We aren't talking about China the overall entity (though if we were that's still enough reason for concern).
No, we are talking about a company the serially does whatever it can to steal trade secrets from other companies. Even if you didn't believe whatever they captured was going back to China proper, why would you trust anything confidential to their gear?
It's not proven that I, personally, will die if I jump in a Yellowstone hot spring. But damned if I'm going to do it when others have died before me.
I thought Apple's service was all original content anyway, so is this really a story? The bigger question is are ANY other companies known to be in on Apple's service? I had not heard of any. I didn't think it was going to be a Netflix competitor, but rather something more like HBO with custom programming...
Why would I want to lag in a single player game, for instance?
What makes you think there is lag?
It's not like streaming is new, and most people report the experience with a good connection, does not have noticeable lag. I'm sure there are some but is there enough that most people would notice, I'm not sure...
I think that there is a pretty large market of people who would rather choose much better looking graphics over slightly more lag. To maintain a really high end gaming PC takes a lot of time and effort, more than most people are willing to invest - this service is a way to experience high-end graphics with none of the hardware pains that comes with owning and maintaining a gaming PC. Yes there are downsides but more casual gamers will happily take that tradeoff.
If Google is smart, they would offer games that are PC only and not on consoles from this service, that would probably be the fastest path to get adoption rates up.
If bandwidth is concerned, it is no different than watching Netflix, Hulu, Twitch, Prime Video, or YouTube.
Sure it is, much different.
First of all, most of that content you get from those providers is not even in 4k yet.
Secondly, all the TV/movie streaming providers compress the video quite a lot more than a game can, without noticeably losing lots of detail. In movies or shows the focus is not so much on tiny minute details bu instead on large figures on the screen.
Lastly, most people spend a LOT more time on a game they like than movies or TV. I know in the times when I am really into a game I put way more hours into gaming than I ever would watching video content.
So this service will indeed sneak up on people who otherwise never notice bandwidth caps (which is I would say, most people). This people are also not truly aware of data caps from a practical sense since it does not affect them today.
I've always figured watching 4K content here and there, I'd never come close to maxing out my bandwidth cap - and indeed I have not.
But it really is true that bandwidth caps everywhere are going to be hit hard if game streaming becomes popular, games you usually play for a lot longer than any movie, even a series... Never mind ISP caps, you could easily see mobile caps being hit even harder and sooner by people streaming games to phones to play them on the go.
Even with Google pushing this you have to wonder if this is a viable business just because of the caps.
I generally agree, but isn't recyclable material today stuff that at least they know can be incinerated fairly well? Then at least it doesn't take more energy to deal with it. Even incineration for energy just seems like another form of recycling to me... though I was wondering how they scrubbed fumes from burning plastic (or maybe that is not incinerated but tossed).
It would seem to make a huge difference what eggs are eaten with, as they usually are consumed with other foods - you'd hope they would have controlled for that...
Same difference to me streaming the display of my PC and the controls the way Steam did with a recently discontinued Steam Link product (think that was the name).
As the game is not on your computer... things like modding outside of what is intended by the dev's of the game is impossible
Are you sure about that? Why would it be impossible. You could basically have an account on Google's to allow you to upload new game files like mods. Just because Google is not supporting that initially does not mean it's impossible, after all they have to be storing things like controller configuration settings on their side also.
Anything a PC game could do could easily be done by streaming, and it seems pretty clear to me they are using PC versions of the game as the base for what they run. So it is PC gaming, just less configurable (at the moment).
In a way this shift is good news, because it was all to easy before to throw a ton of crap into the recycling bin and pretend a problem was handled.
We are just now getting to a realistic point where we can truly decide what it makes sense to recycle, and what is really trash. Then we can make better choices about what things are made of, or what packaging they have. Like maybe paper products are not so bad, as we see with the rise of things like paper straws... remember how plastic used to be preferred over paper, and there was a big shift to move to plastic bags?
Do you need to though? With a wholly vertical design there's really not much of a way for dust to build up. It gets flushed out the system by the fans and doesn't really have anywhere to collect the way it would with a flat motherboard and/or case design that has a lot of area at the bottom to collect dust.
Apple's been shitting the bed on cooling solutions and just jamming more powerful hardware into their passively cooled units.
The iMac pro has an excellent cooling system with two huge fans (hint: fans are not passive), it's extremely quiet and does a great job keeping the system cool.
I work with a lot go photo and video stuff, it's really nice to have internal storage be as large as possible to hold large projects, then when I'm done I can save them off to traditional larger external spinning discs.
Every now and then I look into faster external RAID arrays but that itself is a very expensive option and can be kind of fragile.
Having a lot of internal storage also saves you time in that you don't have to be as picky in cleaning out your system from time to time. I fought for way too long with a laptop that was always too close to the edge of available hard drive space, which was really annoying.
You don't have to pay Apple's prices to upgrade RAM, you can buy the chips yourself. The process to get to the ram slots is somewhat involved, but you can also just have Apple install the ram you bring them.
The thing is the RAM the iMac Pro uses is not cheap (2666MHz DDR4 ECC / PC4-21300), so you'll be paying a lot regardless of the path you take. For instance an iFixit RAM upgrade kit to 128GB is $2,000.00. To reach 265GB you'll need four 64GB memory chips... and probably best not to use the cheapest ones. Crucial does not even list chips that will work with the iMac Pro...
It's hard to tell from the article, but Google is obviously running the game on PC's in the backend. It makes way more sense than Google modifying a bunch of consoles to stream games, wouldn't you say?
So you are running the PC version of the game, probably with display settings fixed, and simply receiving the display via video stream, and sending control commands back to the "PC" )probably some kind of virtual PC) that is streaming the game.
So how is this not PC gaming? In theory it would be easy to have access to any PC game this way, at a resolution and quality level maybe better than most people's local PC's could handle.
After all that Google has abandoned over the years, why would anyone trust them for anything?
The key thing about this service is, there's really not much need to trust Google. You just play and enjoy games.
The only thing you are technically "trusting" them with is save game data. But even there, a lot of games you are playing are saving your real status back to some server like an EA account.
I am OK with the risk of playing through a game, and losing the same game status sometime later - since those tend to not be useful after a while anyway, it's often hard to go back and play older games anyway never mind keeping the save.
I agree with the other items, but the system has to be able to decode a high resolution video stream very quickly - which is usually dedicated hardware, or the GPU on most systems. I don't think that even the faster CPU's today could manage to decode a 4K video stream quickly enough for the bandwidth required.
It's not as important though for sure, just saying there is still some base of performance you have to meet for the video needs.
Its been pretty impressive seeing the resurgence of PC gaming after consoles seemed to have expanded to take over the gaming market... Google's move can only help to cement that trend.
I know of PLC aggregation / communication software that literally only exists on Windows, simply because that's what many factories run.
Oh yes, I totally agree, I've seen the same thing.
That's why I'm saying, change the systems to run Linux and use Wine to run the software that is Windows only. Only question is what kinds of attached hardware they have that Linux would not support, but I was thinking most of it's probably variants of serial ports and it seems like if anything, obscure hardware cards would be more likely to have Linux drivers written than not.
And factories, by and large, never replace anything unless it has been fully depreciated... and sometimes, not even then.
Right, but the beauty of the plan is, no need to replace anything. Make a backup, install Linux on your existing hardware, install Wine, then the custom control software from the backup. Then you are immune to bored operators who watch porn at work or guys that pick up USB sticks off the street.
I have to wonder how many of these random malware infections of industrial machinery could be avoided by having all control systems running Linux.
Sure they could still be targeted by a dedicated hacker but at least you wouldn't have general mass-market malware accidentally get in and shut you down.
Maybe you could even use Wine to run existing control software and switch over today... I can't imagine the software they use is very sophisticated in terms of Windows API use.
there's a storm coming, as soon as Trump is gone and Brexit isn't distracting every moment of British political discourse anymore, the genie he let out of the bottle of political interference is going to cause serious blowback in Russia
Just how would blowback in Russia happen even before these measures. Guess what, real totalitarian states don't allow "blowback".
Why would Trump being gone have anything to do with this, if the U.S. manages to get rid of trump, it means the naturally communist side of the Democratic Party will have taken over and people won't be worrying about what Russia does, but loss of freedoms in America... you don't think many Democrats are not chomping at the bit for similar laws to be passed in the U.S.?
The optics for the President, because 80-90% of the public supports Net Neutrality,
How many of those that "supports" net neutrality will care one whit about that issue when it comes time to vote. Maybe 0.001% of the populace would even think about it.
You are right about optics, but it seems like a really stupid use of resources given it cannot actually pass, nor do any candidate any good whatsoever.
the Democrats are being really stupid about this. Why on earth would they bring this to bear when they already know the president will veto it? It's just going to make it less likely that the next congress will bring up such a bill.
You have inadvertently revealed the game. Make sure to vote for things that are popular when they can have no effect, so that you'll not be voting on things later that might make the giant corporations that support you mad.
It's the same reason why neither the Democrats nor Republicans ever seem to get much passed when they control both house and senate.
Slashdot Mirror
China: Accused of but not proven
We aren't talking about China the overall entity (though if we were that's still enough reason for concern).
No, we are talking about a company the serially does whatever it can to steal trade secrets from other companies. Even if you didn't believe whatever they captured was going back to China proper, why would you trust anything confidential to their gear?
It's not proven that I, personally, will die if I jump in a Yellowstone hot spring. But damned if I'm going to do it when others have died before me.
I thought Apple's service was all original content anyway, so is this really a story? The bigger question is are ANY other companies known to be in on Apple's service? I had not heard of any. I didn't think it was going to be a Netflix competitor, but rather something more like HBO with custom programming...
Why would I want to lag in a single player game, for instance?
What makes you think there is lag?
It's not like streaming is new, and most people report the experience with a good connection, does not have noticeable lag. I'm sure there are some but is there enough that most people would notice, I'm not sure...
I think that there is a pretty large market of people who would rather choose much better looking graphics over slightly more lag. To maintain a really high end gaming PC takes a lot of time and effort, more than most people are willing to invest - this service is a way to experience high-end graphics with none of the hardware pains that comes with owning and maintaining a gaming PC. Yes there are downsides but more casual gamers will happily take that tradeoff.
If Google is smart, they would offer games that are PC only and not on consoles from this service, that would probably be the fastest path to get adoption rates up.
If bandwidth is concerned, it is no different than watching Netflix, Hulu, Twitch, Prime Video, or YouTube.
Sure it is, much different.
First of all, most of that content you get from those providers is not even in 4k yet.
Secondly, all the TV/movie streaming providers compress the video quite a lot more than a game can, without noticeably losing lots of detail. In movies or shows the focus is not so much on tiny minute details bu instead on large figures on the screen.
Lastly, most people spend a LOT more time on a game they like than movies or TV. I know in the times when I am really into a game I put way more hours into gaming than I ever would watching video content.
So this service will indeed sneak up on people who otherwise never notice bandwidth caps (which is I would say, most people). This people are also not truly aware of data caps from a practical sense since it does not affect them today.
I've always figured watching 4K content here and there, I'd never come close to maxing out my bandwidth cap - and indeed I have not.
But it really is true that bandwidth caps everywhere are going to be hit hard if game streaming becomes popular, games you usually play for a lot longer than any movie, even a series... Never mind ISP caps, you could easily see mobile caps being hit even harder and sooner by people streaming games to phones to play them on the go.
Even with Google pushing this you have to wonder if this is a viable business just because of the caps.
Why? For ideological zealots who are offended by every attempt to better ones station in life?
Who benefits? Not the workers, that's for sure. The only person this benefits is the person who is paid to head the union for the workers.
A person who does no actual work, but just talks to management about the workers. Which each side could easily do on their own, for free.
I generally agree, but isn't recyclable material today stuff that at least they know can be incinerated fairly well? Then at least it doesn't take more energy to deal with it. Even incineration for energy just seems like another form of recycling to me... though I was wondering how they scrubbed fumes from burning plastic (or maybe that is not incinerated but tossed).
It would seem to make a huge difference what eggs are eaten with, as they usually are consumed with other foods - you'd hope they would have controlled for that...
As the game is not on your computer...
Same difference to me streaming the display of my PC and the controls the way Steam did with a recently discontinued Steam Link product (think that was the name).
As the game is not on your computer... things like modding outside of what is intended by the dev's of the game is impossible
Are you sure about that? Why would it be impossible. You could basically have an account on Google's to allow you to upload new game files like mods. Just because Google is not supporting that initially does not mean it's impossible, after all they have to be storing things like controller configuration settings on their side also.
Anything a PC game could do could easily be done by streaming, and it seems pretty clear to me they are using PC versions of the game as the base for what they run. So it is PC gaming, just less configurable (at the moment).
In a way this shift is good news, because it was all to easy before to throw a ton of crap into the recycling bin and pretend a problem was handled.
We are just now getting to a realistic point where we can truly decide what it makes sense to recycle, and what is really trash. Then we can make better choices about what things are made of, or what packaging they have. Like maybe paper products are not so bad, as we see with the rise of things like paper straws... remember how plastic used to be preferred over paper, and there was a big shift to move to plastic bags?
You can't clean dust from them easily or at all
Do you need to though? With a wholly vertical design there's really not much of a way for dust to build up. It gets flushed out the system by the fans and doesn't really have anywhere to collect the way it would with a flat motherboard and/or case design that has a lot of area at the bottom to collect dust.
Apple's been shitting the bed on cooling solutions and just jamming more powerful hardware into their passively cooled units.
The iMac pro has an excellent cooling system with two huge fans (hint: fans are not passive), it's extremely quiet and does a great job keeping the system cool.
I work with a lot go photo and video stuff, it's really nice to have internal storage be as large as possible to hold large projects, then when I'm done I can save them off to traditional larger external spinning discs.
Every now and then I look into faster external RAID arrays but that itself is a very expensive option and can be kind of fragile.
Having a lot of internal storage also saves you time in that you don't have to be as picky in cleaning out your system from time to time. I fought for way too long with a laptop that was always too close to the edge of available hard drive space, which was really annoying.
You don't have to pay Apple's prices to upgrade RAM, you can buy the chips yourself. The process to get to the ram slots is somewhat involved, but you can also just have Apple install the ram you bring them.
The thing is the RAM the iMac Pro uses is not cheap (2666MHz DDR4 ECC / PC4-21300), so you'll be paying a lot regardless of the path you take. For instance an iFixit RAM upgrade kit to 128GB is $2,000.00. To reach 265GB you'll need four 64GB memory chips... and probably best not to use the cheapest ones. Crucial does not even list chips that will work with the iMac Pro...
This isn't PC gaming.
It's hard to tell from the article, but Google is obviously running the game on PC's in the backend. It makes way more sense than Google modifying a bunch of consoles to stream games, wouldn't you say?
So you are running the PC version of the game, probably with display settings fixed, and simply receiving the display via video stream, and sending control commands back to the "PC" )probably some kind of virtual PC) that is streaming the game.
So how is this not PC gaming? In theory it would be easy to have access to any PC game this way, at a resolution and quality level maybe better than most people's local PC's could handle.
After all that Google has abandoned over the years, why would anyone trust them for anything?
The key thing about this service is, there's really not much need to trust Google. You just play and enjoy games.
The only thing you are technically "trusting" them with is save game data. But even there, a lot of games you are playing are saving your real status back to some server like an EA account.
I am OK with the risk of playing through a game, and losing the same game status sometime later - since those tend to not be useful after a while anyway, it's often hard to go back and play older games anyway never mind keeping the save.
Your local GPU is no longer important
I agree with the other items, but the system has to be able to decode a high resolution video stream very quickly - which is usually dedicated hardware, or the GPU on most systems. I don't think that even the faster CPU's today could manage to decode a 4K video stream quickly enough for the bandwidth required.
It's not as important though for sure, just saying there is still some base of performance you have to meet for the video needs.
Its been pretty impressive seeing the resurgence of PC gaming after consoles seemed to have expanded to take over the gaming market... Google's move can only help to cement that trend.
I know of PLC aggregation / communication software that literally only exists on Windows, simply because that's what many factories run.
Oh yes, I totally agree, I've seen the same thing.
That's why I'm saying, change the systems to run Linux and use Wine to run the software that is Windows only. Only question is what kinds of attached hardware they have that Linux would not support, but I was thinking most of it's probably variants of serial ports and it seems like if anything, obscure hardware cards would be more likely to have Linux drivers written than not.
And factories, by and large, never replace anything unless it has been fully depreciated... and sometimes, not even then.
Right, but the beauty of the plan is, no need to replace anything. Make a backup, install Linux on your existing hardware, install Wine, then the custom control software from the backup. Then you are immune to bored operators who watch porn at work or guys that pick up USB sticks off the street.
I have to wonder how many of these random malware infections of industrial machinery could be avoided by having all control systems running Linux.
Sure they could still be targeted by a dedicated hacker but at least you wouldn't have general mass-market malware accidentally get in and shut you down.
Maybe you could even use Wine to run existing control software and switch over today... I can't imagine the software they use is very sophisticated in terms of Windows API use.
there's a storm coming, as soon as Trump is gone and Brexit isn't distracting every moment of British political discourse anymore, the genie he let out of the bottle of political interference is going to cause serious blowback in Russia
Just how would blowback in Russia happen even before these measures. Guess what, real totalitarian states don't allow "blowback".
Why would Trump being gone have anything to do with this, if the U.S. manages to get rid of trump, it means the naturally communist side of the Democratic Party will have taken over and people won't be worrying about what Russia does, but loss of freedoms in America... you don't think many Democrats are not chomping at the bit for similar laws to be passed in the U.S.?
You need to recheck because you can turn off the protections that disallow using Linux, even on the older iMac Pro (which has the T2).
The optics for the President, because 80-90% of the public supports Net Neutrality,
How many of those that "supports" net neutrality will care one whit about that issue when it comes time to vote. Maybe 0.001% of the populace would even think about it.
You are right about optics, but it seems like a really stupid use of resources given it cannot actually pass, nor do any candidate any good whatsoever.
the Democrats are being really stupid about this. Why on earth would they bring this to bear when they already know the president will veto it? It's just going to make it less likely that the next congress will bring up such a bill.
You have inadvertently revealed the game. Make sure to vote for things that are popular when they can have no effect, so that you'll not be voting on things later that might make the giant corporations that support you mad.
It's the same reason why neither the Democrats nor Republicans ever seem to get much passed when they control both house and senate.
...is the ultimate Sock Puppet.