"Do all your gadgets have communications systems (wifi or bluetooth) and can they talk between them?"
Yes. I've never used it.
"Can you use your camera to take a picture of a QRCode and send the decoded URL to your phone so it can access it through 3G?"
Why the hell would I ever want to do that? The tech for that has been around since Cuecat and I've never used it.
"Can you use your satnav's location to download the local traffic information?"
Yes. It has TDS-RMC which is much better at picking up information than any GSM or 3G dongle, costs absolutely nothing and will work for decades to come because my country uses it for all sorts of things. It works in Europe, too, also for free. I've yet to know of anyone that has got traffic information quicker than my TDS-enabled TomTom even when we're sitting in the same car having a "satnav fight".
UNIX tools that do everything you NEED / WANT to do don't need combinations.
As a techy, everyone expects me to have some all-singing device that does everything. People who use their iPhones to navigate ask me why I don't do the same (apart from not having an iPhone myself).
My justification is this: My TomTom does one job and does it extraordinarily well. Google Maps *can't* compete, I'm afraid, but is an adequate substitute if my TomTom is out of commission (hasn't happened yet except once when I left it in a car in Italy). My phone does one job and does it extraordinarily well. My watch does one job and does it extraordinarily well. My digital camera does one job and does it extraordinarily well. I see no need to have to accept inevitable compromises by throwing those functions into a single device which, if it breaks, means I lose all the functionalities.
I don't see the need for convergence at all. Yes, I carry several gadgets but they are all better at their jobs than any genericised device that claims to perform their functions. And when I'm not taking photos, I don't need a camera. When I'm not driving, I don't need a sat-nav. You get the idea.
It's easier this way, cheaper (overall, it is, because of the lifetime of each component of the products - if my TomTom breaks, I only have to buy a new sat-nav, if my phone breaks, I only have to buy a new, very basic phone), more reliable (my phone can break but I can still get to my destination, or my sat-nav can break and I can still phone someone to ask for directions) and I don't have to upgrade, install, manage a generic computer like I do for 99% of my working life. If my TomTom breaks, I moan at TomTom, not worry about whether it's because I've recently upgraded my phone. My phone is quite basic but does everything I need, so I don't need to stay on the bleeding edge. It makes phone calls and sends text messages. It *does* have a built-in camera (because it was all but impossible to find one without at the time I bought it) but I've never used it. It can go on the Internet, but I don't have it setup to do that.
In an absolute emergency, yes, I can use the additional features on these devices to perform some of their secondary functions (i.e. I have a car accident, use my phone to take a photo of the scene... it's better than nothing. I'm pretty sure my TomTom can talk to my phone but I haven't bothered to set it up). But overall, I have devices that conform to the UNIX-philosophy - do one job, and do it really well. I don't have hulking bags full of gadgets, either. My devices fit into my pockets comfortably and I'm not carrying any more than I absolutely need to. And because I buy single-purpose devices they don't need to be the advanced models, or to be high-spec, or fragile, they can be bog-standard basic units. I can upgrade a bit at a time without worrying about the other components (if I upgrade my iPhone, does my satnav app stop working?).
And when I want someone else to do the navigating, I give them the device. I can even lend it to them. And I could (theoretically) use it at the same time as being on the phone to the person I'm navigating to. And other things like that.
Convergence is for people that tolerate the mediocre and are happy to sit and "manage" another device in their life. Me? I just want to press a small amount of button on a dedicated device to make things do their job. Similarly, if someone at work suggested I put all the desktops into a single machine which did everything from routing to serving to faxing to processing to replacing the network switches and modems to running the clocks on the wall to running the phone system to producing client displays etc. I would be equally as horrified. Some functions are just better off in their own self-contained devices that attract simple support (modems, switches, routers, etc). If my TomTom hardware breaks, I send it back to TomTom. If my TomTom app breaks? Good luck getting support from either TomTom or Apple.
Where you walk is public information too. Maybe I should write that down, then publish it on a major search engine for everyone to see, with times, dates, locations, what buildings you entered, who you were with, whether they have known allegiances to other people, etc.
Information that's publicly available is not secure, obviously, but that doesn't mean that you can just collate it and publish it at will. That's why data protection laws exist and why this is most likely what Google will fall foul of (they already did in Germany). Nobody cared that the information was "public" - everything that happens once you step outside your front door is "public". Hell, the brand of condom that I use, or the woman I was last seen in public with, or even what porno mags someone buys in a newsagent is "public" information. It doesn't mean that corporations (or even private individuals) can then publish that online, en masse, without good reason.
Unlike some places, the EU holds dear its data protection laws. The MAC could very well be classed as personal information, seeing as it uniquely identifies a device that I have in my possession and its location and various settings on the device. Just because the next door neighbours can sniff that doesn't mean you can just collate that information en masse. Especially when it's trivial to connect that information with, say, a list of addresses. Hell, phones have MAC's nowadays - how easy would it be to go hunting for Apple-branded MAC addresses (e.g. iPhones) and then raid the houses that show up on Google maps as having one inside?
Publicly collectable information does not imply publicly distributable.
Erm... the maps were spot-on in that case, by the account you linked to. The map didn't kill him, his own stupid choices killed him. He'd used a paper map, too. And you *can't* rely on a map except if you're really, really pushed and have nothing to go on.
Believing a town was only 4 miles away, he left the car (WARNING SIGN #1) that had run into trouble because they had failed to heed warnings that they acknowledged were on the map and on the road to NOT use the road because of snowdrifts (WARNING SIGN #2). He wore unsuitable clothing (WARNING SIGN #3), left the car and then, 16 miles away, died. 16 miles is a bit more than 4 miles (WARNING SIGN #4). He promised to turn back the next day if he couldn't find the place, but didn't (WARNING SIGN #5).
Shame, because up until that point they'd been doing quite well - stopping, conserving the car's power for essentials, etc. It was an extreme situation. He probably felt he had no choice but to push on. But that's a critical error of his own that killed him and to say that the map did anything wrong is bullshit. An "updated" map, paper or electronic, would not have made him have any greater chance of survival. More likely, if he was right about the "4 miles" thing, then he just didn't know how to orienteer in a real-life situation. Orienteering in the wild, especially a snow-covered wild, is a bit harder than reading a sat-nav.
Oh god, you've reminded me of *EVERY* game release since... well, ever. Non-linear storylines, eh? Cor, never heard of that before. And every implementation of it I've seen must have been absolutely perfect. I mean, it's not like every single game in the last 20 years has claimed to have that and yet, when you dig beneath the surface, it turns out that you have a very limited options tree at certain stages that don't do much more than send you to a slightly different level with some different text. Next you'll be telling me it has a fully-destructible environment (apart from the bits that aren't fully destructible), smooth load transitions (assuming you have a Cray on your desk), "intelligent" AI, photo-realistic graphics, etc.
And, please, please tell me that you don't judge a game by the cut-scenes. Go out, buy a movie, play the movie-tie-in game if that's what you want. The more cutscenes there are, and the further removed from the game-engine they are, the more likely the game is nothing but a prop to hold up some cheap Hollywood-esque plot with bad acting and rendered graphics. Red Alert got away with it originally by being a damn good game with, for the time, very decent amounts of high-quality cutscenes that you could skip. Since then, everyone's taken away the impression "expensive cutscenes = good game". It doesn't.
How on Earth you can take those two elements and then say "It's going to be a fun game", I have no idea. And at this stage, *everything* is rumour. That's because they don't want people to complain about how the controls are fidgety, the network is unreliable, the DRM is atrocious or whatever else might be wrong with it. They want people to nudge their friends and go "Oooh, pretty cutscenes, the in-game graphics must be brilliant!" and similar.
Never judge a book by its cover, and never, ever, ever judge a game by it's graphics/cutscenes/marketing/hype.
There are no "no-cap" providers any more. The most there's been lately is "unlimited" (subject to terms and conditions, fair use policy, we will cut you off if you use too much, not-really-unlimited but nobody's bothered to take us to court to clear up the definition and Ofcom don't care...).
If you get 50Gb a month, that's a *GOOD* package. Some consumer ones are as low as 2Gb/month.
Then there's even more wrong with the system than I could ever have imagined. Can even get World of Goo working smoothly? Shit, I'm not touching the thing with a bargepole now!
Yeah, I'd at least have thought they'd have some form of accelerated virtualisation. If you buy a game for a service like that, what's stopping you having an "image" of a server for each game that runs it via your Cloud server and gets instantiated on-demand. Whether the server is brand-new or ten years old, or whether the games been in the archives for ten minutes or a decade, it should just be a matter of loading a virtual machine on the cloud servers and having them run it. This also brings you things like pause-and-resume for the service should the user disconnect in the middle of a game, and/or being able to migrate apps between servers and upgrades seamlessly.
Once the image is set up, no more "backwards compatibility" problems - you're in an isolated network, running a heavily-locked-down virtualised machine, for a single user (so security of running old Windows isn't an issue). You also become OS-agnostic and can offer DOS-only, Linux-only, or Apple-only games (not that there's many of them) or even emulators of older systems. Virtual machines are one of the best ways to permanently keep a working image of something going forever. A disaster-recovery technician trying to provide modern replacements would give you *anything* for a virtual image of how the system used to be.
If they're *not* virtualising like this, then they're idiots. If they are, there's no excuse for not being able to run those machines forever except license negotiation (and that won't be too hard 2-3 years down the line when the game is on the budget shelves and in Steam for £5). The only question is that of hardware acceleration under virtualisation but I'm sure such a "revolutionary" idea should have no problems finding backers to make sure the DirectX / OpenGL hand-over works fine under virtualisation. VMWare already does it, from what I remember.
The Times (£1 / £2) has a circulation of approximately 502,436 (March 2010). The Metro (a free newspaper distributed *by itself* only in major towns and supported completely by advertising) has a circulation of 1,361,306 (October 2008, but representative of modern figures too). Three times as much, and that's only because every place that distributes them is normally empty by about 8:30am.
The Metro is free to read online, too. The Times costs £1 a day to read online.
I would say that points to The Times not using its advertising properly. It *might* make a lot more money now. I think, however, that it is missing out on a *huge* potential business that others are taking advantage of. And mostly their cost-savings from not having to have more than a single server running The Times website now means they are more profitable than they were before. Doesn't mean they *are* profitable on their online ventures at all. I think that, basically, it's a cost-cutting measure because they don't know how to exploit the web and want to stay in the dead-tree game forever. Shame that the rest of the world won't see it that way.
Is anyone else really sick of hearing about this dead horse that they're trying to flog?
Latency claims - false. Framerate claims - false. Image quality claims - false. "Blockbuster" games claims - false. Bandwidth required - 2.5 Gb / hour (so the average UK broadband customer would exceed their monthly allowance in less than 10-15 hours a month). Overall system capability to handle powerful games - looking false already but there's nothing on the system to really tax them yet.
Pricing - slightly more than just buying the damn game from a shop (and "owning" it forever), and actually cheaper to run it on your own PC even if you take into account the graphics card investment necessary to run those games (but, come on, my laptop cost no more than usual and comes with a card that can laugh at most of those games in bigger resolutions - are there still systems out there that can't do Half-life 2 at 60fps or equivalent?).
It was a nice idea, but it was derided for making exactly those claims that turned out to be false. Some people may buy it but I'd be doubtful they'd keep it for very long. Probably because they don't know how to load / run Steam. If you'd pitched it at casual gamers, it would have sold millions and you could run be running every grannies Wii-style games for them, but you aimed it at fast-paced, FPS-gamers and the like, requiring huge investment in CPU, RAM, graphics cards and latency reduction. World of Goo is on their store lists - that will *work* perfectly in such a setup - low CPU/GPU demand, no latency issues, easily compressible graphics. Saying it could run "any" game was just silly. If you'd pitched it as a "no-maintenance Wii replacement" without the hassle of sticky fingers, scratched disks, special hardware, constant upgrades, etc. then you could have recouped your investment by now. As it is, most people are laughing at you. Give it up now, before the whole thing collapses under the weight of its own claims.
The problem is the definition - at the moment people are patenting things as basic as how to sort a list of windows and stupid things like that. They are not "inventions", and it's hard to "invent" anything on a computer that is purely software. Machines that rely on computers to do a certain task are still patentable worldwide, but just saying "I take these bits and do this to them" isn't an invention and isn't patentable in New Zealand now. It won't be too long (on a government timescale - i.e. 20 years+) before everyone else starts following suit.
Software patents have never been seriously considered patentable in the EU, for example, and nobody really suffers from this.
Fine. Let them do it. I want my percentage of that "tax" based on the number of copies of software/music/images etc. with my copyright and without my permission that I believe are being passed through their connections too. I will back it up in exactly the same way that they do the arithmetic on their "industry losses" and then demand that money too. They will have to prove that I *don't* lose that amount of money due to the same piracy as they experience, or else I have to get my percentage, no matter how small. And when every artist hears that I succeeded, they'll all want *their* percentage and thus the tax will be going straight from my pocket back into my pocket without the music/movie industry seeing a penny of it.
Or they could just cut out the years of legal hassle and give up now. It's their choice.
Answers my questions? It was infinitely more interesting and informative than the original article.
To be honest, it would take a lot to make me avoid a food - a man who was still eating beef while the BSE scare was on, etc. The usual procedures about such substances are "BAN IT ALL!" and then everyone keeps eating it for 50 years without ill effects, or "Ah, it's nothing" and then everyone starts dying.
By the sounds of it, it's just a by-product of the modern age that is probably easily cancelled out by the things that produce it - having power stations is better than not dying of dioxins, to grossly simplify it. I couldn't help but laugh though as I read: "Fish which are long-lived in general contain higher levels of dioxin" - how long before someone says that dioxins will make you live longer?:-)
I'll still eat my vegetables mostly unwashed (except where there's visible gunk) but I'm a tiny bit less ignorant now than I was when I got up this morning. Thanks.
To all those people questioning range, don't forget that Bluetooth operates in 2.4GHz - roughly the same frequency as wireless, and thus is a prime candidate for Pringle "cantenna's" or just plugging in any old 2.4GHz directional antenna. You can get Wifi going dozens if not hundreds of kilometres with some simple antennas, so Bluetooth and a directional antenna, even homebrew, is likely to provide 100's of metres of safe distance between you and a device if you're hacking hardware on these scales anyway.
So, if we take your credentials at face value, what's the message here? Is it possible to reduce dioxin levels, is it necessary, can man just cope with it anyway, are we infinitely more likely to die of something OTHER than dioxin-caused problem, would cutting out parts of a diet be a sensible course or is it just one of the myriad millions of cancer-causing things that you CAN'T avoid and that even your basic food will end up containing no matter what, where does it sit in the trade-off, is this article just bollocks or sound science?
You've tried to be funny but you've missed the point. The drivers are not OLD, they just MUST be signed. That destroys home-brew driver projects. Maybe you don't use them but I, and the parent poster, do. That wipes out whole hoards of PIC programmers, A/D convertors, USB interfaces, etc. for not good reason. Why can't there just be a simple registry tweak that says "I know what I'm doing, just install this unsigned driver?"
All that happens is that you drive those in the know either back to XP or, more likely, onto Linux. I had the same problem recently with the K8055's that I use for little electronics projects. The hardware is still sold in shops (Maplin Electronics, Rapid Electronics, etc.) but the software still works, and works better, on a modern Linux machine. Things like the Arduino are going strong at the moment - removing unsigned drivers just makes people move to other OS's that allow them, and it stops those devices being portable to the consumer without investment in a signed driver.
Remember this next time you wonder why "cool USB gadget X" doesn't come with Windows 7 drivers, or why you have to pay £50 to do something quite simple with custom hardware, e.g. LIRC, etc.
It's wrapped in extreme amounts of emotive narrative, but that story just describes how something can go horribly wrong if you do extremely dangerous things without planning them properly, and don't follow established rules. A diver's (Deon) dead body, that's been there for years, found in a deep cave, is recovered for no particular reason than to be heroic. The equipment they use is new, improperly tested and mostly "home-brew" for the situation they want to use it in. Some of it breaks.
The body-recovery is then portrayed as something brave and necessary, instead of just plain silly to go EXACTLY where a previous expert, experienced diver has died and whose body is STILL stuck, and as a single diver (with only backup crews who won't dive that far down) try, on your own, to recover the body. Something killed the original diver, and you're going to have to stand there and deal with whatever that was in order to free the body.
To quote, when they reviewed the footage of that *solo* diver who died going in to recover a body that was already *trapped* in place, the video (recovered only by sheer chance, and recorded on bog-standard video camera in a home-brew housing) showed the body floated. "This was totally unexpected. Deon, as it turned out, was not completely skeletal, and he was no longer stuck in the silt. Instead of decomposing, his corpse had mummified into a soaplike composition that gave it mass and neutral buoyancy. And for some reason--no one has an explanation--the body had become unstuck from the mud as soon as Shaw started working on it. "The fact that the body was now loose, and not pinned to the ground, was not one of the scenarios that we had thought about," Shirley sighs. "The body was not meant to be floating." It's a lot easier to slip a bag over an immobile body than a body floating and rolling in front of you at 886 feet."
Amazing that a body comes loose when you're disturbing it in order to loosen it. And amazing that a body isn't completely skeletal given that recovery of bodies in every extreme has shown some to be remarkably well-preserved.
After the video shows the recovery diver's breathing rate increasing (and he's very experienced in dealing with that and the intoxication of breathing diving gases): "Watching the video with a clear head, it is hard not to wonder why Shaw didn't just turn around right then and abandon the dive." The "attempted recovery dive" that he was stating when he was on the surface. And he's quoted earlier as saying "Better one dead than two".
But he pushes on: "He keeps working to control the body, letting go of his cave light so he can use both hands... Shaw has been at it for two minutes, and the cave line is seemingly everywhere. It snags on his cave light, and Shaw pauses to clear it. At this, Shirley and Herbst bridled. A cave diver should never let gear float loose. "It's a recipe for disaster," says Shirley, who will always regret not being present when Shaw told Hiles (ON THE SURFACE!) he would put the light to the side at times. "Do not do that," he would have warned him."
Then the video shows more of the hazard that the diver was in: "Suddenly he loses his footing on the sloping bottom. He scrambles back to the body in a cloud of silt." (the bottom where the body was already trapped and claimed its first victim).
Afterwards, doubt is cast on his abilities by companions - extremely experienced, cave-divers - but the author conveniently tucks it away: "But he also wonders whether Shaw should have done more buildup dives to increase his tolerance for narcosis--much the way a climber will try to acclimatize to altitude--and his ability to recognize when it reaches dangerous levels. "When he started putting the body in the bag and it didn't work, he should have immediately turned around and left," Gomes (the only person to have successfully dived that cave that far) says. "I didn't think it was worth the risk of a diver losing his life to recover the remains of Deon Dreyer," he says flatly."
Once I'd scrolled past the #defines, the prototypes for required API calls, the typedefs for certain structs, etc. I then found nothing else.
Seriously, the submitter should learn how to code and what it means to reimplement existing, public, standard, API's, and then they should have the difference between an *interface* and actual *code* explained to them.
Unfortunately, sales figures for Crysis are hard to come by. From a simple google, 50% of the historical press releases are showing how people aren't buying it because of the heavy system requirements, the other 50% (usually released later on) are saying that sales exceeded expectations, etc. It sold over a million copies worldwide between the November it was released and the following January, according to http://www.incrysis.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=612
That's a quarter of Counterstrike's *total* sales figures within three months. One fifth of Doom's. One tenth of Half-life / Half-life 2's lifetime sales. That's pretty astounding sales if that's true. Saying piracy harmed that? That's really a stretch. Maybe it wasn't profitable even with all those sales? That's much more a business issue and cost-analysis, but saying that it didn't sell, possibly due to piracy, is really a big stretch. Bear in mind that it was universally recognised as an extremely high cost development because it *WAS* so demanding on the hardware. The Wiki pages says 1Gb of textures, 1,000,000 lines of code and 85,000 shaders. That's WAY, WAY more than predecessor "big hits" ever required. If it wasn't "competitively" profitable, this is probably due to the wrong kind of time-money investment trade-off, which was plainly visible from day one and the reason that the "Can it run Crysis?" jokes are STILL around.
"Piracy is perceived to be a sufficiently significant problem that dealing with piracy is as important as dealing with marketing, deadlines, etc. It's a core business concern."
I call bullshit. Piracy gets little mention in comparison to other things, there are few effective counter-measures and actual prosecutions are rare if not damn-near non-existent. Or, by now, each vendor would have their own hand-rolled DRM instead of just licensing Securom, etc. Spending even 10% of a games budget on DRM would see seriously stringent and complex DRM far beyond what anyone has bundled into a modern game. As it is, we get half-baked, re-re-re-re-licensed standard libraries, like slapping on a sound engine, or something similar. I would hazard a guess that licensing a game engine costs MUCH more than licensing Securom. Even a physics engine would cost a lot more. And you probably find that in-house development is orders-of-magnitude more expensive, and that's the "secret sauce" of any games development shop. The rest is just licensed libraries to save people from reinventing the wheel each time. DRM is one of those. If people are spending more than 10% of their budget on anti-piracy measures and messages, I would be flabbergasted and I would be telling them to stop pissing money away.
Piracy costs money, no doubt. It will cost a few genuine buyers no matter what people say, but to say that it's a core business concern? I doubt it. Getting the sales to even have to *WORRY* about piracy would be the best sign that your games company is doing well. How many types of DRM are there in use in major games studios at the moment? How many hand-roll their own because the console-based ones are insufficient for their needs? So long as you stop "casual" copying (i.e. not a determined person trying to make a copy), that's as far as you can go and as far as it makes sense to go. Once you get a game to the distribution stage, the rest is mostly just licensing some library to save you having to code your own, putting out scary warnings in the press and maybe following up the odd prosecution or two - I should think any large software house pays more in patent-licensing on software patents (in countries that have them) than they ever would on anti-piracy measures.
Your measles analogy would work if it weren't for the fact that we have data pre-measles (and pre-DRM) and that we have modern data about non-immunised people (and non-protected games). The fact that they *aren't* trumpeted from the
But we end up with lots of mass-supported stuff like ADSL broadband and then perform juggling acts between them with our own equipment. They find them more reliable and easier to deal with than specialist hardware that only one company can play with. Hell, most companies that offer us "faster business" packages basically run two/three phones line and do ADSL2 over them, so it's just the same thing but more "independent". And when something goes wrong, it's easier to threaten to walk away from an individual supplier.
In the UK there aren't many options at all. Eurogamer.net is UK-based, hence the mention of BT.
My company don't want the expense of using leased line and other specialist stuff, just an ordinary thing that can work like a home package over an ordinary phone line. The FASTEST damn thing we can have is a single or multiple ADSL2 lines. We have basically unlimited funds for such things and often specify overkill-measures (i.e. 3 or 4 ADSL2 lines from seperate suppliers rather than 1 leased line). We get 20Mbps sync and a little less real-world speed. We are approximately 10 metres from the exchange. We are in an affluent and well-populated area of London.
In terms of what the average home user can have, only Virgin media fibre really beats the other offerings but that's highly variable and although you are told "up to 50MBps", the infrastructure isn't there to give you that as usable bandwidth.
To be honest, I'm impressed they managed to get what they did considering the state of UK broadband. Of course, you can pay stupid money and get serious pipes put in but that's hardly a "real world" scenario for the average home user. It's not unimaginable, though, that a true gamer might have the best a home user can be offered - which in the UK is a 25/50Mbps fibre service.
You had a good business model. A lot of people would be happy to play games that can be played with lag without noticing (I spent hours on Puzzler World, Max and the Magic Marker, Crayon Physics, World of Goo, Age of Booty, all sorts of games that aren't that affected by lag). You could easily have had a Wii-like console in every home that delivered as powerful a game as necessary, against as many players as necessary while needing no fancy installation, discs, etc. and most importantly NEVER needing an upgrade. Specifically, I would compare the system to those arcade machines that let you play, say, 20 minutes of Super Mario World or some other Nintendo games. You pay a flat fee and can swap between games as much as you like during that time without having to install demos, or buy them all. Brilliant idea.
Instead you didn't listen to the only criticism of the idea (enormous lag is inevitable - yeh cannae break the lawsa fisics...), wouldn't heed it, denied there was any problem, etc. and thus in the first, purportedly "ideal" real-world test, your founder's press statements were found to be orders-of-magnitudes out. As such, you've killed the interest from people who *knew* that all along and who would be asked their opinions on it by other people. If you'd just said "the affect won't ruin the majority of games", or "the latency isn't something we can do anything about but we don't expect it to affect the titles we offer, and the kind of customers we're aiming at", then nobody would have cared and if their granny bought the system they would have played on it too. But the stupid claims did not hold up and, thus, we're waiting to discover what the next lie is... *do* you have an accord with BT to get onto the UK broadband backbone? Do you have top-name titles properly licensed and ready-to-go? Do you have the capability to scale the service with the number of users? Do you have the hardware ready? Do you have something that you can sell if the system was to go live as quickly as possible?
You spoiled your image with bullshit. On an ideal test, a quite basic but fast-paced game that plays well locally gets up to 250ms of lag. Optimised or not, ideal conditions or not, that's just never going to sit well with people, even if they have a 60ms lag on their TFT monitors and don't realise it (http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/images/input_lag_graph.jpg). All I see is the "250ms" and think - damn - when I play CS online I think of anything over 80ms as "laggy". And that's just a one-way property, my lag to the server. God knows how a server performs when ALL players have a few hundred milliseconds of lag. I think 90% of your CPU time in that case must be input smoothing and path prediction.
It's just a pity that your failure to be honest will tar the rest of your business' life and that of any similar systems that might arise in the future.
Not exactly the same thing (as others have pointed out, XBox = PC with a TV-out - it just gets abused whoever makes it into a vendor-locked system) but anyone remember the Amstrad Mega-PC? Huge ordinary PC (of the 386-era, I think) with a little slidy door that revealed a Megadrive slot and turned the computer into a Megadrive (Don't think it was emulation, just a switch to an internal Megadrive board).
I would have killed to have the money for one of those at one time.
No matter the medium, smartphone, iPlayer, TV reception, etc. - so long as you don't watch/record it while it's being broadcast live on TV, you're fine. You can watch anything "historical" (i.e. was on TV 20 minutes ago) without needing a license at all (though how you record that using a DVD/VCR/PVR without recording the live signal is another matter entirely, but thankfully the BBC have iPlayer to solve that problem).
Realising that I watch about 0.01% of what's broadcast, if that, and that I watch things that are mostly being *re-broadcast* (and thus easily available on DVD / VHS), and that I watch most things online in a time-shifted way anyway, I stopped paying for a TV licence. You do have to deal with the idiot licensing authorities who appear to have a hard time believing someone *does* understand the law and *doesn't* need a TV license, no matter how legitimately, but that's another matter entirely.
And as pointed out - they have no right to enter premises AT ALL unless accompanied by a police officer who himself has to have good cause and/or a search warrant. Considering the TV licence is about the same price as a cheap TV itself (discounts for blind / black-and-white "viewers" - big F deal) it's hardly worth them even bothering to go that far when they can just spam every valid address in the UK with their "You don't appear to have a license" crap which you can happily bin and ignore.
Slashdot Mirror
"Do all your gadgets have communications systems (wifi or bluetooth) and can they talk between them?"
Yes. I've never used it.
"Can you use your camera to take a picture of a QRCode and send the decoded URL to your phone so it can access it through 3G?"
Why the hell would I ever want to do that? The tech for that has been around since Cuecat and I've never used it.
"Can you use your satnav's location to download the local traffic information?"
Yes. It has TDS-RMC which is much better at picking up information than any GSM or 3G dongle, costs absolutely nothing and will work for decades to come because my country uses it for all sorts of things. It works in Europe, too, also for free. I've yet to know of anyone that has got traffic information quicker than my TDS-enabled TomTom even when we're sitting in the same car having a "satnav fight".
UNIX tools that do everything you NEED / WANT to do don't need combinations.
I'm going the other way.
As a techy, everyone expects me to have some all-singing device that does everything. People who use their iPhones to navigate ask me why I don't do the same (apart from not having an iPhone myself).
My justification is this: My TomTom does one job and does it extraordinarily well. Google Maps *can't* compete, I'm afraid, but is an adequate substitute if my TomTom is out of commission (hasn't happened yet except once when I left it in a car in Italy). My phone does one job and does it extraordinarily well. My watch does one job and does it extraordinarily well. My digital camera does one job and does it extraordinarily well. I see no need to have to accept inevitable compromises by throwing those functions into a single device which, if it breaks, means I lose all the functionalities.
I don't see the need for convergence at all. Yes, I carry several gadgets but they are all better at their jobs than any genericised device that claims to perform their functions. And when I'm not taking photos, I don't need a camera. When I'm not driving, I don't need a sat-nav. You get the idea.
It's easier this way, cheaper (overall, it is, because of the lifetime of each component of the products - if my TomTom breaks, I only have to buy a new sat-nav, if my phone breaks, I only have to buy a new, very basic phone), more reliable (my phone can break but I can still get to my destination, or my sat-nav can break and I can still phone someone to ask for directions) and I don't have to upgrade, install, manage a generic computer like I do for 99% of my working life. If my TomTom breaks, I moan at TomTom, not worry about whether it's because I've recently upgraded my phone. My phone is quite basic but does everything I need, so I don't need to stay on the bleeding edge. It makes phone calls and sends text messages. It *does* have a built-in camera (because it was all but impossible to find one without at the time I bought it) but I've never used it. It can go on the Internet, but I don't have it setup to do that.
In an absolute emergency, yes, I can use the additional features on these devices to perform some of their secondary functions (i.e. I have a car accident, use my phone to take a photo of the scene... it's better than nothing. I'm pretty sure my TomTom can talk to my phone but I haven't bothered to set it up). But overall, I have devices that conform to the UNIX-philosophy - do one job, and do it really well. I don't have hulking bags full of gadgets, either. My devices fit into my pockets comfortably and I'm not carrying any more than I absolutely need to. And because I buy single-purpose devices they don't need to be the advanced models, or to be high-spec, or fragile, they can be bog-standard basic units. I can upgrade a bit at a time without worrying about the other components (if I upgrade my iPhone, does my satnav app stop working?).
And when I want someone else to do the navigating, I give them the device. I can even lend it to them. And I could (theoretically) use it at the same time as being on the phone to the person I'm navigating to. And other things like that.
Convergence is for people that tolerate the mediocre and are happy to sit and "manage" another device in their life. Me? I just want to press a small amount of button on a dedicated device to make things do their job. Similarly, if someone at work suggested I put all the desktops into a single machine which did everything from routing to serving to faxing to processing to replacing the network switches and modems to running the clocks on the wall to running the phone system to producing client displays etc. I would be equally as horrified. Some functions are just better off in their own self-contained devices that attract simple support (modems, switches, routers, etc). If my TomTom hardware breaks, I send it back to TomTom. If my TomTom app breaks? Good luck getting support from either TomTom or Apple.
Where you walk is public information too. Maybe I should write that down, then publish it on a major search engine for everyone to see, with times, dates, locations, what buildings you entered, who you were with, whether they have known allegiances to other people, etc.
Information that's publicly available is not secure, obviously, but that doesn't mean that you can just collate it and publish it at will. That's why data protection laws exist and why this is most likely what Google will fall foul of (they already did in Germany). Nobody cared that the information was "public" - everything that happens once you step outside your front door is "public". Hell, the brand of condom that I use, or the woman I was last seen in public with, or even what porno mags someone buys in a newsagent is "public" information. It doesn't mean that corporations (or even private individuals) can then publish that online, en masse, without good reason.
Unlike some places, the EU holds dear its data protection laws. The MAC could very well be classed as personal information, seeing as it uniquely identifies a device that I have in my possession and its location and various settings on the device. Just because the next door neighbours can sniff that doesn't mean you can just collate that information en masse. Especially when it's trivial to connect that information with, say, a list of addresses. Hell, phones have MAC's nowadays - how easy would it be to go hunting for Apple-branded MAC addresses (e.g. iPhones) and then raid the houses that show up on Google maps as having one inside?
Publicly collectable information does not imply publicly distributable.
Erm... the maps were spot-on in that case, by the account you linked to. The map didn't kill him, his own stupid choices killed him. He'd used a paper map, too. And you *can't* rely on a map except if you're really, really pushed and have nothing to go on.
Believing a town was only 4 miles away, he left the car (WARNING SIGN #1) that had run into trouble because they had failed to heed warnings that they acknowledged were on the map and on the road to NOT use the road because of snowdrifts (WARNING SIGN #2). He wore unsuitable clothing (WARNING SIGN #3), left the car and then, 16 miles away, died. 16 miles is a bit more than 4 miles (WARNING SIGN #4). He promised to turn back the next day if he couldn't find the place, but didn't (WARNING SIGN #5).
Shame, because up until that point they'd been doing quite well - stopping, conserving the car's power for essentials, etc. It was an extreme situation. He probably felt he had no choice but to push on. But that's a critical error of his own that killed him and to say that the map did anything wrong is bullshit. An "updated" map, paper or electronic, would not have made him have any greater chance of survival. More likely, if he was right about the "4 miles" thing, then he just didn't know how to orienteer in a real-life situation. Orienteering in the wild, especially a snow-covered wild, is a bit harder than reading a sat-nav.
Oh god, you've reminded me of *EVERY* game release since... well, ever. Non-linear storylines, eh? Cor, never heard of that before. And every implementation of it I've seen must have been absolutely perfect. I mean, it's not like every single game in the last 20 years has claimed to have that and yet, when you dig beneath the surface, it turns out that you have a very limited options tree at certain stages that don't do much more than send you to a slightly different level with some different text. Next you'll be telling me it has a fully-destructible environment (apart from the bits that aren't fully destructible), smooth load transitions (assuming you have a Cray on your desk), "intelligent" AI, photo-realistic graphics, etc.
And, please, please tell me that you don't judge a game by the cut-scenes. Go out, buy a movie, play the movie-tie-in game if that's what you want. The more cutscenes there are, and the further removed from the game-engine they are, the more likely the game is nothing but a prop to hold up some cheap Hollywood-esque plot with bad acting and rendered graphics. Red Alert got away with it originally by being a damn good game with, for the time, very decent amounts of high-quality cutscenes that you could skip. Since then, everyone's taken away the impression "expensive cutscenes = good game". It doesn't.
How on Earth you can take those two elements and then say "It's going to be a fun game", I have no idea. And at this stage, *everything* is rumour. That's because they don't want people to complain about how the controls are fidgety, the network is unreliable, the DRM is atrocious or whatever else might be wrong with it. They want people to nudge their friends and go "Oooh, pretty cutscenes, the in-game graphics must be brilliant!" and similar.
Never judge a book by its cover, and never, ever, ever judge a game by it's graphics/cutscenes/marketing/hype.
There are no "no-cap" providers any more. The most there's been lately is "unlimited" (subject to terms and conditions, fair use policy, we will cut you off if you use too much, not-really-unlimited but nobody's bothered to take us to court to clear up the definition and Ofcom don't care...).
If you get 50Gb a month, that's a *GOOD* package. Some consumer ones are as low as 2Gb/month.
Then there's even more wrong with the system than I could ever have imagined. Can even get World of Goo working smoothly? Shit, I'm not touching the thing with a bargepole now!
Yeah, I'd at least have thought they'd have some form of accelerated virtualisation. If you buy a game for a service like that, what's stopping you having an "image" of a server for each game that runs it via your Cloud server and gets instantiated on-demand. Whether the server is brand-new or ten years old, or whether the games been in the archives for ten minutes or a decade, it should just be a matter of loading a virtual machine on the cloud servers and having them run it. This also brings you things like pause-and-resume for the service should the user disconnect in the middle of a game, and/or being able to migrate apps between servers and upgrades seamlessly.
Once the image is set up, no more "backwards compatibility" problems - you're in an isolated network, running a heavily-locked-down virtualised machine, for a single user (so security of running old Windows isn't an issue). You also become OS-agnostic and can offer DOS-only, Linux-only, or Apple-only games (not that there's many of them) or even emulators of older systems. Virtual machines are one of the best ways to permanently keep a working image of something going forever. A disaster-recovery technician trying to provide modern replacements would give you *anything* for a virtual image of how the system used to be.
If they're *not* virtualising like this, then they're idiots. If they are, there's no excuse for not being able to run those machines forever except license negotiation (and that won't be too hard 2-3 years down the line when the game is on the budget shelves and in Steam for £5). The only question is that of hardware acceleration under virtualisation but I'm sure such a "revolutionary" idea should have no problems finding backers to make sure the DirectX / OpenGL hand-over works fine under virtualisation. VMWare already does it, from what I remember.
The Times (£1 / £2) has a circulation of approximately 502,436 (March 2010).
The Metro (a free newspaper distributed *by itself* only in major towns and supported completely by advertising) has a circulation of 1,361,306 (October 2008, but representative of modern figures too). Three times as much, and that's only because every place that distributes them is normally empty by about 8:30am.
The Metro is free to read online, too. The Times costs £1 a day to read online.
I would say that points to The Times not using its advertising properly. It *might* make a lot more money now. I think, however, that it is missing out on a *huge* potential business that others are taking advantage of. And mostly their cost-savings from not having to have more than a single server running The Times website now means they are more profitable than they were before. Doesn't mean they *are* profitable on their online ventures at all. I think that, basically, it's a cost-cutting measure because they don't know how to exploit the web and want to stay in the dead-tree game forever. Shame that the rest of the world won't see it that way.
Is anyone else really sick of hearing about this dead horse that they're trying to flog?
Latency claims - false.
Framerate claims - false.
Image quality claims - false.
"Blockbuster" games claims - false.
Bandwidth required - 2.5 Gb / hour (so the average UK broadband customer would exceed their monthly allowance in less than 10-15 hours a month).
Overall system capability to handle powerful games - looking false already but there's nothing on the system to really tax them yet.
Pricing - slightly more than just buying the damn game from a shop (and "owning" it forever), and actually cheaper to run it on your own PC even if you take into account the graphics card investment necessary to run those games (but, come on, my laptop cost no more than usual and comes with a card that can laugh at most of those games in bigger resolutions - are there still systems out there that can't do Half-life 2 at 60fps or equivalent?).
It was a nice idea, but it was derided for making exactly those claims that turned out to be false. Some people may buy it but I'd be doubtful they'd keep it for very long. Probably because they don't know how to load / run Steam. If you'd pitched it at casual gamers, it would have sold millions and you could run be running every grannies Wii-style games for them, but you aimed it at fast-paced, FPS-gamers and the like, requiring huge investment in CPU, RAM, graphics cards and latency reduction. World of Goo is on their store lists - that will *work* perfectly in such a setup - low CPU/GPU demand, no latency issues, easily compressible graphics. Saying it could run "any" game was just silly. If you'd pitched it as a "no-maintenance Wii replacement" without the hassle of sticky fingers, scratched disks, special hardware, constant upgrades, etc. then you could have recouped your investment by now. As it is, most people are laughing at you. Give it up now, before the whole thing collapses under the weight of its own claims.
If you *create* something you, you can.
The problem is the definition - at the moment people are patenting things as basic as how to sort a list of windows and stupid things like that. They are not "inventions", and it's hard to "invent" anything on a computer that is purely software. Machines that rely on computers to do a certain task are still patentable worldwide, but just saying "I take these bits and do this to them" isn't an invention and isn't patentable in New Zealand now. It won't be too long (on a government timescale - i.e. 20 years+) before everyone else starts following suit.
Software patents have never been seriously considered patentable in the EU, for example, and nobody really suffers from this.
Fine. Let them do it. I want my percentage of that "tax" based on the number of copies of software/music/images etc. with my copyright and without my permission that I believe are being passed through their connections too. I will back it up in exactly the same way that they do the arithmetic on their "industry losses" and then demand that money too. They will have to prove that I *don't* lose that amount of money due to the same piracy as they experience, or else I have to get my percentage, no matter how small. And when every artist hears that I succeeded, they'll all want *their* percentage and thus the tax will be going straight from my pocket back into my pocket without the music/movie industry seeing a penny of it.
Or they could just cut out the years of legal hassle and give up now. It's their choice.
Answers my questions? It was infinitely more interesting and informative than the original article.
To be honest, it would take a lot to make me avoid a food - a man who was still eating beef while the BSE scare was on, etc. The usual procedures about such substances are "BAN IT ALL!" and then everyone keeps eating it for 50 years without ill effects, or "Ah, it's nothing" and then everyone starts dying.
By the sounds of it, it's just a by-product of the modern age that is probably easily cancelled out by the things that produce it - having power stations is better than not dying of dioxins, to grossly simplify it. I couldn't help but laugh though as I read: "Fish which are long-lived in general contain higher levels of dioxin" - how long before someone says that dioxins will make you live longer? :-)
I'll still eat my vegetables mostly unwashed (except where there's visible gunk) but I'm a tiny bit less ignorant now than I was when I got up this morning. Thanks.
To all those people questioning range, don't forget that Bluetooth operates in 2.4GHz - roughly the same frequency as wireless, and thus is a prime candidate for Pringle "cantenna's" or just plugging in any old 2.4GHz directional antenna. You can get Wifi going dozens if not hundreds of kilometres with some simple antennas, so Bluetooth and a directional antenna, even homebrew, is likely to provide 100's of metres of safe distance between you and a device if you're hacking hardware on these scales anyway.
So, if we take your credentials at face value, what's the message here? Is it possible to reduce dioxin levels, is it necessary, can man just cope with it anyway, are we infinitely more likely to die of something OTHER than dioxin-caused problem, would cutting out parts of a diet be a sensible course or is it just one of the myriad millions of cancer-causing things that you CAN'T avoid and that even your basic food will end up containing no matter what, where does it sit in the trade-off, is this article just bollocks or sound science?
You've tried to be funny but you've missed the point. The drivers are not OLD, they just MUST be signed. That destroys home-brew driver projects. Maybe you don't use them but I, and the parent poster, do. That wipes out whole hoards of PIC programmers, A/D convertors, USB interfaces, etc. for not good reason. Why can't there just be a simple registry tweak that says "I know what I'm doing, just install this unsigned driver?"
All that happens is that you drive those in the know either back to XP or, more likely, onto Linux. I had the same problem recently with the K8055's that I use for little electronics projects. The hardware is still sold in shops (Maplin Electronics, Rapid Electronics, etc.) but the software still works, and works better, on a modern Linux machine. Things like the Arduino are going strong at the moment - removing unsigned drivers just makes people move to other OS's that allow them, and it stops those devices being portable to the consumer without investment in a signed driver.
Remember this next time you wonder why "cool USB gadget X" doesn't come with Windows 7 drivers, or why you have to pay £50 to do something quite simple with custom hardware, e.g. LIRC, etc.
It's wrapped in extreme amounts of emotive narrative, but that story just describes how something can go horribly wrong if you do extremely dangerous things without planning them properly, and don't follow established rules. A diver's (Deon) dead body, that's been there for years, found in a deep cave, is recovered for no particular reason than to be heroic. The equipment they use is new, improperly tested and mostly "home-brew" for the situation they want to use it in. Some of it breaks.
The body-recovery is then portrayed as something brave and necessary, instead of just plain silly to go EXACTLY where a previous expert, experienced diver has died and whose body is STILL stuck, and as a single diver (with only backup crews who won't dive that far down) try, on your own, to recover the body. Something killed the original diver, and you're going to have to stand there and deal with whatever that was in order to free the body.
To quote, when they reviewed the footage of that *solo* diver who died going in to recover a body that was already *trapped* in place, the video (recovered only by sheer chance, and recorded on bog-standard video camera in a home-brew housing) showed the body floated. "This was totally unexpected. Deon, as it turned out, was not completely skeletal, and he was no longer stuck in the silt. Instead of decomposing, his corpse had mummified into a soaplike composition that gave it mass and neutral buoyancy. And for some reason--no one has an explanation--the body had become unstuck from the mud as soon as Shaw started working on it. "The fact that the body was now loose, and not pinned to the ground, was not one of the scenarios that we had thought about," Shirley sighs. "The body was not meant to be floating." It's a lot easier to slip a bag over an immobile body than a body floating and rolling in front of you at 886 feet."
Amazing that a body comes loose when you're disturbing it in order to loosen it. And amazing that a body isn't completely skeletal given that recovery of bodies in every extreme has shown some to be remarkably well-preserved.
After the video shows the recovery diver's breathing rate increasing (and he's very experienced in dealing with that and the intoxication of breathing diving gases): "Watching the video with a clear head, it is hard not to wonder why Shaw didn't just turn around right then and abandon the dive." The "attempted recovery dive" that he was stating when he was on the surface. And he's quoted earlier as saying "Better one dead than two".
But he pushes on: "He keeps working to control the body, letting go of his cave light so he can use both hands... Shaw has been at it for two minutes, and the cave line is seemingly everywhere. It snags on his cave light, and Shaw pauses to clear it. At this, Shirley and Herbst bridled. A cave diver should never let gear float loose. "It's a recipe for disaster," says Shirley, who will always regret not being present when Shaw told Hiles (ON THE SURFACE!) he would put the light to the side at times. "Do not do that," he would have warned him."
Then the video shows more of the hazard that the diver was in: "Suddenly he loses his footing on the sloping bottom. He scrambles back to the body in a cloud of silt." (the bottom where the body was already trapped and claimed its first victim).
Afterwards, doubt is cast on his abilities by companions - extremely experienced, cave-divers - but the author conveniently tucks it away: "But he also wonders whether Shaw should have done more buildup dives to increase his tolerance for narcosis--much the way a climber will try to acclimatize to altitude--and his ability to recognize when it reaches dangerous levels. "When he started putting the body in the bag and it didn't work, he should have immediately turned around and left," Gomes (the only person to have successfully dived that cave that far) says. "I didn't think it was worth the risk of a diver losing his life to recover the remains of Deon Dreyer," he says flatly."
Arrogance,
I clicked on the "damning" evidence linked to.
Once I'd scrolled past the #defines, the prototypes for required API calls, the typedefs for certain structs, etc. I then found nothing else.
Seriously, the submitter should learn how to code and what it means to reimplement existing, public, standard, API's, and then they should have the difference between an *interface* and actual *code* explained to them.
Unfortunately, sales figures for Crysis are hard to come by. From a simple google, 50% of the historical press releases are showing how people aren't buying it because of the heavy system requirements, the other 50% (usually released later on) are saying that sales exceeded expectations, etc. It sold over a million copies worldwide between the November it was released and the following January, according to http://www.incrysis.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=612
That's a quarter of Counterstrike's *total* sales figures within three months. One fifth of Doom's. One tenth of Half-life / Half-life 2's lifetime sales. That's pretty astounding sales if that's true. Saying piracy harmed that? That's really a stretch. Maybe it wasn't profitable even with all those sales? That's much more a business issue and cost-analysis, but saying that it didn't sell, possibly due to piracy, is really a big stretch. Bear in mind that it was universally recognised as an extremely high cost development because it *WAS* so demanding on the hardware. The Wiki pages says 1Gb of textures, 1,000,000 lines of code and 85,000 shaders. That's WAY, WAY more than predecessor "big hits" ever required. If it wasn't "competitively" profitable, this is probably due to the wrong kind of time-money investment trade-off, which was plainly visible from day one and the reason that the "Can it run Crysis?" jokes are STILL around.
"Piracy is perceived to be a sufficiently significant problem that dealing with piracy is as important as dealing with marketing, deadlines, etc. It's a core business concern."
I call bullshit. Piracy gets little mention in comparison to other things, there are few effective counter-measures and actual prosecutions are rare if not damn-near non-existent. Or, by now, each vendor would have their own hand-rolled DRM instead of just licensing Securom, etc. Spending even 10% of a games budget on DRM would see seriously stringent and complex DRM far beyond what anyone has bundled into a modern game. As it is, we get half-baked, re-re-re-re-licensed standard libraries, like slapping on a sound engine, or something similar. I would hazard a guess that licensing a game engine costs MUCH more than licensing Securom. Even a physics engine would cost a lot more. And you probably find that in-house development is orders-of-magnitude more expensive, and that's the "secret sauce" of any games development shop. The rest is just licensed libraries to save people from reinventing the wheel each time. DRM is one of those. If people are spending more than 10% of their budget on anti-piracy measures and messages, I would be flabbergasted and I would be telling them to stop pissing money away.
Piracy costs money, no doubt. It will cost a few genuine buyers no matter what people say, but to say that it's a core business concern? I doubt it. Getting the sales to even have to *WORRY* about piracy would be the best sign that your games company is doing well. How many types of DRM are there in use in major games studios at the moment? How many hand-roll their own because the console-based ones are insufficient for their needs? So long as you stop "casual" copying (i.e. not a determined person trying to make a copy), that's as far as you can go and as far as it makes sense to go. Once you get a game to the distribution stage, the rest is mostly just licensing some library to save you having to code your own, putting out scary warnings in the press and maybe following up the odd prosecution or two - I should think any large software house pays more in patent-licensing on software patents (in countries that have them) than they ever would on anti-piracy measures.
Your measles analogy would work if it weren't for the fact that we have data pre-measles (and pre-DRM) and that we have modern data about non-immunised people (and non-protected games). The fact that they *aren't* trumpeted from the
Yeah, me neither. :-)
But we end up with lots of mass-supported stuff like ADSL broadband and then perform juggling acts between them with our own equipment. They find them more reliable and easier to deal with than specialist hardware that only one company can play with. Hell, most companies that offer us "faster business" packages basically run two/three phones line and do ADSL2 over them, so it's just the same thing but more "independent". And when something goes wrong, it's easier to threaten to walk away from an individual supplier.
Nope. But some, obviously:
http://www.verizonbusiness.com/uk/products/internet/fios/
Were you trying to suggest that Verizon only do business in the US?
In the UK there aren't many options at all. Eurogamer.net is UK-based, hence the mention of BT.
My company don't want the expense of using leased line and other specialist stuff, just an ordinary thing that can work like a home package over an ordinary phone line. The FASTEST damn thing we can have is a single or multiple ADSL2 lines. We have basically unlimited funds for such things and often specify overkill-measures (i.e. 3 or 4 ADSL2 lines from seperate suppliers rather than 1 leased line). We get 20Mbps sync and a little less real-world speed. We are approximately 10 metres from the exchange. We are in an affluent and well-populated area of London.
In terms of what the average home user can have, only Virgin media fibre really beats the other offerings but that's highly variable and although you are told "up to 50MBps", the infrastructure isn't there to give you that as usable bandwidth.
To be honest, I'm impressed they managed to get what they did considering the state of UK broadband. Of course, you can pay stupid money and get serious pipes put in but that's hardly a "real world" scenario for the average home user. It's not unimaginable, though, that a true gamer might have the best a home user can be offered - which in the UK is a 25/50Mbps fibre service.
You had a good business model. A lot of people would be happy to play games that can be played with lag without noticing (I spent hours on Puzzler World, Max and the Magic Marker, Crayon Physics, World of Goo, Age of Booty, all sorts of games that aren't that affected by lag). You could easily have had a Wii-like console in every home that delivered as powerful a game as necessary, against as many players as necessary while needing no fancy installation, discs, etc. and most importantly NEVER needing an upgrade. Specifically, I would compare the system to those arcade machines that let you play, say, 20 minutes of Super Mario World or some other Nintendo games. You pay a flat fee and can swap between games as much as you like during that time without having to install demos, or buy them all. Brilliant idea.
Instead you didn't listen to the only criticism of the idea (enormous lag is inevitable - yeh cannae break the lawsa fisics...), wouldn't heed it, denied there was any problem, etc. and thus in the first, purportedly "ideal" real-world test, your founder's press statements were found to be orders-of-magnitudes out. As such, you've killed the interest from people who *knew* that all along and who would be asked their opinions on it by other people. If you'd just said "the affect won't ruin the majority of games", or "the latency isn't something we can do anything about but we don't expect it to affect the titles we offer, and the kind of customers we're aiming at", then nobody would have cared and if their granny bought the system they would have played on it too. But the stupid claims did not hold up and, thus, we're waiting to discover what the next lie is... *do* you have an accord with BT to get onto the UK broadband backbone? Do you have top-name titles properly licensed and ready-to-go? Do you have the capability to scale the service with the number of users? Do you have the hardware ready? Do you have something that you can sell if the system was to go live as quickly as possible?
You spoiled your image with bullshit. On an ideal test, a quite basic but fast-paced game that plays well locally gets up to 250ms of lag. Optimised or not, ideal conditions or not, that's just never going to sit well with people, even if they have a 60ms lag on their TFT monitors and don't realise it (http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/images/input_lag_graph.jpg). All I see is the "250ms" and think - damn - when I play CS online I think of anything over 80ms as "laggy". And that's just a one-way property, my lag to the server. God knows how a server performs when ALL players have a few hundred milliseconds of lag. I think 90% of your CPU time in that case must be input smoothing and path prediction.
It's just a pity that your failure to be honest will tar the rest of your business' life and that of any similar systems that might arise in the future.
Not exactly the same thing (as others have pointed out, XBox = PC with a TV-out - it just gets abused whoever makes it into a vendor-locked system) but anyone remember the Amstrad Mega-PC? Huge ordinary PC (of the 386-era, I think) with a little slidy door that revealed a Megadrive slot and turned the computer into a Megadrive (Don't think it was emulation, just a switch to an internal Megadrive board).
I would have killed to have the money for one of those at one time.
Or they don't watch TV as it's being broadcast.
No matter the medium, smartphone, iPlayer, TV reception, etc. - so long as you don't watch/record it while it's being broadcast live on TV, you're fine. You can watch anything "historical" (i.e. was on TV 20 minutes ago) without needing a license at all (though how you record that using a DVD/VCR/PVR without recording the live signal is another matter entirely, but thankfully the BBC have iPlayer to solve that problem).
Realising that I watch about 0.01% of what's broadcast, if that, and that I watch things that are mostly being *re-broadcast* (and thus easily available on DVD / VHS), and that I watch most things online in a time-shifted way anyway, I stopped paying for a TV licence. You do have to deal with the idiot licensing authorities who appear to have a hard time believing someone *does* understand the law and *doesn't* need a TV license, no matter how legitimately, but that's another matter entirely.
And as pointed out - they have no right to enter premises AT ALL unless accompanied by a police officer who himself has to have good cause and/or a search warrant. Considering the TV licence is about the same price as a cheap TV itself (discounts for blind / black-and-white "viewers" - big F deal) it's hardly worth them even bothering to go that far when they can just spam every valid address in the UK with their "You don't appear to have a license" crap which you can happily bin and ignore.