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Investor Money Goes To Magic Lag Reducing Tech
Gamasutra reports on Texas technology company Bigfoot networks, which just received a $4 Million investment to develop a lag-reducing hardware PC card. From the piece: "According to the firm, it will bring to market the world's first Gaming Network Accelerator card, which will allow online gamers to play their favorite games with less lag. The company explained: 'Lag is the number one problem in online video games today, and Bigfoot Networks is the only company in the world whose sole mission is to fight lag', but gave no specific technical explanation about how it intends to do this." Greg Costikyan spells it out on the Games*Design*Art*Culture blog: "So yes, there might be a business here. But if so, it will be a business built largely on bullshit."
I think it's obvious to all of us that the NIC is certainly not the weakest link in a connection. I know there has been some effort to produce NICs that handle the TCP/IP stack onboard, thus reducing the load on the CPU, but the potential difference between NICs is on the order of microseconds, if not less!
For those of you looking for quite entertaining reviews of products that are quite obviously scams like this, I highly recommend articles like this one on Dan's Data
Help find a cure for cancer. Join the [H]orde
I wonder if these are the same people as the ones behind the magic cellphone boosting sticker.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Maybe it's a regular old NIC, but part of the driver just shuts down all your P2P apps and torrents.
This isn't any different than the phantom console, magnets which supposedly help your arthritis or whatever book that Kevin Trudeau is bilking people into buying claiming this is information that the government doesn't want you to know about.
This shouldn't surprise anyone. Not the least of which that there are VC idiots who will gladly pony up the money for a non-existant, never-to-be-made product simply because it has oodles of neat sounding words in its description.
*PT Barnum never actually said those words but people routinely attribute the phrase to him.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
The card must have a reservoir of quantom-entangled particles that can be used to communicate instantaneously with the server (which has the other half of each pair). You'll probably have to subscribe to a service that ships you new bundles of particles each month to replace the bandwidth you use up. Be careful not to do anything important with it, or you'll violate causality, and cause all sorts of trouble for the universe...
I guess it was just a matter of time before something like this appeared.. The hi-fi industry has cables and magic boxes all over the place, now we get magic hardware.. I'm VERY curious to how they plan to eliminate lag introduced by routers that they have no control over. Not to completely blow them off, but I'm not holding my breath. Seeing is believing.
I have a semi-decent 5.1 surround setup, and have avoided expensive cables because I simply don't believe in it. Audio cables might benefit from better shielding and low capacitance wiring, but digital signals.. come on man. A bit across the wire that's "worn in the edges" is still a bit, unlike a sound wave.
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Both Duke Nukem Forever and the Phantom console will have to be redesigned to incorporate this technology.