Every game could include an input lag calibration mode, much like the one in Guitar Hero. Heck, it wouldn't even have to be obvious - just include it with the tutorial mode of the first level, and the user won't even know.
If the lag-compensation in GH works the way I think it does, I'm not sure it would be very effective for FPS games.
There's no way for the game to properly remove the lag between the console and display device. Instead, to account for the fact that you're seeing things on screen a few tens of milliseconds after they actually happen, the game engine compensates by delaying the time window in which it expects to a response (controller input). You won't be too slow on your chords anymore, but the delay between button press and on-screen action is still there.
That sort of delay can really throw off your rythym in a FPS when you're expecting an immediate response to movement / throwing a grenade / firing your gun. In a fast-paced multiplayer scenario, a lot can change in the span of a few video frames (depending on the action and movement of your opponents), whereas gameplay in GH is fairly deterministic.
Modern FPS do use a few tricks to minimize the impact of internet lag - motion prediction, immediate client-side response to many actions (moving, shooting) with no host-side verification, etc - these help in making the game play feel more natural, but latency still has a big impact on gameplay quality.
How do you fit four people around a 19" LCD panel for a game like Super Smash Bros. Brawl (see "Smash Boards" at the top of the page you linked)? Or does MLG play only games that need a separate console and a separate monitor for each player?
At MLG events, back in the Halo CE days (2003-2004), they used to play 4-player splitscreen on slightly larger CRTs. Nowadays they play on LCDs and it's limited to 2-player split screen max. For example, in the open section of Halo 3 play where teams of 4 compete head-to-head, each team has 2 TV+xbox setups. In the pro section of the bracket each player has their own TV (4 TV+xbox setups per team).
Smash isn't played at events anymore - it's strictly online, so players can probably use whatever setup they feel comfortable with.
Yea, I've heard some manufacturers started offering this feature on newer models. But is it really offered on 'most' HDTVs as of now?
I should have clarified in my earlier post - a typical choice among serious console gamers is a medium sized LCD (19"-22") using VGA for video. This is actually the standard for Major League Gaming.
The hardcore gaming crowd is well aware of the fact that many HDTVs exhibit a significant amount of input lag (delay caused processing and buffering of the video signal in HDTVs). It's the type of thing a casual gamer might not really be aware of until they play on a different TV because you tend to adjust to whatever you're playing on. Most TVs and monitors don't even publish it among the main specs even though it usually dwarfs response time. It really can have a serious effect on gameplay, particularly in fast-paced FPS games (though Gears is rather slow-paced). I didn't really notice the difference until I started playing on a smaller monitor instead of my larger HDTV.
CRTs are the still best choice for minimizing input lag, but most LCD monitors are decent as well. I'm not sure if this is mainly due to their smaller size or that they're designed for quick response to mouse movement (whereas TVs are designed for viewing, so a few tens of milliseconds extra lag is of no consequence).
Sounds like the practical solution, although somewhat suboptimal. The echo from the windmill array will obscure the terrain behind it (from the radar's point of view) to some extent. You could run into the situation of a real storm being missed by the radar, i.e. a false rejection, which can be more serious than the false alarms TFA eludes to.
Classical radar system typically use some form of a constant false alarm rate algorithm to differentiate between unwanted background clutter and the object of interest they're trying to detect. In effect, the clutter establishes the baseline received signal of your system, and you're looking for signal strength returns above the baseline. This works fine when the surrounding environment is relatively static. The situation sounds a little more complicated here because they're claiming that the reflection strength varies depending on the windmill speed. A more sophisticated detection algorithm might be able to provide improved reliability (in the vicinity of the windmills) by accounting for these variations rather than just ignoring everything from that area.
We also like these games or we wouldnâ(TM)t take them on as clients. The entire list of iTunes accounts in your story are from staff members who have played the games.
How many prospective clients have been declined because you didn't like their game?
I agree, tentatively. Among the reasons cited in TFA for taking these measures are declining growth (not sure how that's a reflection on the accuracy of existing articles) and the increased responsibility of being a widely-used and trusted source of information. Specifically, an incident involving a falsely attributed (completely manufactured) quote which ended up in an obituary on major news sites, as well as a couple falsely reported deaths, were cited.
My question is, can Wikipedia be held legally liable for the veracity of its articles? This could be a cover-our-asses move rather than protection against misinformation or disinformation for the sake of maintaining their reputation. Is there any history of Wiki being sued for slander or defamation by an individual / company, or being coerced into changing articles under threats of litigation?
According to an ABC article (linked by the Wiki entry on CCTV) from a couple years ago, there is some evidence to suggest CCTV is worse at prevention than it is at solving crimes.
Quoting from page 2:
"According to a British Home Office review of dozens of studies analyzing the cameras' value at reducing crime, half showed a negative or negligible effect and the other half showed a negligible decrease of 4 percent at most. Researchers found that crime in Glasgow, Scotland, actually increased by 9 percent after cameras were installed there.
In the United States, one of the most prominent examples was Tampa's use of facial recognition technology in 2001. But the city's police department dropped the technology two years later when it failed to result in a single arrest. The use of video surveillance was considered by the Oakland, Calif., police chief, but he ultimately found that "there is no conclusive way to establish that the presence of video surveillance resulted in the prevention or reduction of crime." "
Re:Thwarted by properly designed online banking
on
Real-Time Keyloggers
·
· Score: 1
An alternative used by at least one bank in Australia is that when you request a transaction they send ans sms to your pre-authenticated mobile number detailing the transaction, i.e who to and how much, and giving an authorisation code that you then enter. That code only authorises that specific transaction.
No need to carry a one-time pad around or a special code generator
Could this be made stronger by requiring an actual voice message to be sent as a response, to which the bank could apply a voice recognition algorithm to verify that it was actually sent by you? It wouldn't have to be a true confirmation "voice message" per se, but the alphanumeric code spoken rather than keyed.
Services which don't require a high data rate and are not sensitive to latency, like what you're describing above, don't put much strain on a network. They're akin to text messaging or e-mail in that they can be accomodated using low rate communication whenever (within reason) the capacity is available. But, if you and everyone else wants broadband internet on your PDA or smart phone, the requirement is large signal bandwidth (which interferes with everyone else in your local area using the shared spectrum) and nearly instantaneous transmission (must be done now, not 10 seconds from now).
First of all, to transmit on wide ranges of frequencies at high power costs a TON of money in electricity. I've researched what a radio station (5000 watts) alone has to pay for a slim band of frequency, and it's not trivial at all.
They transmit at such a high power so as to achieve good coverage over the entire city they're serving. If the signal only had to be heard over a radius of a few kilometres or less, such as with a cell tower, then the tramsit power could be reduced greatly. Although FM is not a particularly power-efficient or bandwidth-efficient modulation scheme (in fact, considering the large guard bands between FM radio channels, the overall bandwidth efficiency is pretty bad), but 5kW power consumption is nothing in the grand scheme of things. Heck, a typical air conditioning unit consumes about 1kW. I'm pretty sure some FM transmitters use up to 10s or 100s of kW, but that's still probably less than your average office building.
The reality is that in the biggest chaos, it isn't the strongest that survive, it's generally the weakest groups that make it. Look at hurricanes (VERY strong, but don't last) versus slightly windy weeks. It's not the strong that maintain for long.
The analogy flew over my head completely.
In the airwaves industry, we have so many proofs of things going right. I know people will cry foul if I say "What about WiFi?" but with WiFi, we have a VERY slim band of frequency that is working VERY well except in the most congested areas. What, in those areas, we had tripled the amount of frequency range? What if we quadrupled it? Again, it's the State's regulations, not WiFi, that breaks that most congested area.
Eh? The Wifi band (2.4 to ~2.5 GHz) is about 100 MHz in width. By no means is that "very slim" in any sense of the word. By comparison, the FM radio band (88 to 108 MHz) is only 20 MHz in width. Now it's kind of apples and oranges to be comparing a long-range broadcast voice service to a short-range broadband data service, but, by any objective measure, 100MHz is a big chunk of spectrum
All those people who have TV and radio now would still have it, but they'd get it on-demand, a la carte. Broad-casting is efficient only in spectrum, it is terribly inefficient in time scheduling. It's lost completely in terms of data analysis to see who is watching/listening to what and when (Nielsen is a failure, really). Since few people can truly watch TV, listen to the radio, talk on the phone, and browse the web at the same time efficiently, most of the spectrum in their given area set for a given service is WASTED. When you are watching TV in your living room, what is happening to all the AM and FM spectrum? Wasted. Cell phone channels? Wasted. It's endless to think of the spectrum being wasted in your given area right now with useless transmissions that are actually using energy to be transmitted to you and not received.
We won't need 50,000 watt radio stations anymore, when a 2 watt transmitter/receiver in your locale will cover so much more, so much more efficiently. And what if no one is using a given set of frequencies at a given time? We can throttle back the transmitter power -- saving energy, saving money.
I say bring on the anarchy, it'll REDUCE the chaos. Especially in terms of the airwaves.
You should probably confine your arguments to bandwidth efficient spectrum utilization because the "wasted power" is, again, a drop in the bucket. Not to rain on your parade of wireless utopia via shared spectrum anarchy, but it will be a huge technological challenge to equip all wireless devices with the ability to privately negotiate channel allocations with competing devices while ensuring fairness and reliability.
For example, let's say demand for cellular channels ramps up around dinner time. The spectrum is already full though, so what do you do? Users of other services will have to be heavi
We kind of already have that in the form of multilayer PCBs / daughterboards.
Although BGA chips have all the pinouts on the bottom, the motherboard is typically composed of multiple layers of traces and vias which makes the routing feasible on densely populated boards.
As for stacking the boards and chips in 3 dimensions, daughterboards which plug directly into the parent board have been around for ages. You don't often see them in a regular PCs because they just aren't necessary to satisfy the space requirements. It's also simpler, cheaper and faster (e.g. max signalling speed between cores) if you can cram the entire design into a single chip.
True, and I know a few people don't play games but have purchased a PS3 for that very reason (media streaming and Blueray).
According to the (limited) sources I've been able to find, they're apparently still losing money on each console sale though. Probably more with this price drop, unless 45nm saves them a pile.
I suggest you educate yourself before criticising a technology that has served the world (as well as the U.S.) for a good several decades.
UMTS, a 3G technology, uses GSM's Mobile Access Part (MAP) and voice codecs. It's basically GSM with a new air interface. Handsets using UMTS can also use 'old' GSM when there's no 3G coverage.
Actually, you should educate yourself beyond skimming Wiki articles.
GSM has been around only since the early 90s (less than 2 decades).
Saying UMTS is "basically GMTS with a new air interface" is completely misleading. GSM is an FDMA / TDMA hybrid, meaning the channels are allocated across frequency but each channel can support multiple time-multiplexed voice streams. UMTS is most commonly CDMA direct sequence spread spectrym, which is an entirely different multiple access method than FDMA / TDMA. All users communicate over the entire spectrum simultaneously, where a unique spreading code provides interference mitigation (processing gain) at the receiver. In addition to different access methods, GSM and UMTS also use different modulation methods (GSM is a spectrally efficient MSK, UMTS is QPSK I believe.
In short, they are entirely different from a telecom standpoint. Multi-mode phones can support both standards only because the RF frequencies are sufficiently close and they have completely separate processing algorithms for each built-in, not because there's a wealth of technical similarities between the two standards. Adoption of the same voice codec is a trivial similarity.
According to the Wiki entry for OnLive:
"Broadband connections of 1.5 Mbps dials the image quality down to Wii levels while 4-5 Mbps pipes are required for HD resolution."
Assuming 4 Mbps (500 kBps) and a monthly quota of 60 GB, this equates to:
60*10^9 Bytes / 500*10^3 Bytes/sec / 60 sec/min / 60 min/hr = 33.3 hours
of gameplay.
Even if you're not a hardcore gamer and you average less than 1 hour per day, a 2GB per hour dent is still pretty stiff.
Except that bandwidth shaping is not only used to make competing services look bad. In Canada it is almost universally applied by the major ISPs to all torrent traffic, which at times results in a painfully slow d/l rate, even on well-seeded torrents.
Not long ago, Slashdot carried an article about a survey in which the majority of respondents considered shaping to be a "fair" pratice. IIRC, there was some dispute about whether the result was actually meaningful or if it was the product of clever wording of the question posed to ingorant subsribers, but I honestly think a guaranteed minimum QoS would be appealing to many consumers.
Aside from the obvious performance issues, something like this could essentially force ISPs to admit how badly they oversell their network. Realistic compromises should be possible, i.e. different bandwidth and latency guarantees based on traffic type and time of day. It might even provide enough incentive for more aggressive network upgrades. At minimum, it puts a leash on how greedy they'd be allowed to be with the shaping algorithms.
Not only that, but xbox live (XBL) rarely provides a level playing field, in part due to its reliance on host-client networking rather than dedicated servers. Anyone who plays a decent amount of console FPS games such as Halo 3 and Gears 2 over XBL will tell you that host conveys a significant advantage. It can easily be the decisive factor when the individuals or teams are closely matched in skill. This becomes an even bigger issue in a game like Halo 3 where you can't manually choose host - it is selected automatically so there's no way to equalize by alternating between teams.
I've also heard that there's been a sharp rise in cheating in Halo 3 as of late (standbying and host-booting) which has gone unchecked by Bungie. It makes one wonder if BringIt's "24/7 staff" will be able to resolve the thousands of disputes (both legitimate and illegimate) per day that will come pouring in if their service ever catches on.
I'd like to think these shenanigans would be less of a problem among the 18+ crowd as compared to something like GameBattles, which is dominated by teenagers, but maturity may be thrown out the window then money is on the line.
Slashdot Mirror
Every game could include an input lag calibration mode, much like the one in Guitar Hero. Heck, it wouldn't even have to be obvious - just include it with the tutorial mode of the first level, and the user won't even know.
If the lag-compensation in GH works the way I think it does, I'm not sure it would be very effective for FPS games.
There's no way for the game to properly remove the lag between the console and display device. Instead, to account for the fact that you're seeing things on screen a few tens of milliseconds after they actually happen, the game engine compensates by delaying the time window in which it expects to a response (controller input). You won't be too slow on your chords anymore, but the delay between button press and on-screen action is still there.
That sort of delay can really throw off your rythym in a FPS when you're expecting an immediate response to movement / throwing a grenade / firing your gun. In a fast-paced multiplayer scenario, a lot can change in the span of a few video frames (depending on the action and movement of your opponents), whereas gameplay in GH is fairly deterministic.
Modern FPS do use a few tricks to minimize the impact of internet lag - motion prediction, immediate client-side response to many actions (moving, shooting) with no host-side verification, etc - these help in making the game play feel more natural, but latency still has a big impact on gameplay quality.
How do you fit four people around a 19" LCD panel for a game like Super Smash Bros. Brawl (see "Smash Boards" at the top of the page you linked)? Or does MLG play only games that need a separate console and a separate monitor for each player?
At MLG events, back in the Halo CE days (2003-2004), they used to play 4-player splitscreen on slightly larger CRTs. Nowadays they play on LCDs and it's limited to 2-player split screen max. For example, in the open section of Halo 3 play where teams of 4 compete head-to-head, each team has 2 TV+xbox setups. In the pro section of the bracket each player has their own TV (4 TV+xbox setups per team).
Smash isn't played at events anymore - it's strictly online, so players can probably use whatever setup they feel comfortable with.
Yea, I've heard some manufacturers started offering this feature on newer models. But is it really offered on 'most' HDTVs as of now?
I should have clarified in my earlier post - a typical choice among serious console gamers is a medium sized LCD (19"-22") using VGA for video. This is actually the standard for Major League Gaming.
The hardcore gaming crowd is well aware of the fact that many HDTVs exhibit a significant amount of input lag (delay caused processing and buffering of the video signal in HDTVs). It's the type of thing a casual gamer might not really be aware of until they play on a different TV because you tend to adjust to whatever you're playing on. Most TVs and monitors don't even publish it among the main specs even though it usually dwarfs response time. It really can have a serious effect on gameplay, particularly in fast-paced FPS games (though Gears is rather slow-paced). I didn't really notice the difference until I started playing on a smaller monitor instead of my larger HDTV.
CRTs are the still best choice for minimizing input lag, but most LCD monitors are decent as well. I'm not sure if this is mainly due to their smaller size or that they're designed for quick response to mouse movement (whereas TVs are designed for viewing, so a few tens of milliseconds extra lag is of no consequence).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_lag
Sounds like the practical solution, although somewhat suboptimal. The echo from the windmill array will obscure the terrain behind it (from the radar's point of view) to some extent. You could run into the situation of a real storm being missed by the radar, i.e. a false rejection, which can be more serious than the false alarms TFA eludes to.
Classical radar system typically use some form of a constant false alarm rate algorithm to differentiate between unwanted background clutter and the object of interest they're trying to detect. In effect, the clutter establishes the baseline received signal of your system, and you're looking for signal strength returns above the baseline. This works fine when the surrounding environment is relatively static. The situation sounds a little more complicated here because they're claiming that the reflection strength varies depending on the windmill speed. A more sophisticated detection algorithm might be able to provide improved reliability (in the vicinity of the windmills) by accounting for these variations rather than just ignoring everything from that area.
We also like these games or we wouldnâ(TM)t take them on as clients. The entire list of iTunes accounts in your story are from staff members who have played the games.
How many prospective clients have been declined because you didn't like their game?
I agree, tentatively. Among the reasons cited in TFA for taking these measures are declining growth (not sure how that's a reflection on the accuracy of existing articles) and the increased responsibility of being a widely-used and trusted source of information. Specifically, an incident involving a falsely attributed (completely manufactured) quote which ended up in an obituary on major news sites, as well as a couple falsely reported deaths, were cited.
My question is, can Wikipedia be held legally liable for the veracity of its articles? This could be a cover-our-asses move rather than protection against misinformation or disinformation for the sake of maintaining their reputation. Is there any history of Wiki being sued for slander or defamation by an individual / company, or being coerced into changing articles under threats of litigation?
If the following article is to be believed, the Samsung Galaxy has been selling quite well in Europe (> 100000 units in the first month). Not sure about their claims of outselling HTC's combined offerings though.
http://www.phonesreview.co.uk/2009/08/24/100000-samsung-galaxy-android-handsets-sold-in-europe-in-a-month/
According to an ABC article (linked by the Wiki entry on CCTV) from a couple years ago, there is some evidence to suggest CCTV is worse at prevention than it is at solving crimes.
http://www.abcnews.go.com/US/Story?id=3360287
Quoting from page 2:
"According to a British Home Office review of dozens of studies analyzing the cameras' value at reducing crime, half showed a negative or negligible effect and the other half showed a negligible decrease of 4 percent at most. Researchers found that crime in Glasgow, Scotland, actually increased by 9 percent after cameras were installed there.
In the United States, one of the most prominent examples was Tampa's use of facial recognition technology in 2001. But the city's police department dropped the technology two years later when it failed to result in a single arrest. The use of video surveillance was considered by the Oakland, Calif., police chief, but he ultimately found that "there is no conclusive way to establish that the presence of video surveillance resulted in the prevention or reduction of crime." "
An alternative used by at least one bank in Australia is that when you request a transaction they send ans sms to your pre-authenticated mobile number detailing the transaction, i.e who to and how much, and giving an authorisation code that you then enter. That code only authorises that specific transaction. No need to carry a one-time pad around or a special code generator
Could this be made stronger by requiring an actual voice message to be sent as a response, to which the bank could apply a voice recognition algorithm to verify that it was actually sent by you? It wouldn't have to be a true confirmation "voice message" per se, but the alphanumeric code spoken rather than keyed.
Services which don't require a high data rate and are not sensitive to latency, like what you're describing above, don't put much strain on a network. They're akin to text messaging or e-mail in that they can be accomodated using low rate communication whenever (within reason) the capacity is available. But, if you and everyone else wants broadband internet on your PDA or smart phone, the requirement is large signal bandwidth (which interferes with everyone else in your local area using the shared spectrum) and nearly instantaneous transmission (must be done now, not 10 seconds from now).
First of all, to transmit on wide ranges of frequencies at high power costs a TON of money in electricity. I've researched what a radio station (5000 watts) alone has to pay for a slim band of frequency, and it's not trivial at all.
They transmit at such a high power so as to achieve good coverage over the entire city they're serving. If the signal only had to be heard over a radius of a few kilometres or less, such as with a cell tower, then the tramsit power could be reduced greatly. Although FM is not a particularly power-efficient or bandwidth-efficient modulation scheme (in fact, considering the large guard bands between FM radio channels, the overall bandwidth efficiency is pretty bad), but 5kW power consumption is nothing in the grand scheme of things. Heck, a typical air conditioning unit consumes about 1kW. I'm pretty sure some FM transmitters use up to 10s or 100s of kW, but that's still probably less than your average office building.
The reality is that in the biggest chaos, it isn't the strongest that survive, it's generally the weakest groups that make it. Look at hurricanes (VERY strong, but don't last) versus slightly windy weeks. It's not the strong that maintain for long.
The analogy flew over my head completely.
In the airwaves industry, we have so many proofs of things going right. I know people will cry foul if I say "What about WiFi?" but with WiFi, we have a VERY slim band of frequency that is working VERY well except in the most congested areas. What, in those areas, we had tripled the amount of frequency range? What if we quadrupled it? Again, it's the State's regulations, not WiFi, that breaks that most congested area.
Eh? The Wifi band (2.4 to ~2.5 GHz) is about 100 MHz in width. By no means is that "very slim" in any sense of the word. By comparison, the FM radio band (88 to 108 MHz) is only 20 MHz in width. Now it's kind of apples and oranges to be comparing a long-range broadcast voice service to a short-range broadband data service, but, by any objective measure, 100MHz is a big chunk of spectrum
All those people who have TV and radio now would still have it, but they'd get it on-demand, a la carte. Broad-casting is efficient only in spectrum, it is terribly inefficient in time scheduling. It's lost completely in terms of data analysis to see who is watching/listening to what and when (Nielsen is a failure, really). Since few people can truly watch TV, listen to the radio, talk on the phone, and browse the web at the same time efficiently, most of the spectrum in their given area set for a given service is WASTED. When you are watching TV in your living room, what is happening to all the AM and FM spectrum? Wasted. Cell phone channels? Wasted. It's endless to think of the spectrum being wasted in your given area right now with useless transmissions that are actually using energy to be transmitted to you and not received.
We won't need 50,000 watt radio stations anymore, when a 2 watt transmitter/receiver in your locale will cover so much more, so much more efficiently. And what if no one is using a given set of frequencies at a given time? We can throttle back the transmitter power -- saving energy, saving money.
I say bring on the anarchy, it'll REDUCE the chaos. Especially in terms of the airwaves.
You should probably confine your arguments to bandwidth efficient spectrum utilization because the "wasted power" is, again, a drop in the bucket. Not to rain on your parade of wireless utopia via shared spectrum anarchy, but it will be a huge technological challenge to equip all wireless devices with the ability to privately negotiate channel allocations with competing devices while ensuring fairness and reliability. For example, let's say demand for cellular channels ramps up around dinner time. The spectrum is already full though, so what do you do? Users of other services will have to be heavi
We kind of already have that in the form of multilayer PCBs / daughterboards.
Although BGA chips have all the pinouts on the bottom, the motherboard is typically composed of multiple layers of traces and vias which makes the routing feasible on densely populated boards.
As for stacking the boards and chips in 3 dimensions, daughterboards which plug directly into the parent board have been around for ages. You don't often see them in a regular PCs because they just aren't necessary to satisfy the space requirements. It's also simpler, cheaper and faster (e.g. max signalling speed between cores) if you can cram the entire design into a single chip.
True, and I know a few people don't play games but have purchased a PS3 for that very reason (media streaming and Blueray).
According to the (limited) sources I've been able to find, they're apparently still losing money on each console sale though. Probably more with this price drop, unless 45nm saves them a pile.
I suggest you educate yourself before criticising a technology that has served the world (as well as the U.S.) for a good several decades.
UMTS, a 3G technology, uses GSM's Mobile Access Part (MAP) and voice codecs. It's basically GSM with a new air interface. Handsets using UMTS can also use 'old' GSM when there's no 3G coverage.
Actually, you should educate yourself beyond skimming Wiki articles.
GSM has been around only since the early 90s (less than 2 decades).
Saying UMTS is "basically GMTS with a new air interface" is completely misleading. GSM is an FDMA / TDMA hybrid, meaning the channels are allocated across frequency but each channel can support multiple time-multiplexed voice streams. UMTS is most commonly CDMA direct sequence spread spectrym, which is an entirely different multiple access method than FDMA / TDMA. All users communicate over the entire spectrum simultaneously, where a unique spreading code provides interference mitigation (processing gain) at the receiver. In addition to different access methods, GSM and UMTS also use different modulation methods (GSM is a spectrally efficient MSK, UMTS is QPSK I believe.
In short, they are entirely different from a telecom standpoint. Multi-mode phones can support both standards only because the RF frequencies are sufficiently close and they have completely separate processing algorithms for each built-in, not because there's a wealth of technical similarities between the two standards. Adoption of the same voice codec is a trivial similarity.
According to the Wiki entry for OnLive: "Broadband connections of 1.5 Mbps dials the image quality down to Wii levels while 4-5 Mbps pipes are required for HD resolution."
Assuming 4 Mbps (500 kBps) and a monthly quota of 60 GB, this equates to:
60*10^9 Bytes / 500*10^3 Bytes/sec / 60 sec/min / 60 min/hr = 33.3 hours of gameplay.
Even if you're not a hardcore gamer and you average less than 1 hour per day, a 2GB per hour dent is still pretty stiff.
Except that bandwidth shaping is not only used to make competing services look bad. In Canada it is almost universally applied by the major ISPs to all torrent traffic, which at times results in a painfully slow d/l rate, even on well-seeded torrents.
Not long ago, Slashdot carried an article about a survey in which the majority of respondents considered shaping to be a "fair" pratice. IIRC, there was some dispute about whether the result was actually meaningful or if it was the product of clever wording of the question posed to ingorant subsribers, but I honestly think a guaranteed minimum QoS would be appealing to many consumers.
Aside from the obvious performance issues, something like this could essentially force ISPs to admit how badly they oversell their network. Realistic compromises should be possible, i.e. different bandwidth and latency guarantees based on traffic type and time of day. It might even provide enough incentive for more aggressive network upgrades. At minimum, it puts a leash on how greedy they'd be allowed to be with the shaping algorithms.
Not only that, but xbox live (XBL) rarely provides a level playing field, in part due to its reliance on host-client networking rather than dedicated servers. Anyone who plays a decent amount of console FPS games such as Halo 3 and Gears 2 over XBL will tell you that host conveys a significant advantage. It can easily be the decisive factor when the individuals or teams are closely matched in skill. This becomes an even bigger issue in a game like Halo 3 where you can't manually choose host - it is selected automatically so there's no way to equalize by alternating between teams.
I've also heard that there's been a sharp rise in cheating in Halo 3 as of late (standbying and host-booting) which has gone unchecked by Bungie. It makes one wonder if BringIt's "24/7 staff" will be able to resolve the thousands of disputes (both legitimate and illegimate) per day that will come pouring in if their service ever catches on.
I'd like to think these shenanigans would be less of a problem among the 18+ crowd as compared to something like GameBattles, which is dominated by teenagers, but maturity may be thrown out the window then money is on the line.