"... two-thirds of non-musicians exposed to music games plan to start playing a real instrument in the next couple of years"
Uh, yeah, and I am planning to have a brick barbequeue, jacuzzi, fake beach and year-round soft fruit crops on my allotment in the next couple of years.
I'll be pleased if I actually get rid of all the weeds:)
If gaming happens at all, it'll happen because of one of two commercial situations:
1) someone wants to push either a Linux-based games console and wants it to "just work" initially with only minor changes to Windows versions (i.e. through wine or a derivative) - the only people with the muscle and motiviation to try might be Valve with their big catalogue for Steam, but it would be a brave backer to want to take on MS and Sony.
or 2) some kind of "live start" feature could be added to Windows CD releases of games - i.e. that Windows became such a pain in the backside for the publisher, and maybe some enterprising developer decided that their customers could boot their game faster from the bare metal upwards. Just put in the CD and play, no installation needed, fast start, presumably hijack a little bit of space on the host's hard drive for settings etc.
I tried a bit of this myself at LUGRadio Live this (oops, last) year when we got 16 discless PCs in a square to boot a Team Fortress client with all the graphics settings correct from a central server using Linux and wine. The boot wasn't very well optimised and Steam takes bloody ages to start up (it was about 4mins per client) but I suspect it could be got down to about 30s with a few days of effort (and removing/hacking Steam out of the way:) ). But a "live start" feature is definitely possible today if a developer was motivated.
Ah, oops, headline was talking about EUR prices, I am talking about GBP. That *is* insane if they're suddenly asking 50EUR for Left 4 Deaad ($70) though.
Contrary to the headline, I think the prices are all "locally adjusted". Left 4 Dead is now £26.99 where it was $49.99 (£33.34), so that is discounted. However World of Goo was $19.99 (£13.33) but has now gone up to £16.99.
So I'll carry on checking against amazon.co.uk / Game boxed prices for big releases. For indie titles, it's always worth looking at the $ price they charge on their own web site, which are sometimes more and sometimes less than what Steam charge.
So nothing changes, but maybe Valve realised that the plunging £ had lost them some sales in the UK (it was $2 : £1 not so long ago, now it is $1.4 as the story points out, so Steam prices used to be pretty sharp for us).
That "whole world in your hands" song is a textbook study; I'm sure Sony will update the next version of Home to include the necessary virtual waterboard and beatings so we can enjoy it as its composer intended.
However I'm not sure the use case you talk about is in any way a typical hosting task, probably because it gives you less overall uptime rather than more. If you have any clients on big hosts that assume 1-day or 1-week DNS, and they pick up the Amazon IP which is valid for maybe a couple of hours, your site will be down for far longer than the actual Dreamhost outage (though if Dreamhost are down for days at a time it might be win).
Cloud is a nice, nebulous term. I would count the people who really know what it means to be less than one hundred in all the world.
I'm guessing from your post and its related link that you're not one of those.
Thankyou for your insight professor:) There are a lot of disparate hosting offerings out there marketed with the word 'cloud'. I understand the abstraction but the commercial reality is the interesting debate: how it develops, and how useful it is.
I did some rough cost comparisons for a high-traffic web site in my similarly cynical article a few weeks ago (disclaimer: I run a hosting company flogging unfashionable servers, and am not a cloud fan yet:) ).
Agree totally - great show, but it does seem like glacial progress compared to anything else I'm watching, and my interest is fading into a sortof nostalgia right now.
My wife suggested a solution though - wait 45 years until they've finished making them for definite, *then* start watching (like we're doing with Doctor Who - glossy new Who doesn't count;) ).
I really am not intending to provoke a "my OS is better than your OS" argument, but as someone who has been in the IT & telecoms industry for 25+ years, I say it like I see it - my friends and workmates all run Windows, about 10% run Linux (usually alongside it) and I know of no-one who either owns a Mac or intends buying one, despite the fact that these are mostly IT literate people with numerous iPods amongst them.
I had assumed, and others pointed it out, that many more people buy Macs than run Linux desktops, however much "under the radar" that Linux desktops might be. My experience and your experience as slashdot freaks probably aren't representative of the wider world's computer purchasing habits:-) So while many games developers are already wondering whether the "PC" is a viable platform at all, the idea of additionally porting to the Mac or Linux as second & third options in terms of market share, seems pretty distant except for those with iron programming discipline and/or resources to spare.
i.e. Half-Life 2, Team Fortress, Portal, right here on my Ubuntu laptop. There *is* a native version of Steam for Linux, albeit one without much of a front-end, just for running dedicated servers. So I suspect this is a non-story. Valve would be insane to worry about porting their games to Linux (at least) before they ported to the Mac, so I really think it's unlikely they're considering it. There's no common programming framework between Steam games, other than the copy protection & integration, so every game would be a separate porting job - not going to happen!
However if they could wrap up Steam, wine, Ubuntu together into a neat physical package, they could be in an interesting position to flog PC-based games consoles with a library of download titles, and *that* is the only reason they might be interested in supporting their own games on Linux. With Popcap and other cheap smaller titles making up the majority of their catalogue (even if those are not the most popular overall) and some hardware partner on board, they might have a shot if they could price a console at the low end of things.
Still- while they have an interest in keeping titles out for the XBox 360, taking on a huge platform project to compete with Microsoft would take balls of steel and plenty of money.
No, this is all crap, undoubtedly. But nice to speculate occasionally:)
That's pretty much my routine when installing new PC games:
1) start installer from the CD 2) alt-tab, search for necessary patches, and patches that depend on previous patches, download them all (usually 100-400MB) 3) go to gamecopyworld, search for "fixed" game.exe that won't demand the CD is in the drive 4) install patches and no-CD hack 5) (after about 20 minutes) play game!
When I did a cheap play-for-prizes PC games a few years back I had a "install latest update" button on the start menu that used rsync to transfer the latest game executable & resources from a remote server. It worked just fine, so why do I have to search through 3rd party sites to find fixes that should have been in the box to start with? Is it just that no publisher wants the "expense" of hosting patches for their own games?
Just curious as someone who owns neither, why is the Iliad worth twice the money of the Sony Reader? (£400 rather than £200, at least that's what it seems to go for here in the UK).
They could just say 'anything you do here is your own responsibility' and leave it at that.
Sony could say that if they weren't hosting the user-made content themselves, and distributing it to other players. If players keep it on their own consoles, it's nobody else's business.
I spent about 4 hours playing Stalker, bought off Steam, and eventually gave up in frustration because it was failing to save *and* it was failing to notify me that it had failed to save, so I only found out I'd lost a chunk of progress once I'd died. I *think* it was just hardwired to save its games to a path starting in c:\ and my Windows machine is installed on h:\ (I don't understand that either, but no other games seemed to have a problem making one lousy system call to find the right path to save under!). Never got to the bottom of the problem either, and I daren't start the game again for about the fifth time.
I had already assumed Steam forced games to do its saving via its own library calls so they could do this kind of trick more easily, so I'm not sure how they're going to do it other than by updating every single game that will need to support it.
This trailer says to me "expect to die - a lot". Think I can hold back my $50 until they're going to give the demo away, and finish watching Dead Set instead:) Plus the UK/US exchange has swung madly away from us Brits so Steam purchases aren't as good value as they used to be.
In the UK, PC World, Carphone Warehouse etc. have all competing on mobile broadband deals for months, throwing in a netbook or laptop at the same time. Just like with mobile phones you're paying a high price for finance on a £150-400 device, plus a 12-24 months broadband / 3G contract.
Separately the phone networks are also competing much harder in the last year for broadband-only deals, and SIM-only deals for calls - those seem like better value if you know what you want.
That's fine and dandy in software land where you can just change your software to support an wibbly wobbly extensible standard. When you are investing in building routers for an ISP or other internet backbone, you need guaranteed performance, and not have to worry about whether fundamental parts of your addressing structures are changing size. That means very expensive Content-Addressable Memory (i.e. hardware hash tables, among other things) to guarantee that packets will go in and out at a particular rate. Those extra bytes in your packets can make a big difference to the price of a router which is trying to guarantee performance.
At some point you have to say, screw it, this is the biggest most ambitious standard we can possibly conceive of, and it's safe for hardware vendors to start investing huge amounts of money in supporting it. And you can't do that with a "completely" futureproof packet.
How kind of your bank to not debit your account for transactions you didn't authorise:) Seriously, you don't need insurance against *them* being defrauded. If someone asks your bank to give them money while pretending to be you, it is the *bank* who has been defrauded, not you. "Identify theft" is a cute term the banks invented to turn the poor security architecture in their payments network into their customers' problem
Rubbish. It's too expensive (£15+ per disc, £200+ for players) and it doesn't offer enough of an advantage over DVD for the enormous price difference. Sony will have to start taking some losses on players and discs to get people replacing their DVD players.
EU law mandates a minimum 2 year warranty on most goods sold to consumers. It seems insane to me that you could buy a new bit of electronics in the US and have no recourse after it dies after 5 months!
I'd heard that a lot of these 3rd party booking sites weren't using any sanctioned API, but scraping the airline's own retail sites for fares and proxying customers' credit card details etc. for making bookings, then charging a premium for the flight. By cancelling these fares the airlines are rocking confidence in comparison sites, and obviously pushing some business away, but I don't think they're opening themselves to lawsuits since customers didn't book with them direct. Only the booking sites might have a case against them, and that seems unlikely given the hoops they had to jump through to make the booking in the first place!
Effective spam filtering for forwarded email is pretty much impossible, as you lose vital information in the forwarding. Either get rid of your forwarding address, or have it hosted at Google as well. Probably the largest single reduction in spam I've ever made was the week that I got rid of years-old forwarding addresses. If the forwarding address is more important, just get it hosted at Google directly, or tell people to stop using it!
God that's sad - your post just reminded me to pay a late credit card bill, and now my finances are square for the month! Now where are the nipple-clamps?
Slashdot Mirror
"... two-thirds of non-musicians exposed to music games plan to start playing a real instrument in the next couple of years"
Uh, yeah, and I am planning to have a brick barbequeue, jacuzzi, fake beach and year-round soft fruit crops on my allotment in the next couple of years.
I'll be pleased if I actually get rid of all the weeds :)
If gaming happens at all, it'll happen because of one of two commercial situations:
1) someone wants to push either a Linux-based games console and wants it to "just work" initially with only minor changes to Windows versions (i.e. through wine or a derivative) - the only people with the muscle and motiviation to try might be Valve with their big catalogue for Steam, but it would be a brave backer to want to take on MS and Sony.
or 2) some kind of "live start" feature could be added to Windows CD releases of games - i.e. that Windows became such a pain in the backside for the publisher, and maybe some enterprising developer decided that their customers could boot their game faster from the bare metal upwards. Just put in the CD and play, no installation needed, fast start, presumably hijack a little bit of space on the host's hard drive for settings etc.
I tried a bit of this myself at LUGRadio Live this (oops, last) year when we got 16 discless PCs in a square to boot a Team Fortress client with all the graphics settings correct from a central server using Linux and wine. The boot wasn't very well optimised and Steam takes bloody ages to start up (it was about 4mins per client) but I suspect it could be got down to about 30s with a few days of effort (and removing/hacking Steam out of the way :) ). But a "live start" feature is definitely possible today if a developer was motivated.
Ah, oops, headline was talking about EUR prices, I am talking about GBP. That *is* insane if they're suddenly asking 50EUR for Left 4 Deaad ($70) though.
Contrary to the headline, I think the prices are all "locally adjusted". Left 4 Dead is now £26.99 where it was $49.99 (£33.34), so that is discounted. However World of Goo was $19.99 (£13.33) but has now gone up to £16.99.
So I'll carry on checking against amazon.co.uk / Game boxed prices for big releases. For indie titles, it's always worth looking at the $ price they charge on their own web site, which are sometimes more and sometimes less than what Steam charge.
So nothing changes, but maybe Valve realised that the plunging £ had lost them some sales in the UK (it was $2 : £1 not so long ago, now it is $1.4 as the story points out, so Steam prices used to be pretty sharp for us).
That "whole world in your hands" song is a textbook study; I'm sure Sony will update the next version of Home to include the necessary virtual waterboard and beatings so we can enjoy it as its composer intended.
We don't do any hosting for $1.50/yr :-)
However I'm not sure the use case you talk about is in any way a typical hosting task, probably because it gives you less overall uptime rather than more. If you have any clients on big hosts that assume 1-day or 1-week DNS, and they pick up the Amazon IP which is valid for maybe a couple of hours, your site will be down for far longer than the actual Dreamhost outage (though if Dreamhost are down for days at a time it might be win).
Cloud is a nice, nebulous term. I would count the people who really know what it means to be less than one hundred in all the world.
I'm guessing from your post and its related link that you're not one of those.
Thankyou for your insight professor :) There are a lot of disparate hosting offerings out there marketed with the word 'cloud'. I understand the abstraction but the commercial reality is the interesting debate: how it develops, and how useful it is.
I did some rough cost comparisons for a high-traffic web site in my similarly cynical article a few weeks ago (disclaimer: I run a hosting company flogging unfashionable servers, and am not a cloud fan yet :) ).
Agree totally - great show, but it does seem like glacial progress compared to anything else I'm watching, and my interest is fading into a sortof nostalgia right now.
My wife suggested a solution though - wait 45 years until they've finished making them for definite, *then* start watching (like we're doing with Doctor Who - glossy new Who doesn't count ;) ).
I really am not intending to provoke a "my OS is better than your OS" argument, but as someone who has been in the IT & telecoms industry for 25+ years, I say it like I see it - my friends and workmates all run Windows, about 10% run Linux (usually alongside it) and I know of no-one who either owns a Mac or intends buying one, despite the fact that these are mostly IT literate people with numerous iPods amongst them.
I had assumed, and others pointed it out, that many more people buy Macs than run Linux desktops, however much "under the radar" that Linux desktops might be. My experience and your experience as slashdot freaks probably aren't representative of the wider world's computer purchasing habits :-) So while many games developers are already wondering whether the "PC" is a viable platform at all, the idea of additionally porting to the Mac or Linux as second & third options in terms of market share, seems pretty distant except for those with iron programming discipline and/or resources to spare.
i.e. Half-Life 2, Team Fortress, Portal, right here on my Ubuntu laptop. There *is* a native version of Steam for Linux, albeit one without much of a front-end, just for running dedicated servers. So I suspect this is a non-story. Valve would be insane to worry about porting their games to Linux (at least) before they ported to the Mac, so I really think it's unlikely they're considering it. There's no common programming framework between Steam games, other than the copy protection & integration, so every game would be a separate porting job - not going to happen!
However if they could wrap up Steam, wine, Ubuntu together into a neat physical package, they could be in an interesting position to flog PC-based games consoles with a library of download titles, and *that* is the only reason they might be interested in supporting their own games on Linux. With Popcap and other cheap smaller titles making up the majority of their catalogue (even if those are not the most popular overall) and some hardware partner on board, they might have a shot if they could price a console at the low end of things.
Still- while they have an interest in keeping titles out for the XBox 360, taking on a huge platform project to compete with Microsoft would take balls of steel and plenty of money.
No, this is all crap, undoubtedly. But nice to speculate occasionally :)
That's pretty much my routine when installing new PC games:
1) start installer from the CD .exe that won't demand the CD is in the drive
2) alt-tab, search for necessary patches, and patches that depend on previous patches, download them all (usually 100-400MB)
3) go to gamecopyworld, search for "fixed" game
4) install patches and no-CD hack
5) (after about 20 minutes) play game!
When I did a cheap play-for-prizes PC games a few years back I had a "install latest update" button on the start menu that used rsync to transfer the latest game executable & resources from a remote server. It worked just fine, so why do I have to search through 3rd party sites to find fixes that should have been in the box to start with? Is it just that no publisher wants the "expense" of hosting patches for their own games?
Just curious as someone who owns neither, why is the Iliad worth twice the money of the Sony Reader? (£400 rather than £200, at least that's what it seems to go for here in the UK).
They could just say 'anything you do here is your own responsibility' and leave it at that.
Sony could say that if they weren't hosting the user-made content themselves, and distributing it to other players. If players keep it on their own consoles, it's nobody else's business.
I spent about 4 hours playing Stalker, bought off Steam, and eventually gave up in frustration because it was failing to save *and* it was failing to notify me that it had failed to save, so I only found out I'd lost a chunk of progress once I'd died. I *think* it was just hardwired to save its games to a path starting in c:\ and my Windows machine is installed on h:\ (I don't understand that either, but no other games seemed to have a problem making one lousy system call to find the right path to save under!). Never got to the bottom of the problem either, and I daren't start the game again for about the fifth time.
I had already assumed Steam forced games to do its saving via its own library calls so they could do this kind of trick more easily, so I'm not sure how they're going to do it other than by updating every single game that will need to support it.
This trailer says to me "expect to die - a lot". Think I can hold back my $50 until they're going to give the demo away, and finish watching Dead Set instead :) Plus the UK/US exchange has swung madly away from us Brits so Steam purchases aren't as good value as they used to be.
In the UK, PC World, Carphone Warehouse etc. have all competing on mobile broadband deals for months, throwing in a netbook or laptop at the same time. Just like with mobile phones you're paying a high price for finance on a £150-400 device, plus a 12-24 months broadband / 3G contract.
Separately the phone networks are also competing much harder in the last year for broadband-only deals, and SIM-only deals for calls - those seem like better value if you know what you want.
That's fine and dandy in software land where you can just change your software to support an wibbly wobbly extensible standard. When you are investing in building routers for an ISP or other internet backbone, you need guaranteed performance, and not have to worry about whether fundamental parts of your addressing structures are changing size. That means very expensive Content-Addressable Memory (i.e. hardware hash tables, among other things) to guarantee that packets will go in and out at a particular rate. Those extra bytes in your packets can make a big difference to the price of a router which is trying to guarantee performance.
At some point you have to say, screw it, this is the biggest most ambitious standard we can possibly conceive of, and it's safe for hardware vendors to start investing huge amounts of money in supporting it. And you can't do that with a "completely" futureproof packet.
How kind of your bank to not debit your account for transactions you didn't authorise :) Seriously, you don't need insurance against *them* being defrauded. If someone asks your bank to give them money while pretending to be you, it is the *bank* who has been defrauded, not you. "Identify theft" is a cute term the banks invented to turn the poor security architecture in their payments network into their customers' problem
Rubbish. It's too expensive (£15+ per disc, £200+ for players) and it doesn't offer enough of an advantage over DVD for the enormous price difference. Sony will have to start taking some losses on players and discs to get people replacing their DVD players.
EU law mandates a minimum 2 year warranty on most goods sold to consumers. It seems insane to me that you could buy a new bit of electronics in the US and have no recourse after it dies after 5 months!
I'd heard that a lot of these 3rd party booking sites weren't using any sanctioned API, but scraping the airline's own retail sites for fares and proxying customers' credit card details etc. for making bookings, then charging a premium for the flight. By cancelling these fares the airlines are rocking confidence in comparison sites, and obviously pushing some business away, but I don't think they're opening themselves to lawsuits since customers didn't book with them direct. Only the booking sites might have a case against them, and that seems unlikely given the hoops they had to jump through to make the booking in the first place!
Effective spam filtering for forwarded email is pretty much impossible, as you lose vital information in the forwarding. Either get rid of your forwarding address, or have it hosted at Google as well. Probably the largest single reduction in spam I've ever made was the week that I got rid of years-old forwarding addresses. If the forwarding address is more important, just get it hosted at Google directly, or tell people to stop using it!
Close :)
God that's sad - your post just reminded me to pay a late credit card bill, and now my finances are square for the month! Now where are the nipple-clamps?