Also I don't see how this helps fight piracy. Are you suggesting only providing games this way, making piracy impossible?
I think it makes it almost impossible.
I can well imagine a game being released *only* on a streaming platform. The executable game code would never leave the provider's servers.
I can only think of two ways to pirate that game:
- hack the authentication / authorization mechanism in order to play for free
- obtain the game code either through hackery or social engineering
Once you have the game code, it's probably not as easy to install and play as a traditional game for Windows.
YouTube buffers because it uses codecs that are optimised for situations where a delay is acceptable. You don't need to worry about the distance between your browser and a YouTube server, because the latency doesn't affect your experience once the video has started playing.
Streaming games is different, because latency is important. So:
- different codecs, designed with low latency in mind.
- a focus on locating servers close to clients
Smart people are investing in this. If it was as simple as "YouTube buffers therefore this can't possibly work", they wouldn't be.
I disagree with a lot of this. I'm not saying that cloud gaming is ideal for the consumer, but to say it removes competition from the market is nonsense.
Just because you have the "best" rally game does not mean you can set any price you like. Consumers pay their money and take their choice. Some will pay $15/m for the best of breed rally game. Some will pay $5/m for a game that's not quite as good - last year's version. Meanwhile other developers are busy trying to outdo the current best game.
you can just keep on raising the fees to play until you start losing too many costumers.
Cloud gaming would be the death of fair pricing for computer games.
What you describe there *is* fair pricing. Fair pricing is whatever the market can bear.
OnLive has said that for HD you need 5Mb/s -- but that it *peaks* at that level. That is, most of the time it's using much less.
So, you'll get a choppy experience if your ISP can't deliver 5Mb/s when you need it. But 1 minute's play won't use anywhere near 5*60Mb = 300Mb of your download allowance.
The same market forces ought to force the price of a decent connection down to the "right" price.
Of course, we've seen market failures in the past. The UK government ought to focus on regulating broadband provision in such a way as to keep the market working properly.
1. Gaikai is going for a model where their servers are widely deployed at the "edge" of the Internet. That means negotiating with ISPs to locate servers near the modems. Part of that deal will involve having sufficient bandwidth for those servers and those protocols.
2. This kind of service is going to build customer demand for stable, fast, low latency connections. Presumably market forces will cause ISPs to provide.
I don't know about Gaikai, but looking at OnLive's demos, it appears they'll have a variety of payment options, varying from game to game.
So I'm expecting to be able to:
- buy "lifetime" access to a certain title
- rent a title by the hour/day/week/month
- subscribe to unlimited access to a certain range of titles
- etc.
You can definitely expect there to be various subscription packages, just as you pay your cable company extra for sports and movies.
Really? An ebook with a color screen just sounds soo useless.
You don't buy books with colour illustrations? All sorts of things benefit from colour, whether it's a cookery book, or an illustrated novel (look up Arthur Rackham's 1915 illustrations for A Christmas Carol).
I'd be very tempted by a device that used colour e-ink. By preference it would have a "true" black like traditional CMYK printing.
Before that though - cheaper B&W e-readers please.
But I've used Linux and AIX for the last 12 years, and believe me, from my perspective, MS fanboys are guilty of all the same stuff you're seeing in Linux fanboys.
There are so many types of game where this kind of lag doesn't matter, or can be compensated for.
Starting with the obvious ones: anything turn based is unaffected. Input could get very sluggish indeed before it broke a game like Civ or XBLA Carcassone. Battles in RPGs like Final Fantasy are the same.
Even a lot of action games don't depend on instant responses. Yes, something like Quake III is all about twitching. But something like Bioshock has a much more measured style, which is *not* ruined by a three frame lag.
Music software really is ruined by input latency. If the software doesn't know what you're going to play, the only solution is to remove the lag. However, as Guitar Hero's lag compensation demonstrates - software can compensate for the lag. I think it works like this:
- Transmit the video early
- Play the audio that *would* play if the player hits the note
- If the player hits the note, carry on, else switch to the failure sound.
Other games can and do compensate for lag in a similar way. For example, a racing game can steer the way it thinks you will steer, then adjust to where you actually steered when it finds out (late). People like OnLive put money into researching this kind of thing - what hints you can feed people in the picture, so that they're fooled into not seeing the lag.
when you hit this max number you wont be able to fire any "new" bullets until an old one hits something or goes offscreen.
It's a classic gameplay mechanic. In Space Invaders, there's one player bullet on screen at a time -- so if you miss you've a long wait before you can fire again. In Asteroids it's three.
Can I use EC2 to run a bit torrent client? Tor? Test the next version of nmap or nessus?
There doesn't appear to be a technical reason why you couldn't. As far as I can tell, you get a virtual RedHat box, connected to the Internet, upon which you can run whatever you like.
OTOH, the AWS Customer Agreement prohibits you from running "Unauthorized probes and port scans for vulnerabilities." or "Open proxies.", which I guess covers Tor, nmap and nessus at least.
But I know I can do that because if *this* service fails, someone else will take over - and - I won't have commited everything to it ! If you start using services like Google Doc - my fear (and maybe it's not justified) is that they may hold more control over my stuff than they should have.
They do have a privacy policy and TOS you know. And you can export to open format files.
Sure, you can hypothesize a cloud based service that really does lock you in, and you'd be foolish to use it. Google Docs is not such a service.
I think the official story is that Amazon went totally overboard with their capacity planning, and ended up with more than they needed. Solution: charge money and let other people use it.
Now, their capacity planning has to take those customers into account.
Without local competition, how long do you think remote options will remain free?
Why do you believe there won't be a healthy free market in remote office suites?
I believe there will always be good-enough products for consumers (I use Google Docs and think it's fine) for free. I suspect business will want features they have to pay for (as with Google Apps today).
I strongly suspect that an OSS in-browser office suite will emerge, that you can run on your own (cloud hosted?) server or use someone else's (just like Wordpress and wordpress.com)
networked storage is not cloud computing. That's just networked storage.
Unless it happens to be implemented on a cloud platform, as S3 is.
As a user of S3 you needn't care that it's implemented as a cloud. You just care that it's there, and it works.
But Amazon implements it as a cloud because that architecture works. Data is mirrored so nodes can fail without data loss. Requests are handled by nodes near the client, and there's cacheing for performance.
This isn't that big a deal if you're just backing up what's on your hard drive. If you're serving that data to users all over the world, it's a big win.
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Also I don't see how this helps fight piracy. Are you suggesting only providing games this way, making piracy impossible?
I think it makes it almost impossible.
I can well imagine a game being released *only* on a streaming platform. The executable game code would never leave the provider's servers.
I can only think of two ways to pirate that game:
- hack the authentication / authorization mechanism in order to play for free
- obtain the game code either through hackery or social engineering
Once you have the game code, it's probably not as easy to install and play as a traditional game for Windows.
YouTube buffers because it uses codecs that are optimised for situations where a delay is acceptable. You don't need to worry about the distance between your browser and a YouTube server, because the latency doesn't affect your experience once the video has started playing.
Streaming games is different, because latency is important. So:
- different codecs, designed with low latency in mind.
- a focus on locating servers close to clients
Smart people are investing in this. If it was as simple as "YouTube buffers therefore this can't possibly work", they wouldn't be.
I disagree with a lot of this. I'm not saying that cloud gaming is ideal for the consumer, but to say it removes competition from the market is nonsense.
Just because you have the "best" rally game does not mean you can set any price you like. Consumers pay their money and take their choice. Some will pay $15/m for the best of breed rally game. Some will pay $5/m for a game that's not quite as good - last year's version. Meanwhile other developers are busy trying to outdo the current best game.
you can just keep on raising the fees to play until you start losing too many costumers.
Cloud gaming would be the death of fair pricing for computer games.
What you describe there *is* fair pricing. Fair pricing is whatever the market can bear.
OnLive has said that for HD you need 5Mb/s -- but that it *peaks* at that level. That is, most of the time it's using much less.
So, you'll get a choppy experience if your ISP can't deliver 5Mb/s when you need it. But 1 minute's play won't use anywhere near 5*60Mb = 300Mb of your download allowance.
What makes you think "we" can't make it work on a LAN?
http://streammygame.com/ provides is just one piece of software you could try it with.
Why is this in the "hardware" category?
Unlike OnLive, which is launching a set top box alongside its software client, Gaikai's client is just a browser plug-in (possibly a Flash app?)
Unlike OnLive, which boasts about custom hardware to render and encode graphics, Dave Perry claims Gaikai's servers run on commodity hardware.
This service is about software and strategically located servers.
The same market forces ought to force the price of a decent connection down to the "right" price.
Of course, we've seen market failures in the past. The UK government ought to focus on regulating broadband provision in such a way as to keep the market working properly.
Is the Gaikai client a Flash app?
Flash has no joypad support. Weird.
Two comments on this:
1. Gaikai is going for a model where their servers are widely deployed at the "edge" of the Internet. That means negotiating with ISPs to locate servers near the modems. Part of that deal will involve having sufficient bandwidth for those servers and those protocols.
2. This kind of service is going to build customer demand for stable, fast, low latency connections. Presumably market forces will cause ISPs to provide.
I don't know about Gaikai, but looking at OnLive's demos, it appears they'll have a variety of payment options, varying from game to game.
So I'm expecting to be able to:
- buy "lifetime" access to a certain title
- rent a title by the hour/day/week/month
- subscribe to unlimited access to a certain range of titles
- etc.
You can definitely expect there to be various subscription packages, just as you pay your cable company extra for sports and movies.
... which is a shame because the Saturn was a wonderful console with some wonderful games.
I went for the Playstation at the time, like millions of others -- but acquiring a second hand Saturn later showed that it was the wrong choice.
Maybe I should dig it out, try and gather 9 friends with some gaming skills and play some Saturn Bomberman...
This seems like a strange requirement. Novels and technical books are usually quite a lot smaller than A4.
Really? An ebook with a color screen just sounds soo useless.
You don't buy books with colour illustrations? All sorts of things benefit from colour, whether it's a cookery book, or an illustrated novel (look up Arthur Rackham's 1915 illustrations for A Christmas Carol).
I'd be very tempted by a device that used colour e-ink. By preference it would have a "true" black like traditional CMYK printing.
Before that though - cheaper B&W e-readers please.
I'm also an adult software engineer.
But I've used Linux and AIX for the last 12 years, and believe me, from my perspective, MS fanboys are guilty of all the same stuff you're seeing in Linux fanboys.
By the same reasoning, cooking should be mandatory
That's a terribly analogy, because there are far better arguments for mandatory cookery lessons than for mandatory typing lessons.
Everyone should be taught how to cost and cook a decent meal from raw ingredients, by the time they're 14.
In the UK, this could easily result in prosecution for carrying a replica gun. I'm not opposed to that law.
We deployed SharePoint years ago. Did that improve anything? No.
Could that be because (from my experience at least), Sharepoint is as user friendly as the lost luggage desk at Franz Kafka International Airport?
There are so many types of game where this kind of lag doesn't matter, or can be compensated for.
Starting with the obvious ones: anything turn based is unaffected. Input could get very sluggish indeed before it broke a game like Civ or XBLA Carcassone. Battles in RPGs like Final Fantasy are the same.
Even a lot of action games don't depend on instant responses. Yes, something like Quake III is all about twitching. But something like Bioshock has a much more measured style, which is *not* ruined by a three frame lag.
Music software really is ruined by input latency. If the software doesn't know what you're going to play, the only solution is to remove the lag. However, as Guitar Hero's lag compensation demonstrates - software can compensate for the lag. I think it works like this:
- Transmit the video early
- Play the audio that *would* play if the player hits the note
- If the player hits the note, carry on, else switch to the failure sound.
Other games can and do compensate for lag in a similar way. For example, a racing game can steer the way it thinks you will steer, then adjust to where you actually steered when it finds out (late). People like OnLive put money into researching this kind of thing - what hints you can feed people in the picture, so that they're fooled into not seeing the lag.
when you hit this max number you wont be able to fire any "new" bullets until an old one hits something or goes offscreen.
It's a classic gameplay mechanic. In Space Invaders, there's one player bullet on screen at a time -- so if you miss you've a long wait before you can fire again. In Asteroids it's three.
Can I use EC2 to run a bit torrent client? Tor? Test the next version of nmap or nessus?
There doesn't appear to be a technical reason why you couldn't. As far as I can tell, you get a virtual RedHat box, connected to the Internet, upon which you can run whatever you like.
OTOH, the AWS Customer Agreement prohibits you from running "Unauthorized probes and port scans for vulnerabilities." or "Open proxies.", which I guess covers Tor, nmap and nessus at least.
These seem like reasonable terms of service.
But I know I can do that because if *this* service fails, someone else will take over - and - I won't have commited everything to it ! If you start using services like Google Doc - my fear (and maybe it's not justified) is that they may hold more control over my stuff than they should have.
They do have a privacy policy and TOS you know. And you can export to open format files.
Sure, you can hypothesize a cloud based service that really does lock you in, and you'd be foolish to use it. Google Docs is not such a service.
Anywhere, even on a laptop away from a public Wi-Fi hotspot?
Maybe. Just as a proof of concept, GMail's offline support is pretty good.
I think the official story is that Amazon went totally overboard with their capacity planning, and ended up with more than they needed. Solution: charge money and let other people use it.
Now, their capacity planning has to take those customers into account.
Without local competition, how long do you think remote options will remain free?
Why do you believe there won't be a healthy free market in remote office suites?
I believe there will always be good-enough products for consumers (I use Google Docs and think it's fine) for free. I suspect business will want features they have to pay for (as with Google Apps today).
I strongly suspect that an OSS in-browser office suite will emerge, that you can run on your own (cloud hosted?) server or use someone else's (just like Wordpress and wordpress.com)
networked storage is not cloud computing. That's just networked storage.
Unless it happens to be implemented on a cloud platform, as S3 is.
As a user of S3 you needn't care that it's implemented as a cloud. You just care that it's there, and it works.
But Amazon implements it as a cloud because that architecture works. Data is mirrored so nodes can fail without data loss. Requests are handled by nodes near the client, and there's cacheing for performance.
This isn't that big a deal if you're just backing up what's on your hard drive. If you're serving that data to users all over the world, it's a big win.