Heh... Then how about pricing it better with more features?
It's vastly better to sell 10k units at $9 each than to sell 2K units at $29.
Pricing's what the industry thinks all us rubes will be willing to shower them with money over their stuff. Pricing is what's actually driving part of the piracy "problem" they face. The pricing's too high for what the market will actually bear and there's a lower amount of people buying and the piracy is a response to as much DRM as it is people wanting but not being willing to pay.
DRM's about control at it's heart. It's not about piracy because pretty much any DRM system has been circumvented when the interest in doing so overrode any difficulty involved with the attempt- which means in the case of most of it, within weeks of release of the title. As several HAVE pointed out, publishers like EA and Warner with SecuROM are pushing people to score cracks to remove the DRM so they can actually play what they bought because the DRM has now gone beyond ridiculous in that if you've two DVD drives, one a recorder, the code presumes you must be attempting to pirate so we won't let you even play the game before removing the other physical drive. It's so ridiculous that you can't even have security monitoring and program development tools from Microsoft on the machine to play.
It does nothing of what was stated as the purpose. It gets in the way of the honest people that don't "cheat" on it and do pirated stuff just so they can use what they bought. It costs the publisher more money.
Why not skip it altogether and find something that'll turn the bulk of those non-payers into customers instead?
Excuse me... It's not predatory pricing. The time that the games hit the prices they do on Windows, they're just trying to excise profits as they've recouped their investment. For a Linux/MacOS port, you're looking at the same general pricing that was in effect at the time you first saw the games. You're making the mistake that many make in that "it's the same game, it should be the same price". That only really works if the game is published at the same time or if it's from the same publisher.
For a typical AAA title, you're typically looking at six figures for rights access- that's $100-250k just to be able to LOOK at the source code to port it.
Then there's the effort to port it that has to be paid out somehow. In the case of LGP, all the developers are on a percentage of royalties basis. That's actually common as that's what's in force for my work for Elecorn's port for Caster- but in that case, the studio/publisher is the same and it's largely out at the same time as the others so it's price ($5, by the by...) is the same across the board.
Then there's the actual per-unit royalties due to the studio/publisher.
Then there's the production costs to make the discs, the documentation, and package the same.
Each piece adds dollars to the end-price. Moreover, if you're spinning 50k units, your costs are cheaper and they can afford to waste some over time.
When you start adding up the pieces of the pie, you end up with a price, if you're going to attempt to make an actual profit at this (they're not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts you know...), you end up with the pricing you see. The truth of the matter is that the way the industry's framed in, each of those titles on a different platform is a different game for a different platform. YOU see it as the same game (and intrinsically it is...) but the industry doesn't- which is why you have to pay for BioShock on the PS3 and then again if you want it on the 360 or PC.
Yet... Keep saying it over and over again. It's more due to not having any skilled and well-heeled reverse engineers working on breaking it than anything else.
MS thought they'd locked down the local (i.e. disc based games) piracy issue solidly, only to find out that it was dead easy to rip their stuff off afterall.
Heh... That's another excuse, really. Console piracy seems to be as rampant (if not moreso...) as the PC stuff, in truth.
The main reason PC gaming is "dying" (It's not, but I digress here...) is more due to smaller profit margins in that space. Most of the gaming "industry" is more akin to the record and movie "industries" and they're needing something with lower efforts to support and larger paybacks and Consoles generally do that for them. It's not piracy- not at all.
If Frictional didn't make it dead clear you were paying for a License, it was a sale, per the Uniform Commercial Code. As a sold item, they can't place restrictions on the resale thereof and typically any attempt to do so is non-enforceable. I'm not a lawyer, so you'll want to do your own research, consult with the lawyer of your own choice, etc. on this.
Heh... Yeah, it's negative. But it's merely an annoyance to the pirates; and a disaster (Warning: Volumes of Coarse Language...) for the end-users and a financial drag on the company that deploys it.
As negative impacts go, EA's starting to figure out that draconian measures don't quite sit well with people and had to relent on the DRM at least a bit.
Whoa... Nice rant there on the link. (As a heads-up: It's Not Safe For Work and has loads of coarse language- but I don't blame the guy on it...) And it does show that this crap doesn't help anyone except the DRM companies. Seriously.
On Burnout Paradise, they've got a mix of billboards all over the place, some of them you're supposed to smash, some you can't. It's intrusive in the same sense of the billboards in real-life being everywhere; but the ads aren't distracting from the game. They're just part of the urban landscape; as you get into town the billboards get more numerous. What's interesting is the humorous ads for the Burnout features, awards, and shop items, intermixed with ads for SlingBox, Burger King, Vizio and a few others.
The ads themselves don't detract from the game (Thanks Criterion...) and they were noticeable enough that I recognized them while going between events and remembered the ones I ticked off.
In that context, the ads will work and won't likely get "worse" like you're concerned about. Other games, heh...remains to be seen.
Each person's different- replayability's one of those nebulous traits. For me, Tribal Trouble's got a lot of replayability. For someone else, not so much so. To me, Far Cry2's NOT something that's "50x World of Goo". To you, it is.
That doesn't negate the remarks others have made or validate all the cash Crytek poured into it. It sold quite a bit, yes. Is it worth what they're asking for it...perhaps, perhaps not.
It remains to be seen that other things would have been done with that time- but the time itself isn't typically factored into the costs of a game, except where salaries come into the picture on it. You can't quantify things QUITE that way- what if the indie game was done in spare time as a hobby? Can I deduct the time you say "cost" on my Income Tax as a business expense? No? I think you've your answer on that one. As far as the SYSTEM we work with is concerned the cost is zero.
It's not a "communist hippie love parade" and you shouldn't frame it that way.
If there was an honest effort, then, I would say something positive.
Unfortunately, they've done efforts in this area in the past only to do something heinous the next couple of days or weeks. I believe that we're all a bit jaded when it comes to MS' professions of "open"- mainly because of that seemingly schizophrenic behaviour from them.
Special software, yes. However it won't work in the large because as you pile more bandwidth on, the worse the latencies get, either because of UDP drops/retransmits or TCP packet delivery delays/retransmits.
The Internet's an unholy mess as far as game networking code is concerned. It might work for hundreds- it won't scale to the levels they need to relegate PC and Console gaming to the dustbin of history anytime soon.
If you allowed for that figure as average, then the numbers I quoted a bit up the comment thread simply go up by nearly a factor of two. So you can consider, without concern, approximately 50 users (accounting for peaks being graceful and all...something I wouldn't do if I were specifying the design here...) on a T3, something on the order of 380 users or so on the OC-3, and so forth.
It still doesn't add up nicely for them for the near to medium future because of the realities of how it all works and will work for some time to come.
I would not use this as a line of argument. It doesn't go to talking to what is required for game streaming, only what is needed for full-motion video streamed via RTSP. While I can have a hard time believing that they've gotten what they claim (It's going to be...interesting...to try to compensate for loss, etc. without that sort of buffering- and in some cases you can actually mostly do it...they may be in one of those cases...), I can tell you that the bandwidth requirements is a dealbreaker- and we won't get into the latency problems you'll encounter as you hit the ceiling on the bandwidth. On a T3, they can do 30 subscribers with no issues and nothing else on the pipe.
Everyone's seizing on the codecs... Heh...that'd be barking up the wrong tree.
Heh... People keep focusing on the codecs... Which may be possible.
But the latency's more than they're accounting for and the bandwidth will break their idea into pieces. There's not enough bandwidth, even if they're at the ISP side of things, to make this work for viable numbers of subscribers without making more trouble (and thereby costing more) than it's actually worth to anyone except the company selling the deal.
And, as for "smart" people...smart people invested in mortgage backed securities (and lillies, etc...) and we all know where that got us in the past.
"Smart" doesn't lend it credence in and of itself.:-D
YouTube's rightly assuming that you will have issues and not a bad connection as you're supposing.
In the case of a TCP/IP network, there are algorithms that get applied to traffic to ensure reasonably decent and reliable delivery of TCP traffic to it's destination. The congestion algorithms in question will delay TCP traffic and drop UDP traffic on the floor when it sees potential congestion. Typically the low-level of this effect kicks in when you are at 30-40% of peak bandwidth on the link.
As a result of pulling in quite a bit of bandwidth via RTSP, you're going to have dropouts which will require retransmission or compensation- which is what YouTube's doing with the buffering. That's part of the loss compensation that it uses to strive to make a fluid presentation of the video. You will need the same sort of thing for this stuff, if you're being honest with yourself.
It's not the same model as Akamai- and it's going to be a bit of a hard sell. Single-player games will keep bandwidth local, but choke up their backhauls that're oversold. And this doesn't get into MMOG bandwidth totals as you go multiplayer.
At 1.5 Mbit/s, they will choke a T3 with only 30-60 of their subscribers on the pipe back to the data center for the ISP. Do you honestly think they're using OC-3/OC-12 backhauls from the residential areas without something like U-Verse or FiOS in the neighborhood in question? With an OC-3 backhaul, it takes only 100-200 subscribers to do the same thing. And this is without anyone else using the pipe at the time- add regular use and it goes to Hell in a handbasket with fewer subscribers.
The ISP's are already bitching about gigging the content providers as well as their customers over bandwidth use. Do you honestly think they're going to go for this sort of abuse?:-D
Heh... I'd not suppose either way. I've seen many a startup go and pull a stupid thing like that in the sake of "cool" and being expeditious about things.
Heh... I say it can't be done because you have to figure your PEAK bandwidth requirements per customer. The moment you oversell something like this in the manner the ISP's have done their bandwidth you're done- you can get away with probably half again more that the math, if you're lucky. If you can't provide snappy service a good 95% of the time, you're not going to get takers. WoW works as well as it does because it's lower bandwidth than this. Ditto most of the other MMOGs.
If you apply the aforementioned guide to how many they can service, unless you get the ISPs to one and all sign up for this and put it fully on the edge (I can tell you that this will be heinously expensive- there's several reasons why epicRealm failed, one of which was being in 50 data centers worldwide to the tune of a $2mil/mo burn rate- and this was with sweetheart co-lo deals...if you don't have the deals, it'll be more painful than that...), the peak numbers without oversell for OnLive, with their stated maximum bandwidth requirements, would be:
30 subscribers on a T3. 103 subscribers on an OC-3. 414 subscribers on an OC-12. 1658 subscribers on an OC-48.
Now, to put the burn rate for this in perspective:
Average cost of an OC-3 is 20,000 USD/mo. Average cost of an OC-12 is 200,000 USD/mo. Average cost of an OC-48 is about $400,000 USD/mo.
This doesn't even get into latency issues- either in the framework itself or over the Internet. Most games do "online" because they compensate for lost traffic, delayed delivery of traffic and so forth. As you fill the pipe, packets will be dropped (UDP) or delayed (TCP) as part of the TCP/IP congestion avoidance algorithms when they kick in (they start doing things to you at about 30% or so of the capacity of the pipe...). With so much bandwidth being used compared to the games we've got today, it's going to be difficult for them to accomplish the return end compensation for these issues. Dropped frames won't cut it here- you'll end up with a jarring experience that's different from lag induced issues that we've all seen with online games.
It works in the low-end numbers tests they're running (and they couldn't be running large numbers tests because of the associated burn-rate supporting more than a couple hundred subscribers...) because they're not tripping over peak values overmuch in the local testing or even the remote testing they're doing with GaiKai and OnLive.
As you can see, my disbelief has less to do with the compression and more due to realities of how the Internet and TCP/IP actually work- and they're going to be broken upon the wheel with this stuff. As for claiming that they're lying- I don't think they're knowingly lying. I think they've missed a few tenets that I've laid out in simplistic terms and they are barking up the wrong tree with a neat "what if we..." line of thought that should have been scotched when they did the aforementioned napkin math I did here in this post.
Our demand only outstrips domestic production because it's cheaper to get it elsewhere than here. It's a bottom line thing coupled with holding on to the bulk of what we've got for a rainy day.
Uh... Unless the Netbook has an NVidia Ion type configuration, it's not likely to be able to play. The GMA950 won't cut it, and the GMA500 would barely cut it with the current state of affairs on the drivers, either Windows or Linux.
Not a new version... I'm getting updates of that nature on a periodic basis- and the kernel doesn't change versions in most cases and the distribution version doesn't change until the next release.
Ever had an ATT rep call you a horses ass on the phone? They did to me back in June, to which they ended up giving me 2 months of free service to apologize
I'd have gigged 'em for about 6-12 months over that. That's rather inexcusable.
The crippled phones are part of the things I don't like about them. Couple that with things like their VZW navigator not working wherever there's coverage...
I like the fact that I generally have better voice and smartphone service than most of my AT&T and T-Mobile subscribing friends have. I don't like the fact that they have this disturbing tendency to fudge a bit on representations of their services and the obnoxious control fetish they seem to have about their phones. Crippled in varying ways. No good modern choices for smartphones- considering that the bulk of the really cool devices are iPhone, Palm Pre, and Android based devices (there's more showing up than just the G1...)- none of which you can have right now.
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Heh... Then how about pricing it better with more features?
It's vastly better to sell 10k units at $9 each than to sell 2K units at $29.
Pricing's what the industry thinks all us rubes will be willing to shower them with money over their stuff. Pricing is what's actually driving part of the piracy "problem" they face. The pricing's too high for what the market will actually bear and there's a lower amount of people buying and the piracy is a response to as much DRM as it is people wanting but not being willing to pay.
DRM's about control at it's heart. It's not about piracy because pretty much any DRM system has been circumvented when the interest in doing so overrode any difficulty involved with the attempt- which means in the case of most of it, within weeks of release of the title. As several HAVE pointed out, publishers like EA and Warner with SecuROM are pushing people to score cracks to remove the DRM so they can actually play what they bought because the DRM has now gone beyond ridiculous in that if you've two DVD drives, one a recorder, the code presumes you must be attempting to pirate so we won't let you even play the game before removing the other physical drive. It's so ridiculous that you can't even have security monitoring and program development tools from Microsoft on the machine to play.
It does nothing of what was stated as the purpose. It gets in the way of the honest people that don't "cheat" on it and do pirated stuff just so they can use what they bought. It costs the publisher more money.
Why not skip it altogether and find something that'll turn the bulk of those non-payers into customers instead?
Excuse me... It's not predatory pricing. The time that the games hit the prices they do on Windows, they're just trying to excise profits as they've recouped their investment. For a Linux/MacOS port, you're looking at the same general pricing that was in effect at the time you first saw the games. You're making the mistake that many make in that "it's the same game, it should be the same price". That only really works if the game is published at the same time or if it's from the same publisher.
For a typical AAA title, you're typically looking at six figures for rights access- that's $100-250k just to be able to LOOK at the source code to port it.
Then there's the effort to port it that has to be paid out somehow. In the case of LGP, all the developers are on a percentage of royalties basis. That's actually common as that's what's in force for my work for Elecorn's port for Caster- but in that case, the studio/publisher is the same and it's largely out at the same time as the others so it's price ($5, by the by...) is the same across the board.
Then there's the actual per-unit royalties due to the studio/publisher.
Then there's the production costs to make the discs, the documentation, and package the same.
Each piece adds dollars to the end-price. Moreover, if you're spinning 50k units, your costs are cheaper and they can afford to waste some over time.
When you start adding up the pieces of the pie, you end up with a price, if you're going to attempt to make an actual profit at this (they're not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts you know...), you end up with the pricing you see. The truth of the matter is that the way the industry's framed in, each of those titles on a different platform is a different game for a different platform. YOU see it as the same game (and intrinsically it is...) but the industry doesn't- which is why you have to pay for BioShock on the PS3 and then again if you want it on the 360 or PC.
Yet... Keep saying it over and over again. It's more due to not having any skilled and well-heeled reverse engineers working on breaking it than anything else.
MS thought they'd locked down the local (i.e. disc based games) piracy issue solidly, only to find out that it was dead easy to rip their stuff off afterall.
Heh... That's another excuse, really. Console piracy seems to be as rampant (if not moreso...) as the PC stuff, in truth.
The main reason PC gaming is "dying" (It's not, but I digress here...) is more due to smaller profit margins in that space. Most of the gaming "industry" is more akin to the record and movie "industries" and they're needing something with lower efforts to support and larger paybacks and Consoles generally do that for them. It's not piracy- not at all.
If Frictional didn't make it dead clear you were paying for a License, it was a sale, per the Uniform Commercial Code. As a sold item, they can't place restrictions on the resale thereof and typically any attempt to do so is non-enforceable. I'm not a lawyer, so you'll want to do your own research, consult with the lawyer of your own choice, etc. on this.
Heh... Yeah, it's negative. But it's merely an annoyance to the pirates; and a disaster (Warning: Volumes of Coarse Language...) for the end-users and a financial drag on the company that deploys it.
As negative impacts go, EA's starting to figure out that draconian measures don't quite sit well with people and had to relent on the DRM at least a bit.
Whoa... Nice rant there on the link. (As a heads-up: It's Not Safe For Work and has loads of coarse language- but I don't blame the guy on it...) And it does show that this crap doesn't help anyone except the DRM companies. Seriously.
Depends on your definition of "intrusive".
On Burnout Paradise, they've got a mix of billboards all over the place, some of them you're supposed to smash, some you can't. It's intrusive in the same sense of the billboards in real-life being everywhere; but the ads aren't distracting from the game. They're just part of the urban landscape; as you get into town the billboards get more numerous. What's interesting is the humorous ads for the Burnout features, awards, and shop items, intermixed with ads for SlingBox, Burger King, Vizio and a few others.
The ads themselves don't detract from the game (Thanks Criterion...) and they were noticeable enough that I recognized them while going between events and remembered the ones I ticked off.
In that context, the ads will work and won't likely get "worse" like you're concerned about. Other games, heh...remains to be seen.
Each person's different- replayability's one of those nebulous traits. For me, Tribal Trouble's got a lot of replayability. For someone else, not so much so. To me, Far Cry2's NOT something that's "50x World of Goo". To you, it is.
That doesn't negate the remarks others have made or validate all the cash Crytek poured into it. It sold quite a bit, yes. Is it worth what they're asking for it...perhaps, perhaps not.
It remains to be seen that other things would have been done with that time- but the time itself isn't typically factored into the costs of a game, except where salaries come into the picture on it. You can't quantify things QUITE that way- what if the indie game was done in spare time as a hobby? Can I deduct the time you say "cost" on my Income Tax as a business expense? No? I think you've your answer on that one. As far as the SYSTEM we work with is concerned the cost is zero.
It's not a "communist hippie love parade" and you shouldn't frame it that way.
If there was an honest effort, then, I would say something positive.
Unfortunately, they've done efforts in this area in the past only to do something heinous the next couple of days or weeks. I believe that we're all a bit jaded when it comes to MS' professions of "open"- mainly because of that seemingly schizophrenic behaviour from them.
Special software, yes. However it won't work in the large because as you pile more bandwidth on, the worse the latencies get, either because of UDP drops/retransmits or TCP packet delivery delays/retransmits.
The Internet's an unholy mess as far as game networking code is concerned. It might work for hundreds- it won't scale to the levels they need to relegate PC and Console gaming to the dustbin of history anytime soon.
Heh...
If you allowed for that figure as average, then the numbers I quoted a bit up the comment thread simply go up by nearly a factor of two. So you can consider, without concern, approximately 50 users (accounting for peaks being graceful and all...something I wouldn't do if I were specifying the design here...) on a T3, something on the order of 380 users or so on the OC-3, and so forth.
It still doesn't add up nicely for them for the near to medium future because of the realities of how it all works and will work for some time to come.
I would not use this as a line of argument. It doesn't go to talking to what is required for game streaming, only what is needed for full-motion video streamed via RTSP. While I can have a hard time believing that they've gotten what they claim (It's going to be...interesting...to try to compensate for loss, etc. without that sort of buffering- and in some cases you can actually mostly do it...they may be in one of those cases...), I can tell you that the bandwidth requirements is a dealbreaker- and we won't get into the latency problems you'll encounter as you hit the ceiling on the bandwidth. On a T3, they can do 30 subscribers with no issues and nothing else on the pipe.
Everyone's seizing on the codecs... Heh...that'd be barking up the wrong tree.
Heh... People keep focusing on the codecs... Which may be possible.
But the latency's more than they're accounting for and the bandwidth will break their idea into pieces. There's not enough bandwidth, even if they're at the ISP side of things, to make this work for viable numbers of subscribers without making more trouble (and thereby costing more) than it's actually worth to anyone except the company selling the deal.
And, as for "smart" people...smart people invested in mortgage backed securities (and lillies, etc...) and we all know where that got us in the past.
"Smart" doesn't lend it credence in and of itself. :-D
YouTube's rightly assuming that you will have issues and not a bad connection as you're supposing.
In the case of a TCP/IP network, there are algorithms that get applied to traffic to ensure reasonably decent and reliable delivery of TCP traffic to it's destination. The congestion algorithms in question will delay TCP traffic and drop UDP traffic on the floor when it sees potential congestion. Typically the low-level of this effect kicks in when you are at 30-40% of peak bandwidth on the link.
As a result of pulling in quite a bit of bandwidth via RTSP, you're going to have dropouts which will require retransmission or compensation- which is what YouTube's doing with the buffering. That's part of the loss compensation that it uses to strive to make a fluid presentation of the video. You will need the same sort of thing for this stuff, if you're being honest with yourself.
It's not the same model as Akamai- and it's going to be a bit of a hard sell. Single-player games will keep bandwidth local, but choke up their backhauls that're oversold. And this doesn't get into MMOG bandwidth totals as you go multiplayer.
At 1.5 Mbit/s, they will choke a T3 with only 30-60 of their subscribers on the pipe back to the data center for the ISP. Do you honestly think they're using OC-3/OC-12 backhauls from the residential areas without something like U-Verse or FiOS in the neighborhood in question? With an OC-3 backhaul, it takes only 100-200 subscribers to do the same thing. And this is without anyone else using the pipe at the time- add regular use and it goes to Hell in a handbasket with fewer subscribers.
The ISP's are already bitching about gigging the content providers as well as their customers over bandwidth use. Do you honestly think they're going to go for this sort of abuse? :-D
Heh... I'd not suppose either way. I've seen many a startup go and pull a stupid thing like that in the sake of "cool" and being expeditious about things.
It can go either way on that score.
Heh... I say it can't be done because you have to figure your PEAK bandwidth requirements per customer. The moment you oversell something like this in the manner the ISP's have done their bandwidth you're done- you can get away with probably half again more that the math, if you're lucky. If you can't provide snappy service a good 95% of the time, you're not going to get takers. WoW works as well as it does because it's lower bandwidth than this. Ditto most of the other MMOGs.
If you apply the aforementioned guide to how many they can service, unless you get the ISPs to one and all sign up for this and put it fully on the edge (I can tell you that this will be heinously expensive- there's several reasons why epicRealm failed, one of which was being in 50 data centers worldwide to the tune of a $2mil/mo burn rate- and this was with sweetheart co-lo deals...if you don't have the deals, it'll be more painful than that...), the peak numbers without oversell for OnLive, with their stated maximum bandwidth requirements, would be:
30 subscribers on a T3.
103 subscribers on an OC-3.
414 subscribers on an OC-12.
1658 subscribers on an OC-48.
Now, to put the burn rate for this in perspective:
Average cost of an OC-3 is 20,000 USD/mo.
Average cost of an OC-12 is 200,000 USD/mo.
Average cost of an OC-48 is about $400,000 USD/mo.
This doesn't even get into latency issues- either in the framework itself or over the Internet. Most games do "online" because they compensate for lost traffic, delayed delivery of traffic and so forth. As you fill the pipe, packets will be dropped (UDP) or delayed (TCP) as part of the TCP/IP congestion avoidance algorithms when they kick in (they start doing things to you at about 30% or so of the capacity of the pipe...). With so much bandwidth being used compared to the games we've got today, it's going to be difficult for them to accomplish the return end compensation for these issues. Dropped frames won't cut it here- you'll end up with a jarring experience that's different from lag induced issues that we've all seen with online games.
It works in the low-end numbers tests they're running (and they couldn't be running large numbers tests because of the associated burn-rate supporting more than a couple hundred subscribers...) because they're not tripping over peak values overmuch in the local testing or even the remote testing they're doing with GaiKai and OnLive.
As you can see, my disbelief has less to do with the compression and more due to realities of how the Internet and TCP/IP actually work- and they're going to be broken upon the wheel with this stuff. As for claiming that they're lying- I don't think they're knowingly lying. I think they've missed a few tenets that I've laid out in simplistic terms and they are barking up the wrong tree with a neat "what if we..." line of thought that should have been scotched when they did the aforementioned napkin math I did here in this post.
Our demand only outstrips domestic production because it's cheaper to get it elsewhere than here. It's a bottom line thing coupled with holding on to the bulk of what we've got for a rainy day.
Uh... Unless the Netbook has an NVidia Ion type configuration, it's not likely to be able to play. The GMA950 won't cut it, and the GMA500 would barely cut it with the current state of affairs on the drivers, either Windows or Linux.
Not a new version... I'm getting updates of that nature on a periodic basis- and the kernel doesn't change versions in most cases and the distribution version doesn't change until the next release.
Heh... I've not seen that. There's exceptions, but the things that aren't supported aren't typically things you honestly WANT/NEED in the first place.
I'd have gigged 'em for about 6-12 months over that. That's rather inexcusable.
The crippled phones are part of the things I don't like about them. Couple that with things like their VZW navigator not working wherever there's coverage...
I like the fact that I generally have better voice and smartphone service than most of my AT&T and T-Mobile subscribing friends have. I don't like the fact that they have this disturbing tendency to fudge a bit on representations of their services and the obnoxious control fetish they seem to have about their phones. Crippled in varying ways. No good modern choices for smartphones- considering that the bulk of the really cool devices are iPhone, Palm Pre, and Android based devices (there's more showing up than just the G1...)- none of which you can have right now.