games. Recently, a friend of mine experienced that problem when he was worrying about the PS4 not supporting his PS3 games.

Locking intellectual property on a physical medium is just another form of DRM.

When there are no server apps running on mine, I turn them off whenever I'm not using them. I know it's not the norm, but I'm borderline religious about the practice.

Beyond electricity concerns and getting more longevity from the hardware, I have a paranoid fear of malware silently running in the background and reporting to its master or otherwise screwing up my computer (and data) in a way I would have noticed (if it uses a lot of resources for example) and stopped had I been around.

Unlike pre-internet consoles, the consoles of today have the slight problem of needing patching. So while you can play the old mario games just fine after 40 decades, certain modern console games may have serious issues.

And lets not even speak about DLC.

While that may be true, I personally don't mind owning a couple of reserve PS3s and PSVitas to play my games in the future. Soon enough they'll be extremely cheap. It all goes down to what you prefer. Honestly, there haven't been a of AAA games that kept me on my chair in front of my PC. Most of my purchases of AAA games are on consoles and handhelds. But an example of a game on PC that kept me interested is Mass Effect 2. Played it on PC and enjoyed it.

I was talking about EU. And yeah there are special cases like Switzerland and Austria who have a lot of water energy - where this is not available we have a problem. Luxembourg is also a special case. Solar energy is still very inneficient and costly. With wind energy there is the problem with frequency. Im not an advocate of nuclear energy but as long as we don't find something that can replace it and produce the same amount of energy then we have no real alternative. Sure green energy supplements the network nicely but just can't produce enough energy. Just look at France and their 50 nuclear plants. How do you recommend to replace that and even increase energy production.

I think patching facilities is definitely a good thing in the grand scheme of things (including for consoles), though it doesn't solve the DRM concern unless you consider downloading a DRM-free copy of the game a patch :P.

If you take the exponential distribution as a model for hardware failure time, it just means that you're increasing your mean time of failure, although there is the fact that the hardware is not running in paralel that is on your side.

While I'm not a fan of DRM (and it is especially problematic for consoles), my main objection to consoles is an environmental one though, even more so once you factor in console exclusives (though from what I can gather, they seem to be getting rarer now thankfully, hence putting a damper on the owning 2-3 consoles madness).

If you are a hardware minimalist (which I am and which I think we need) and you'll own a general computing device anyway, is it not more efficient to also use it for gaming?

The general computing device is not as efficient as you may think. To provide a mere example that explains why: An EDM producer & DJ needs an entire high-tech laptop(mandatory to be laptop) for his line of business. Is he allowed to game on that device? Not unless he wants to be successful. In order to obtain the best music without flaw, your entire device has to be focused on that.

As for general computing device. Some may like it, some may not. I personally don't care. I enjoy my handhelds and consoles and I buy more games for them than for PC.

My cousin on my father's side produces music and owns a Mac, because apparently they are very good for that. Not sure what the graphics card is on that machine, but given that it's a generic OS, I'm sure he could game at least older titles on it if he was so inclined.

Anyways, most people are not DJs. I'm a programmer and the only thing preventing me from gaming on my development partition is that it's on Linux, though I can also boot on Windows to game, it's just more of a hassle to have to use 2 OSes because Linux support is not on the same level as Windows for gaming (die Windows, die! :P).

For being a hardware minimalist, I don't think it's as much a question of liking it as a growing necessity that is not fully internalized in the western world because of externalities and I fully realize that desktops are not that solution due to their lack of mobility.

I myself am more of a laptop user at this point and laptops are powerful enough now to game AAA titles for the lifetime of a console. I look forward to the day when it also applies to even smaller devices as I think they are probably the most sensible general computing choice for the majority people, especially if you add facilities to hook them up to a bigger screen and peripherals.

The thing people don't take in consideration when they think about consoles is the support, at least game-wise, that comes from the companies behind the console. Sure, Microsoft might not be a good example, but Sony began to have more and more exclusives since their decline at the beginning of the 7th generation. Nintendo had almost the entirety of its Wii library exclusive, and while more than half of it may be mediocre, there are more than enough high quality games. Hopefully the Wii U will get a better treatment when it comes to the quality of the exclusives. As far as graphics go. I don't play video games for pretty pictures. I play them for the stories, gameplay, worlds/universes, and the lore and adventures they offer.