True that. But now you change the problem "just" implementing game specific logic to implementing game specific logic AND palatalization and network serialization. No matter how you turn it, making something run in or rather with "the cloud" will mean more development effort. Oh yea... don't forget to implement soft fail over when the internet goes down.
Of course it's going to be more development work, but it's insignificant. This sort of stuff has been well refined, there are APIs available and with well-design code and clean interfaces this is trivial.
The simple answer to avoid that is if you want to use any vendor's proprietary office suite you write your own file exporter or use one of the pre-existing ones that go to ODF or something.
Actually the article basically says, "The BSA says non-pirated software is better, and Open Source Software isn't pirated, and it costs even less, so Open Source Software is a hell of a lot better!"
That doesn't follow, just because something is cheaper doesn't make it better, not to mention that 'Free Software' is centered around Freedom not Free-of-charge yet many governments tout the license cost savings in monetary terms rather than any aspect of Freedom. The whole Free and Open Source Software movement is being sold on cost rather than what it was actually designed for so it's no wonder the software industry hasn't rushed to embrace it wholeheartedly, you can't sell it on being free of charge and the turn around and say 'oh but there are all these support and training costs associated with it because this is how the industry is funded'.
I think that the clear challenger to FOSS is pirated proprietary software.
These days I would think it is more likely 'cloud' software, with more and more software running just a client in the browser (and compiling software to javascript - which ends up as a confusing thing for OSS licenses as Javascript is source code) users are running less software from their own systems. Web-based email, storage, office suites, video conferencing, social networking, etc... are all effectively non-free programs that the user has no control over, the free software movement now has to somehow make a case for that now too, though most of it to date has been around fear-mongering (corporations stealing and locking up your data, which is of course mitigated by syncing to a local backup every now and then) rather than practicality unfortunately, I doubt many people are going to be willing to run and expose their own server with all these applications hosted so they can access them on the go.
For one thing, the content providers would yank their content from their boxes, pretty much ripping apart their business model
This is exactly the issue, DRM and lockdown exists to appease the content providers yet FOSS advocates go after the software and device makers that implement these schemes. If the content producers/publishers were happy to distribute their products DRM-free we wouldn't have software and hardware DRM in the first place, but they aren't and they never have been, this goes back to the days before digital distribution - with things like Macrovision VHS copy protection - and continues on physical media distribution with various DRM and copy protection schemes implemented on DVD and Bluray.
The reason most of the anti-DRM movement in the software industry has never gone anywhere is they don't even know who they are supposed to target.
I highly doubt the cloud is going to allow just sending a copy of your binary to run and then return the results. It'll have some specific API with security focussed restrictions compared to what you can do with optimised code on the local console.
Why? It'll be sandboxed anyway and run on the same kind of hardware as the console, it may not be the exact same binary but it will be almost entirely the same code, you don't need to write separate versions just because it's 'in the cloud'.
I'm surprised this is being voted up. You'd think there are techies around here.
Have you actually seen the responses around here to anything that disrupts the status quo? Any sort of change that requires adapting to? Recent examples are things like Google Glass but of course touch screen phones, the iPod, tablets, etc... have all been bashed as gimmicks, form over function or construed as part of some sinister evil corporate conspiracy here before eventually becoming ubiquitous, if you want an idea of whether something is going to be successful just look to whatever disruptive technology is being railed against by a large chunk of/.
What processing is offloaded to the cloud matters. Not every processor intensive task is a frame by frame operation. Not every result transfer has to be real time.
Exactly, if it means pre-processing tasks can be done ahead of time in the background - when available - i'm all for it.
Preorders seem to be around $900AUD for the Xbox One based on a quick glance online.
That's because they don't know how much they will cost, so they put in a ceiling, notice how every one of them says that the price paid will be lower if the console price is lower at release? That's because they don't know how much it will cost but are certain it won't be more than $900.
Maybe because it's extra work for developers. They will need to write the code to work standalone on the Xbox One anyway in case internet goes down etc, and if they already have that code which works fine locally there's not much point putting in extra work to write a second implementation to push it to the cloud.
Why would you need to write a second implementation? Why wouldn't you just use the same code? Outside of that you'll just have some boilerplate code for communicating with whatever the cloud platform is.
As Jim Sterling points out MSFT is pretty much giving the finger to everybody that doesn't have 1.-A ton of money and 2.- Incredible broadband
Then Jim Sterling has no idea what this is, TFA even explains it! It's for pre-processing, not for realtime OnLive-style streaming, so I don't see where the need for either of the above comes in. Why would you not want to capitalize on additional computing power if it's there?
Apart from being robbed of the possibility to re-sell their games (either because they finished it or it turned out to not to match their expectations) they have to put their trust in (sometimes multiple) companies to keep the authentication-servers on-line.
Which is equally applicable on the PC these days as it is on consoles, smartphones and tablets.
Now they also have to trust those game-companies to actually put all that computing-power(?) and storage in "the cloud" for extended ammounts of time ?
They don't have to, but most will because in the end they just want to play the games.
The GPL crowd really needs to get off the FUD bandwagon, the fear-mongering that goes with the 'you users are paying to be abused by evil corporations' is not convincing anybody. I'm not saying it's unfounded but the fact is you need to sell the premise on positives, you can't go around telling users how they are being abused and having their rights stolen or whatever other rhetoric by using an iPhone - for example - and expect them to care when the alternative is non-existent. It really is time to start doing rather than spreading FUD, the tipping point will come when the benefits speak for themselves and you can say 'hey this smartphone is better than an iPhone or Galaxy or whatever in the ways end users actually care about and it also happens to be free and open'.
The sad part is how many buy the bullshit, H.264 is worse in EVERY SINGLE METRIC over the Flash that its supposed to replace, worse in CPU, memory,bandwidth, and of course while Adobe let you package Flash with anything and even let there be a FOSS spinoff without so much as a C&D you're gonna replace it with a patent troll, because St Steve of Cupertino said it should be so.
You do realize that most of the YouTube content in Flash was encoded in H.264? I don't know where you get the idea that Flash (a container) was ever supposed to replace H.264 (a codec).
Sorry, CFAA. Under the wire fraud statute. The exact charges which were levelled against Aaron Swartz for writing a tool which violated the TOS of JSTOR.
That was a private network on private premises not publicly accessible, this is a publicly accessible network. It's not the same thing, and he wasn't charged for writing that tool.
I agree that specs would be nice. However, as someone who's holding on to a N900 (a peerless mobile device IMHO) I'm just glad that between this and the efforts of the Firefox guys, we may see more open devices that let those of us who are interested in digging around under the hood can look forward to.
But are these really any more open than a Nexus? The closed part of the Android system is at the driver level - which the Firefox and Ubuntu guys use anyway.
It comes down to hardware drivers, Ubuntu (and Firefox) leverages Android device drivers to interface with the hardware, not how easy it would be on this device.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, and MS Office has had support for ODF for a while - however, in a very incompatible manner.
So use one of the available thirdparty plugins.
Like I said, RMS would take exception to anyone describing him as being a part of the OSS community
Fair enough, given I was talking about the GPL crowd I assumed we were on the same page, replace that with 'Free Software crowd' if you prefer.
True that. But now you change the problem "just" implementing game specific logic to implementing game specific logic AND palatalization and network serialization. No matter how you turn it, making something run in or rather with "the cloud" will mean more development effort. Oh yea... don't forget to implement soft fail over when the internet goes down.
Of course it's going to be more development work, but it's insignificant. This sort of stuff has been well refined, there are APIs available and with well-design code and clean interfaces this is trivial.
The simple answer to avoid that is if you want to use any vendor's proprietary office suite you write your own file exporter or use one of the pre-existing ones that go to ODF or something.
Actually the article basically says, "The BSA says non-pirated software is better, and Open Source Software isn't pirated, and it costs even less, so Open Source Software is a hell of a lot better!"
That doesn't follow, just because something is cheaper doesn't make it better, not to mention that 'Free Software' is centered around Freedom not Free-of-charge yet many governments tout the license cost savings in monetary terms rather than any aspect of Freedom. The whole Free and Open Source Software movement is being sold on cost rather than what it was actually designed for so it's no wonder the software industry hasn't rushed to embrace it wholeheartedly, you can't sell it on being free of charge and the turn around and say 'oh but there are all these support and training costs associated with it because this is how the industry is funded'.
Uh huh, every government clerk uses Photoshop and other highly specialized software to do his/her day to day job.
What do government clerks have to do with anything?
I think that the clear challenger to FOSS is pirated proprietary software.
These days I would think it is more likely 'cloud' software, with more and more software running just a client in the browser (and compiling software to javascript - which ends up as a confusing thing for OSS licenses as Javascript is source code) users are running less software from their own systems. Web-based email, storage, office suites, video conferencing, social networking, etc... are all effectively non-free programs that the user has no control over, the free software movement now has to somehow make a case for that now too, though most of it to date has been around fear-mongering (corporations stealing and locking up your data, which is of course mitigated by syncing to a local backup every now and then) rather than practicality unfortunately, I doubt many people are going to be willing to run and expose their own server with all these applications hosted so they can access them on the go.
I haven't actually seen fear mongering from the oss community.
Really? Most of RMS' interviews center around him spreading fear about the potential evil of proprietary software.
For one thing, the content providers would yank their content from their boxes, pretty much ripping apart their business model
This is exactly the issue, DRM and lockdown exists to appease the content providers yet FOSS advocates go after the software and device makers that implement these schemes. If the content producers/publishers were happy to distribute their products DRM-free we wouldn't have software and hardware DRM in the first place, but they aren't and they never have been, this goes back to the days before digital distribution - with things like Macrovision VHS copy protection - and continues on physical media distribution with various DRM and copy protection schemes implemented on DVD and Bluray.
The reason most of the anti-DRM movement in the software industry has never gone anywhere is they don't even know who they are supposed to target.
I highly doubt the cloud is going to allow just sending a copy of your binary to run and then return the results. It'll have some specific API with security focussed restrictions compared to what you can do with optimised code on the local console.
Why? It'll be sandboxed anyway and run on the same kind of hardware as the console, it may not be the exact same binary but it will be almost entirely the same code, you don't need to write separate versions just because it's 'in the cloud'.
I'm surprised this is being voted up. You'd think there are techies around here.
Have you actually seen the responses around here to anything that disrupts the status quo? Any sort of change that requires adapting to? Recent examples are things like Google Glass but of course touch screen phones, the iPod, tablets, etc... have all been bashed as gimmicks, form over function or construed as part of some sinister evil corporate conspiracy here before eventually becoming ubiquitous, if you want an idea of whether something is going to be successful just look to whatever disruptive technology is being railed against by a large chunk of /.
What processing is offloaded to the cloud matters. Not every processor intensive task is a frame by frame operation. Not every result transfer has to be real time.
Exactly, if it means pre-processing tasks can be done ahead of time in the background - when available - i'm all for it.
I did some of those optimizations on PS3/X360
What optimizations?
Preorders seem to be around $900AUD for the Xbox One based on a quick glance online.
That's because they don't know how much they will cost, so they put in a ceiling, notice how every one of them says that the price paid will be lower if the console price is lower at release? That's because they don't know how much it will cost but are certain it won't be more than $900.
Maybe because it's extra work for developers. They will need to write the code to work standalone on the Xbox One anyway in case internet goes down etc, and if they already have that code which works fine locally there's not much point putting in extra work to write a second implementation to push it to the cloud.
Why would you need to write a second implementation? Why wouldn't you just use the same code? Outside of that you'll just have some boilerplate code for communicating with whatever the cloud platform is.
As Jim Sterling points out MSFT is pretty much giving the finger to everybody that doesn't have 1.-A ton of money and 2.- Incredible broadband
Then Jim Sterling has no idea what this is, TFA even explains it! It's for pre-processing, not for realtime OnLive-style streaming, so I don't see where the need for either of the above comes in. Why would you not want to capitalize on additional computing power if it's there?
Apart from being robbed of the possibility to re-sell their games (either because they finished it or it turned out to not to match their expectations) they have to put their trust in (sometimes multiple) companies to keep the authentication-servers on-line.
Which is equally applicable on the PC these days as it is on consoles, smartphones and tablets.
Now they also have to trust those game-companies to actually put all that computing-power(?) and storage in "the cloud" for extended ammounts of time ?
They don't have to, but most will because in the end they just want to play the games.
you are refering to textures, he is refering to code.
What's so good about the textures in Crysis 3?
abuse your users
The GPL crowd really needs to get off the FUD bandwagon, the fear-mongering that goes with the 'you users are paying to be abused by evil corporations' is not convincing anybody. I'm not saying it's unfounded but the fact is you need to sell the premise on positives, you can't go around telling users how they are being abused and having their rights stolen or whatever other rhetoric by using an iPhone - for example - and expect them to care when the alternative is non-existent. It really is time to start doing rather than spreading FUD, the tipping point will come when the benefits speak for themselves and you can say 'hey this smartphone is better than an iPhone or Galaxy or whatever in the ways end users actually care about and it also happens to be free and open'.
That was the MIT component of the charges. There are also the JSTOR components, which were to do with violating the TOS.
Firstly, read your own link:
despite the fact that Swartz was not prosecuted based on Terms of Service violations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron's_Law#Aaron.27s_Law_proposal
Secondly that is still a private network on private premises not publicly accessible, in contrast to this situation which is public APIs.
The sad part is how many buy the bullshit, H.264 is worse in EVERY SINGLE METRIC over the Flash that its supposed to replace, worse in CPU, memory,bandwidth, and of course while Adobe let you package Flash with anything and even let there be a FOSS spinoff without so much as a C&D you're gonna replace it with a patent troll, because St Steve of Cupertino said it should be so.
You do realize that most of the YouTube content in Flash was encoded in H.264? I don't know where you get the idea that Flash (a container) was ever supposed to replace H.264 (a codec).
Sorry, CFAA. Under the wire fraud statute. The exact charges which were levelled against Aaron Swartz for writing a tool which violated the TOS of JSTOR.
That was a private network on private premises not publicly accessible, this is a publicly accessible network. It's not the same thing, and he wasn't charged for writing that tool.
I agree that specs would be nice. However, as someone who's holding on to a N900 (a peerless mobile device IMHO) I'm just glad that between this and the efforts of the Firefox guys, we may see more open devices that let those of us who are interested in digging around under the hood can look forward to.
But are these really any more open than a Nexus? The closed part of the Android system is at the driver level - which the Firefox and Ubuntu guys use anyway.
Or HTML5.
It comes down to hardware drivers, Ubuntu (and Firefox) leverages Android device drivers to interface with the hardware, not how easy it would be on this device.
Unlike Android, it has no carrier-driven limitations.
Android doesn't have any carrier-driven limitations.